participatory action research

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• Published: 27 April 2023

Participatory action research

• Flora Cornish   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3404-9385 1 ,
• Nancy Breton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8388-0458 1 ,
• Ulises Moreno-Tabarez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3504-8624 2 ,
• Jenna Delgado 3 ,
• Mohi Rua 4 ,
• Ama de-Graft Aikins 5 &
• Darrin Hodgetts 6  

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume  3 , Article number:  34 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research to generate new knowledge. This Primer sets out key considerations for the design of a PAR project. The core of the Primer introduces six building blocks for PAR project design: building relationships; establishing working practices; establishing a common understanding of the issue; observing, gathering and generating materials; collaborative analysis; and planning and taking action. We discuss key challenges faced by PAR projects, namely, mismatches with institutional research infrastructure; risks of co-option; power inequalities; and the decentralizing of control. To counter such challenges, PAR researchers may build PAR-friendly networks of people and infrastructures; cultivate a critical community to hold them to account; use critical reflexivity; redistribute powers; and learn to trust the process. PAR’s societal contribution and methodological development, we argue, can best be advanced by engaging with contemporary social movements that demand the redressingl of inequities and the recognition of situated expertise.

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Introduction

For the authors of this Primer, participatory action research (PAR) is a scholar–activist research approach that brings together community members, activists and scholars to co-create knowledge and social change in tandem 1 , 2 . PAR is a collaborative, iterative, often open-ended and unpredictable endeavour, which prioritizes the expertise of those experiencing a social issue and uses systematic research methodologies to generate new insights. Relationships are central. PAR typically involves collaboration between a  community with lived experience of a social issue and professional researchers, often based in universities, who contribute relevant knowledge, skills, resources and networks. PAR is not a research process driven by the imperative to generate knowledge for scientific progress, or knowledge for knowledge’s sake; it is a process for generating knowledge-for-action and knowledge-through-action, in service of goals of specific communities. The position of a PAR scholar is not easy and is constantly tested, as PAR projects and roles straddle university and community boundaries, involving unequal  power relations and multiple, sometimes conflicting interests. This Primer aims to support researchers in preparing a PAR project, by providing a scaffold to navigate the processes through which PAR can help us to collaboratively envisage and enact emancipatory futures.

We consider PAR an emancipatory form of scholarship 1 . Emancipatory scholarship is driven by interest in tackling injustices and building futures supportive of human thriving, rather than objectivity and neutrality. It uses research not primarily to communicate with academic experts but to inform grassroots collective action. Many users of PAR aspire to projects of liberation and/or transformation . Users are likely to be critical of research that perpetuates oppressive power relations, whether within the research relationships themselves or in a project’s messages or outcomes, often aiming to trouble or transform power relations. PAR projects are usually concerned with developments not only in knowledge but also in action and in participants’ capacities, capabilities and performances.

PAR does not follow a set research design or particular methodology, but constitutes a strategic rallying point for collaborative, impactful, contextually situated and inclusive efforts to document, interpret and address complex systemic problems 3 . The development of PAR is a product of intellectual and activist work bridging universities and communities, with separate genealogies in several Indigenous 4 , 5 , Latin American 6 , 7 , Indian 8 , African 9 , Black feminist 10 , 11 and Euro-American 12 , 13 traditions.

PAR, as an authoritative form of enquiry, became established during the 1970s and 1980s in the context of anti-colonial movements in the Global South. As anti-colonial movements worked to overthrow territorial and economic domination, they also strived to overthrow symbolic and epistemic injustices , ousting the authority of Western science to author knowledge about dominated peoples 4 , 14 . For Indigenous scholars, the development of PAR approaches often comprised an extension of Indigenous traditions of knowledge production that value inclusion and community engagement, while enabling explicit engagements with matters of power, domination and representation 15 . At the same time, exchanges between Latin American and Indian popular education movements produced Orlando Fals Borda’s articulation of PAR as a paradigm in the 1980s. This orientation prioritized people’s participation in producing knowledge, instead of the positioning of local populations as the subject of knowledge production practices imposed by outside experts 16 . Meanwhile, PAR appealed to those inspired by Black and postcolonial feminists who challenged established knowledge hierarchies, arguing for the wisdom of people marginalized by centres of power, who, in the process of survivance, that is, surviving and resisting oppressive social structures, came to know and deconstruct those structures acutely 17 , 18 .

Some Euro-American approaches to PAR are less transformational and more reformist, in the action research paradigm, as developed by Kurt Lewin 19 to enhance organizational efficacy during and after World War II. Action research later gained currency as a popular approach for professionals such as teachers and nurses to develop their own practices, and it tended to focus on relatively small-scale adjustments within a given institutional structure, instead of challenging power relations as in anti-colonial PAR 13 , 20 . In the late twentieth century, participatory research gained currency in academic fields such as participatory development 21 , 22 , participatory health promotion 23 and creative methods 24 . Although participatory research includes participants in the conceptualization, design and conduct of a project, it may not prioritize action and social change to the extent that PAR does. In the early twenty-first century, the development of PAR is occurring through sustained scholarly engagements in anti-colonial 5 , 25 , abolitionist 26 , anti-racist 27 , 28 , gender-expansive 29 , climate activist 30 and other radical social movements.

This Primer bridges these traditions by looking across them for mutual learning but avoiding assimilating them. We hope that readers will bring their own activist and intellectual heritages to inform their use of PAR and adapt and adjust the suggestions we present to meet their needs.

Four key principles

Drawing across its diverse origins, we characterize PAR by four key principles. The first is the authority of direct experience. PAR values the expertise generated through experience, claiming that those who have been marginalized or harmed by current social relations have deep experiential knowledge of those systems and deserve to own and lead initiatives to change them 3 , 5 , 17 , 18 . The second is knowledge in action. Following the tradition of action research, it is through learning from the experience of making changes that PAR generates new knowledge 13 . The third key principle is research as a transformative process. For PAR, the research process is as important as the outcomes; projects aim to create empowering relationships and environments within the research process itself 31 . The final key principle is collaboration through dialogue. PAR’s power comes from harnessing the diverse sets of expertise and capacities of its collaborators through critical dialogues 7 , 8 , 32 .

Because PAR is often unfamiliar, misconstrued or mistrusted by dominant scientific 33 institutions, PAR practitioners may find themselves drawn into competitions and debates set on others’ terms, or into projects interested in securing communities’ participation but not their emancipation. Engaging communities and participants in participatory exercises for the primary purpose of advancing research aims prioritized by a university or others is not, we contend, PAR. We encourage PAR teams to articulate their intellectual and political heritage and aspirations, and agree their core principles, to which they can hold themselves accountable. Such agreements can serve as anchors for decision-making or counterweights to the pull towards inegalitarian or extractive research practices.

Aims of the Primer

The contents of the Primer are shaped by the authors’ commitment to emancipatory, engaged scholarship, and their own experience of PAR, stemming from their scholar-activism with marginalized communities to tackle issues including state neglect, impoverishment, infectious and non-communicable disease epidemics, homelessness, sexual violence, eviction, pollution, dispossession and post-disaster recovery. Collectively, our understanding of PAR is rooted in Indigenous, Black feminist and emancipatory education traditions and diverse personal experiences of privilege and marginalization across dimensions of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability. We use an inclusive understanding of PAR, to include engaging, emancipatory work that does not necessarily use the term PAR, and we aim to showcase some of the diversity of scholar-activism around the globe. The contents of this Primer are suggestions and reflections based on our own experience of PAR and of teaching research methodology. There are multiple ways of conceptualizing and conducting a PAR project. As context-sensitive social change processes, every project will pose new challenges.

This Primer is addressed primarily to university-based PAR researchers, who are likely to work in collaboration with members of communities or organizations or with activists, and are accountable to academic audiences as well as to community audiences. Much expertise in PAR originates outside universities, in community groups and organizations, from whom scholars have much to learn. The Primer aims to familiarize scholars new to PAR and others who may benefit with PAR’s key principles, decision points, practices, challenges, dilemmas, optimizations, limitations and work-arounds. Readers will be able to use our framework of ‘building blocks’ as a guide to designing their projects. We aim to support critical thinking about the challenges of PAR to enable readers to problem-solve independently. The Primer aims to inspire with examples, which we intersperse throughout. To illustrate some of the variety of positive achievements of PAR projects, Box  1 presents three examples.

Box 1 What does participatory action research do?

The Tsui Anaa Project 60 in Accra, Ghana, began as a series of interviews about diabetes experiences in one of Accra’s oldest indigenous communities, Ga Mashie. Over a 12-year period, a team of interdisciplinary researchers expanded the project to a multi-method engagement with a wide range of community members. University and community co-researchers worked to diagnose the burden of chronic conditions, to develop psychosocial interventions for cardiovascular and associated conditions and to critically reflect on long-term goals. A health support group of people living with diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, called Jamestown Health Club (JTHC), was formed, met monthly and contributed as patient advocates to community, city and national non-communicable disease policy. The project has supported graduate collaborators with mixed methods training, community engagement and postgraduate theses advancing the core project purposes.

Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 were approached by members of the Katkari tribal community in Maharashtra, India, who were concerned about landlords erecting fences around their villages. Using their institutional networks, the academics investigated the villagers’ legal rights to secure tenure and facilitated a series of participatory investigations, through which Katkari villagers developed their own understanding of the inequalities they faced and analysed potential action strategies. Subsequently, through legal challenges, engagement with local politics and emboldened local communities, more than 100 Katkari communities were more secure and better organized 5 years later.

The Morris Justice Project 74 in New York, USA, sought to address stop-and-frisk policing in a neighbourhood local to the City University of New York, where a predominantly Black population was subject to disproportionate and aggressive policing. Local residents surveyed their neighbours to gather evidence on experiences of stop and frisk, compiling their statistics and experiences and sharing them with the local community on the sidewalk, projecting their findings onto public buildings and joining a coalition ‘Communities United for Police Reform’, which successfully campaigned for changes to the city’s policing laws.

Experimentation

This section sets out the core considerations for designing a PAR project.

Owing to the intricacies of working within complex human systems in real time, PAR practitioners do not follow a highly proceduralized or linear set of steps 34 . In a cyclical process, teams work together to come to an initial definition of their social problem, design a suitable action, observe and gather information on the results, and then analyse and reflect on the action and its impact, in order to learn, modify their understanding and inform the next iteration of the research–action cycle 3 , 35 (Fig.  1 ). Teams remain open throughout the cycle to repeating or revising earlier steps in response to developments in the field. The fundamental process of building relationships occurs throughout the cycles. These spiral diagrams orient readers towards the central interdependence of processes of participation, action and research and the nonlinear, iterative process of learning by doing 3 , 36 .

Participatory action research develops through a series of cycles, with relationship building as a constant practice. Cycles of research text adapted from ref. 81 , and figure adapted with permission from ref. 82 , SAGE.

Building blocks for PAR research design

We present six building blocks to set out the key design considerations for conducting a PAR project. Each PAR team may address these building blocks in different ways and with different priorities. Table  1 proposes potential questions and indicative goals that are possible markers of progress for each building block. They are not prescriptive or exhaustive but may be a useful starting point, with examples, to prompt new PAR teams’ planning.

Building relationships

‘Relationships first, research second’ is our key principle for PAR project design 37 . Collaborative relationships usually extend beyond a particular PAR project, and it is rare that one PAR project finalizes a desired change. A researcher parachuting in and out may be able to complete a research article, with community cooperation, but will not be able to see through the hard graft of a programme of participatory research towards social change. Hence, individual PAR projects are often nested in long-term collaborations. Such collaborations are strengthened by institutional backing in the form of sustainable staff appointments, formal recognition of the value of university–community partnerships and provision of administrative support. In such a supportive context, opportunities can be created for achievable shorter-term projects to which collaborators or temporary researchers may contribute. The first step of PAR is sometimes described as the entry, but we term this foundational step building relationships to emphasize the longer-term nature of these relationships and their constitutive role throughout a project. PAR scholars may need to work hard with and against their institutions to protect those relationships, monitoring potential collaborations for community benefit rather than knowledge and resource extraction. Trustworthy relationships depend upon scholars being aware, open and honest about their own interests and perspectives.

The motivation for a PAR project may come from university-based or community-based researchers. When university researchers already have a relationship with marginalized communities, they may be approached by community leaders initiating a collaboration 38 , 39 . Alternatively, a university-based researcher may reach out to representatives of communities facing evident problems, to explore common interests and the potential for collaboration 40 . As Indigenous scholars have articulated, communities that have been treated as the subjects or passive objects of research, commodified for the scientific knowledge of distant elites, are suspicious of research and researchers 4 , 41 . Scholars need to be able to satisfy communities’ key questions: Who are you? Why should we trust you? What is in it for our community? Qualifications, scholarly achievements or verbal reassurances are less relevant in this context than past or present valued contributions, participation in a heritage of transformational action or evidence of solidarity with a community’s causes. Being vouched for by a respected community member or collaborator can be invaluable.

Without prior relationships one can start cold, as a stranger, perhaps attending public events, informal meeting places or identifying organizations in which the topic is of interest, and introducing oneself. Strong collaborative relationships are based on mutual trust, which must be earned. It is important to be transparent about our interests and to resist the temptation to over-promise. Good PAR practitioners do not raise unrealistic expectations. Box  2 presents key soft skills for PAR researchers.

Positionality is crucial to PAR relationships. A university-based researcher’s positionalities (including, for example, their gender, race, ethnicity, class, politics, skills, age, life stage, life experiences, assumptions about the problem, experience in research, activism and relationship to the topic) interact with the positionalities of community co-researchers, shaping the collective definition of the problem and appropriate solutions. Positionalities are not fixed, but can be changing, multiple and even contradictory 42 . We have framed categories of university-based and community-based researchers here, but in practice these positionings of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are often more complex and shifting 43 . Consideration of diversity is important when building a team to avoid  tokenism . For example, identifying which perspectives are included initially and why, and whether members of the team or gatekeepers have privileged access owing to their race, ethnicity, class, gender and/or able-bodiedness.

The centring of community expertise in PAR does not mean that a community is ‘taken for granted’. Communities are sites of the production of similarity and difference, equality and inequalities, and politics. Knowledge that has the status of common sense may itself reproduce inequalities or perpetuate harm. Relatedly, strong PAR projects cultivate  reflexivity 44 among both university-based and community-based researchers, to enable a critical engagement with the diversity of points of view, positions of power and stakes in a project. Developing reflexivity may be uncomfortable and challenging, and good PAR projects create a supportive culture for processing such discomfort. Supplementary files  1 and   2 present example exercises that build critical reflexivity.

Box 2 Soft skills of a participatory action researcher

Respect for others’ knowledge and the expertise of experience

Humility and genuine kindness

Ability to be comfortable with discomfort

Sharing power; ceding control

Trusting the process

Acceptance of uncertainty and tensions

Openness to learning from collaborators

Self-awareness and the ability to listen and be confronted

Willingness to take responsibility and to be held accountable

Confidence to identify and challenge power relations

Establishing working practices

Partnerships bring together people with different sets of norms, assumptions, interests, resources, time frames and working practices, all nested in institutional structures and infrastructures that cement those assumptions. University-based researchers often take their own working practices for granted, but partnership working calls for negotiation. Academics often work with very extended time frames for analysis, writing and review before publication, hoping to contribute to gradually shifting agendas, discourses and politics 45 . The urgency of problems that face a community often calls for faster responsiveness. Research and management practices that are normal in a university may not be accessible to people historically marginalized through dimensions that include disability, language, racialization, gender, literacy practices and their intersections 46 . Disrupting historically entrenched power dynamics associated with these concerns can raise discomfort and calls for skilful negotiation. In short, partnership working is a complex art, calling for thoughtful design of joint working practices and a willingness to invest the necessary time.

