Participatory Action Research

PAR is, at its heart, a radical departure from traditional hierarchical constructions of power and knowledge. Aditi Mehti describes it as “a collaborative form of inquiry in which the line between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the researched’ is blurred” (par. 1). Fran Baum, Colin MacDougall, and Danielle Smith (2006) assert that this approach, “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” (par. 3).

Chad Raphael (2019) emphasizes the strengths-based and assets-based (as opposed to deficits-based) foundations of PAR, writing that what he calls Community Based Participatory Research “typically views even highly stressed and oppressed communities as possessing valuable assets. Whereas traditional research tends to apply outside expertise to assess and cure a community’s weaknesses, CBPR identifies a community’s existing strengths, sources of resilience, and latent potentials” (p. 25-27). PAR walks a tight-rope, drawing on academic expertise in pursuit of community-driven goals. 

PAR also asks its academic practitioners to localize and narrow their work, favoring depth over breadth, and community knowledge over traditional academic accolades. Lawrence Susskind asserts that “PAR puts a premium on local knowledge (what people in real situation [sic] know from their first-hand experience), rather than what experts think. And, PAR measures the success of applied social research in terms of what the client-communities understand, rather than what peer-reviewers think or the replicability of findings” (par. 7). PAR welcomes experiential knowledge and connections to multiple groups and different ways of knowing, which runs counter to traditionalist or positivist research mindsets that prioritize objectivity. This approach may thus be a provocation to some faculty. 

But examples of PAR make its impacts clear. A common approach has been partnerships involving researchers from public health and other health-related fields gathering and publishing data on self-reported health effects in communities. Research Action Design (RAD) is a research and digital design firm that specializes in PAR. They showcase a range of projects, including some focused on public health. Another exciting example from RAD is Contratados, a project styled as “Yelp for migrant workers,”which empowers Latin and Central American migrant workers to share and research information about job recruiters, specific employers, and more, in the US. 

University of Oregon faculty also do PAR work. Lynn Stephen of the Department of Anthropology has long engaged in PAR, including a collaboration with Oregon’s farmworker advocacy organization and union, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), that resulted in (among other things), a history of the organization, The Story of PCUN. Faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies worked with multiple community partners on the Oregon Water Futures Project, which used a water justice lens to shape how people—from policy-makers to artists to non-profit professionals—imagine our future water use.

PAR presents some crucial challenges for university research faculty. For tenure track faculty in particular, PAR may not easily generate the kinds of work published in academic journals and this research may not be recognized when evaluating the case for promotion and tenure. Faculty should check their own unit guidelines to see if and how they can align PAR work to promotion and tenure requirements, which is particularly important for BIPOC faculty and first generation faculty who are often held to more inflexible standards. That said, the case can and should be made for PAR being legitimate, even vital, research, and faculty who make this case in their P&T files push the university to think beyond rigid definitions when evaluating faculty work and its impacts on human knowledge and the world. If PAR work is not feasible for pre-tenure faculty, consider how community engaged learning can serve as a training and relationship building bridge for work that you may want to do post-tenure. 

PAR can also contribute to the teaching component of faculty evaluations, contract renewals, and promotion and tenure cases because it helps students identify “the value of academic questions beyond the academy and of lived experience as evidence,” which is a recognized standard of inclusive teaching as defined by the August 2019 MOU between the UO and United Academics. Doing PAR with students has both challenges and rich rewards, which are unpacked in other sections of the guide. On a personal level, doing PAR can connect faculty to community off campus, which is often welcome for those who are new to the area or who identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA and looking for connections beyond their primarily white and straight/cis institution.

For all faculty, because it relies on human relationships, PAR takes time. It takes time both to build functional relationships and through the inherently messy process of true collaboration. Faculty may find that partners need support in understanding university-based research methodologies (and bureaucracy) and faculty may need to embrace a level of research ethics and radical transparency they have not encountered before. Both faculty and partners may struggle to envision the whole scope of responsibility, the project’s timelines, and the details for each phase of the project. From a pedagogical standpoint, a PAR project will rarely fit within the confines of quarter learning.

For a deep-dive into the literature and history of PAR, see Chad Rafael’s “Engaged Scholarship for Environmental Justice” guide and the Research University Engaged Scholarship Toolkit by Campus Compact (see Works Cited and Referenced).