Abstract
In their Handbook on Participatory Action Research and Community Development, Randy Stoecker and Adrienne Falcón have compiled an ambitious anthology of community-driven projects that produce knowledge to drive social change. The volume comprises 21 case studies that span a wide range of geographic locations, types of communities, and areas of intervention but, nonetheless, share consistent themes and a single line of argument. The editors seek to show the benefits of leveraging Participatory Action Research to further Community Development.
Participatory Action Research is a long-standing tradition of social research that empowers the people who are being studied—the people with the most experience with and stakes in the research—to be the experts and drivers of the research. Community Development includes any collective action by a place-based community to improve its environment, local institutional structure, or way of life. Stoecker and Falcón’s edited volume illustrates the impact that researchers can have on social change when they subordinate themselves to the interests of local communities and break free from the traditional power relation between authoritative academic experts and marginalized communities.
Participatory Action Research (PAR) has a long tradition of engaged scholarship with roots in Paolo Freire’s social justice pedagogy and the work of Colombian sociologist and political activist Orlando Fals Borda. In North America, it has been adopted by scholars in various fields of study like African American studies, education studies, and sociology. The spirit of this methodology is to empower communities by taking the means of intellectual production out of the academy and putting it into the hands of people on the ground.
In practice, PAR risks becoming a slogan to justify academic work that uses the knowledge and labor of research participants for its own ends. The contributors to this volume share a sensitivity to this dilution of PAR. The book builds on Stoecker’s prior critique of traditional “service learning” models that encourage scholars to use community service programs to conduct their own research (2016). By providing rich descriptions of collective action projects that generate knowledge to effect change, the book makes a powerful argument for “eradicating the ‘outside expert’ notion” and subordinating researchers to the questions and goals of community organizations (p. 195).
Most chapters delve into the inner-workings of grassroots community development projects that redefine the researcher’s role within community organizing and community development efforts. A recurring theme is the tension between community-driven social change projects and the neoliberal state. In the West, this tension demands that community organizations operate at a distance from the state and formal institutions like the university. In one example, a study of “science shops” in Ontario, Canada demonstrated how this model for mediating between researchers and community organizations was more effective when the science shops established greater independence from higher education institutions (p. 57). The influence of academic expertise and university resources reinforced the existing bureaucratic systems and undermined grassroots social change efforts.
In the global South, however, community organizing effectively draws from and coexists with established state and nongovernmental institutions. In Cuba, for instance, government agencies dedicated to social causes and local universities committed to serving communities supported “socio-cultural organizers” as they established local community development projects from the ground up (Chapter 5). According to this chapter, the projects depended on the work of these organizers, many of whom were from the communities in question, as a constant presence committed to mobilizing local people. Researchers can effectively contribute to this community empowerment process as long they remembered that “their personal or academic opinions do not matter” (p. 85).
The Handbook, thus argues that PAR can support transformative community development efforts on the condition that research processes are integrated within and subordinated to larger community organizing and collective action projects. This focus leads the book to sometimes read as more of a “handbook” for organizers and activists than for the researchers who are brought in to facilitate PAR. It provides important first principles for all practitioners of the PAR method but less concrete guidance on how specialized researchers might navigate the potential tensions between their training and local perspectives.
For instance, Chapter Nineteen discusses a citizens’ collective in Cuenca, Ecuador and its series of campaigns over a ten-year period for mobilizing citizens and improving public services. The overview mentions various research projects enacted at each stage of the collective’s work but offers limited detail on the division of labor in designing and executing any of the studies. We learn that a quality of life survey was supported by the sociology department of a local university and borrowed from existing models from across Latin America, but the authors emphasize the role of citizens’ collective members and the findings of its prior citizens forums (pp. 372–73). Did the existing models serve the goals of the collective? Did sociologists develop original survey items and analytic tools to capture local concerns? The use of formalized academic research methods and theories raises questions about the nature of the expert-community collaboration. This volume, however, often examines less formal and more locally tailored research methods like community forums, public assemblies, and storytelling sessions as techniques for gathering information while centering community voices.
While the Handbook’s focus on subordinating outside experts provides a necessary corrective to more superficial uses of PAR, it might risk encouraging researchers to withhold valuable knowledge and resources in order to avoid taking a more independent leadership role. For instance, an underfunded community organization might ask its university partner to take the lead in designing and executing its research, or an advocate for houseless people might lean on outside scholars to help identify the systemic political and economic causes of local problems. The volume illustrates how these researcher-community relationships might undermine rather than promote the collective participation of communities in knowledge-making and social change. It does not, however, suggest strategies for managing these structural power imbalances in a manner that is consistent with or supportive of a genuine PAR ethos. Even when routines for community-led research projects are established, such power imbalances might manifest at different stages of a project. This volume may have benefited from more examples of PAR plans that failed to support meaningful community development to illustrate these potential pitfalls and discuss strategies for managing them.
In general, the Handbook exhibits a wide range of transformative and inspiring community-level social change projects and teaches us valuable lessons about how research can be integrated into these grassroots approaches to community development. The contributors collaborated in drafting their respective pieces, and their effort is evident in the impressive level of cohesiveness and consistency across the 21 distinct chapters. By illustrating successful models for incorporating research in community development projects and by provoking necessary questions about how researchers can simultaneously leverage their expertise and subordinate their goals to community projects, this book provides an important starting point for a renewed discussion about the relationship between scholars and the marginalized communities that they study.