Making working practices and areas of tension explicit is one useful starting point. Not all issues need to be fully set out and decided at the outset of a project. A foundation of trust, through building relationships in building block 1, allows work to move ahead without every element being pinned down in advance. Supplementary file  1 presents an exercise designed to build working relationships and communicative practices.

Establishing a common understanding of the issue

Co-researchers identify a common issue or problem to address. University-based researchers tend to justify the selection of the research topic with reference to a literature review, whereas in PAR, the topic must be a priority for the community. Problem definition is a key step for PAR teams, where problem does not necessarily mean something negative or a deficit, but refers to the identification of an important issue at stake for a community. The definition of a problem, however, is not always self-evident, and producing a problem definition can be a valid outcome of PAR. In the example of risks of eviction from Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 (Box  1 ), a small number of Katkari people first experienced the problem in terms of landlords erecting barbed wire fences. Other villages did not perceive the risk of eviction as a big problem compared with their other needs. Facilitating dialogues across villages about their felt problems revealed how land tenure was at the root of several issues, thus mobilizing interest. Problem definitions are political; they imply some forms of action and not others. Discussion and reflexivity about the problem definition are crucial. Compared with other methodologies, the PAR research process is much more public from the outset, and so practices of making key steps explicit, shareable, communicable and negotiable are essential. Supplementary file  3 introduces two participatory tools for collective problem definition.

Consideration of who should be involved in problem definition is important. It may be enough that a small project team works closely together at this stage. Alternatively, group or public meetings may be held, with careful facilitation 5 . Out of dialogue, a PAR team aims to agree on an actionable problem definition, responding to the team’s combination of skills, capacities and priorities. A PAR scholar works across the university–community boundary and thus is accountable to both university values and grassroots communities’ values. PAR scholars should not deny or hide the multiple demands of the role because communities with experience of marginalization are attuned to being manipulated. Surfacing interests and constraints and discussing these reflexively is often a better strategy. Creativity may be required to design projects that meet both academic goals (such as when a project is funded to produce certain outcomes) and the community’s goals.

For example, in the context of a PAR project with residents of a public housing neighbourhood scheduled for demolition and redevelopment, Thurber and colleagues 47 describe how they overcame differences between resident and academic researchers regarding the purposes of their initial survey. The academic team members preferred the data to be anonymous, to maximize the scientific legitimacy of their project (considered valuable for their credibility to policymakers), whereas the resident team wanted to use the opportunity to recruit residents to their cause, by collecting contact details. The team discussed their different objectives and produced the solution of two-person survey teams, one person gathering anonymous data for the research and a second person gathering contact details for the campaign’s contact list.

Articulating research questions is an early milestone. PAR questions prioritize community concerns, so they may differ from academic-driven research questions. For example, Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 facilitated a participatory process that developed questions along the lines of: What are the impacts of not having a land title for Katkari people? How will stakeholders respond to Katkari organizing, and what steps can Katkari communities take towards the goal of securing tenure? In another case, incarcerated women in New York state, USA, invited university academics to evaluate a local college in prison in the interest of building an empirical argument for the value of educational opportunities in prisons 38 , 48 Like other evaluations, it asked: “What is the impact of college on women in prison?” But instead of looking narrowly at the impact on re-offending as the relevant impact (as prioritized by politicians and policymakers), based on the incarcerated women’s advice, the evaluation tracked other outcomes: women’s well-being within the prison; their relationships with each other and the staff; their children; their sense of achievement; and their agency in their lives after incarceration.

As a PAR project develops, the problem definition and research questions are often refined through the iterative cycles. This evolution does not undermine the value of writing problem definitions and research questions in the early stages, as a collaboration benefits from having a common reference point to build from and from which to negotiate.

Observing, gathering and generating materials

With a common understanding of the problem, PAR teams design ways of observing the details and workings of this problem. PAR is not prescriptive about the methods used to gather or generate observations. Projects often use qualitative methods, such as storytelling, interviewing or ethnography, or participatory methods, such as body mapping, problem trees, guided walks, timelines, diaries, participatory photography and video or participatory theatre. Gathering quantitative data is an option, particularly in the tradition of participatory statistics 49 . Chilisa 5 distinguishes sources of spatial data, time-related data, social data and technical data. The selected methods should be engaging to the community and the co-researchers, suited to answering the research questions and supported by available professional skills. Means of recording the process or products, and of storing those records, need to be agreed, as well as ethical principles. Developing community members’ research skills for data collection and analysis can be a valued contribution to a PAR project, potentially generating longer-term capacities for local research and change-making 50 .

Our selection of data generation methods and their details depends upon the questions we ask. In some cases, methods to explore problem definitions and then to brainstorm potential actions, their risks and benefits will be useful (Supplementary file  3 ). Others may be less prescriptive about problems and solutions, seeking to explore experience in an open-ended way, as a basis for generating new understandings (see Supplementary file  2 for an example reflective participatory exercise).

Less-experienced practitioners may take a naive approach to PAR, which assumes that knowledge should emerge solely from an authentic community devoid of outside ideas. More established PAR researchers, however, work consciously to combine and exchange skills and knowledge through dialogue. Together with communities, we want to produce effective products, and we recognize that doing so may require specific skills. In Marzi’s 51 participatory video project with migrant women in Colombia, she engaged professional film-makers to provide the women with training in filming, editing and professional film production vocabulary. The women were given the role of directors, with the decision-making power over what to include and exclude in their film. In a Photovoice project with Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto, Canada, Tuck and Habtom 25 drew on their prior scholar–activist experience and their critical analysis of scholarship of marginalization, which often uses tropes of victimhood, passivity and sadness. Instead of repeating narratives of damage, they intended to encourage desire-based narratives. They supported their young participants to critically consider which photographs they wanted to include or exclude from public representations. Training participants to be expert users of research techniques does not devalue their existing expertise and skills, but takes seriously their role in co-producing valid, critical knowledge. University-based researchers equally benefit from training in facilitation methods, team development and the history and context of the community.

Data generation is relational, mediated by the positionalities of the researchers involved. As such, researchers position themselves across boundaries, and need to have, or to develop, skills in interpreting across boundaries. In the Tsui Anaa Project (Box  1 ) in Ghana, the project recruited Ga-speaking graduate students as researchers; Ga is the language most widely spoken in the community. The students were recruited not only for their language skills, but also for their Ga cultural sensibilities, reflected in their sense of humour and their intergenerational communicative styles, enabling fluid communication and mutual understanding with the community. In turn, two community representatives were recruited as advocates to represent patient perspectives across university and community boundaries.

University-based researchers trained in methodological rigour may need reminders that the process of a PAR project is as important as the outcome, and is part of the outcome. Facilitation skills are the most crucial skills for PAR practitioners at this stage. Productive facilitation skills encourage open conversation and collective understandings of the problem at hand and how to address it. More specifically, good facilitation requires a sensitivity to the ongoing and competing social context, such as power relations, within the group to help shift power imbalances and enable participation by all 52 . Box  3 presents a PAR project that exemplifies the importance of relationship building in a community arts project.

Box 3 Case study of the BRIDGE Project: relationship building and collective art making as social change

The BRIDGE Project was a 3-week long mosaic-making and dialogue programme for youth aged 14–18 years, in Southern California. For several summers, the project brought together students from different campuses to discuss inclusion, bullying and community. The goal was to help build enduring relationships among young people who otherwise would not have met or interacted, thereby mitigating the racial tensions that existed in their local high schools.

Youth were taught how to make broken tile mosaic artworks, facilitated through community-building exercises. After the first days, as relationships grew, so did the riskiness of the discussion topics. Youth explored ideas and beliefs that contribute to one’s individual sense of identity, followed by discussion of wider social identities around race, class, sex, gender, class, sexual orientation and finally their identities in relationship to others.

The art-making process was structured in a manner that mirrored the building of their relationships. Youth learned mosaic-making skills while creating individual pieces. They were discouraged from collaborating with anyone else until after the individual pieces were completed and they had achieved some proficiency. When discussions transitioned to focus on the relationship their identities had to each other, the facilitators assisted them in creating collaborative mosaics with small groups.

Staff facilitation modelled the relationship-building goal of the project. The collaborative art making was built upon the rule that no one could make any changes without asking for and receiving permission from the person or people who had placed the piece (or pieces) down. To encourage participants to engage with each other it was vital that they each felt comfortable to voice their opinions while simultaneously learning how to be accountable to their collaborators and respectful of others’ relationships to the art making.

The process culminated in the collective creation of a tile mosaic wall mural, which is permanently installed in the host site.

Collaborative analysis

In PAR projects, data collection and analysis are not typically isolated to different phases of research. Instead, a tried and tested approach to collaborative analysis 53 is to use generated data as a basis for reflection on commonalities, patterns, differences, underlying causes or potentials on an ongoing basis. For instance, body mapping, photography, or video projects often proceed through a series of workshops, with small-scale training–data collection–data analysis cycles in each workshop. Participants gather or produce materials in response to a prompt, and then come together to critically discuss the meaning of their productions.

Simultaneously, or later, a more formal data analysis may be employed, using established social science analytical tools such as grounded theory, thematic, content or discourse analysis, or other forms of visual or ethnographic analysis, with options for facilitated co-researcher involvement. The selection of a specific orientation or approach to analysis is often a low priority for community-based co-researchers. It may be appropriate for university-based researchers to take the lead on comprehensive analysis and the derivation of initial messages. Fine and Torre 29 describe the university-based researchers producing a “best bad draft” so that there is something on the table to react to and discuss. Given the multiple iterations of participants’ expressions of experiences and analyses by this stage, the university-based researchers should be in a position that their best bad draft is grounded in a good understanding of local perspectives and should not appear outlandish, one-sided or an imposition of outside ideas.

For the results and recommendations to reflect community interests, it is important to incorporate a step whereby community representatives can critically examine and contribute to emerging findings and core messages for the public, stakeholders or academic audiences.

Planning and taking action

Taking action is an integral part of a PAR process. What counts as action and change is different for each PAR project. Actions could be targeted at a wide range of scales and different stakeholders, with differing intended outcomes. Valid intended outcomes include creating supportive networks to share resources through mutual aid; empowering participants through sharing experiences and making sense of them collectively; using the emotional impact of artistic works to influence policymakers and journalists; mobilizing collective action to build community power; forging a coalition with other activist and advocacy groups; and many others. Selection between the options depends on underlying priorities, values, theories of how social change happens and, crucially, feasibility.

Articulating a theory of change is one way to demonstrate how we intend to bring about changes through designing an action plan. A theory of change identifies an action and a mechanism, directed at producing outcomes, for a target group, in a context. This device has often been used in donor-driven health and development contexts in a rather prescriptive way, but PAR teams can adapt the tool as a scaffolding for being explicit about action plans and as a basis for further discussions and development of those plans. Many health and development organizations (such as Better Evaluation ) have frameworks to help design a theory of change.

Alternatively, a community action plan 5 can serve as a tangible roadmap to produce change, by setting out objectives, strategies, timeline, key actors, required resources and the monitoring and evaluation framework.

Social change is not easy, and existing social systems benefit, some at the expense of others, and are maintained by power relations. In planning for action, analysis of the power relations at stake, the beneficiaries of existing systems and their potential resistance to change is crucial. It is often wise to assess various options for actions, their potential benefits, risks and ways of mitigating those risks. Sometimes a group may collectively decide to settle for relatively secure, and less-risky, small wins but with the building of sufficient power, a group may take on a bigger challenge 54 .

Ethical considerations are fundamental to every aspect of PAR. They include standard research ethics considerations traditionally addressed by research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs), including key principles of avoidance of harm, anonymity and confidentiality, and voluntary informed consent, although these issues may become much more complex than traditionally presented, when working within a PAR framework 55 . PAR studies typically benefit from IRBs that can engage with the relational specificities of a case, with a flexible and iterative approach to research design with communities, instead of being beholden to very strict and narrow procedures. Wilson and colleagues 56 provide a comprehensive review of ethical challenges in PAR.

Beyond procedural research ethics perspectives, relational ethics are important to PAR projects and raise crucial questions regarding the purpose and conduct of knowledge production and application 37 , 57 , 58 . Relational ethics encourage an emphasis on inclusive practices, dialogue, mutual respect and care, collective decision-making and collaborative action 57 . Questions posed by Indigenous scholars seeking to decolonize Western knowledge production practices are pertinent to a relational ethics approach 4 , 28 . These include: Who designs and manages the research process? Whose purposes does the research serve? Whose worldviews are reproduced? Who decides what counts as knowledge? Why is this knowledge produced? Who benefits from this knowledge? Who determines which aspects of the research will be written up, disseminated and used, and how? Addressing such questions requires scholars to attend to the ethical practices of cultivating trusting and reciprocal relationships with participants and ensuring that the organizations, communities and persons involved co-govern and benefit from the project.

Reflecting on the ethics of her PAR project with young undocumented students in the USA, Cahill 55 highlights some of the intensely complex ethical issues of representation that arose and that will face many related projects. Determining what should be shared with which audiences is intensely political and ethical. Cahill’s team considered editing out stories of dropping out to avoid feeding negative stereotypes. They confronted the dilemma of framing a critique of a discriminatory educational system, while simultaneously advocating that this flawed system should include undocumented students. They faced another common dilemma of how to stay true to their structural analysis of the sources of harms, while engaging decision-makers invested in the current status quo. These complex ethical–political issues arise in different forms in many PAR projects. No answer can be prescribed, but scholar–activists can prepare themselves by reading past case studies and being open to challenging debates with co-researchers.

The knowledge built by PAR is explicitly knowledge-for-action, informed by the relational ethical considerations of who and what the knowledge is for. PAR builds both  local knowledge and conceptual knowledge. As a first step, PAR can help us to reflect locally, collectively, on our circumstances, priorities, diverse identities, causes of problems and potential routes to tackle them.

Such local knowledge might be represented in the form of statistical findings from a community survey, analyses of participants’ verbal or visual data, or analyses of workshop discussions. Findings may include elements such as an articulation of the status quo of a community issue; a participatory analysis of root causes and/or actionable elements of the problem; a power analysis of stakeholders; asset mapping; assessment of local needs and priorities. Analysis goes beyond the surface problems, to identify underlying roots of problems to inform potential lines of action.

Simultaneously, PAR also advances more global conceptual knowledge. As liberation theorists have noted, developments in societal understandings of inequalities, marginalization and liberation are often led by those battling such processes daily. For example, the young Black and Indigenous participants working with Tuck and Habtom 25 in Toronto, Canada, engaged as co-theorists in their project about the significance of social movements to young people and their post-secondary school futures. Through their photography project, they expressed how place, and its history, particularly histories of settler colonialism, matters in cities — against a more standard view that treated the urban as somehow interchangeable, modern or neutral. The authors argue for altered conceptions of urban and urban education scholarly literatures, in response to this youth-led knowledge.

A key skill in the art of PAR is in creating achievable actions by choosing a project that is engaging and ambitious with achievable elements, even where structures are resistant to change. PAR projects can produce actions across a wide range of scales (from ‘small, local’ to ‘large, structural’) and across different temporal scales. Some PAR projects are part of decades-long programmes. Within those programmes, an individual PAR project, taking place over 12 or 24 months, might make one small step in the process towards long-term change.

For example, an educational project with young people living in communities vulnerable to flooding in Brazil developed a portfolio of actions, including a seminar, a native seeds fair, support to an individual family affected by a landslide, a campaign for a safe environment for a children’s pre-school, a tree nursery at school and influencing the city’s mayor to extend the environmental project to all schools in the area 30 .

