Academic Participatory Researchers: More harm than good?

According to the experience of Randy Stoecker, academic participatory researchers can be irrelevant or damaging to PAR projects. Irrelevant, as the whole purpose of participatory research is that community members become “self-sufficient” researchers and activists, and potentially damaging, as academic researchers may over-emphasize the research component of a PAR project and find themselves incapable of assisting in social change.
So what are the [...]

The challenges of PAR’s increasing legitimacy

Budd Hall, Director of Community-based Research at the University of Victoria, is an expert on PAR. In his paper, “In from the Cold? Reflections on participatory research”, he tracks how participatory research emerged in Tanzania in the 1970s to examine PAR in the present day. He provides an eye-witness account of how a [...]