Participatory Action Research

mrs c kinpaisby-hill1
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by S. Kindon, R. Pain, M. Kesby, volume 8, pp 90–95, © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.

The antiapartheid wisdom of “nothing about us, without us, is for us” resonates strongly with the commitment of participatory
action research (PAR) to value knowledge that has been historically marginalized and produced through collaboration for action.
Raising questions with regards to the purposes and publics of research PAR takes seriously the critique that unless we actively seek
to democratize the academy, then our research risks reproducing intersectional hierarchies along class, race, gender, and other axes
of difference. In this overview of PAR, we consider the theory and practice of engaging with communities to address injustice
through collective knowledge production in geography.
Grounded in commitments to democratic modes of knowledge production, PAR is a collaborative and integrative approach
to research, education, and action that is explicitly oriented toward social change. Challenging the normative production of
knowledge, PAR includes excluded perspectives, engaging those who are most affected by the issues under investigation in
as much of the research process as possible from identifying the questions to be explored, interpreting the data, to deciding
upon the intended actions (including the purposes and publics of the research). Working with the assumption that all
research involves collaboration whether this is acknowledged or not, PAR decenters the lone scholar, contesting the individ-
ualized expertise fetishized by the neoliberal academy. PAR challenges traditional and positivist modes of research, which
might be characterized as extractive, hierarchical, and even colonizing. Instead PAR builds upon and draws inspiration
from feminist, critical race, indigenous theories, and grassroots organizing/research approaches committed to working
“with” rather than “on” communities. It extends the logic of situated knowledges by regarding the subjects and agents of
knowledge as multiple, heterogeneous, contradictory, embodied, and socially constructed. It also recognizes their capacity
to engage actively in the research process, not simply to be its informants. Concerned with shifting power, in PAR collabo-
rations, academic researchers and communities work together, engaging those who are too often “studied” but who do not
usually benefit from the research. Valuing the process of collaboration, PAR is committed to democratizing the research
process and building the capacity of all involved to analyze and transform their own lives and communities. Radically shifting
how data are collected and to what end, PAR opens up new spaces for participatory knowledge production, not only refram-
ing the “problem” but also exploring “solutions,” pushing scholarship and theory in new directions, and rethinking “impact”
“beyond the journal article.”
Participatory approaches have found increasingly wide support in geography and across the social sciences more broadly,
offering a promising alternative for scholars who are interested in engaging in activist ways of doing and integrating research,
learning, and teaching. However, while researchers often engage in PAR due to their commitments to social justice, doing so
does not circumvent ethical dilemmas. We join critical scholars who raise significant concerns about how uncritical and broad
applications of the term “participation” may mask tokenism and provide an illusion of consultation. As we shall discuss
further, when PAR is presented as a “toolkit” or as a set of techniques rather than a commitment to working with communities,
it may reproduce, rather than challenge, social inequities. In what follows, first we provide a brief history of PAR, outlining
critiques as well as epistemological and ontological commitments. Next, we discuss significant debates and developments in
the field of PAR. In conclusion, we discuss future directions and questions to address.

Origins

The best way to understand something is to try to change it.

Lewin (1998, p. 19)

The silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher but are the masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world.
In this context research becomes a means of moving them beyond silence into a quest to proclaim the world.
Freire (1982, pp. 30–31)

1
mrs c kinpaisby-hill acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Caitlin Cahill (Pratt Institute, New York, United States), Mike Kesby (University of St. Andrews, St.
Andrews, United Kingdom), Sara Kindon (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand), and Rachel Pain (Newcastle University, Newcastle,
United Kingdom), as well as the many community members we have collaborated with over the years.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 1 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10849-2 9