Often the ideal scenario is that such actions lead to material changes in the power of a community. Over the course of a 5-year journey, the Katkari community (Box  1 ) worked with PAR researchers to build community power to resist eviction. The community team compiled households’ proof of residence; documented the history of land use and housing; engaged local government about their situations and plans; and participated more actively in village life to cultivate support 39 . The university-based researchers collected land deeds and taught sessions on land rights, local government and how to acquire formal papers. They opened conversations with the local government on legal, ethical and practical issues. Collectively, their legal knowledge and groundwork gave them confidence to remove fencing erected by landlords and to take legal action to regularize their land rights, ultimately leading to 70 applications being made for formal village sites. This comprised a tangible change in the power relation between landlords and the communities. Even here, however, the authors do not simply celebrate their achievements, but recognize that power struggles are ongoing, landlords would continue to aggressively pursue their interests, and, thus, their achievements were provisional and would require vigilance and continued action.

Most crucially, PAR projects aim to develop university-based and community-based researchers’ collective agency, by building their capacities for collaboration, analysis and action. More specifically, collaborators develop multiple transferable skills, which include skills in conducting research, operating technology, designing outputs, leadership, facilitation, budgeting, networking and public speaking 31 , 59 , 60 .

University-based researchers build their own key capacities through exercising and developing skills, including those for collaboration, facilitation, public engagement and impact. Strong PAR projects may build capacities within the university to sustain long-term relationships with community projects, such as modified and improved infrastructures that work well with PAR modalities, appreciation of the value of long-term sustained reciprocal relations and personal and organizational relationships with communities outside the university.

Applications

PAR disrupts the traditional theory–application binary, which usually assumes that abstract knowledge is developed through basic science, to then be interpreted and applied in professional or community contexts. PAR projects are always applied in the sense that they are situated in concrete human and social problems and aim to produce workable local actions. PAR is a very flexible approach. A version of a PAR project could be devised to tackle almost any real-world problem — where the researchers are committed to an emancipatory and participatory epistemology. If one can identify a group of people interested in collectively generating knowledge-for-action in their own context or about their own practices, and as long as the researchers are willing and able to share power, the methods set out in this Primer could be applied to devise a PAR project.

PAR is consonant with participatory movements across multiple disciplines and sectors, and thus finds many intellectual homes. Its application is supported by social movements for inclusion, equity, representation of multiple voices, empowerment and emancipation. For instance, PAR responds to the value “nothing about us without us”, which has become a central tenet of disability studies. In youth studies, PAR is used to enhance the power of young people’s voices. In development studies, PAR has a long foundation as part of the demand for greater participation, to support locally appropriate, equitable and locally owned changes. In health-care research, PAR is used by communities of health professionals to reflect and improve on their own practices. PAR is used by groups of health-care service users or survivors to give a greater collective power to the voices of those at the sharp end of health care, often delegitimized by medical power. In environmental sciences, PAR can support local communities to take action to protect their environments. In community psychology, PAR is valued for its ability to nurture supportive and inclusive processes. In summary, PAR can be applied in a huge variety of contexts in which local ownership of research is valued.

Limitations to PAR’s application often stem from the institutional context. In certain (often dominant) academic circles, local knowledge is not valued, and contextually situated, problem-focused, research may be considered niche, applied or not generalizable. Hence, research institutions may not be set up to be responsive to a community’s situation or needs or to support scholar–activists working at the research–action boundary. Further, those who benefit from, or are comfortable with, the status quo of a community may actively resist attempts at change from below and may undermine PAR projects. In other cases, where a community is very divided or dispersed, PAR may not be the right approach. There are plenty of examples of PAR projects floundering, failing to create an active group or to achieve change, or completely falling through. Even such failures, however, shed light on the conditions of communities and the power relations they inhabit and offer lessons on ways of working and not working with groups in those situations.

Reproducibility and data deposition

Certain aspects of the open science movement can be productively engaged from within a PAR framework, whereas others are incompatible. A key issue is that PAR researchers do not strive for reproducibility, and many would contest the applicability of this construct. Nonetheless, there may be resonances between the open science principle of making information publicly available for re-use and those PAR projects that aim to render visible and audible the experience of a historically under-represented or mis-represented community. PAR projects that seek to represent previously hidden realities of, for example, environmental degradation, discriminatory experiences at the hands of public services, the social history of a traditionally marginalized group, or their neglected achievements, may consider creating and making public robust databases of information, or social history archives, with explicit informed permission of the relevant communities. For such projects, making knowledge accessible is an essential part of the action. Publicly relevant information should not be sequestered behind paywalls. PAR practitioners should thus plan carefully for cataloguing, storing and archiving information, and maintaining archives.

On the other hand, however, a blanket assumption that all data should be made freely available is rarely appropriate in a PAR project and may come into conflict with ethical priorities. Protecting participants’ confidentiality can mean that data cannot be made public. Protecting a community from reputational harm, in the context of widespread dehumanization, criminalization or stigmatization of dispossessed groups, may require protection of their privacy, especially if their lives or coping strategies are already pathologized 25 . Empirical materials do not belong to university-based researchers as data and cannot be treated as an academic commodity to be opened to other researchers. Open science practices should not extend to the opening of marginalized communities to knowledge exploitation by university researchers.

The principle of reproducibility is not intuitively meaningful to PAR projects, given their situated nature, that is, the fact that PAR is inherently embedded in particular concrete contexts and relationships 61 . Beyond reproducibility, other forms of mutual learning and cross-case learning are vitally important. We see increasing research fatigue in communities used, extractively, for research that does not benefit them. PAR teams should assess what research has been done in a setting to avoid duplication and wasting people’s time and should clearly prioritize community benefit. At the same time, PAR projects also aspire to produce knowledge with wider implications, typically discussed under the term generalizability or transferability. They do so by articulating how the project speaks to social, political, theoretical and methodological debates taking place in wider knowledge communities, in a form of “communicative generalisation” 62 . Collaborating and sharing experiences across PAR sites through visits, exchanges and joint analysis can help to generalize experiences 30 , 61 .

Limitations and optimizations

PAR projects often challenge the social structures that reproduce established power relations. In this section, we outline common challenges to PAR projects, to prompt early reflection. When to apply a workaround, compromise, concede, refuse or regroup and change strategy are decisions that each PAR team should make collectively. We do not have answers to all the concerns raised but offer mitigations that have been found useful.

Institutional infrastructure

Universities’ interests in partnerships with communities, local relevance, being outward-facing, public engagement and achieving social impact can help to create a supportive environment for PAR research. Simultaneously, university bureaucracies and knowledge hierarchies that prize their scientists as individuals rather than collaborators and that prioritize the methods of dominant science can undermine PAR projects 63 . When Cowan, Kühlbrandt and Riazuddin 45 proposed using gaming, drama, fiction and film-making for a project engaging young people in thinking about scientific futures, a grants manager responded “But this project can’t just be about having fun activities for kids — where is the research in what you’re proposing?” Research infrastructures are often slow and reluctant to adapt to innovations in creative research approaches.

Research institutions’ funding time frames are also often out of sync with those of communities — being too extended in some ways and too short in others 45 , 64 . Securing funding takes months and years, especially if there are initial rejections or setbacks. Publishing findings takes further years. For community-based partners, a year is a long time to wait and to maintain people’s interest. On the other hand, grant funding for one-off projects over a year or two (or even five) is rarely sufficient to create anything sustainable, reasserting precarity and short-termism. Institutions can better support PAR through infrastructure such as bridging funds between grants, secure staff appointments and institutional recognition and resources for community partners.

University infrastructures can value the long-term partnership working of PAR scholars by recognizing partnership-building as a respected element of an academic career and recognizing collaborative research as much as individual academic celebrity. Where research infrastructures are unsupportive, building relationships within the university with like-minded professional and academic colleagues, to share work-arounds and advocate collectively, can be very helpful. Other colleagues might have developed mechanisms to pay co-researchers, or to pay in advance for refreshments, speed up disbursement of funds, or deal with an ethics committee, IRB, finance office or thesis examiner who misunderstands participatory research. PAR scholars can find support in university structures beyond the research infrastructure, such as those concerned with knowledge exchange and impact, campus–community partnerships, extension activities, public engagement or diversity and inclusion 64 . If PAR is institutionally marginalized, exploring and identifying these work-arounds is extremely labour intensive and depends on the cultivation of human, social and cultural capital over many years, which is not normally available to graduate students or precariously employed researchers. Thus, for PAR to be realized, institutional commitment is vital.

Co-option by powerful structures

When PAR takes place in collaboration or engagement with powerful institutions such as government departments, health services, religious organizations, charities or private companies, co-option is a significant risk. Such organizations experience social pressure to be inclusive, diverse, responsive to communities and participatory, so they may be tempted to engage communities in consultation, without redistributing power. For instance, when ‘photovoice’ projects invite politicians to exhibitions of photographs, their activity may be co-opted to serving the politician’s interest in being seen to express support, but result in no further action. There is a risk that using PAR in such a setting risks tokenizing marginalized voices 65 . In one of our current projects, co-researchers explore the framing of sexual violence interventions in Zambia, aiming to promote greater community agency and reduce the centrality of approaches dominated by the Global North 66 . One of the most challenging dilemmas is the need to involve current policymakers in discussions without alienating them. The advice to ‘be realistic’, ‘be reasonable’ or ‘play the game’ to keep existing power brokers at the table creates one of the most difficult tensions for PAR scholars 48 .

We also caution against scholars idealizing PAR as an ideal, egalitarian, inclusive or perfect process. The term ‘participation’ has become a policy buzzword, invoked in a vaguely positive way to strengthen an organization’s case that they have listened to people. It can equally be used by researchers to claim a moral high ground without disrupting power relations. Depriving words of their associated actions, Freire 7 warns us, leads to ‘empty blah’, because words gain their meaning in being harnessed to action. Labelling our work PAR does not make it emancipatory, without emancipatory action. Equally, Freire cautions against acting without the necessary critical reflection.

To avoid romanticization or co-option, PAR practitioners benefit from being held accountable to their shared principles and commitments by their critical networks and collaborators. Our commitments to community colleagues and to action should be as real for us as any institutional pressures on us. Creating an environment for that accountability is vital. Box  4 offers a project exemplar featuring key considerations regarding power concerns.

Box 4 Case study: participatory power and its vulnerability

Júba Wajiín is a pueblo in a rural mountainous region in the lands now called Guerrero, Mexico, long inhabited by the Me’phaa people, who have fiercely resisted precolonial, colonial and postcolonial displacement and dispossession. Using collective participatory action methods, this small pueblo launched and won a long legal battle that now challenges extractive mining practices.

Between 2001 and 2012, the Mexican government awarded massive mining concessions to mining companies. The people of Júba Wajiín discovered in mid-2013 that, unbeknown to them, concessions for mining exploration of their lands had been awarded to the British-based mining company Horschild Mexico. They engaged human rights activists who used participatory action research methods to create awareness and to launch a legal battle. Tlachinollan, a regional human rights organization, held legal counselling workshops and meetings with local authorities and community elders.

The courts initially rejected the case by denying that residents could be identified as Indigenous because they practised Catholicism and spoke Spanish. A media organization, La Sandia Digital , supported the community to collectively document their syncretic religious and spiritual practices, their ability to speak Mhe’paa language and their longstanding agrarian use of the territory. They produced a documentary film Juba Wajiin: Resistencia en la Montaña , providing visual legal evidence.

After winning in the District court, they took the case to the Supreme Court, asking it to review the legality and validity of the mining concessions. Horschild, along with other mining companies, stopped contesting the case, which led to the concessions being null and void.

The broader question of Indigenous peoples’ territorial rights continued in the courts until mid-2022 when the Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous peoples had the constitutional right to be consulted before any mining activities in their territory. This was a win, but a partial one. ‘Consultations’ are often manipulated by state and private sectors, particularly among groups experiencing dire impoverishment. Júba Wajiín’s strategies proved successful but the struggle against displacement and dispossession is continual.

Power inequalities within PAR

Power inequalities also affect PAR teams and communities. For all the emphasis on egalitarian relationships and dialogue, communities and PAR teams are typically composed of actors with unequal capacities and powers, introducing highly complex challenges for PAR teams.

Most frequently, university-based researchers engaging with marginalized communities do not themselves share many aspects of the identities or life experiences of those communities. They often occupy different, often more privileged, social networks, income brackets, racialized identities, skill sets and access to resources. Evidently, the premise of PAR is that people with different lives can productively collaborate, but gulfs in life experience and privilege can yield difficult tensions and challenges. Expressions of discomfort, dissatisfaction or anger in PAR projects are often indicative of power inequalities and an opportunity to interrogate and challenge hierarchies. Scholars must work hard to undo their assumptions about where expertise and insights may lie. A first step can be to develop an analysis of a scholar’s own participation in the perpetuation of inequalities. Projects can be designed to intentionally redistribute power, by redistributing skills, responsibilities and authority, or by redesigning core activities to be more widely accessible. For instance, Marzi 51 in a participatory video project, used role swapping to distribute the leadership roles of chairing meetings, choosing themes for focus and editing, among all the participants.

Within communities, there are also power asymmetries. The term ‘community participation’ itself risks homogenizing a community, such that one or a small number of representatives are taken to qualify as the community. Yet, communities are characterized by diversity as much as by commonality, with differences across sociological lines such as class, race, gender, age, occupation, housing tenure and health status. Having the time, resources and ability to participate is unlikely to be evenly distributed. Some people need to devote their limited time to survival and care of others. For some, the embodied realities of health conditions and disabilities make participation in research projects difficult or undesirable 67 . If there are benefits attached to participation, careful attention to the distribution of such benefits is needed, as well as critical awareness of the positionality of those involved and those excluded. Active efforts to maximize accessibility are important, including paying participants for their valued time; providing accommodations for people with health conditions, disabilities, caring responsibilities or other specific needs; and designing participatory activities that are intuitive to a community’s typical modes of communication.

Lack of control and unpredictability

For researchers accustomed to leading research by taking responsibility to drive a project to completion, using the most rigorous methods possible, to achieve stated objectives, the collaborative, iterative nature of PAR can raise personal challenges. Sense 68 likens the facilitative role of a PAR practitioner to “trying to drive the bus from the rear passenger seat—wanting to genuinely participate as a passenger but still wanting some degree of control over the destination”. PAR works best with collaborative approaches to leadership and identities among co-researchers as active team members, facilitators and participants in a research setting, prepared to be flexible and responsive to provocations from the situation and from co-researchers and to adjust project plans accordingly 28 , 68 , 69 . The complexities involved in balancing control issues foreground the importance of reflexive practice for all team members to learn together through dialogue 70 . Training and socialization into collaborative approaches to leadership and partnership are crucial supports. Well-functioning collaborative ways of working are also vital, as their trusted structure can allow co-researchers to ‘trust the process’, and accept uncertainties, differing perspectives, changes of emphasis and disruptions of assumptions. We often want surprises in PAR projects, as they show that we are learning something new, and so we need to be prepared to accept disruption.

The PAR outlook is caught up in the ongoing history of the push and pull of popular movements for the recognition of local knowledge and elite movements to centralize authority and power in frameworks such as universal science, professional ownership of expertise, government authority or evidence-based policy. As a named methodological paradigm, PAR gained legitimacy and recognition during the 1980s, with origins in popular education for development, led by scholars from the Global South 16 , 32 , and taken up in the more Global-North-dominated field of international development, where the failings of externally imposed, contextually insensitive development solutions had become undeniable 21 . Over the decades, PAR has both participated in radical social movements and risked co-option and depoliticization as it became championed by powerful institutions, and it is in this light that we consider PAR’s relation to three contemporary societal movements.

