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Digital Affordances for Participation

The concept of affordances is well established in design and technology studies but has not been applied systematically in participatory methods. Affordances refer to the ‘new action possibilities’ enabled, allowed, or invited by a new technology. Digital affordances can include the ability to combine images, sound, video, and text, to share files globally instantly, and to work collaboratively with hundreds of people in multiple locations. 

The concept of digital affordances for participation is used to analyse the ways in which the introduction of new digital tools or the use of online spaces makes methods more or less participatory. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many participatory projects were forced online. This introduced some exclusions as the ability to participate was related to the quality of connectivity, digital literacies, and agency. However, some people living with disabilities found participation became easier, and some people felt more able to voice their concerns online that they did in a face-to-face setting. The chapter argues that more research attention is to better understand the particular affordance of different technologies for enhancing or limiting participation.

The concept of digital affordances for participation is one way of taking seriously the impact of introducing digital technologies to participatory methods. It focuses attention on the ‘new action possibilities’ that technology adoption involves. The introduction of digital technologies may enable practitioners to reduce dependencies on external experts. Online facilitation may enable the inclusion of people living with disabilities or make it possible to scale participation to include hundreds of people on multiple continents without flights. But it may also exclude people without connectivity or digital literacies. Five chapters of detailed case studies are provided that illustrate the negative and positive affordance of digital technologies for participation. 

The participation cube is a novel way to structure a three-dimensional analysis of (a) who participates (b) at which stage of the process, and (c) at what level of participation. The participation cube is designed as a heuristic device to help practitioners avoid homogenising the experience of all participants across all stages of a project. It provides a simple means to help structure a systematic analysis at each stage of the process. By disaggregating participants and trace their changing experience at each key stage of the project cycle a more nuanced analysis is possible. 

The ‘who’ dimension of the participation cube enables a disaggregation of distinct actors. Who gets to participate in any project, whose voice is heard, who has decision-making power, and who remains relatively excluded, has been discussed extensively in the participation literature. Like the other dimensions of the participation cube, the ‘who’ dimension needs to be re-calibrated anew for each project to make it relevant to the actual project actors. There may be more or less than four types of (non)participant and so the cube will need to be drawn and labelled afresh for each project. 

The stages of participation dimension of the cube will also need to be recalibrated for each new application to reflect the specificity of each project. There may be more or less than four stages and more or less than four levels. Arnstein had eight levels of participation in three groups in her popular ‘ladder of participation’. In Figure 1 only four of these were selected for the purposed of illustration. Users of the participation cube will need to calibrate their cube with the appropriate number of levels and label it accordingly. 

The process of using the participation cube involves tracing the level of participation, in each stage of the project, for each type of participant. This will show that each participant has different levels of participation over the project life cycle. One way of doing this would be as illustrated in the figure below. 

Source: Author's own

Roberts, T. (editor) Digital Technologies in Participatory Research (six chapter section) in Burns, D., Howard, J. and Ospina S. (2021) The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry, London, SAGE.

Roberts, T. (2021) Digital Affordances in Participatory Research Methods, in Burns, D., Howard, J. and Ospina S. (2021) The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry, London, SAGE

This is part of a series of chapter summaries of the Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry. 

Action Research as a systems science: This chapter argues that Action Research is built upon a scientifically-grounded epistemology and a set of well-developed theories and methods. Together these aim to produce more just, sustainable, and desirable states of human life. Underlying Action Research is an epistemology that understands the empirical world as a complex, dynamic, group of interacting systems. All local phenomena exist within the interplay of these dynamic systems. All living systems are open systems, thus depending for survival on successful adaption to the environments and processes affecting them. 

No neutrality: In an Action Research world, there are no neutral positions, no uninvolved spectator observers. Action Research both observes and participates in the surrounding world. Not acting this way makes the world around us fundamentally unintelligible. 

Moral aims: Action Research aims to bring about improved conditions of life for the broadest array of stakeholders possible, human and non-human. The goal is the greater realization of human potential, fairness, and sustainability in solidarity with other humans and in a positive interaction with the planetary ecologies. 

Coping with diversity is the only path forward: To bring this about Action Research proceeds by bringing together the broadest array of relevant stakeholder possible and orchestrating their interactions to surface the wealth of knowledge and experiences in any group of people so these can be brought to bear on solving the problems collectively deemed important. Any social theory or method that does not involve the subjugation of human actors or despoiling other animals and the environment is potentially relevant to Action Research projects. The methods may be qualitative, quantitative, phenomenological, Marxist, constructivist, etc. What matters is the analysis of problems, the collaborative development of potential solutions, and the collaborative application of those solutions to solving human problems. 