10 Participatory Action Research

Tracing lineages from around the world, PAR draws from long-standing emancipatory histories across a range of disciplines and
traditions. These have been connected with grassroots organizing, social movements, popular education, and community develop-
ment approaches which place an emphasis upon collective action responding to urgent concerns. As there are several detailed collec-
tions that provide detailed histories of PAR across the social sciences and in geography (as noted in the further reading list), here we
offer a brief overview. Mindful that identifying particular individuals contradicts the collective spirit (or ethos) of PAR, we argue that
PAR is best understood within particular historical geopolitical contexts and as part of a complex web of relations that span the
globe intersecting with social movements in countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (in the global South and North). Within
this broader field, at the risk of being simplistic, two traditions of PAR are often highlighteddKurt Lewin’s development of action
research in the United States and the activist scholar tradition in Latin America, including Paulo Freire, Orlando Martín-Baro,
Orlando Fals Borda, and others. Zeller-Berkman (2014) offers a detailed account of these movements.
Fleeing German anti-Semitism in the 1930s, social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1946) coined the term “action research” to describe
iterative cycles of action and reflection, something he called “spiral science.” Drawing upon his Marxist orientation, Lewin was
committed to doing research to affect social change with community groups. Of note, in the context of World War II, Lewin’s
research focused on questions of prejudice and discrimination impacting “minority groups”, responding to similar trends in
Germany and the United States (that are still relevant today).
Scholars from Latin America developed new approaches to research to challenge positivist research models that maintained the
status quo, specifically the power of elites and international development policies. Within the context of the successful Cuban Revo-
lution, and related social struggles in countries throughout South America, scholars understood their work as part of the fight
against imperialism and colonialism, advocating for what Orlando Fals Borda called the “people’s science.” Brazilian radical
educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, also working within a Marxist tradition, developed an epistemological approach engaging
participants directly in knowledge production as a means of social transformation. Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed detailed
his theory of conscientização (conscientization or critical consciousness), a process through which people come to terms with the
“roots of their oppression,” engaging the contradictions of their everyday lives as a basis for social and political action.
By the early 1970s participatory approaches proliferated across the Americas, Africa, and India, and in the years that followed, the
foundations for PAR were laid, among others, by Marja-Liisa Swantz in Tanzania who first coined the term “participatory action
research,” Rajesh Tandon in India, Mohammad Anisur Rahman in Bangladesh, Orlando Fals-Borda in Colombia, liberation theolo-
gist Ignacio Martin-Baro, Budd Hall in Canada, and many others. Around the world, grassroots organizers and practitioners working
in community development and social movements, engaged in collaborative research toward social transformation (see, for example,
the Highlander Center) to address urgent local concerns such as housing and environmental justice issues, as well as deep-rooted
structural issues including colonialism, racism, and capitalism (cf Zeller-Berkman, 2014; Hall, 2005; Fals Borda, 2001).
Within and outside of institutions, a multitude of approaches to PAR exist informed by these diverse overlapping traditions and
lineages. In the academy, there is a rich historical trajectory of activist scholars, including feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and indig-
enous researchers, working with engaged and community-based research that is meaningful and beneficial to community partners,
even if they have not identified it as PAR. Work by María Elena Torre et al. (2012) documents some of this understudied history.
One example is the African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, who over a hundred years ago worked in solidarity with Black commu-
nities to conduct research on their experience living in segregated Philadelphia. In another example, there is now renewed interest in
early community-based investigations conducted by social workers in settlement houses (i.e., Jane Adams in Chicago) and community
development practitioners who engaged in research with community members to address local issues (see the further reading list).
In geography, the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), well known as an inspiring example of radical geography
from the early 1970s, may also be understood as an example of PAR, in recognition of the significant role of young Black Detroiters
who were key players in shaping the activist orientation of the research project (although much of this history was not known until
recently). Addressing structural and racial inequalities including the desegregation of schools and educational concerns in the Black
community, the DGEI offers many important insights into both the possibilities and potential problems of PAR, as well as its politics.
Significantly, more recent scholarship coauthored by codirector, Gwendolyn Warren (Warren, Katz, Heynen, 2019), offers a meaning-
ful corrective, shedding light on questions of power, race, and solidarity that are at the heart of critical PAR, as we shall discuss.
Over the last several decades, the more recent “participatory turn” across the social and environmental sciences (including what
is now known as “citizen science”) is a response to renewed calls for relevance and less hierarchical research practices. This turn is in
keeping with the heightened interest for public scholarship and community-based research, and, in our field, “public geographies”
(see, for example, mrs kinpainsby’s notion of “communiversity”). PAR is one way that scholars committed to social justice are chal-
lenging the neoliberal corporate university and what Bernal and Villalpando (2002) identify as an “apartheid of knowledge”
production within academia. Destabilizing hierarchies of theory and practice, participatory praxis offers a vehicle for deepening
understandings of the social relations informed and being constituted by spatial difference, while simultaneously addressing
inequalities through collective action. In this respect, PAR praxis furthers the goals of critical social geographers and theorists
who argue that we must draw upon radical theories and politics rooted in feminism, anarchism, Marxism, and other critical move-
ments to help solve social problems rather than only studying them. Participatory praxis offers one very effective means to address,
not only explain, the sociospatial injustices which are so often our focus.
Participatory approaches to research have become increasingly prevalent within geography over the last two decades as evi-
denced by consistent programming at the American Association of Geographers and Royal Geographic Society annual meetings,
special conferences dedicated to PAR, inclusion in key geography readers, and publication in established journals including Envi-
ronment & Planning A, Gender, Place and Culture, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Area, ACME: An International Journal
 Participatory Action Research 11