Decolonizing or re-powering

The development of PAR took place in tandem with anti-colonial movements and discourses during the 1970s and 1980s, in which the colonization of land, people and knowledge were all at stake. During the mid-2010s, calls for decolonization of the university were forced onto the agenda of the powerful by various groups, including African students and youth leading the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, ‘Fees must Fall’ and ‘Gandhi must Fall’ movements 71 , followed by the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 (ref. 72 ). PAR is a methodology that stands to contribute to decolonization-colonization through the development of alternatives to centralizing knowledge and power. As such, the vitality of local and global movements demanding recognition of grassroots knowledge and the dismantling of oppressive historical power–knowledge systems heralds many openings and exciting potential collaborations and causes for PAR practitioners 73 , 74 . As these demands make themselves felt in powerful institutions, they create openings for PAR.

Yet, just as PAR has been subject to co-option and depoliticization, the concept of decolonization too is at risk of appropriation by dominant groups and further tokenization of Indigenous groups, as universities, government departments and global health institutions absorb the concept, fitting it into their existing power structures 41 , 75 . In this context, Indigenous theorists in Aotearoa/New Zealand are working on an alternative concept of ‘re-powering Indigenous knowledge’ instead of ‘decolonizing knowledge’. By doing so, they centre Indigenous people and their knowledge, instead of the knowledge or actions of colonizers, and foreground the necessity of changes to power relations. African and African American scholars working on African heritage and political agency have drawn on the Akan philosophy of Sankofa for a similar purpose 76 . Sankofa derives from a Twi proverb Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri (It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind). Going back to fetch what is lost is a self-grounded act that draws on the riches of Indigenous history to re-imagine and restructure the future 77 . It is also an act independent of the colonial and colonizing gaze. Contributing to a mid-twenty-first century re-powering community knowledge is a promising vision for PAR. More broadly, the loud voices and visionary leadership of contemporary anti-racist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, intersectional feminist and other emancipatory movements provide a vibrant context to re-invent and renew PAR.

Co-production

In fields concerned with health and public service provision, a renewed discourse of respectful engagement with communities and service users has centred in recent years on the concept of  co-production 78 . In past iterations, concepts such as citizen engagement, patient participation, community participation and community mobilization had a similar role. Participatory methods have proved their relevance within such contexts, for example, providing actionable and wise insights to clinicians seeking to learn from patients, or to providers of social services seeking to target their services better. Thus, the introduction of co-production may create a receptive environment for PAR in public services. Yet again, if users are participating in something, critical PAR scholars should question in which structures they are participating, instantiating which power relations and to whose benefit. PAR scholars can find themselves compromised by institutional requirements. Identifying potential compromises, lines that cannot be crossed and areas where compromises can be made; negotiating with institutional orders; and navigating discomfort and even conflict are key skills for practitioners of PAR within institutional settings.

One approach to engaging with institutional structures has been to gather evidence for the value of PAR, according to the measures and methods of dominant science. Anyon and colleagues 59 systematically reviewed the Youth PAR literature in the United States. They found emerging evidence that PAR produces positive outcomes for youth and argued for further research using experimental designs to provide harder evidence. They make the pragmatic argument that funding bodies require certain forms of evidence to justify funding, and so PAR would benefit by playing by those rules.

A different approach, grounded in politics rather than the academy, situates co-production as sustained by democratic struggles. In the context of sustainability research in the Amazon, for instance, Perz and colleagues 79 argue that the days of externally driven research are past. Mobilization by community associations, Indigenous federations, producer cooperatives and labour unions to demand influence over the governance of natural resources goes hand in hand with expectations of local leadership and ownership of research, often implemented through PAR. These approaches critically question the desirability of institutional, external funding or even non-monetary support for a particular PAR project.

Global–local inequality and solidarity

Insufferable global and local inequalities continue to grow, intensified by climate catastrophes, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and extreme concentrations of wealth and political influence, and contested by increasingly impactful analyses, protests and refusals by those disadvantaged and discriminated against. Considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PAR projects, Auerbach and colleagues 64 identify increasing marketization and austerity in some universities, and the material context of growing pressure on marginalized communities to simply meet their needs for survival, leaving little capacity for participating in and building long-term partnerships. They describe university-based researchers relying on their own capacities to invent new modes of digital collaboration and nourish their partnerships with communities, often despite limited institutional support.

We suggest that building solidaristic networks, and thus building collective power, within and beyond universities offers the most promising grounding for a fruitful outlook for PAR. PAR scholars can find solidarity across a range of disciplines, traditions, social movements, topics and geographical locations. Doing so offers to bridge traditions, share strategies and resonances, build methodologies and politics, and crucially, build power. In global health research, Abimbola and colleagues 80 call for the building of Southern networks to break away from the dominance of North–South partnerships. They conceptualize the South not only as a geographical location, as there are of course knowledge elites in the South, but as the communities traditionally marginalized from centres of authority and power. We suggest that PAR can best maximize its societal contribution and its own development and renewal by harnessing the diverse wisdom of knowledge generation and participatory methods across Southern regions and communities, using that wisdom to participate in global solidarities and demands for redistribution of knowledge, wealth and power.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank their PAR collaborators and teachers, who have shown us how to take care of each other, our communities and environments. They thank each other for generating such a productive critical thinking space and extending care during challenging times.

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Flora Cornish & Nancy Breton

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Ulises Moreno-Tabarez

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Jenna Delgado

Māori Studies, University of Auckland, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand

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Ama de-Graft Aikins

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Involving multiple team members in the analysis and interpretation of materials generated, typically in iterative cycles of individual or pair work and group discussion.

Both a structure and a process, community refers to a network of often diverse and unequal persons engaged in common tasks or actions, stakes or interests that lead them to form social ties or commune with one another.

A process through which a person or group’s activities are altered or appropriated to serve another group’s interests.

A term typically used in service provision to describe partnership working between service providers and service users, to jointly produce decisions or designs.

A call to recognize and dismantle the destructive legacies of colonialism in societal institutions, to re-power indigenous groups and to construct alternative relationships between peoples and knowledges that liberate knowers and doers from colonial extraction and centralization of power.

Scholarship that creates knowledge of the conditions that limit or oppress us to liberate ourselves from those conditions and to support others in their own transformations.

Injustices in relation to knowledge, including whose knowledge counts and which knowledge is deemed valid or not.

Research that extracts information and exploits relationships, places and peoples, producing benefit for scholars or institutions elsewhere, and depleting resources at the sites of the research.

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The relationships of domination, subordination and resistance between individuals or social groups, allowing some to advance their perspectives and interests more than others.

A methodological practice through which scholars critically reflect on their own positionality and how it impacts on participants and co-researchers, understanding of the topic and the knowledge produced.

An approach to ethical conduct that situates ethics as ongoingly negotiated within the context of respectful relationships, beyond following the procedural rules often set out by ethics committees.

A dual role in which scholars use their knowledge (scholarship) to tackle injustices and instigate changes (activism) in collaboration with marginalized communities and/or organizations.

Doing something or appointing a person for reasons other than in the interest of enabling meaningful change.

A systemic change in which relationships and structures are fundamentally altered, often contrasted with smaller-scale changes such as varying or refining existing relations.

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Participatory action research.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an approach to enquiry which has been used since the 1940s. It involves researchers and participants working together to understand a problematic situation and change it for the better. There are many definitions of the approach, which share some common elements. PAR focuses on social change that promotes democracy and challenges inequality; is context-specific , often targeted on the needs of a particular group; is an iterative cycle of research, action and reflection; and often seeks to ‘liberate’ participants to have a greater awareness of their situation in order to take action. PAR uses a range of different methods, both qualitative and quantitative.

Resources for researchers, practitioners, organizers, and communities.

Participatory action research (PAR)

is a framework for conducting research and generating knowledge centered on the belief that those who are most impacted by research should be the ones taking the lead in framing the questions, the design, methods, and the modes of analysis of such research projects. The framework is rooted in the belief that there is value in both traditionally recognized knowledge, such as scholarship generated by university-based researchers, and historically delegitimized knowledge, such as knowledge generated within marginalized communities.

Participatory action research differs from social justice–oriented research conducted by university-based researchers because PAR involves affected community members in all aspects of the research. Andrea Dyrness explains that while “activist research often tries to shift the balance of power by changing how research is used,” such research does not necessarily change the research process (Dyrness, 2011, p. 203). In contrast, she argues that participatory action research assumes that “‘ordinary’ people also produce knowledge that is useful in struggles for change, and [that] the research process itself could be an important arena for making change” (p. 203). PAR aims to make the research process more democratic and collaborative.

The PAR framework provides one way for critical reflection on problems of social inequity, attempting to move beyond the divisions that often exist between universities and their surrounding communities. Michelle Fine (2018), a researcher foundational in developing the PAR framework in the field of education, explains, “Like the arts, independent media, and social movements, in moments of crisis, critical participatory action research can carve out delicate spaces for fragile solidarities and collective inquiries, and even more valid research, where we might join with others to collectively ignite the slow fuse of possible” (p. 123).

PAR assumes that people in a particular context want to study themselves and their practices with the aim of changing their practices to make their context better. Rather than imposing research projects or solutions onto a community, PAR projects provide targeted community groups with the tools and skills to study their context in order “to transform ‘the way we do things around here’” (McTaggart et al., 2017, p. 28). PAR projects are contextually specific; they are focused on “what happens here, in this single case—not what goes on anywhere or everywhere” (p. 28). PAR projects can involve a range of research methodologies, and findings can be disseminated in various ways, including through art and performance.

As PAR scholars have noted, these projects take time, and the process is often messy and unpredictable. There will be inevitable conflicts of interests, ideas, and identities. The principles of participatory action research encourage everyone involved in the research to “excavate and explore disagreements and disjunctures rather than smooth them over in the interests of consensus” (Torre, 2009).

Watch this video to learn from various experts about what PAR is and why it matters

Dyrness, A. (2011).  Mothers united: an immigrant struggle for socially just education . University of Minnesota Press.

Fine, M. (2018).  Just research in contentious times: widening the methodological imagination . Teachers College Press.

McTaggart, R., Nixon, R., & Kemmis, S. (2017). Critical Participatory Action Research. In L. L. Rowell (Ed.),  The Palgrave International Handbook of Action Resea rch (pp. 21-35). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40523-4_2

Torre, M. E. (2009). PAR-Map. The Public Science Project. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mcX3OR0nfif6pRx1eMXRfnqv2xoRV3PJ/view

History of PAR

The origins of PAR cannot be traced back to any one lineage; instead, participatory action research is a convergence of multiple traditions, ranging from academic fields of social work, public health, and education to popular social justice movements. PAR also developed distinctly all across the world. As Fine and Torre note, in each of these varied places,

“PAR developed out of the rich soil of critical, community knowledges held by ‘insiders’ to community life. As those insiders sat at the bottom of social arrangements, they witnessed the holes in the ideological stories told, the practices engaged, and the contradictions that sustain stratification” (2004, p. 18).

There are two particularly prominent lineages: that of psychologist Kurt Lewin and his work to develop what he termed “action research” and that of Latin American popular social reform movements informed by the thinking of Paulo Freire and other activists. Contemporarily, a movement of critical PAR seeks to (re)orient the framework toward decolonizing theories.

Fine, M., & Torre, M. E. (2004). Re-membering exclusions: Participatory action research in public institutions.  Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1 (1), 15–37. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088704qp003oa

Zeller-Berkman, S. M. (2014). Lineages: A past, present, and future of participatory action research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 518–532). Oxford University Press.

Kurt Lewin came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Influenced by Marxism, Lewin wanted to study anti-Semitism and the subjugation of Jewish communities while also taking action against it; he began to study group dynamics and the psychology of minority communities. As he delved deeper into this work, Lewin became increasingly committed to using research to effect social change. As a member of the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) formed in 1945 by the American Jewish Congress, Lewin pushed for research on minority communities to be done outside of the academy, within the studied communities themselves (Cherry & Borshuk, 1998). Counter to psychological approaches of the time, Lewin’s philosophy “implicated all members of society as responsible for changing the conditions that create so-called minority problems” (Zeller-Berkman, 2014). Specifically, he wrote, “In recent years we have started to realize that so-called minority problems are in fact majority problems, that the Negro problem is the problem of the white, that the Jewish problem is the problem of the non-Jew, and so on” (Lewin, 1946, p. 44).

Lewin introduced the term action research to describe the study of a social problem with the intent to change it. He envisioned action research, and participatory action research, as a continuous self-reflective cycle of inquiry, action, and evaluation, undertaken collectively with or by society’s marginalized peoples (Torre, 2014; Cherry & Borshuk, 1998; Zeller-Berkman, 2014). Lewin wrote, “Fact-finding has to include all the aspects of community life—economic factors as well as political factors or cultural tradition. It has to include the majority and the minority, non-Jews and ourselves” (Cherry & Borshuk, 1998, p. 126).

Cherry, F., & Borshuk, C. (1998). Social action research and the Commission on Community Interrelations.  The Journal of Social Issues,   54 (1), 119–142.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1998.tb01210.x

Greenwood, D. J., & Levin, M. (1998).  Introduction to action research: Social research for social change.  Sage Publications, Inc.

Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems.  The Journal of Social Issues,   2 (4), 34–46.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x

Torre, M. E. (2014). Participatory action research. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology . Springer.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_211

Latin American Legacy

The Latin American revolutionary lineage of PAR includes thinkers such as Paulo Freire, a Brazilian advocate for critical pedagogy and popular education, and Orlando Fals Borda, a Colombian sociologist.

According to Zeller-Berkman (2014), a legacy of corrupt and exploitative international development efforts of the 1960s and 1970s led social scientists in Latin America to develop self-sufficiency within research processes, taking control of and decolonizing the means of knowledge production. In this lineage of PAR, the role of the academic researcher was to be the “animator,” or the person who facilitated the transformation of common community knowledge to critical knowledge. The eventual goal was to have the community researchers gain enough research skills so they could use these practices independently of academia to engage in inquiry into their own communities, produce their own knowledge, and develop their own solutions. Central to the PAR process, then, was capacity building and community organizing; Fals Borda called this combination of community organizing, popular education, and social science research a “people’s science” (Fals Borda, 1977).

Paulo Freire’s thinking around critical pedagogy and popular movements was central to the development of this decolonizing research process (Torre, 2014). Freire advocated for a democratic education and research system, in which people and communities were involved in the production of knowledge about themselves, and a social system in which this community knowledge was valued as an equal to university-based knowledge. A major theme in Freire’s process and work was the raising of critical consciousness—or conscientização —of one’s social and political situation through a cycle of inquiry, reflection, and action (Torre, 2014; Zeller-Berkman, 2014).

Fals Borda, O. (1977). Por la praxis: El problema de cómo investigar la realidad para transformarla. In O. Fals Borda (Ed.), Crítica y Política en Ciencias Sociales . Punta de Lanza.

Rahman, M. (1991). The theoretical standpoint of PAR. In  O. Fals Borda & M. Rahman,  Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action research (pp. 13–24). Apex Press.  https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780444239.002

Contemporary Critical PAR

More recently, critical race and feminist scholars are re-centering PAR’s liberatory and decolonizing history. Wary of the potential co-optation of PAR by stakeholders with power (Fine, 2009; Torre, 2014), these researchers emphasize the framework’s connection to queer, feminist, Marxist, and Indigenous theories (Torre, 2014; Torre et al., 2012).