Cycles of action and research: If the solutions tried do not work to their satisfaction, the collaborators return to the analysis and development of new action plans until the results meet their aims. This is why Action Research is specifically a form of “pragmatic” action. 

Action Research and the return to a “real” social science: In most respects, Action Research is the product of a period at the end of the 18th century when the distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences first emerged with vigour. The work of Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and others showed that moral and political designs by themselves failed to produce effective human outcomes. In addition recognizing the gradually growing understanding of the “laws of nature”, these thinkers understood that societies and cultures had another kind of law-like properties. These properties meant that no amount of moralizing could reduce poverty, inequality, or human degradation.  

The birth of the social sciences: The social sciences emerged from this recognition originally in the form of political economy. It had the explicit aim of understanding these structuring principles and managing them to produce better human outcomes. Soon these analyses followed by those of others like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels produced a clear answer to the reasons why inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation existed. The answer was the greed and desire for political hegemony of those made wealthy by the industrial revolution at the expense an unprotected, underpaid, and short-lived work force. Therefore, as the 19th century progressed, political economy ran head-on into resistance from the wealthy and political elites who did not appreciate having the sources of their wealth and power revealed by academics, journalists, and novelists. 

The contradictory role of the research university: This period of elite reaction coincided with the creation of the “research university” in Europe and the United States, a process that could have given wings to the social critique provided by political economy and to a variety of populist and working class movements aimed at creating more egalitarian and solitary societies. The response to the risk that critical political economy posed was to use the same management strategy that worked in the factories of the Robber Barons, namely Taylorism. 

Taylorism: Taylorism is a hierarchical, authoritarian system. Those at the apex of the pyramid exercise total control over those below. To achieve this, manufacturing tasks are divided into smaller, hermetic units, each with its own hierarchical internal structure as well. Passing down from the bosses to the managers to the foreman to the workers, experts from the apex of the system organize the work process, work rules, productivity targets, and remuneration schemes. The farther down in the structure you are, the less intelligent you are asserted to be. You are conceived to be just a body to do the bidding of the bosses in work processes designed by efficiency experts who themselves do no manual labour. This is the model that gave us the Ford Model T and the assembly line system. Politically this was an ideal system for extracting value from the work of poorly paid others while preventing them from addressing the conditions of their work and their salaries. These organizations were viciously anti-union and heavily dependent on low wage labour. 

Academic Taylorism: As it happened, the development of the research universities coincided with the heyday of Taylorism in factories and universities were rapidly built on the model of the Tayloristic factory. Deeply hierarchical, universities were structured to have an authoritarian apex that delegates power downward to deans, department heads, and last of all to faculty and secretarial staff.  All the fields of inquiry are divided up into the physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, and the humanities and each of these was further segmented into the separate “disciplines”, each with its own budget and personnel lines. For the bosses this is an ideal management system because it reserves to them the ultimate authority over budget and resources. The deans then compete for those resources and the department heads under the deans complete with each other for the dean’s resources, and the faculty members compete with each other, and so on.  This system maximizes authoritarianism and minimizes participation. 

Impact on the social sciences: This form of organization was particularly disastrous for the social sciences. Following its logic, the “dangerous” political economists were segmented up into historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Within these categories, the disciplines were further subdivided into disciplinary specialties. With all the power concentrated at the apex, any of these fields whose practitioners produced perspectives critical of or calling into question the unequal, authoritarian, racist, sexist, and hierarchical nature of the surrounding society and polity were and are disciplined without mercy. 

Domestication of conventional social science: Political economy that began as an analysis aimed at reforming and democratizing society was domesticated into a group of spectator activities. When an occasional practitioner strays from this script, they are mercilessly harassed, often fired, and publicly humiliated. In the early twentieth century, John Dewey and colleagues founded the American Association of University Professors in an unsuccessful effort to protect faculty freedom of speech on such issues. Facing this coercive environment, many faculty in these fields took refuge in academic jargon, positivist and statistical studies, and obfuscating claims of being impartial and objective spectators. So hegemonic is this system become that many of the inmates have become their own jailers.  