of Critical Geographies, Progress in Human Geography, among others. In addition, across the disciplines, there are many critical and
useful overviews of PAR, including the influential text by Kindon, Pain and Kesby, Participatory Action Research Approaches and
Methods: Connecting people, Participation and Place. PAR theory and methods are often included in research methodology volumes,
as well as in graduate course work. In addition, we note the establishment of the Participatory Geographies Research Group
(PyGyRG) in the United Kingdom, and training centers/think tanks including the Public Science Project (www.
publicscienceproject.org) in the United States, and the Centre for Social Justice and Action in the United Kingdom (https://
www.dur.ac.uk/socialjustice/), among others, that connect universities and communities through PAR.

Epistemological and Ontological Commitments and Critiques

Critiques of participatory research highlight tensions between the theory and practice of participation that warrant our attention.
Engaging with the problems of participation, we unpack epistemological and ontological commitments of PAR. In our discussion
we draw upon feminist, intersectional, critical race, and decolonizing theories that inform PAR praxis and social justice orientation.
“Participation” does not have an inherent or stable meaning (see, for example, Judith Butler on “queer”) and can be deployed in
different ways to produce quite different effects. For example, within the neoliberal logic of “personal responsibility”, the imperative
to “participate” shifts accountability for structural problems to individuals and communities. In this way the term participation may
reinforce rather than challenge social hierarchies, emphasize normative consensus, and reproduce hegemony. For example the Inter-
national Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two bastions of global capitalism, use participatory research practices to pursue
“development,” leaving questions about global restructuring and uneven power relations unaddressed in their work. However,
even in work that imagines itself to be more radical, a latent liberal populism often favors local experiences/concerns and singular
projects, and loses sight of how broader structural processes and inequalities interact at the local scale. Furthermore, while it may be
legitimate to deploy participation at some stages of a research project (e.g., research design) and not others (e.g., reporting/
writingdif this is what participants choose or have the time to do), simply adopting one or more of the many innovative “partic-
ipatory” research methods does not in itself constitute PAR. Projects using alternative techniques can still constitute “business as
usual,” strengthening hierarchical and elite forms of knowledge production that are extractive and colonizing. Put simply, every
use of the term “participatory” needs to be critically assessed for the work it is actually doing.
Over 50 years ago planner Sherry Arnstein was among the first to tackle this issue. Her highly influential Ladder of Participation
presented a linear representation of the relationship between power and participation (see also Roger Hart’s "Ladder of Children’s
Participation"). More recently, Cooke and Kotari’s book, The Tyranny of Participation, offered a blistering post-structural critique
focused primarily on participatory development (where methods like rapid and participatory rural appraisal [RRA and PRA] are
widely used), that concludes that participation will always be entangled with power relations.
In response to the recognition that participatory practices may be complicit with dominant policies and structural oppression
there have been recent calls for Critical PAR, Decolonial PAR, PARentremundos, militant research, and -within geography- Solidarity
Action Research (see further reading list). Reaffirming the critical underpinnings of PAR, critical scholarship and participatory praxis
underlines the significance of the politics of representation, challenging what Foucault (1980) identified as the “subjectifying social
sciences.” Critical PAR “documents the grossly uneven structural distributions of opportunities, resources, and dignity” and “trou-
bles ideological categories projected onto communities (delinquent, at risk, damaged, innocent, victim)” (Torre et al., 2012, p.171).
More than a method, PAR is an epistemological and ontological commitment to collaboration and praxis that takes seriously
what it means to do social science (mrs. c. kinpaisby-hill, 2011). Foregrounding the explicit recognition that all knowledge is
produced through relationships, a participatory epistemology is grounded in an ontology that affirms the capacity of all human
beings for critical and creative thinking, analysis and reflexivity. Building on Gramsci’s (1999) understanding of “organic intellec-
tuals” whose critical perspectives are developed from everyday experiences, PAR starts with the understanding that all people
develop social theory in the course of their life experiences. As bell hooks (1990) articulated many years ago in her pivotal piece
From Margin to Center, those whose perspective has been marginalized or otherwise erased have critical insights into processes of
social exclusion.
Paulo Freire (1970, p. 47) argues “discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must also involve action; nor can it be limited to
mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be praxis.” Thus recognizing the connectedness of knowing,
doing, and being, participatory praxis challenges the false binary of theory and practice and offers “an alternative ontology of theo-
rizing.” As we have noted elsewhere, PAR “is a citational process, a relational bricolage of one’s own and other’s ideas, and it is an
embedded and constantly ongoing praxis of coming to knowing through iterative cycles, moving between experiences of everyday
social life, and individual and collective analysis and reflection” (kinpaisby-hill, 2011, p. 223).
In this way, participatory praxis might be understood as a form of theoretically informed action on the one hand, and on the
other, as a practical and grounded form of theorization. Such a perspective helps us to reflect upon, and challenge, some of the
unexamined assumptions that too often frame the way researchers think about theorizing. Destabilizing the dualism between
theory and practice, PAR explicitly recognizes and encourages iterative cycles of action and reflection within and during the research
process. Working with participatory coresearchers’ theorizing of issues is inductive, emergent, and collective, rather than taking place
after the fact. What this means in practice is that participatory researchers analyze problems and contradictions directly with
multiple participants (who may have different interpretations) and together they make sense of (’theorize’) complex issues. This
is not easy. The world is social, messy, contradictory, provisional, and structured by unequal power relations, and therefore so
12 Participatory Action Research