Some scholars have linked PAR with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands theories (Anzaldúa, 1987), advocating for a PAR that “embraces mestizaje ” and welcomes conflict—or choques —rather than only organizing around consensus (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 390). These scholars note that even within research collectives that do participatory research under common goals, “individual co-researchers carry particular interests, agendas, are differently situated with regard to resources and privilege;” these borders and nuances can be valuable spaces of knowledge creation, because they reflect conflicts that go beyond the research collective (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 388).

Moreover, PAR scholars center the experiences and theories of women of color as critical spaces of knowledge, pointing out that “mestiza consciousness houses multiplicity, hybridity, conflict and collaboration, within the bodies of women of color… From this consciousness, knowledge is presumed as existing within the flesh, with theory-making as part of the collective existence for women of color” (Ayala, 2009, p. 72).

(Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a Maori scholar, in her book  Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,  p. 10)

Anzaldúa, G. E. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . Aunt Lute Books.

Ayala, J. (2009). Split scenes, converging visions: The ethical terrains where PAR and Borderlands scholarship meet.  The Urban Review,   41 , 66–84.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0095-9

Fine, M. (2009). Postcards from Metro America: Reflections on youth participatory action research for urban justice.  The Urban Review,   41 , 1–6.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0099-5

Torre, M. E., & Ayala, J. (2009). Envisioning participatory action research entremundos.  Feminism & Psychology,   19 (3), 387–393.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353509105630

Torre, M. E., Fine, M., Stoudt, B., & Fox, M. (2012). Critical participatory action research as public science. In P. Camic & H. Cooper (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design (2nd ed., pp. 171–184). American Psychological Association.  https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-011

Common Types of PAR

While most PAR projects tend to share common themes, such as being led by community members most affected by the research, equity and inclusion throughout the research process, honoring diverse forms of knowledge, and the intent to act on findings through social change, there are a few different kinds of projects.

It is helpful to delineate the differences among these various types of PAR, but actual projects often contain elements of various types. For example, a university-based scholar might collaborate with a high school teacher to understand and improve the teacher’s practice, or adults in a community-based organization might collaborate with youth in their community on a PAR project.

The rest of the site is framed around these four types of PAR, allowing you to quickly find resources and examples relevant to your particular area of focus:

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)

YPAR is an approach to community development in which youth take the lead, partnering with adults to create change or find a solution to a problem.

Teacher Action Research (TAR)

TAR is a method for educators to understand, evaluate, and improve their own practice. 

Community-Based PAR (CBPAR)

CBPAR is an approach in which a project is co-led in all phases by community members and academic researchers with the intent that findings will be used to change inequitable practices and systems.

University-Community PAR Collaborations

UCPAR collaborations tend to be started by university-based scholars reaching out to community members to conduct collaborative research around community issues that are aligned with the scholars’ area of research and discipline.

Ethics of PAR

A consideration of ethics is important in all research projects, including participatory action research projects., there are different ways to think about ethics:.

• There are often rules and regulations researchers need to follow that consider the well-being of people who are participating in research studies. Institutional review boards, often affiliated with universities, are committees that oversee the ethics of research studies.

Watch this video to learn about how IRBs protect human research participants

There are also community-based review boards such as the Bronx Community Research Review Board (BxCRRB):

The Bronx Community Research Review Board (BxCRRB)

The  BxCRRB advocates ensuring that every community member has a voice and is heard. It was founded to add community-focused oversight to the research review process in order to protect the disadvantaged and vulnerable populations in the Bronx from academic research abuse, such as lying about the potential dangers of studies or violating their human rights. The review process also works with researchers and advises them on how to approach the community in a way that is culturally sensitive.

• Ethics guide decision-making about research questions, methods, and so forth.
• There are also the everyday and on-the-ground ethics which guide how we work with others in the research process.
• Then in regards to regulations, there must be “respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.” This is from The Belmont Report :

• Because PAR projects often involve communities who have been historically marginalized and oppressed, the history of unethical medical research practices in the United States, particularly targeting communities of color, are an important part of how we need to understand ethics.

Two examples of such unethical practices are what happened during the Tuskegee Experiment:

(Learn more about the Tuskegee experiment: Reverby, S. M. (Ed.). (2012). Tuskegee’s truths: rethinking the Tuskegee syphilis study . UNC Press Books.)

…and what happened with Henrietta Lacks:

(Learn more about Henrietta Lacks: Skloot, R. (2017). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks . Broadway Paperbacks.)

• PAR researchers might want to consider the following questions on an ongoing basis: How are you ensuring that you’re following the ethical principles that are central to any research, but especially to community-based participatory research (e.g., mutual respect, equality and inclusion, democratic participation, collective action, and so forth)?
• To learn more about what ethics look like in practice beyond consent forms in community-based participatory research, check out this team’s work with LGBT youth in the United Kingdom.

The various community research groups in the Carleton-Faribault project explored both research and everyday ethics in their groups:

For further exploration:

• “A Guide to Ethical Principles and Practice .” Developed by the Durham University’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, and published by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement.
• A presentation on “ Tackling Ethical Challenges in Community-Based Participatory Research” by Sarah Banks from Durham University.
• This PAR checklist created by Katie Johnston-Goodstar and Jenna Sethi is helpful in thinking through many of the ethical dimensions of PAR projects.

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Participatory action research

This glossary aims to clarify some of the key concepts associated with participatory action research.

Participatory action research (PAR) differs from most other approaches to public health research because it is based on reflection, data collection, and action that aims to improve health and reduce health inequities through involving the people who, in turn, take actions to improve their own health.

PAR has a number of antecedents. 1 It reflects questioning about the nature of knowledge and the extent to which knowledge can represent the interests of the powerful and serve to reinforce their positions in society. 2 It affirms that experience can be a basis of knowing and that experiential learning can lead to a legitimate form of knowledge that influences practice. 3 Adult educators in low income countries drew on these intellectual perspectives to develop a form of research that was sympathetic to the participatory nature of adult learning. This perspective was strongly supported by the work of Freire, 4 who used PAR to encourage poor and deprived communities to examine and analyse the structural reasons for their oppression. From these roots PAR grew as a methodology enabling researchers to work in partnership with communities in a manner that leads to action for change.

Definition of PAR

PAR seeks to understand and improve the world by changing it. At its heart is collective, self reflective inquiry that researchers and participants undertake, so they can understand and improve upon the practices in which they participate and the situations in which they find themselves. The reflective process is directly linked to action, influenced by understanding of history, culture, and local context and embedded in social relationships. The process of PAR should be empowering and lead to people having increased control over their lives (adapted from Minkler and Wallerstein 5 and Grbich 6 ).

The distinctiveness of PAR

PAR differs from conventional research in three ways. Firstly, it focuses on research whose purpose is to enable action. Action is achieved through a reflective cycle, whereby participants collect and analyse data, then determine what action should follow. The resultant action is then further researched and an iterative reflective cycle perpetuates data collection, reflection, and action as in a corkscrew action. Secondly, PAR pays careful attention to power relationships, advocating for power to be deliberately shared between the researcher and the researched: blurring the line between them until the researched become the researchers. The researched cease to be objects and become partners in the whole research process: including selecting the research topic, data collection, and analysis and deciding what action should happen as a result of the research findings. Wadsworth 7 sees PAR as an expression of “new paradigm science” that differs significantly from old paradigm or positivist science. The hallmark of positivist science is that it sees the world as having a single reality that can be independently observed and measured by objective scientists preferably under laboratory conditions where all variables can be controlled and manipulated to determine causal connections. By contrast new paradigm science and PAR posits that the observer has an impact on the phenomena being observed and brings to their inquiry a set of values that will exert influence on the study. Thirdly, PAR contrasts with less dynamic approaches that remove data and information from their contexts. Most health research involves people, even if only as passive participants, as “subjects” or “respondents”. PAR advocates that those being researched should be involved in the process actively. The degree to which this is possible in health research will differ as will the willingness of people to be involved in research

Methodology/method

Research methodology is a strategy or plan of action that shapes our choice and use of methods and links them to the desired outcomes. 8 In contrast with a decade ago, when epidemiological methods were regarded as the only gold standard in public health research, many authors agree 9 , 9a , 9b that effective public health research requires methodological pluralism. PAR draws on the paradigms of critical theory and constructivism and may use a range of qualitative and quantitative methods. For instance a participatory needs assessment would include extensive engagement with local communities and may also include a survey of residents who are less centrally engaged in the participatory process. 10

Application of PAR to health

In the 21st century PAR is increasingly used in health research. By contrast, in the 1980s and in earlier decades, very little research using PAR was reported in health journals. Through the 1990s more participatory research was reported and textbooks including PAR became more common. 11 , 11a An example of this interest is the special edition of the Journal of Interprofessional Care , with an editorial and 16 articles reporting on PAR. 12 Initially PAR was mainly used in low income countries for needs assessment (see for example De Kroning and Martin 13 ) and planning and evaluating health services (for examples see collection in Minkler and Wallerstein 14 ). The work by Howard‐Grabman 15 provides a typical description of developing a community plan to tackle maternal and neonatal health problems in rural Bolivia. The project built on and strengthened existing women's networks and the staff played the part of facilitators rather than educators. A community action cycle was developed whereby problems were identified and prioritised, joint planning took place, and the plan was implemented and then evaluated in a participatory way. The project developed innovative and engaging ways for staff and community members to work together effectively.

Recently PAR has been used more frequently in rich countries. In mental health research, for instance, PAR has been used in response to the survivor's movement and demands for a voice in planning and running services and to stimulate choices and alternative forms of treatment. 16 PAR principles also form the basis of “empowerment evaluation” 17 that argue that the evaluation of health promotion should include those whose health is being promoted. 18 While there has been some debate about the distinctiveness of empowerment evaluation 19 it certainly strives to be more democratic, to build capacity, to encourage self determination and make evaluation less expert driven.

PAR is increasingly recognised as useful in Indigenous health research, both internationally 20 , 21 and in Australia. 22 , 23 , 24 It has the potential to reduce the negative—and some would argue colonising—effects much conventional research has had on Indigenous people. It does this by avoiding some of the criticisms made of health research including: (1) Indigenous people being exploited and treated disrespectfully, (2) research processes that see non‐Indigenous researchers and research bodies retain all the power and control, (3) the lack of specified short and long term benefits to Indigenous communities and persons, and (4) the misrepresentation of Indigenous societies, cultures, and persons by non‐Indigenous academics and professionals. 25 , 26 , 27

An example of the application of PAR in a remote Aboriginal Australian community is the work to support a men's self help group to plan, implement, and evaluate their activities. 28 With support from the research team community members are acting as researchers exploring priority issues affecting their lives, recognising their resources, producing knowledge, and taking action to improve their situation. The ongoing PAR process of reflection and action, which incorporates participant observation, informal discussions, in‐depth interviews, and a “feedback box”, is viewed by the participants as contributing to their self reported increased sense of self awareness, self confidence, and hope for the future.

For academics, dilemmas arise in the use of PAR because it is time consuming and unpredictable, unlikely to lead to a high production of articles in refereed journals and its somewhat “messy” nature means it is less likely to attract competitive research funding. 29 Acceptance of PAR as a legitimate research methodology will require change from public health journals, funding bodies, and universities in the way that they judge research performance. For instance most public health academic units assess their academic researchers' suitability for promotion according to the number of peer reviewed journal articles. The ability of a researcher to engage with communities and bring about real change to their quality of life and health status rarely counts. The global research community is already being urged to adapt its grant assessment methods and its assessment of research performance to ensure that the engaged processes typical of PAR are valued and encouraged. 30

PAR also requires health researchers to work in close partnership with civil society and health policy makers and practitioners. This requires each of these players to learn methods of working together effectively and to manage the different and sometimes competing agendas of the partners. The focus of the research partners should also be on health improvement for the community involved. 31

Participation

Participation has been central to improving health since the WHO Health for All Strategy and its importance to health promotion strategies has been reinforced by subsequent statements on health promotion. 32 Participation has been seen as a means to overcome professional dominance, to improve strategies (whether they are for practice or research), and to show a commitment to democratic principles. In the 1970s debate on development emphasised that development should no longer be a top‐down process but should emphasise participation of those whose development was being attempted. 33 PAR came to be used in many development projects as a mechanism through which to put the rhetoric of participation into action. Associated methods are rapid assessment methods and rapid rural appraisal both of which aim to produce knowledge that combines professional and community perspectives.

Power/empowerment

Power is a crucial underpinning concept to PAR. PAR aims to achieve empowerment of those involved. Labonte 34 conceptualises empowerment as a shifting or dynamic quality of power relations between two or more people; such that the relationship tends towards equity by reducing inequalities and power differences in access to resources. Power itself is an elusive concept about which there has been considerable discussion. Foucault's position is particularly relevant to PAR because he sees power as something that results from the interactions between people, from the practices of institutions, and from the exercise of different forms of knowledge. 35 His work on discipline and control shows that disciplinary power functions through surveillance and internal discipline of people to achieve their subjugations and “docility”. 36 The PAR movement challenges the system of surveillance and knowledge control established through mainstream research. When communities seek control of research agendas, and seek to be active in research, they are establishing themselves as more powerful agents. In health services and public health initiatives in recent years community members and consumers have gained more power over the practices of institutions and the production of knowledge. Developments in participation have implications for health services and public health organisations that, if they are to be true to the principles of participation, must initiate organisational change to improve their capacity to work in partnership with a wide variety of communities. 37 , 37a

Many dilemmas of the PAR approach revolve around contested power dynamics in research relationships. Wallerstein detailed the power conflicts in research on New Mexico's Healthier Communities Initiatives and concluded that handling these requires “a painful self‐reflective process”. 38 These included differences in perceptions of priorities between researchers and community members, dealing with community politics in the different communities involved in the study and resolving different ways in which researchers and communities might interpret findings.

Lived experience

PAR stands in contrast with what Husserl (quoted in Crotty 39 ) describes as the mathematisation of the scientific world by Galileo, for whom the real properties of things were only those that could be measured, counted, and quantified. Husserl argued that the scientific world is an abstraction from the lived world, or the world we experience. This scientific world is systematic and well organised, unlike the uncertain, ambiguous, idiosyncratic world we know at first hand. 39 On the other hand, PAR draws on the work of phenomenologists who expand the breadth and importance of experience when they argue that humans cannot describe and object in isolation from the conscious being experiencing that object; just as an experience cannot be described in isolation from its object. Experiences are not from a sphere of subjective reality separate from an external, objective world. Rather they enable humans to engage with their world and unite subject and object. 40 One example of a use of lived experience is research using feminist theory, which refers to “women's ways of knowing or women's experience”. 41

Critical reflection and a critical edge

Crotty 42 argues that while interpretivists place confidence in the authentic accounts of lived experience that they turn up in their research, this is not enough for critical theorists who see in these accounts voices of an inherited tradition and prevailing culture. Critical theorists use critical reflection on social reality to take action for change by radically calling into question the cultures that they study. This critical edge is central to PAR.

Critical reflection on professional practice

PAR draws heavily on Paulo Freire's epistemology that rejects both the view that consciousness is a copy of external reality and the solipsist argument that the world is a creation of consciousness. For Freire, human consciousness brings a reflection on material reality, whereby critical reflection is already action. Freire's concept of praxis flows from the position that action and reflection are indissolubly united: “reflection and action on the world in order to transform it”. 43 It is from this position that Freire derives his famous dictum that reflection without action is sheer verbalism or armchair revolution and action without reflection is pure activism, or action for action's sake . 44 In the same vein, PAR sees that action and reflection must go together, even temporally so that praxis cannot be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. When action and reflection take place at the same time they become creative and mutually illuminate each other. 45 Through praxis, critical consciousness develops, leading to further action through which people cease to see their situation as a “dense, enveloping reality or a blind alley” and instead as “an historical reality susceptible of transformation”. 46 This transformative power is central to PAR.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our reviewers—Valery Ridde, Ruth Balogh, and one anonymous. Their comments have improved this glossary.