“Pure” versus “applied” social science: Another solution developed was to divide the social sciences into the “pure” and the “applied” fields.  The applied social sciences were permitted to work on welfare programs, advise public schools, teach “home economics”, and advise on international development programs. Most of these applied social scientists saw themselves as “experts” who were intellectually superior the people they applied their nostrums to. But the applied practitioners were disrespected by the “pure” social scientists as mere “social workers”. Thus, anyone who applied their ideas in practice risked status loss in academic settings. 

Modest counter-movements: Despite the hegemony this scheme, there have been occasional counter-movements.  Among these were the fields of Institutional Economics, John Dewey´s pedagogical philosophy, various pro-social programs at US land-grant universities (e.g., agricultural extension, labour studies), academic feminism, Afro-American studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, post-colonial studies, etc.   

Key among these in the history of Action Research was the work of Kurt Lewin at MIT where he created an action research program and coined the name “Action Research”. Despite the promise of this work, Lewin died suddenly, and the flame gradually went out in post-World War II America. Action Research remained mainly practiced outside of the boundaries of Taylorized academia in places like the Highlander Center, the civil rights movement, Fals-Borda´s work in Colombia, Paolo Freire´s work in Brazil, and others. 

Action Research and the global reckoning: Now Action Research is gradually rebuilding momentum because life itself has imposed its challenges on not just the university but on all of society. Climate change and environmental collapse, racism and hate crimes, increasing ruptures of civil society, collapsing rural towns and pathological cities, inequality of a sort never seen before on the planet, the re-emergence of the Cold War, surveillance capitalism, and algorithmic subordination have made it clear that the Tayloristic university and the siloed disciplines are an unaffordable fantasy world. Real answers to real questions are needed and we circle back to the original intentions of political economy. 

Transdisciplinary system problem-solving: Starting from a recognition that the real world is a complexly nested and dynamic set of interacting systems whose evolutionary consequences (biological and cultural) either promote life or result in extinction, it is clear that the social sciences have to be recomposed to take their place in a transdisciplinary approach to physical, biological, social, and cultural “wicked problems”. No one field has the necessary knowledge and methods, but each has a piece of the puzzle and tested methods to contribute to a collective endeavour. 

Diversity again: For the very same reasons that diversity matters in the study of complex systems, human diversity also matters in solving these problems. Tayloristic organizations and societies behave much less intelligently than they would if they were to tap the experience, expertise, and energy of all the stakeholders together. Creating and managing the conditions in which every actor with ideas and capabilities can contribute to creating fairer and more sustainable solutions to human problems is the strength of Action Research. The multiple crises our Tayloristic global systems has created to preserve the power and wealth of a few at the expense of the rest of humanity make it clear that respecting diversity is not merely a moral imperative but an empirical necessity if we are to survive this millennium. 

Recommended reading

Argyris, Chris, Diana McLain Smith, and Robert Putnam. 1985. Action Science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Belenky, Mary Field. 1997. A Tradition That Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families, and Communities. New York: Basic Books.

Greenwood, D., (2021) Pragmatism: Linking Systems, Evolution, and Democratization in Participatory and Action Research in Burns, Danny, Jo Howard, and Sonia Ospina, eds. 2021. The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry. London: SAGE Publications, Inc., pp: 79-92.

Fals-Borda, Orlando., and Md. Anisur Rahman, eds. 1991. Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. New York: Apex Press.

Freire, Paolo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by M.B. Ramos. New York: Herder & Herder.

Greenwood, Davydd, and Morten Levin. 2006. Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change. Second edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.

Horton, Myles. 2003. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Edited by Dale Jacobs. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

This is part of a series of chapter summaries of the Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry. 

As two long-standing action researchers we both maintain a curiosity about the traditions and emergent ideas that surround and underpin our practice here in the UK. In our chapter 'Becoming Participatory: some contributions to Action Research in the UK' (ref) we offer a set of reflections on where - in the pursuit of becoming participatory - we have come from, and where we're heading, and in this further contribution we take our reflections a little further.

We acknowledge our chapter is a partial account from two practitioners and participants, who believe AR is fundamentally an ethical endeavour overtly committed to social justice, that creating knowledge is a process of co-production, rooted in experience, rather than as a means to generate decontextualised and generalisable 'truths'.  As we looked back, we viewed some of the work we cite as not particularly participatory, and that we have experienced the participatory impulse as an aspiration that inevitably has to navigate the possibilities, contradictions, and tensions of the dominant hierarchical non-participatory world.  

