Participatory Action Research (PAR) may be conceived of as a politic or an epistemology rather than a rigid methodology. If this is the case, how can PAR inform other qualitative methodologies? How can qualitative researchers adopt the spirit of PAR without doing PAR work itself? In this work, I seek to explore these questions by reviewing how PAR can guide my future dissertation work on the productive effects of the obesity epidemic. I examine how I might base my research in the ethics and politics of social justice and yet also remain open to and accountable for the ways in which my choice of methods reflects what can be seen as the colonizing approach of traditional social science.
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