Participatory Action Research at MIT

What is par, participatory action research (par).

By Lawrence Susskind*

This is not to say that applied social science research isn't important. On the contrary, the most serious problems we face today are social and political, not physical. We need to make sure that social science is used to produce prescriptive insights and advice for those trying to promote social change.

Where have social scientists gone wrong?

• First, you have to believe that the two halves of the community are initially the same (and stay the same) during the course of the experiment.
• Second, you must believe that everything else remains constant during the course of the experiment.
• Third, you have to believe that the experimental effort and not something else caused whatever statistically results emerged..

Putting aside ethical and moral concerns about withholding a benefit or imposing something bad on half a community so that someone’s theories can be tested, serious methodological problems remain. Mere correlation isn't a sufficient basis for reshaping public policy or interfering in people's lives. Even more important is the fact that statistical relevance doesn't explain why good or bad things happen. Social scientists should stop pretending that correlation equals causation. They should admit that the complexity and uncertainty involved in the social systems in which we live and work make science-like generalizations about people, communities and institutions extremely unreliable.

Getting social science back on track

PAR produces “actionable” knowledge by focusing on individual situations rather than on statistical analysis of large samples or controlled experiments. All PAR knowledge is "situated."  That means it is place- or case-specific. PAR puts a premium on local knowledge (what people in real situation know from their first-hand experience), rather than what experts think. And, PAR measures the success of applied social research in terms of the what client-communities understand , rather than what peer-reviewers think or the replicability of  findings. The goal of PAR-like applied social research isn't to generate proof.. On the contrary, the objective of PAR is to generate what Aristotle would have called "practical wisdom" or useable knowledge, believable to those who have to take action if social change is going to occur. Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin, in  Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change (2006), do a nice job of summarizing the development and current state of PAR.

Many dilemmas still surround participatory action research. These are the focus of ongoing debate among a growing community of PAR scholars and practitioners. Who represents a community, an agency or a client? How should power imbalances in a client-community be handled? How can a "friendly outsider" (i.e. a PAR researcher) convince a client-community that he or she should be trusted? Who should make the final decision about which data ought to be gathered and how findings should be interpreted? How should case specific findings be integrated with what has been learned from other cases or from insights generated by traditional applied social scientists? What role should PAR researchers play in formulating prescriptions for action? Can and should the PAR researcher stay involved with a client-community as its seeks to monitor results and make ongoing adjustments?

Building a community of PAR scholars

The resistance to PAR is strongest among social scientists who yearn to be part of the natural science fraternity, and who are more concerned about being respected by other academics than they are about building the capacity of client-communities to solve the problems they face. In their view, PAR advocates feed right into the hands of natural science skeptics who think putting "social" in front of scientist is equivalent to putting "witch" in front of "doctor." PAR practitioners, for their part, are worried that traditional social scientists are oblivious to the harm they do when they generalize about social and political phenomenon and fail to appreciate the case specific implications of their findings.

We want to initiate a different conversation. PAR teachers and practitioners should focus on explaining to their potential client-communities what they do, and why they do it (and why it would be best to work with PAR researchers rather than traditional social scientists). They should do more to codify the ethical norms that guide PAR in practice so they can be held accountable. And, they should think hard about the best ways of integrating what PAR teaches about case specific situations with the kinds of generalizations that traditional social scientists produce. Finally, we believe that graduate students interested in PAR should also seek to master a range of traditional science research methods. Mixed methods can yield valuable insights.

*Lawrence Susskind is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.  He has been a member of the MIT faculty for more than 40 years. He is also Vice-Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Founder/Chief Knowledge Officer of the Consensus Building Institute.

[1] A number of authors have done a masterful job spelling out all the reasons why social scientists should stop aspiring to be natural scientists. See Bent Flyvbjerg’s books  Real Social Science  (2012) and  Making Social Science Matter  (2001) for a full explanation. 

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1 What Is Participatory Action Research? Contemporary Methodological Considerations

• Published: May 2022
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Chapter 1 outlines the key characteristics of Participatory Action Research (PAR), a methodology or approach that privileges active involvement of people with lived experiences, or co-researchers, to generate findings and strategies to effect change. The author explains how participatory research models can lead to social justice outcomes and the significance of co-research and co-production of new knowledge. The chapter focuses on eight underpinning principles of PAR: It involves disruption of traditional research approaches; reciprocal benefits; trust; deep engagement; social change; intersectionality; co-researchers’ agendas; and a challenge to power differentials. The author outlines how academic researchers’ commitment to reciprocity, or shared understanding of mutually beneficial outcomes, is at the core of PAR. She explains the concept of vulnerability as an ethical research practice, where academic researchers are open to the impact others have on their sense of self. The final part of the chapter outlines the book structure and provides background information on the five vignette contributors.

1.1. Participatory Action Research as a Co-research Model

For those readers who are new to Participatory Action Research (PAR), Chapter 1 provides an overview of the key principles associated with this methodology. It explains how PAR can yield meaningful research processes and rich findings when used in ethical ways. Other readers may have heard about PAR and already embrace its principles in research but may be keen to explore further practical and conceptual discussions. This introductory chapter provides an overview of PAR that imparts a clear understanding of the ethos or the philosophy behind this approach before delving into broader discussions on the complexities of PAR models in subsequent chapters.

PAR is a research approach that privileges the active involvement of people with lived experiences of the topic as co-researchers to generate new knowledge and act on findings to improve their lives ( Raynor, 2019 ; Reid et al., 2006 ). It is usually referred to as a methodology, which is an approach or strategy that determines our choice and use of methods to achieve research outcomes. For some, PAR is more than a mere methodology; it is an approach to research or “an epistemology—a theory of knowledge—that radically challenges who is an expert, what counts as knowledge and, therefore, by whom research questions and designs should be crafted” ( Fine & Torre, 2019 , p. 435).

When academic researchers use PAR models, they collaborate with co-researchers, community-based organizations and partners to identify key issues and problems, articulate their perspectives through diverse techniques, and devise strategies to convey their concerns to audiences including decision makers ( Málovics et al., 2021 ). The aim of PAR is “to understand and improve the world by changing it” ( Baum et al., 2006 , p. 854). To achieve this aim, those who wield power, including academic researchers and decision makers, relinquish control to co-researchers and prioritize their strengths and capabilities in the research process ( Hagey, 1997 ). PAR aims are achieved “through a cyclical process of exploration, knowledge construction, and action” at different or concurrent points, and the research becomes “a living dialectical process” ( McIntyre, 2008 , p. 1).

PAR is part of a broader set of participatory research (PR) approaches, where people with direct experiences of, or interest in, the research topic participate in all or some aspects of the process, including research design, data collection and analysis, and reporting and dissemination ( Lenette et al., 2019 ; Mahn et al., 2021 ). PR goes beyond superficial insider–outsider interactions among academic researchers and co-researchers, collapsing artificial boundaries that define who can create new knowledge. This approach promotes an inclusive research paradigm, that is, a set of ideas, concepts, and assumptions that explain how we perceive knowledge at a particular point in time. PR reflects a paradigm shift from conventional and extractive methodologies toward subjective and context-specific approaches ( MacDonald, 2012 ).

Academic researchers who privilege PR methods share “this abiding respect for people’s knowledge and for their ability to understand and address the issues confronting them and their communities” ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 , p. 14). Unlike linear and prescriptive methodologies, PR combines academic-expert research knowledge with local, lived experience-led or subjective knowledges, making the research instantly valid ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 ). Participatory and action-focused projects (re)center values as integral to research processes ( May, 2011 ) and reject outdated assumptions about objectivity as quintessential to research quality.

The term co-researcher is used to refer to people with lived experiences who are active agents in the co-production (co-design or co-creation) of new knowledge as a core characteristic of PAR (e.g., Baum et al., 2006 ; Lenette et al., 2019 ). While the word “co-researcher” can sometimes mask rather than address power imbalances in research, its use reflects “a social, ethical and moral commitment not to treat people as objects of research but, rather, to recognize and value the differing and diverse experiences and knowledge of all those involved” ( Lenette et al., 2019 , pp. 161–162). Co-researchers are seen as experts rather than mere subjects, respondents, or participants. They are Knowledge Holders who co-produce or co-create new data using collaborative, participatory, and ethical processes (see Lenette, 2019 ). PAR brings together different ways of knowing ( Swantz, 2016 ) through a collaborative and relational methodology where co-researchers play a key role in activities that can lead to individual, social, and policy change.

Co-research refers to knowledge exchange through participatory activities and shared experiences that revalue co-researchers’ perspectives, agendas, and wishes ( Lenette et al., 2019 ). Co-research models involve a collaborative relationship among academic researchers and co-researchers who work together to develop, implement, and share the research, rather than the former imposing their research agendas on the latter. While the knowledge of academic researchers remains valuable in co-research, equally legitimate ways of knowing such as lived experience can be explored in more depth to provide richer knowledge on a topic ( Mooney-Somers & Olsen, 2018 ). As a result, findings and research outcomes are co-produced ( Thomas-Hughes, 2018 ).

Co-production is the “design, administration and dissemination of academic knowledge through collaboration” ( Flinders et al., 2016 , p. 264). The notion of co-produced research gained momentum in the 1990s through, for instance, feminist writings (e.g., Humm, 1995, cited in May, 2011 ). The term has become more prevalent in recent years, especially in the social sciences ( Cahill, 2007 ; Littlechild et al., 2014 ) and health research ( Di Lorito et al., 2017 ; Tanner, 2012 ). Co-production draws on different skills, knowledges, expertise, and experiences and aims to redress power imbalances in research and democratize knowledge ( Thomas-Hughes, 2018 ). The principles of co-production challenge the outdated notion that academic researchers are the sole experts who define how new knowledge should be generated and disseminated. I discuss co-production in detail in Chapter 4 .

1.1.1. Participatory Action Research as Social Justice Research for Change

Many academics claim to embrace the values of social justice in their research, but few can articulate what this actually means. Social justice is concerned with “creating fair relations in terms of opportunity between people and society” ( Cook et al., 2019 , p. 380). The values of social justice challenge assumptions about elitism, exclusion, and prejudice as normal in social relations and institutions. In PAR, social justice principles of equity, restitution, procedural justice, and autonomy are crucial. Equity acknowledges the need to challenge systemic disadvantage, while restitution refers to rectifying institutional discrimination ( Hagey, 1997 ). Procedural justice encompasses several values to address how relationships and interactions based on power hurt and humiliate those who are disadvantaged and marginalized. Autonomy is valued in processes where academic researchers, who are in positions of power, do not speak on behalf of co-researchers but act as mediators and remain accountable to communities ( Hagey, 1997 ).

Lorenzetti (2013, p. 456) describes the qualities and skills of a social justice academic researcher as follows:

[A] social justice researcher is an activist who has discovered a new set of lenses, evolving tools, and pathways. It is not a separate self now called “an academic” but an extension of one’s role as someone invested in human rights, social change, and collective well-being. It is a journey with no particular end point, but many opportunities to reflect, grow, and share one’s learnings with others. Developing this new role requires humility and an open mind as well as a confidence in the value of everything that exists outside of this role.

These values align with the motivations of academic researchers who use PAR and are committed to social change and improving the lives of co-researchers.

To achieve social justice outcomes, academic researchers should be aware of and state their positionality, which refers to academic researchers’ awareness of their subjective experiences in relation to the research topic and context and co-researchers’ experiences. Positionality is a crucial consideration in PAR because the different positions academic researchers might hold and their intersecting identities can determine how they design projects, tackle challenges and ethical dilemmas, and achieve research outcomes ( McIntyre, 2008 ). Positionality involves an awareness of personal biographies and reflexive engagement with the ability to listen, question, analyze, and interpret new knowledge. Importantly, stating one’s positionality or worldview alone does not equate to being an ethical researcher.

Social justice is a principle that participatory researchers value as well as an aim of PAR. The justice emphasis is as much on research processes as it is on outcomes ( Cahill, 2007 ; Fine & Torre, 2019 ). Co-researchers who are marginalized from institutions and decision-making processes are actively engaged in meaningful PAR activities precisely to achieve social justice outcomes (e.g., Dickson, 2017 ; O’Reilly, 2020 ).

The “action” component of PAR is a fundamental concern of research for social justice, not through lukewarm strategies as afterthoughts, but as integral to each project. The focus on change as a result of research activities and outcomes is a distinctive element of the methodology and differentiates PAR from other qualitative approaches ( Raynor, 2019 ; Swantz, 2016 ). Actions involve a “multi-faceted and dynamic process that can range from speaking to validate oneself and one’s experiences in the world to ‘the process of doing something,’ such as taking a deliberate step towards changing one’s circumstances” ( Reid et al., 2006 , p. 317). The collective process involved in analyzing and reflecting on the data leads to determining what action(s) should follow to achieve change ( Baum et al., 2006 ), including policy change (see Chapter 7 ).

PAR goes beyond mere extraction of data and narratives from the field and favors “an explicitly political, socially engaged, and democratic practice” ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 , p. 13) to achieve change through actionable strategies. Measures for and discussions about action begin from conceptualization and continue through to implementation, evaluation, and dissemination, with ample opportunity to reflect on research processes in ways that are “pedagogical or provocative . . . as dynamic interventions to unfair practices” ( Tuck, 2009 , p. 53). In PAR, academic researchers and co-researchers feel compelled to act on emerging findings as part of a democratic social change process ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 ).

Change can be achieved at the individual level, such as feeling valued through the opportunity of sharing perspectives on problems and solutions. For example, Málovics et al. (2021) used PAR with members of extremely poor Roma communities living in segregated urban areas in Hungary to co-produce strategies to improve their circumstances. O’Neill (2018) collaborated with 10 women seeking asylum in England to develop a participatory arts action research project exploring notions of citizenship, well-being, and motherhood. They used photography, walking interviews, and film to document the women’s sense of belonging in the everyday. In both cases, engagement in PAR became an act of democratic expression of co-researchers’ identities within the complex sociopolitical contexts that shaped their lived experiences. However, as Chapter 7 outlines, changes at institutional or structural and policy levels require deeper, systematic, and ideological shifts (see Tuck, 2009 ). In some contexts, local-level change can unintentionally limit broader-level social change ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 ).

PAR researchers can choose to explicitly state what theories of change inform their approach. But Swantz (2016) has argued that clear boundaries between scientific (theoretical) and everyday (practice-based) expertise are not as relevant in PAR because knowledge emerges along a continuum. When using action-focused methodologies, theory and practice are integrated since

action research goes beyond the notion that theory can inform practice, to a recognition that theory can and should be generated through practice, and . . . that theory is really only useful insofar as it is put in the service of a practice focused on achieving positive social change ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 , p. 15).

If the emphasis on theory is too strong, academic researchers may be disconnected from co-researchers’ and community partners’ realities and field practice ( Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 ). However, these blurred boundaries have inadvertently led to gaps in scholarship on the links between theory and practice in PAR, with an assumption of lack of rigor and quality.