When we encountered action research, both of us strongly felt the weight of the positivist tradition in our educational upbringing. We were eager to shake off our assumptions with a fresh approach to knowledge as being provisional, contested, and contingent, where instead of the presumption of an external abstract ‘knower’, we position knower/s within a system oriented towards producing knowledge for worthwhile action. Yet the questions we had to face in so doing were many and indeed, they continue to inspire our curiosity.

As Richard Winter and colleagues point out, all writing is in itself a research act (Winter et al 1999), and the invitation to collaborate on this chapter offered us each an opportunity to examine the development of action research thinking and practice that had shaped our engagement with such questions. What we present here draws on our reflections about the process of writing the chapter together and how we now view the importance of the content we chose to highlight.

I (Ruth) approached my contribution from two decades of co-ordinating the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) initially as a Co-ordinating Group member and later as Lead Co-ordinator. In the course of writing the chapter, Cathy drew my attention to the government sponsored Community Development Projects (CDPs) in the 1970s which had enthused her early interest in urban studies, and this prompted me to recall my glancing encounters with the CDP, and with action research and the participatory turn at this time.  My engagement with the field had, I realised, actually begun with an intuitive grasp of action research and its thinking in the radical community development and protest movements of the 1970s. In turn this led me to question what had obstructed my subsequent ability to incorporate these early experiences into my 'official' biography as an action researcher. It seemed to me that there was a significant gap in the documentation of these events, and that this 'absent literature' might account for how little they figured in our discipline’s traditions. I myself had been viewing my own biography through the narrow lens of academia and its publications.

Cathy's experiences derive from working in research, teaching and policy roles across government, practice settings and academia.  Her first real immersion in action research came about alongside other mid-career professionals seeking to reappraise their practices and impacts to foster social change by studying at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP) at the University of Bath. CARPP was co-founded in 1993 by Judi Marshall, Peter Reason, David Sims, and Jack Whitehead to develop the theory and practice of AR, underpinned by an internationally informed participative worldview and an extended epistemology. CARPP specifically aimed to enable postgraduate research that would meet established quality criteria and bring about radical developments in both ideas and practices.

In the late 1980s I (Ruth) re-entered the academic world into action research practice in health settings at London University Institute of Education to undertake commissioned research, and this provided me with an opportunity to explore some of the origins of action research. I found that London's Tavistock Institute was the main champion of action research in the UK post-war years, where clinicians and HR specialists radically re-envisioned both individual and institutional 'frozenness'- or the inability to encounter problems as available for inquiry - as socially constructed.

But, in trying to present an account in our chapter of its key influences in the UK setting, I re-discovered how slippery the UK's geographical boundary proved to be. Kurt Lewin – a German Jewish refugee from Nazism – practised AR in the USA, yet the Tavistock Institute counts his work as foundational. Similarly, the origins of CARN in England arose from an American funded curriculum development project and drew from the outset on international networks. Ideas were crossing international boundaries fast.

On the other hand, we also realised that while this cross-fertilisation was apparent across the growing body of participatory work in the UK, there has always been a certain insularity between distinct centres of inquiry based in the UK academy itself, including the ones we report on here. Looking back, I wonder to what extent this productive international exchange of thinking was stimulated by a fascination with unfamiliar – ‘exotic’ - contexts and an ease of imaginative connection that may have seemed less straightforward between the directly connected world of neighbours.

The democratic impulse was one of CARN's core values and was practiced through inquiry and discovery approaches to learning.  Initially it was school-based – it was the Classroom Action Research Network – and grounded research acts in the processes of teaching and learning. Carr and Kemmis thought of action research as 'an embodiment of democratic principles in research'. This radical re-orientation of focus towards practice as knowledge production challenged the hegemony of academic educational research by 'making teachers' investigations of classroom practice its central component' (Somekh 2010: 109).

This approach emerged in other disciplines, particularly the caring professions, and postgraduate study which bridged higher education and practice settings began to develop. It was at this point that the term 'classroom' was exchanged for 'collaborative' in CARN's title, though there is a continuing sense within the network of the inquiring classroom as omni-present, potentially in every setting if we care to think of it that way.

I (Cathy) found that CARPP was strongly committed to the exploration of the ontological and epistemological groundings of AR, rooted in pragmatist philosophy and a participatory world view where ‘truth is something we do together’. As a student, this was an exhilarating experience that positioned AR as a life-long endeavour and commitment to dialogue, collaboration, exploring purposes, living values, and taking worthwhile action.

