Re-signifying participatory action research (PAR) in higher education: what does ‘P’ stand for in PAR?

Abstract

While carrying out a study aimed at understanding the contribution of participatory action research (PAR) to the political realm in contemporary higher education, a problematic situation was found when doing a literature review in the field of action research. This problem concerns the intermittent appearance of the ‘participatory’ component (P) in the acronyms used by PAR practitioners. To flag this problem, a decision was made to use the parentheses around the ‘P’ in PAR; that is, (P)AR. This intermittent appearance of (P) in the literature of action research is linked to one of the main findings in the study; namely, the existence of contested views of ‘action’ and ‘politics’ in action research. In order to address the concept of ‘participatory’ in PAR, and drawing from Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘natality’, it is suggested that the participatory aspect of PAR (i.e. the ‘P’) be re-signified on the basis of six imbricated ‘P’ notions: people, plurality, publicity, participation, power and politics. The objective of this article is to present how this theoretical resource was utilised to re-signify the ‘participatory’ component of PAR. It is discussed that this re-signification of participation (the P), together with the re-signification of the action (‘A’) and the research (‘R’) components of PAR, constitutes one of the implications to contribute to the re-humanisation of contemporary higher education.

Keywords:

• Participatory action research
• politics
• Arendt

Acknowledgement

This article draws on the author’s PhD thesis, ‘On New Beginnings: Natality and (Participatory) Action Research in Higher Education’ (Santos 2012a). The author thanks the editor and the anonymous reviewers of Educational Action Research for constructive suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, higher education refers to that level of education in which academic degrees are granted in various disciplines. Specifically, the reflections presented here refer to one particular institution of higher education: the university. The main focus of this article is therefore the communities of teachers, students and administrative staff involved in the research and teaching activities that bring universities into life, and through them the communities of the broader society they work with and for.

2. The experiences of those who practice (P)AR – that is, (P)AR practitioners – are of special interest here.

3. I explored in my study the co-existence of different, changing and contested notions of ‘social justice’, ‘democracy’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘higher education’. I argue that we, (P)AR practitioners, are promoting political lives in higher education that differ from one another as a result of our different approaches to both the ontological tension in the notion of ‘action’ embedded in (P)AR and the contesting (P)AR participants’ views of politics.

4. A more detailed account of this literature review is presented in Santos (2013).

5. Natality was coined for the first time in Arendt’s doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine, with supervision by existential philosopher Karl Jaspers. According to Vecchiarelli and Stark (1995), some of the key terms in Arendt’s dissertation include natality as a key term jointly with caritas, memory, foundations, free will, narrative, society and the world. They say that Love and Saint Augustine provides a provocative glimpse into the implied ‘context for Arendt’s phenomenology, especially, in relation to her reflections on the social source and moral ground for action in the public realm’ (1995, 116). For the last time, in her reflections on Willing, published after her death in The Life of the Mind (Arendt 1978), Arendt cites Augustine’s God’s creation of man as the introduction of new beginnings in the world: ‘This very capacity [the will] for beginning is rooted in natality, and by no means in creativity, not in a gift but in a fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth’ (Vecchiarelli and Stark 1995, 147; original emphasis).

6. Work is related to the concept of the homo faber who makes and literally ‘works upon’ (Arendt 1998, 136).