Critically Engaging Participatory Action Research

This timely and informative book reasserts the value of Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR): an approach to participatory action research (PAR) that is informed by critical theories attending to questions of privilege and power, and that generates collaborations focused on challenging structural inequality.

The authors, writing explicitly from Minority World perspectives, are experienced researcher-practitioners who have worked with communities in the UK, USA, South Africa, Australia, India, and Colombia over many years. They offer an assessment, exploration, and illustration of CPAR at this point in time, outlining how the approach has evolved over time and space. Exploring its roots in strands of critical thought including postcolonialism, anti-imperialism, feminism, antiracism, queer theory, and Indigenous ontologies, the book asks how PAR is being critically re-engaged to maintain its commitment to greater justice and transformational change. Each chapter provides a rich case study of how these theories inform current collaborations and offers reflection on the entanglements of power that come with attempting CPAR in different institutional and geopolitical contexts. Their examples show that critical interrogation of PAR practices may lead to innovative and impactful outcomes for those involved, as well as new theoretical and substantive research findings.

The collection will be of especial interest to students and researchers across the social sciences and humanities, as well as those working outside universities, who are interested in developing or extending their use of CPAR.

Sara Kindon has worked for thirty years in a range of community-based, participatory projects with Indigenous communities, women, young people and migrants and former refugees and in a range of places including Costa Rica, Indonesia, Aotearoa and Oceania. Since 2006, she has provided research support to refugee-background communities and refugee-led organisations advocating for educational equity in the tertiary sector, improved service delivery, and more holistic approaches to refugee resettlement in New Zealand. This work, using a range of creative and arts-based approaches, has informed the establishment of the NZ National Tertiary Network to Support Refugee Background Learners and the NZ Government’s new Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship Programme. She is the first female Professor of Human Geography and Development Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, a wife, mother, occasional dancer and poet.

Rachel Pain is a Professor of Human Geography at Newcastle University in the UK. Her research focuses on violence, fear and trauma, with gender-based violence a particular interest, and analyses connections between intimate, community and international scales. Her work is informed by feminist theory and participatory action research. She collaborates on this research with public and voluntary sector organisations, and with survivor groups.

Mike Kesby is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of St Andrews Scotland UK. His research focuses on a range of health issues in Southern and Eastern Africa (HIV, sexual health and gender relations and most recently antimicrobial resistance in UTIs). His work is informed by participatory action research and feminist, post-structuralist, and latterly new materialist theory. He uses participatory video and other creative methods in collaborations with a range of academic, governmental, and non-governmental organisations, and grassroots citizens.