The joy of writing the chapter was in part, an opportunity to revisit and reflect on the experience of being part of the CARPP ‘community of inquiry’.  The work of the founders is internationally known and there is a substantial rich, thematically coherent, and values-based body of work that thankfully, is still accessible. There are journal articles and PhD theses that include experimental, creative, and innovative forms of writing and representation and more expansive expositions of ways of knowing.

Being part of this community also exposed me (Cathy) to the different perspectives and space occupied by a parallel, yet distinct approach to inquiry as a critically reflexive, relational, and improvisational approach, through the work of SOLAR (Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research). 

SOLAR was established by Susan Weil, initially based at University College Northampton in 1996, and then at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol 2002-9. Despite shared epistemological roots with CARPP, SOLAR wanted to be more systemic, seeking powerful patterns in stories, recurring themes and tensions that reproduce themselves in complex systems and tended to avoid the terms first-, second- and third-person inquiry used by CARPP.

At a CARPP workshop in 2002, I (Cathy) was excited and challenged by the invitation from Susan to engage more explicitly with power relations and system dynamics; to find ways to conduct inquiry amidst the ‘minefields of silence’, designing for emergence, and having the courage to learn from the mess, naming contradictions as an act of power, making it legitimate to notice frozenness, the issues that are not discussed, and how people respond.

Twenty years later, this challenge is highly resonant. In revisiting this work for our chapter, we saw some of the Tavistock's ideas, for example, organisational frozenness, silences, and denial, but transformed through an epistemological framework where expertise is no longer positioned via the ‘expert’ clinical gaze and framed instead as egalitarian.

We were also struck by the prescience of Susan Weil’s work from the 1990s that was developing creative ways to work with stories and acknowledge the realities of complex systems, those ‘not capable of being understood or controlled, in which we must approach learning and change as relational and improvisational processes’ (Weil, 1997: 378). 

At times highly experimental, SOLAR continued to develop the thinking and practice of Systemic Action Research (SAR) in stark contrast to traditional research or consultation. Their work was a clear call to ‘build cultures that support new forms of collaborative inquiry and action research’ that strongly reverberates throughout our experience and, to this day, warrants a wider audience.

As in the case of the early decades of AR in the community development movement, documentation in the initial period of education-based AR was also limited, with publication taking place in single sustained works such as Carr and Kemmis's Becoming Critical (1986), collections such as the Handbooks of Winter (1999) and Winter and Munn-Giddings (2001) and Reason & Bradbury (2001), and guides to practice.

On setting out the dates of origin of the two foremost UK based international AR journals we were surprised to see how long it had taken for them to emerge: Educational Action Research in 1993 and Action Research Journal ten years later.  Whilst SOLAR’s continuing influence manifests in Barry Percy-Smith’s work at the University of Huddersfield and Danny Burns at IDS, University of Sussex, the closure of the SOLAR archive at UWE creates a significant loss of documented activity for the action research community.

In registering silences, we concluded by finding hope for the flourishing of action research  and the contribution it can make to a more just and sustainable world often manifesting in marginal, off the radar spaces.  We propose that any revitalised vision of a deeply participatory AR will need to adopt a more holistic, affective, and relational approach to learning and knowledge creation that demands that we recognise the part emotion – including fear, anger, sadness, excitement, passion, and courage – plays in creating cultures, and the necessity to better integrate acknowledgement of our feelings into our practice.

Silence about important participatory work has much to do with the ‘enclosure of knowledge’ (Hall & Tandon 2017) within universities. We are encouraged by the emergence of new publication opportunities outside the conventional peer-review system – eg via The Social Publishers Foundation, CARN Praxis – in a cycle of return to the days before the establishment of peer-reviewed journal in our discipline, but in this iteration, embracing diversity.

The UK-based initiatives we highlight always drew on significant worldwide connections and interchange. Acknowledging that global exchanges and meetings of AR scholars from different networks and with differing interests are now taking place more often, the chapter that we originally wrote in 2019 issues a challenge for action researchers to be more collaborative, to share our practices within and across disciplines and sectors in the UK and embrace the technologies that can reduce our airmiles.

