I Need to See Me in It: Critical Participatory Inquiry as a Bridge Between Theory and Practice for PAR in Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

Critical Participatory Inquiry (CPI) is an emergent epistemological anchoring of Participatory Action Research (PAR) that grounds its users in a spectrum of participation that considers the way that social constraints including race, politics, and power dynamics influence how researchers operationalize and practice amplification of minoritized voices in their research. This article is a scholarly and reflexive perspective piece that invites scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners to explore the ontology and axiology of their own ideologies and their alignment with how they show up in the world and how they manage the implicit hierarchies within healthcare research and within healthcare organizations. The author uses her own positionality to explain how she grounds and frames her research in her lived experience and personal truths. It considers the types of knowledge and the knowledge holders that are privileged in academia and compares that to the realized hierarchies and power dynamics in the healthcare setting.