PAR is a way of life: Participatory action research as core re-training for fugitive research praxis

Abstract

In this article, we present participatory action research (PAR) as a radical act of humanity: a direct response to real dehumanization of vulnerable communities. We argue, as an enactment of critical social theories, that PAR privileges relationships and shared knowledge creations as strategies for transforming everyday worlds. We draw on interviews conducted with nine participants of a 2013 PAR Institute, which aimed to explore and document the ways in which PAR is taken up in the lives, bodies, and thinking of PAR activists and students. Interviews reveal PAR is not an act of imagination, but rather an act of reclaiming and disrupting realities. As a result, PAR fractures an ongoing dystopia/utopia dialectic, and positions horror and hope side-by-side in the material world. It is through and with participant interview narratives that we frame PAR as a site for re-training one’s epistemic core away from Western, Eurocentric standardized and normalized human conduct rooted in historical and ongoing violence towards a fugitive praxis. We conclude that PAR is a radical commitment to guiding social science researchers towards epistemological fugitivity: a moving with and through current, though historically rooted, devastating social realities, as a possibility for a way to be with each other – indeed with the other – in this world. We find that PAR is a way of resisting and rejecting the nastiness of the world, while not waiting for utopia: It is a way of being in this world, a way of life.

Keywords:

• Participatory action research
• epistemic violence
• core research training
• fugitive research praxis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout this article, the authors use “we” and “us” to indicate their multiple shared statuses and experiences in academia as two pre-tenure women faculty (one of us is a woman of color; and one of us an immigrant in the country where she works, and who had a long term career interruption pre tenure due to medical issues) at two different public universities in the United States and in Canada.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Krueger-Henney

Patricia Krueger-Henney is an Associate Professor in the Urban Education, Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Through critical and anti-racist participatory community-centered research Patricia documents how young people perceive and experience social injustices produced and reproduced by current purposes of education. She has authored journal articles and book chapters outlining how youth-centered visual narratives situate purposes of education as embodied and spatialized knowledges.

Jessica Ruglis

Jessica Ruglis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at McGill University. Her work centers on participatory, critical race/ethnic, social justice, feminist, and inclusive approaches to research and teaching in the areas of public education, public health, justice, and youth development. Her community commitments and research program are organized around three main axes: 1) Contexts and institutions of youth development, 2) Social determinants of health (SDH) and education, 3) Participatory and community engaged approaches to research, policy and professional training.