Our experience of the subsequent Covid 19 pandemic has at least demonstrated to us just how possible and valuable this really is, both internationally and more locally.  Our individual and mutual immersion in online meetings and networks across a wide variety of contexts and localities, has been sudden and hugely beneficial.  We have seen conference participation transformed by the inclusion of students, researchers, teachers, and practitioners of action research who would never attend a face-to-face event, not least because of the barriers of costs and time to travel.

We have taken part in and witnessed encounters as equals between eminent writers and figures from the action research world and novice researchers, practitioners and mid-career researchers in small breakout rooms and other configurations.  Such a fresh shape to our networking has created a significant and welcome disruption to the power dynamics and cliques that can prevail. We hope this will continue to re-orient our relationships in ever more productive ways.

Open access resources

https://www.socialpublishersfoundation.org/ 

https://www.carn.org.uk/resources/carn-praxis/

Open Access title: Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South by Carmen Martinez-Vargas. https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1511

https://www.carn.org.uk/

https://arnawebsite.org/

https://www.alarassociation.org/

https://knowledgedemocracyorg.wordpress.com/

https://stephenkemmis.com/

https://research-for-real.co.uk/

References

Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming Critical: Education Knowledge and Action Research. London:  Routledge.

Hall, B. L. and Tandon, R. (2017). Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research and higher education, Research for All 1 (1) 6-19

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2001). Introduction: Inquiry and participation in search of a world worthy of human aspiration. In P. Reason and H. Bradbury (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Action Research. London: Sage

Somekh, B. (2010). The collaborative action research network: 30 years of agency in developing educational action research. Educational Action Research, 18(1): 103–121.

Sharp, C. & Balogh, R. (2021). Becoming Participatory: Some Contributions to Action Research in the UK. In D. Burns, J. Howard, S.M. Ospina (eds)  The Sage Handbook of Participatory Research & Inquiry pp 154 - 168 Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC, Melbourne: Sage Publications

Weil, S. (1997) ‘Social and organisational learning in a different key: an introduction to the principles of critical learning theatre and dialectical inquiry’, in Stowell, F.,  Ison, R. and Armsonet, R (eds) Systems for sustainability: People, organisations and environments, New York, NY: Plenum. 378

Winter, R., Buck, A. and Sobiechowska, P. (1999). Professional Experience and the Investigative Imagination: The Art of Reflective Writing. London: Routledge.

Winter, R. and Munn-Giddings, C. (2001). A Handbook of Action Research in Health and Social Care. London: Routledge.

This is part of a series of chapter summaries of the Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry. 

Feminism is a multifaceted approach to facilitating research that cannot be defined by a single theoretical framework. Third- wave feminism (1980s–present), also known as Black Feminist Thought, Critical Race Theory/Feminism, and/or Intersectionality, is the feminist space we currently reside(Coghlan and Brydon-Miller, 2014). Feminist  research ‘put(s) the social construction of gender at the center of one’s inquiry’ (Lather, 1988: 570), arguing that gender is central in shaping our consciousness, knowledge, and institutions, as well as determining who holds power and privilege. At its core, feminist research  aims to ensure the voices of all, particularly in the context of gender, are heard in order to create a more just world. As such, the links to participatory research (PR) are clear; PR allows for us to see a future where the diverse voices of humanity are welcomed.  

The tenets of PR cannot be achieved if we do not welcome a feminist lens in our work. How can we advocate for   a world that is more equitable, through PR, without listening to the voices of women and  marginalized genders? How can we advocate   for social change if we aren’t willing to think  deeply about how power and privilege impact our worldview? How can we speak about justice if we first aren’t   willing to look at the ways we contribute to gendered bias? 

Key contributions:

The history of feminism in PR markedly begins with the seminal work of Patricia Maguire (1987), one of the first to recognize   the androcentric (focused on the experiences of men) nature of PR and ‘critique … male chauvinism in participatory research’ (Maguire, 1987: ix). Maguire’s piece, Doing   Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach, created a new paradigm by bridging feminist thought with participatory action research, and paved the way for the integration of feminism into PR. Maguire raised the question, where are the women? Stating that at the time, ‘gender was rendered invisible by supposedly inclusive terms such as people, the oppressed, the campesinos, or simply the community’ (Maguire, 1996: 111).  