1.1.2. Applications

PAR is often used with co-researchers who are considered marginalized across disciplines such as decolonial studies ( Held, 2019 ), education ( Duval-Diop, 2016 ), health ( Clini et al., 2019 ), (trans-)gender studies ( Katz-Wise et al., 2019 ), development studies ( Cooke & Kothari, 2001 ), criminology ( Sherwood & Kendall, 2013 ), refugee studies ( Mahn et al., 2021 ), or geography ( Cahill, 2007 ). Other research approaches that are closely associated with PAR include community-based participatory research ( Katz-Wise et al., 2019 ), action research ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 ), community-based participatory action research ( Maiter et al., 2008 ), participatory visual arts-based research ( Stavropoulou, 2019 ), or community-based collaborative-action research ( Baird et al., 2015 ). Inclusive theoretical foundations such as Indigenous ( Held, 2019 ) and feminist ( Gustafson et al., 2019 ) epistemologies, as well as postcolonial ( Janes, 2016 ) and critical race scholarship ( Akom, 2009 ), have emerged more strongly in the PAR literature, as discussed in subsequent chapters. The growth of such scholarship contributes to addressing current theory–practice gaps that characterize the literature on PAR.

Several methods can be used in PAR, including interviews, visual arts-based methods such as photovoice or participatory filmmaking (e.g., Klein, 2012 ; Lenette, 2019 ), surveys, focus groups (e.g., Fine & Torre, 2019 ), drama ( Wernick et al., 2014 ) or mobile methods such as walking interviews (e.g., O’Neill, 2018 ). Some methods can be experimental, that is, developed and trialed in the course of the research ( Gatenby & Humphries, 2000 ). Recent examples include community-based secondary analyses of “official” databases or co-researcher-led surveys as counter-narratives to institutional and psychology-based surveys ( Fine & Torre, 2019 ). PAR projects usually involve methods that emphasize “collective inquiry and experimentation grounded in experience and social history” ( Mahn et al., 2021 , p. 6) over impersonal or rigid tools such as surveys with close-ended questions.

Despite the growing body of literature on PAR, it is difficult to outline one neat definition of PAR because the methodology did not originate from a single discipline (see Chapter 2 ) and has a complex history. PAR is an amalgamation of different approaches over time, which is both a strength and weakness. Because its application is context specific, “there is no fixed formula for designing, practicing, and implementing PAR projects” ( McIntyre, 2008 , p. 2). This can sometimes lead to reticence to use the methodology or misunderstandings about how PAR works. As subsequent chapters discuss, PAR can generate diverse sets of challenges, ethical dilemmas, and messes, and the PAR label can be used in very poor, if not damaging, ways ( Cooke & Kothari, 2001 ; Dadich et al., 2019 ; Eversole, 2010 ).

1.2. Methodological Framing and Underpinning Principles of Participatory Action Research

PAR reflects a rather unique methodological framing based on relational research ( Datta et al., 2015 ), which distinguishes this approach from other (but not all) qualitative research approaches. Several core tenets are associated with PAR. Here, I describe eight principles from the PAR literature across disciplines. I focus on collaborations between academic (rather than independent) researchers and community-based co-researchers, partners, and organizations. While I discuss the intricacies of applying these principles in other parts of the book, I point to key tensions here.

Disruption of traditional research approaches : PAR reflects a commitment to challenging traditional epistemologies ( Cahill, 2007 ) and questioning whose interests are served by valuing particular research models and forms of knowledge ( Baum et al., 2006 ). In PAR, people with lived experiences are not seen as passive research subjects but as co-researchers and agents of change with a vested interest in projects who are actively engaged in critical discussions and actions ( Cahill, 2007 ; McIntyre, 2008 ). As Chapter 2 outlines, PAR challenges established colonial ideas about knowledge production and research, including the assumption that academic expertise is the only valid way of knowing ( Phipps, 2019 ). Experience is seen as a basis for knowing, and experiential learning produces legitimate forms of knowledge ( Baum et al., 2006 ). Findings generated through PAR as a co-research model enrich academia.

Reciprocal benefits : PAR involves ethical and reciprocal processes, where both academic researchers and co-researchers benefit from involvement in the research ( Datta et al., 2015 ; Lenette et al., 2020 ). PAR implies a shared commitment to addressing an issue or problem, where self- and collective reflection are integral to the research. Co-learning and knowledge sharing from planning through to dissemination create a context where academic researchers and co-researchers develop authentic and effective strategies collaboratively ( McIntyre, 2008 ). There is also a shared and negotiated understanding of how each stakeholder benefits from the research. Academic researchers are committed learners rather than detached observers ( Hagey, 1997 ) and relinquish their roles as leaders or “question askers” in favor of facilitating collaborative processes ( Lenette, 2019 ).

Trust : Relationships of trust are essential to honor co-researchers’ lived experiences, knowledge and perspectives in PAR. Co-researchers follow their own process until they can trust academic researchers’ intentions and advice and feel they can contribute to all aspects of the research (i.e., topic exploration, knowledge production, and action) if and when they choose to do so. Trust leads to shared commitment to identifying and addressing problems through dialogue and collaboration to achieve common goals ( McIntyre, 2008 ; Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 ). This means that it takes significant time to implement PAR projects ethically and with meaningful outcomes for co-researchers ( Baird et al., 2015 ; Dickson, 2017 ; Raynor, 2019 ). PAR requires patience, flexibility, and perseverance ( Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 ).

Deep engagement : PAR implies a deep level of engagement ( Hagey, 1997 ) to genuinely understand co-researchers’ narratives and research goals and aspirations. Academic researchers need to be “truly present” ( Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 , p. 336) and cannot be passive or distant observers to achieve project outcomes. The depth of involvement in people’s lives, where academic researchers (who may initially be outsiders) become part of a community, can create research relationships that last well beyond projects. Researchers who use PAR methodologies are usually committed to social justice outcomes; are scholar-activists; aim to achieve meaningful outcomes for co-researchers; are patient with trust-building processes; tend to be optimistic and believe in the possibility of change; and, importantly, “find joy in being with others, in working passionately in groups, in brainstorming, in struggling together” ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 , p. 21). Caring for PAR projects and for co-researchers is not a risk but a pathway to meaningful research ( Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 ), as discussed in section 1.3.2.

Social change : PAR projects focusing on community-level change and challenging social structures emphasize issues of equity, oppression, and access to resources ( Fine & Torre, 2019 ; McIntyre, 2008 ). Academic researchers and co-researchers bring together their knowledge and skills to effect individual, social, and policy change, although the latter is potentially the most challenging aim of PAR ( Nyemba & Mayer, 2017 ), as Chapter 7 outlines. PAR can act as a tool to re-center lived experience as a source of knowledge, democratize research and academia by strengthening the capacity of individuals and communities, and engage in meaningful participation strategies to effect change.

Intersectionality : PAR avoids compartmentalizing individual and group experiences based on one distinct feature (e.g., “Muslims” or “Sudanese”). Instead, PAR activities respond to lived experiences of disadvantage, discrimination, and inequity that are intersectional. By intersectionality, I mean the compounded effect of markers of identity that can be at the source of oppression, disadvantage, and marginalization, such as gender identity, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, visa status, ethnicity, religion, indigeneity, language and literacy, educational background, disability, and socioeconomic status (see Chapter 2 ). Uncritical uses of intersectionality can result in too much focus on singling out individual experiences to satisfy an outsider gaze rather than interrogating systems of oppression that should be challenged ( Nasser-Eddin & Abu-Assab, 2020 ).

Co-researchers’ agendas : PAR is inductive and values “bottom-up” knowledge production approaches, that is, knowledge generated from individual, local, community, grassroots, and everyday experiences (the micro), to inform and challenge broader institutional, socioeconomic, and policy domains (the macro) at national and international levels. PAR projects reflect the desires of co-researchers:

Participant-generated actions can range from changing public policy, to making recommendations to government agencies, to making informal changes in the community that benefit the people living there, to organizing a local event, to simply increasing awareness about an issue native to a particular locale. ( McIntyre, 2008 , p. 5)

PAR is said to “empower” (i.e., transfer or redistribute power to) co-researchers by privileging their perspectives, needs, and values about what matters to them ( Datta et al., 2015 ). The likelihood of imposing external research agendas on individuals and communities can be significantly reduced using this approach.

Challenge to power differentials : PAR techniques can challenge power inequalities inherent to all forms of research and can shift power dynamics in ways that support co-researchers to participate actively and make decisions about processes, knowledge ownership, and data quality ( Datta et al., 2015 ). Analyzing power differentials and their impact on relationships and outcomes is crucial when undertaking PAR with marginalized co-researchers ( Cahill, 2007 ). Indeed, PAR is often assumed to automatically eliminate power hierarchies, but the promise of participation can be used as a “cloak” to disguise nonparticipatory, conventional approaches ( Eversole, 2010 ). When used uncritically, problematic notions such as voice, empowerment, and participation can threaten the ethos of PAR (see Chapter 3 ).

While these eight key principles reflect the wide potential of PAR, Mahn et al. (2021, p. 7) caution against romanticizing models that lead to co-produced research and findings. Indeed, adopting approaches that de-privilege academic researchers’ expertise

does not mean that the knowledge produced should be reified or accepted as a singular “Truth.” Good research still needs to interrogate these spaces by asking questions such as “whose knowledge has been given dominance?,” “whose voice is absent and why?,” “is this really the ‘authentic’ voice of the person speaking or are they echoing ‘the voices of the powerful’?,” etc. This echoing can occur either as a result of internalizing the views of the powerful or as a conscious act of self-alignment.

Such interrogations are now more common in the literature on PAR as the chapters in this book indicate. These shifts in scholarship on participatory approaches have created a critical body of knowledge on the strengths and complications of PAR as a methodology and epistemology.

1.3. Reciprocity and Vulnerability

In section 1.1.1, I explained that academic researchers who use PAR models are usually concerned with effecting change and achieving social justice outcomes. They possess a range of skills and experiences to nurture strong relationships with co-researchers and partners to work toward meaningful outcomes. Some contend that academic researchers who subscribe to action research should “be able to handle a certain degree of chaos, uncertainty and messiness” ( Brydon-Miller et al., 2003 , p. 21) as a distinct skill.

There are many variations of PAR in practice, and academic researchers draw on a range of qualities, skills, and experiences to implement such projects. The literature often extrapolates the qualities of qualitative researchers or group facilitators to academic researchers who privilege PAR methodologies without much discussion on core values. But in my view, academic researchers’ commitment to reciprocity and embracing their own vulnerability is crucial for participatory research activities to be meaningful and to lead to positive outcomes for all involved.

1.3.1. Reciprocity

The notion of reciprocity is central to ethical participatory research. Maiter et al. (2008) situate reciprocity—between academic researchers and co-researchers and among co-researchers—as an essential social process for respectful relationships in research contexts. They describe reciprocity as the “simplest mode of social exchange” (p. 29) with an expectation of exchange or return that “reinforces egalitarian relationships but carries moral weight” (p. 30).

As section 1.2 in this chapter outlines, a reciprocal research model refers to mutually beneficial outcomes for academic researchers and co-researchers. Reciprocal research is a marker of professional ethical standards of honesty, trust, and negotiation ( Maiter et al., 2008 ; see also Gilhooly & Lee, 2017 ). It requires academic researchers to acknowledge their privileges and interrogate long-held prejudices ( O’Reilly, 2020 ). Reciprocity is inherent to participatory research when deployed ethically. It promotes principles of beneficence ( Wood, 2017 ), informed consent, and justice ( Gillam, 2013 ) to challenge superficial research approaches guided by outsider-imposed agendas.

Reciprocity is not a new principle. It has been at the heart of Indigenous relationships and protocols for millennia. For example, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies’ Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research , or the AIATSIS Code ( AIATSIS, 2020 ), synthesizes a set of fundamental principles to guide collaborations with Indigenous peoples. Reciprocity is one of the central responsibilities in research endeavors with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants, partners, and co-researchers.

When the principle of reciprocity guides research with Indigenous co-researchers, they are equal partners in and benefit from projects, and they are not disadvantaged and further marginalized. Examples of how the principle of reciprocal benefit can be applied in practice include negotiating (financial) compensation proportionate to the time and efforts devoted to contributing to the research; archiving materials of cultural significance; and maintaining transparency about potential risks from their participation and reporting ( AIATSIS, 2020 ).

The ethic of reciprocity is a leitmotiv in contemporary literature on Indigenous knowledges across contexts. Reciprocity was a key principle in research with Indigenous students from Alaska and Aotearoa New Zealand who shared key themes based on their research experiences ( Mercier & Leonard, 2020 ); for a Stó:lō and St’at’imc First Nations academic when she described a methodology she developed called Indigenous storywork in British Columbia ( Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, 2020 ); and as a core tenet of an Indigenous Karen framework, Tapotaethakot , used in a PAR project with refugee-background young people in the United States ( Gilhooly & Lee, 2017 ).

The intent of reciprocity in research (or reciprocal research) is not to “even out” power relations but to design projects in which co-researchers have ample opportunity to exercise agency ( Allen, 2008 ). Reciprocity is not necessarily about equal roles and responsibilities in research because this may be unrealistic ( Sandercock & Attili, 2010 ). Rather, reciprocity implies equivalent or equitable opportunities and fair benefits as negotiated with and among co-researchers.

In disciplines such as social sciences and health, the notion of reciprocity is gaining more recognition in methodological discussions to challenge harmful, colonialist-infused approaches ( Lenette, 2019 ; Maiter et al., 2008 ). Shifts in research practice frameworks disrupt power imbalances and entrenched tendencies among those who approach research as “amoral plunderers of the stories of ‘others,’ typically those with little power, for personal as well as scientific aggrandizement and without any accompanying sense of reciprocity” ( Sandercock & Attili, 2010 , p. 28). Despite these developments on the reciprocal value of research participation and knowledge co-production, the “data mining” or “dip-in, dip-out” approach that characterized research for decades as an acceptable way to advance knowledge still dominates ( Lenette, 2019 ). While—or perhaps because—reciprocity is not a novel western-based academic invention, it is still peripheral to much research that claims to be participatory (I intentionally use lower case “w” in “western” to decenter colonialist linguistic dominance and discourses; see Bhattacharya, 2022 ).

As a key component of PAR, the aim of delivering reciprocal benefits constitutes more than a research principle. Commitments to knowledge exchange and mutually beneficial outcomes are moral imperatives of decolonial research (see Chapter 2 ). Developing meaningful, reciprocal relationships requires time, reflexivity, and a commitment to addressing power differentials and creating culturally safe research settings for knowledge exchange ( Lenette, 2019 ). Research teams should be explicit about PAR projects’ reciprocal benefits rather than assume that these will emerge automatically in planning and design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination (see Maiter et al., 2008 ).

1.3.2. Vulnerability

Everyone, including academic researchers, has the potential to be vulnerable in research practice ( Bell, 1998 ; Lenette, 2019 ; Perry, 2011 ). Vulnerability usually refers to the impact of witnessing and writing about difficult sociocultural issues on academic researchers ( Howard & Hammond, 2019 ) or feelings of distress, helplessness, confusion, or humiliation that can result from the research process ( Lenette, 2019 ). The kind of deep engagement that PAR requires ( Hagey, 1997 ) and researchers’ involvement in activities that challenge power imbalances inevitably lead to increased risks and vulnerability. When academic researchers are committed to researching complex issues or collaborating with people in difficult circumstances, they may face physical risks and long-term psychological impacts, paired with fear of hurting others, including family members, colleagues, research assistants, and co-researchers ( Apoifis et al., 2020 ). Yet, the literature on PAR seems to underestimate how taking action for change can generate risks and vulnerability ( Reid et al., 2006 ).

Vulnerability, as academic researchers experience it, is not usually an enjoyable feeling (e.g., Gatenby & Humphries, 2000 ). For instance, Tracy (2014) described how she was snubbed and had to grapple with uncomfortable conversations and practices among staff members during fieldwork in correctional facilities. Dertadian (2020) recounted his discomfort interviewing a white supremacist as a man with dark skin and fitting the description of a person of Middle Eastern appearance—the same people his interviewee was advocating violence against. Vulnerability is perceived negatively as a symptom of diminished agency and a research risk to be mitigated ( Jakimow, 2020 ).

