Practice of participatory action research

Seminars: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

This course runs for six weeks total.

As planning students and professional practitioners, we work in and with communities on a variety of issues from health justice and climate change adaptation to affordable housing and immigration reform. However, in the rush to meet deadlines and finalize deliverables, we rarely devote sufficient time to reflecting on the processes and relationships we are part of in the communities in which we work. How can we truly collaborate with community members to co-generate knowledge for social change? What are the appropriate methods for doing this? Who owns the knowledge that is co-produced? What are key ethical dilemmas at the heart of partnerships between applied social scientists and community members?

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a way of producing "actionable" knowledge that communities can use to solve the problems they face. PAR processes are place or case-specific, place a premium on local ways of knowing, and gauge the success of research in terms of what partner-communities do with the knowledge that is co-produced. The objective of PAR is to generate what Aristotle would have called "practical wisdom:" The ideas, information, and understandings that ought to inform efforts to promote social change.

This course will introduce students to the practice of case study research (and competing ideas about context-independent vs. context dependent knowledge), arguments for and against generating theory or public policy recommendations on the basis of a single case, and problems of verification (i.e. disconfirming the researcher's preconceptions). Focusing on ways of co-producing knowledge using various forms of data collection and analysis, we will try to understand how the people and communities who are often university partners in applied social science research can use findings or results to address the challenges they confront.

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