In the late 1980s, feminist researchers sought a way to combat traditional, positivistic research by implementing approaches that celebrated relationships and iterative processes, giving way to PR (McIntyre et al., 2004). Before this time, ‘rarely have feminist and participatory action researchers acknowledged each other as collaborators with mutually important contributions to the journey’ (McIntyre et al., 2004: ix). Unfortunately, even at this point, feminism and PR continued to diverge, with feminism still rooted in more positivistic research paradigms, and PR remaining predominantly androcentric (McIntyre et al., 2004).  

Scholars such as Patricia Maguire, Yolanda Wadsworth, Andrea Cornwall, Mary Brydon-Miller, and Alice McIntyre continued to fight for a feminist space in PR in order to make way for the two frameworks to converge. Cornwall’s (2001) book Making a Difference? Gender and Participatory Development highlights the exclusion of women’s voices in participatory discourse and community engagement, and argues for a deeper consideration of power dynamics and more inclusive spaces for all genders.

In 2004, McIntyre, Brydon-Miller, and Maguire published their text Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research, which compiles perspectives from feminist participatory researchers as they explore and reflect upon power, practice, and positionality within their own scholarly action-oriented practice. Concurrently with the introduction of feminist thought into PR came the notion of race and power through the lens of critical race theory (CRT). Much like feminist scholars determined a stark gap in PR as women were left out of conversations surrounding privilege and power, Bell (2006) pointed out  that race and racial issues too are left out of PR discourse. 

Tenets: 

The tenets of feminist PR include: (1) Rejection of value-free research, (2) Inclusivity, (3) Power, voice, and empowerment, (4) Positionality, and (5) Relationships and collaboration. 

Rejection of value-free research:

Feminist scholars reject a positivistic  approach that suggests research must be objective and value-free, acknowledging this paradigm creates ‘dehumanizing assumptions, methods, and implicit messages’ (Maguire, 1996: 113). Instead, feminist scholars acknowledge that knowledge is socially constructed and research exists within a system of values. Feminist PR researchers commit themselves to conduct research that challenges political systems of power and practices that continue to marginalize populations (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003). 

Inclusivity:

Participatory research as a whole has historically failed to be inclusive of marginalized communities, which led to inclusivity becoming a core concept within feminist PR (Reid and Frisby, 2008). In order for PR to be authentic and transformative it must be inclusive and couched within a feminist lens that appreciates the depth and intersectionality of human experience (Frisby et al., 2009: 24). Cornwall (2001) argues that in order for  women to be fully engaged, they must feel comfortable and welcomed in spaces where participatory work is being done. Frisby et al. (2009: 23) notes that ‘this is where action research contributes back to  feminist theory-building, because the goal is to engage in participatory processes that are inclusive of those usually marginalized from  more formal processes of theory production,’ suggesting that the overall processes are more intentional about inclusivity. 

Power, voice, and empowerment:

As feminist researchers we are called to  explore how power comes into play in the  world around us, but also within our research. Facilitating participatory methods from a feminist perspective requires that we give up  control of conducting research, and rather welcome collaboration with others. Participatory approaches are designed to expose the role of power in the construction of knowledge, recognizing that it is feminist research that ‘calls attention to the centrality of male power in that social construction of knowledge’ (Maguire, 1996: 111).  

Positionality:

Within a single feminist PR project, the researcher takes on multiple roles that can be impacted by their own positionality and personal bias, both of which are necessary to address. An action researcher may hold several roles, which is further confounded by whether the researcher is an insider in the community they are studying, an outsider, or some combination of the two. Feminist participatory researchers have an obligation to acknowledge and delve into the ‘interlocking nature of oppression and privilege’ (Brydon-Miller and Maguire, 2009: 85). Despite power differentials that may exist, or the multiple roles that a researcher may carry, the participants, or co-researchers, are the leaders of decision-making (McIntyre, 2008), to stay true to the PR process. 

Relationships & Collaboration:

Feminist PR involves ‘creating knowledge through participatory processes in the context of human relationships’ (Maguire, 1987: xvi). Within a single feminist PR framework, participants in a project are considered to be co-researchers who contribute fully to the research throughout the entire process (McIntyre, 2008), which is grounded in a deep commitment to a relational approach  as a philosophical underpinning. By developing strong relationships with co-researchers, participatory researchers are able to gain the trust of underserved communities and gather more rich, relevant data in order to work towards creating measurable, positive change  (Vaughn et al., 2017). 