But our tendency to promptly address situations of vulnerability might preclude us from assessing what can be learned from feeling vulnerable. The ability to be vulnerable and show vulnerability in participatory research can also be a strength. Recent shifts in discourse offer a different angle on vulnerability as “a practice to both enhance the quality of our research, as well as make it more ethical” ( Jakimow, 2020 , p. 147). Vulnerability as an ethical research practice refers to academic researchers being open to and welcoming the impact that others, including co-researchers, can have on their sense of self. Vulnerability as practice goes beyond merely acknowledging encounters with others to identifying how these relationships influence and challenge academic researchers’ identities. This approach involves increased risks, but the potential to experience significant benefits and personal change is also greater and can outweigh the risks ( Jakimow, 2020 ; see also Aure et al., 2020 ; Bell, 1998 ; Tracy, 2014 ).

Some academic researchers might choose to ignore the “I” or self in action research and neglect reflexivity in the name of objectivity, but vulnerability means being open to risk, learning humility and tolerance, and setting realistic expectations ( Bell, 1998 ). Embracing vulnerability makes it possible to recognize when we make mistakes and, more importantly, what we can learn about ourselves, social relationships, and potential for change from such situations. For example, Tracy’s (2014, p. 458) research in correctional facilities yielded moments of humiliation, discomfort, and embarrassment that were also “opportunities for self-reflexivity, examination of tacit assumptions, and transformative resistance.” Following his interview with a man expressing white supremacist views, Dertadian (2020 , pp. 95–96) reflected:

Afterwards I wondered how my discomfort impacted the interview. Should I be able to do an interview with someone who is trying to make me uncomfortable? . . . With hindsight, I am still glad I did that interview . . . hearing views that are personally uncomfortable for me can be a powerful thing and it is worth pursuing. . . . I would certainly feel more prepared if it happened again.

In another example, Clover (2011) facilitated a feminist arts-based collaboration with homeless or street-involved women in Canada, where she witnessed severe mood swings among co-researchers. Sometimes, she would be welcomed with smiles and hugs. On other days, she was told, “back off, bitch.” Clover was hurt and took it personally at first, but over time, she learned to recognize her own vulnerability in this context and developed a deeper awareness of how mental illness and addiction shaped co-researchers’ relationships and research outcomes.

This does not mean that risks to academic researchers’ safety and mental health should not be addressed or indeed avoided altogether. But contemporary debates on vulnerability push us to consider what can happen when we embrace vulnerability as part of ethical collaborative research rather than see it as a problem or sign of weakness. Increasingly, academic researchers are encouraged “to be honest about the vulnerabilities that come with research, vulnerabilities that make fieldwork an exciting endeavour, but also an inherently risky one” ( Wadds et al., 2020 , p. 219) and to recognize the crucial role of emotions in research ( Howard & Hammond, 2019 ; Jakimow, 2020 ).

In Jakimow’s (2020) research with women in politics in India, she perceived risks to self and heightened vulnerability as necessary to the process. Co-producing rich data on women’s political, emotional, and affective labor and the enablers and obstacles to their political careers required her, the white academic researcher from overseas, to be on the ground, campaigning with these women door-to-door and at rallies and distributing posters. She was emotionally invested in their campaigns and, consequently, shared the devastation when they were unsuccessful.

When Jakimow (2020) reflected on emotional risks and exhaustion, she concluded that it was necessary to completely empathize and try to feel as the women candidates felt to conduct the research ethically. All her senses were involved. She became more susceptible to being affected and understanding the emotional dimensions of the campaign with its joys and devastations, rather than limiting herself to a mere intellectual, outsider interpretation of the women’s experiences. The unfamiliarity and at times disorienting nature of these situations were precisely where co-learning and change could take place.

Deep encounters with others in PAR can be emotionally draining and present risks to the self and others (colleagues, research assistants, co-researchers), which is why strategies for self-care and for supporting or protecting others should be integral to projects ( Howard & Hammond, 2019 ; Lenette, 2019 ). Vulnerability as ethical practice requires giving up the temptation to wield power when things get messy or risky (when safe to do so) and instead “open up the wound” and interrogate what we could have done better, how we can let encounters with those who are less powerful transform our sense of self and challenge existing dynamics and, in doing so, cede control and space for co-researchers to exercise agency ( Jakimow, 2020 ).

1.4. Book Structure

Rather than merely providing step-by-step explications of PAR as a methodology, my approach is to outline a framework for participatory research by drawing attention to topics such as research for change, social justice, positionality, privilege, intersectionality, cultural safety, decolonization, and the politics of research. My aim is to highlight the key characteristics of ethical participatory research so that readers can reflect on their own practices and identify what needs improving.

In this first chapter, I have provided an overview of what PAR refers to, how it is used in different research contexts, and its strengths and potential as a participatory methodology. I have highlighted key principles underpinning PAR and the importance of reciprocity and embracing vulnerability to provide a clear idea of how participatory research differs from other approaches and constitutes an ethical epistemology.

In Chapter 2 , I briefly retrace the origins of PAR to research practices and debates in majority-world countries. I discuss the significance of decolonization in research contexts and how PAR can be an effective tool for decolonial research. I use Indigenous PAR and Black Participatory Research (BPR) as examples of frameworks that promote decolonial and transformative research and explain intersectionality and decolonial intersectionality as central notions to PAR.

Chapter 3 critiques the concept of participation and shows how challenging it can be to uphold this principle in reality. While participation is at the heart of PAR, many projects involve research activities with weak or tokenistic versions of participation. I provide examples of what constitutes genuine participation, even when there might be institutional constraints to overcome.

Chapter 4 adds to this critique focusing on threats to genuine co-production, which has become a buzzword in the participatory research literature. The lack of robust discussions on the meaning of co-production and how it occurs in practice can lead to uncritical applications. The chapter discusses the idea of mess in social research, often seen as a sign of “research gone wrong” rather than a source of learning.

Chapter 5 extends discussions on the problematic aspects of PAR to consider key ethical issues, including when established ethical guidelines clash with the tenets of PAR. I explore ethical considerations in the practice of participatory research and tensions linked to gaining institutional ethics approval.

In Chapter 6 , I outline the characteristics of feminist PAR as a distinct approach that aims to address gender inequalities. I discuss the potential of PAR to explore issues related to diverse gender identities, different gender expressions, and the importance of trans-inclusive feminism.

Chapter 7 focuses on the challenges of using research findings to effect policy change. I outline enduring problems with research–policy gaps and how PAR can be used as a tool for change. I discuss the centrality of a feminist policy analysis framework to contemporary research that seeks to achieve broader level change.

While it is necessary to discuss these topics in separate chapters, the issues raised are interlinked, and I do not want to give the impression that they exist in silos. This structure was designed to produce chapters of a reasonable length with digestible chunks of information to consider and discuss gradually. I have concluded each chapter with questions for discussion and suggestions for further reading and resources to extend the conversation on the themes raised.

I deliberately devote significant space to the challenging aspects of PAR rather than summarizing potential obstacles in small chapter sections. Many publications on PAR and research methods more broadly pay little attention to the politics of research, the limitations of methodologies, and the intricacies of applying participatory research principles. This paucity of discussion on the tricky or murky aspects of PAR leaves many unprepared for the dilemmas they encounter in practice and ill-equipped to deal with such situations. Rather than reinforce the myth that PAR is a feel-good methodology that is easy to use, my objective is to offer realistic and comprehensive discussions on the strengths as well as difficulties of upholding this approach to show that good research can be and usually is complex.

My aim is not at all to discredit PAR, as it is an enriching and exciting way of engaging in research. My hope is that new and experienced participatory researchers will be much better prepared to undertake meaningful research activities using the key considerations this book outlines and to preempt some of the complications that can result from using PAR models.

1.4.1. Vignettes

In the Preface, I outlined my rationale for including contributions from diverse researchers who use participatory methods in different contexts and disciplines in the form of vignettes to challenge the dominance of western-based scholarship and forms of knowledge. In my invitation email to contributors, I provided a brief outline of the book with tentative chapter titles but did not prescribe which chapter each contributor should target so that the vignettes would emerge through reflexive writing. I suggested questions to trigger reflections on: (1) how they described themselves and their research approach and (2) the incidents and anecdotes they felt would be beneficial to share with readers (e.g., What was the learning experience? How did you feel? What did you do? What happened? What remains unresolved? What should we pay careful attention to in PAR?).

It is an absolute privilege to showcase the work and reflections of diverse participatory research experts to enrich critical discussions on PAR methodologies. Contributors are:

Yusra Price (South Africa): Yusra is an independent anthropologist, educator, researcher, and facilitator who cannot settle on a single occupation but dabbles in many interrelated work practices. She holds a Masters in Anthropology from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and specializes in Education and Storytelling. At tertiary education level, her current focus is on pedagogy of methodologies within anthropology and the broader social sciences. She is interested in how researchers are cultivated and in the kinds of innovations educators have developed to foster research sensibilities that are contextually and ethically driven. She feels excited that the recently resurfacing conversations around decolonization encourage border crossing between disciplines and methodological paradigms such as arts-based methods. She is a member of the iBali network that is currently focused on Storytelling for Transformation, supported by Open University. Her story-work is located in community engagement and advocacy where a participatory and people-centered approach tries to assist others in achieving social justice. She is also the co-director of Eneyble , a newly developed consultancy in which to situate her passions. Her dream is to make education accessible for those who would generally have to struggle in the current education landscape due to socioeconomic barriers.

Yusra situates her work mainly in South Africa. She identifies as a black, creole, Muslim woman who lives in Cape Town and is locally identified as colored. This is a historical marker of racial identity in South Africa that was claimed as a cultural marker. Her vignette entitled White Tears and Jokes on transformative story-work and the challenges of facilitating PAR activities as a colored woman in South Africa appears in Chapter 2 , Why decolonize? Participatory Action Research’s origins, decolonial research, and intersectionality.

Thea Shahrokh (United Kingdom): Thea is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. She was born in London to parents of Scottish and Iranian backgrounds, and her wider family has found home in new countries globally. This personal connection has shaped her research interests in the complexity of identities and belonging, reinforced through her experience living in Guyana and South Africa, working on participatory action research with young people. She is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in sociology, psychology, and development studies. Her work continues to evolve within the fields of youth and migration studies and has an underlying commitment to addressing issues of injustice.

Thea’s past research focused on participation, gender equality, and collective action at the Institute of Development Studies, where she innovated in the use of power-aware participatory, creative, and story-based research methodologies. She has worked on research, policy, and advocacy projects within the voluntary and nonprofit sector in the United Kingdom and majority-world countries. Her vignette entitled Care and Belonging Through PAR on the ethics of care that can lead to personal, community, and political change for academic researchers and co-researchers draws on her experiences collaborating with young people and appears in Chapter 3 , What does participation entail? Challenges to genuine participation in Participatory Action Research .

Natalie Nesvaderani (United States): Natalie is an Iranian-American visual anthropologist, storyteller, and collective organizer. Growing up in a mixed culture home in the California Bay Area, she learned from an early age the power of education to turn confusion and scorn into curiosity and appreciation. This inspired her to pursue a career researching and teaching about the complex stories of the Middle East. She completed her PhD in Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology with designated concentrations in Film and Video Studies and in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She’s a co-founder of Ethnocine , a feminist ethnographic filmmaking collective. She co-produces the podcast, Bad Feminist Making Films , hosting intimate conversations with feminist filmmakers about their work and their journey through the male-dominated film industry.

Natalie’s ethnographic research project, “Mediating Youth Futurity: Displaced Youth, Advocacy, and Participatory Filmmaking in Iran,” investigates how displaced ethnic minority youths are racialized through changing state practices and in local humanitarian initiatives. We have co-authored a book chapter on PAR in an edited collection on working effectively with community-based partners. Her vignette entitled, The Ups and Downs of Participatory Filmmaking , on the intricacies of using a co-production model with young people in a context used to extractive research methods appears in Chapter 4 , How do we engage in co-research? Co-production and mess .

Louisa Smith (Australia): Louisa is Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, Disability and Inclusion, Faculty of Health. Her research interests center on the relationship between experiences of disability across the life course, complexity, social policy, and social change. Louisa’s research works across the disciplines of sociology, disability studies, and policy studies. She leads the Care Connections stream of the Connections for Life with Dementia, Global Challenge Keystone project. Louisa uses creative and arts-based methods to engage people with complex support needs, disabilities, and dementia and those who provide care.

I have worked with Louisa on interdisciplinary projects, and we have co-authored peer-reviewed publications exploring refugee–disability–health intersections. Her vignette entitled, Open and Closed Doors , on the dilemmas of participatory work in a dementia ward in an aged care facility appears in Chapter 5 , Participatory Action Research is ethical, right? Ethics in practice and institutional ethics .

Nelli Stavropoulou (United Kingdom): Nelli is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Psychology and Counselling at The Open University. She is also a freelance producer engaging with migration stories through participatory creative methods. She recently completed a participatory arts-based study with individuals seeking asylum in the North East of England as part of her PhD. Nelli has several years’ experience in project management, media production, qualitative research, community outreach, workshop facilitation, and charity work. She is interested in exploring and revisiting the interrelationship and intersections between biography, memory, identity, and story. Her work is defined to co-produce, co-discover, and reimagine personal stories and lived experiences of seeking refuge.

Originally from Greece, Nelli has been living in the United Kingdom since the age of 18. She identifies as a Greek migrant in her early 30s, married, a new mother, and the granddaughter of a Greek national who was deported from Istanbul in 1964. Nelli recalls growing up surrounded by stories and fairytales, imaginatively sewn together by her mother every night. Her exposure to stories and especially to her grandfather’s exilic story has shaped and influenced her analytical curiosity and appreciation of the important role of storytelling as a means to understand and respond to the world around us.

With several other colleagues, we have co-authored a paper on the intricacies of participatory research. Her vignette entitled, What About Making a Difference? , on how collaborative research provides alternative pathways to storytelling within complicated policy settings appears in Chapter 7 , How do we influence policy? Challenges to knowledge translation.

I wrote the vignette entitled Gatekeepers of Women’s Experiences in Chapter 6 , What of gender equality? Feminist Participatory Action Research and gender diversity , on the politics of gatekeeping when engaging in research on women’s perspectives and lived experiences. I use the word “women” inclusively; that is, I refer to cisgender and transgender women and girls while recognizing that the term does not include nonbinary expressions of gender (see Chapter 6 ). I include my own reflexive account for two reasons: first, because of the alignment between my research and the chapter’s focus, and second, because the challenge I had set for my peers to explore insightful anecdotes that might be excluded from previous research accounts also applied to me. As researchers, we often fail to share dilemmas or incidents, especially those we did not manage to resolve or address well, for fear of discrediting our research approach (see Lenette et al., 2019 ). This was an opportunity for me to consider the questions I had posed to others and share my thoughts on what I could do better to enrich knowledge on participatory research. I have stated my positionality in the Preface.

1.5. Questions for Discussion

How does PAR differ from the research approaches and methods you have used before or the research projects you have participated in?

Can you identify research topics or areas where PAR would be especially beneficial as the methodology of choice?

Why do some scholars refer to PAR as a “nontraditional” methodology? What are usually considered as “traditional” research approaches and what are their key characteristics?

What do you think are the potential difficulties of upholding the key principles of PAR? How would you overcome these obstacles in your research area?

What would it mean for you to embrace vulnerability as part of your research practice?

Further Reading and Resources

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