Intersectionality:

Black Feminist Thought, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Intersectionality lend themselves well to participatory research strategies (Houh and Kalsem, 2015), particularly in terms of collaboration and authentic relationships between researchers and par ticipants (Thomas, 2009). Intersectionality, a theory that highlights and values intersecting identities in relation to human experience (Crenshaw, 1989, 1990), is a concept originating in both CRT and Black Feminist Thought.

The primary tenet of intersectionality is the consideration of intersecting oppressions that are a result of being a part of more than one historically marginalized group (Crenshaw, 1989, 1990). According to Anderson et al. (2007: 7), PR ‘has the potential for empowerment and the inclusion for greater diversity of voices in educational policy and social change.’ The issue of power relations and balance of power is a key theme in PR (McIntyre, 2008), CRT, and third-wave feminism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; hooks, 2000). 

Feminist-Informed PR Methods:

Through its connection with feminist thought, PR has the ability to appreciate and highlight marginalized voices as well as view women as capable contributors to research and social justice (McIntyre, 2008). Just as there is no single theory that informs PAR, there is also no single method that PAR implements (Burns, 2007; McIntyre, 2008). 

Photovoice:

The development of Photovoice was rooted in utilizing a feminist theoretical lens to address the androcentric nature of participatory research (Wang and Burris, 1997). Photovoice involves providing people with cameras so that they can take photographs as a means to ‘identify, represent, and enhance their community’ (Wang and Burris, 1997: 369). It is used most often around the topic of   health, however it is beginning to gain popularity in other spaces.

Photovoice is rooted in a feminist inquiry; it is in opposition with positivist ways of knowing, instead focused on ‘listening to and learning from women’s own portrayal of their lives’ (Wang, 1999, p. 187). Photovoice confronts other forms of research that rely on the researcher to determine the needs of the community; rather, within this method communities are empowered to ‘collectively prioritize’ their needs (Wang and Burris, 1997). Photovoice empowers people to be catalysts of change within their own communities, by providing them an opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise (Wang and Burris, 1997). 

Group-Level Assessment:

Group-Level Assessment (GLA) is a qualitative, participatory methodology meant for large groups (Vaughn and Lohmueller, 2014). The process involves participants responding to prompts on large posters presented throughout the room, then a preliminary group analysis is conducted, followed by group discussion; reflection is also a key part of the GLA process (Vaughn and Lohmueller, 2014). GLA leads to data that are propelled by participants, not by researchers, and it leads to the creation of action plans that work toward program development and problem solving (Vaughn and Lohmueller, 2014). The nature of the participatory process makes GLA inclusive of multiple individuals and experiences, and responding to prompts anonymously allows for leveling the playing field between stakeholders.

Within the context of feminist PR, GLA has been used in several instances to amplify women’s voices and capture their unique, pluralistic experiences. Guy and Boards (2019) used intersectionality as a framework for their participatory research project investigating the perspectives and needs of under- represented minority (URM) women students enrolled in STEM degree programs. Their study implemented a GLA to develop an action plan to support them at the university. Arthur and Guy (2020) also utilized GLA within a feminist PR framework to better understand women engineering students’ experiences during their cooperative education (co-op) programs. Through the GLA process, Arthur and Guy (2020) worked with their participants to develop several action items that are being used to improve the experiences of women engineers on co-op. 

Conclusions

Feminism challenges PR to focus on power, gender, and collaboration as key tenets. Feminism has helped participatory researchers ensure that relational collaboration and genuine participation are central to their practice. Feminist participatory scholars urge participatory researchers to ensure that conversations around gender and power are discussed as central to our development of knowledge, in an attempt to combat the traditional, androcentric nature that has historically plagued PR.

Feminist PR promotes inclusivity of all genders in the PR process, while not simplifying individuals’ experiences as mono lithic. Furthermore, feminist PR demands that participatory researchers be intentional about who is offered a seat at the table, while also consistently revisiting who is left out. 

Recommended reading:

Arthur, B. and Guy, B. (2020). ‘No, I’m not the secretary’: Using participatory methods to explore women engineering students’ experiences on co-op. International Journal of Work-Integrated Learning, 21(3): 211–222. 

Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford law Review., 43 (6): 1241-1299. 

Frisby, W., Maguire, P. and Reid, C. (2009). The f’word has everything to do with it: How feminist theories inform action research. Action Research, 7(1): 13–29. 

Maguire, P. (1987). Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 

McIntyre, A., Brydon-Miller, M. and Maguire, P. (Eds.) (2004). Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research. West- port, CT: Greenwood.