too is PAR. What is different about PAR is a commitment to engage collectively with this complexity as part of the research process
and as part of theory building.
María Elena Torre (2008) conceptualizes such a process as a “participatory contact zone.” Building on this, feminist geographers
Kye Askins and Rachel Pain (2011) deepen our understanding of the participatory contact zone, theorizing the materiality of spaces
of encounter. Placing emphasis upon how participatory research teams representing radically different standpoints might come
together to engage in inquiry, participatory contact zones enable differential relationships to structural conditions and power to
become an explicit part of the research process and analysis. By exploring our mutual implication in each other’s lives and explicitly
engaging the “messiness” of interaction, participatory contact zones offer potential for building solidarities across intersectional
differences of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation.
For geographers, PAR is especially well suited to research that explores human–environment and place-based relations as it
foregrounds context and site-specific knowledge, and produces richly situated accounts. PAR offers a process for connecting
relations of the body, state and nation, drawing upon feminist conceptualizations of scale as interconnected, challenging
top-down understandings of power and reductive binaries of local–global and private–public. Theorizing how we collectively
negotiate contradictions in everyday life and take action, participatory praxis moves between embodied, emotional spaces and
broader structural forces. This work is informed by emotional, embodied, and affective geographies that offer insights into the
experiences of participation, how it informs the development of new subjectivities, and how these might be a resource for
social transformation. Through a participatory process of investigating everyday life and engaging in collective reflection, core-
searchers identify their individual experiences as shared, as social, and then in turn, as political. In this sense, triangulation
involves not only a conscious engagement of difference and multiplicity, but also the active situating of analyses in their rele-
vant social and geopolitical contexts.

Ethics

Debates about institutional ethics and policies are thrown into sharp relief when considering participatory practice. Questions
of ethics often focus upon the potential harms and benefits of research, the rights of individual participants to information,
privacy, confidentiality, and the integrity of researchers. While this is critically important, we join critical scholars who point
out that institutional ethical procedures are at least as interested in protecting institutions as they are in protecting partici-
pants. Furthermore, they tend to demand a complete and final research design prior to research conduct, to collapse ethics
into the moment of consent and to frame ethics as something that the researcher controls. These requirements not only
make it difficult to obtain ethical clearance for emergent PAR projects but they also fail to recognize the profound implica-
tions that PAR has for rethinking our ethical practices associated with consent, protection, and vulnerability within larger
sociopolitical contexts.
Informed by an “ethic of care” in its most profound sense, participatory ethics reflect deep respect for relationships and
humanity. Beyond doing no harm, “a PAR inspired understanding of social justice suggests that it is in fact unethical to
look in on circumstances of pain and poverty and yet do nothing” (Manzo and Brightbill, 2007, p. 35). However, while
researchers may choose to engage in PAR for ethical reasons and commitments to social justice, PAR does not evade ethical
dilemmas. In fact, explicitly engaging PAR involves an ethical obligation to actively negotiate the politics of collaboration,
positionality, power, and accountability. Rather than top-down, participatory ethics are emergent and negotiated with partic-
ipants, culturally and contextually situated, and accountable to place and community. Participatory ethics are also increasingly
informed by indigenous approaches that recognize the primacy of human and more-than-human relationships, including our
relationship with the land, and within a context informed by history, the legacies of colonial violence, and unequal power
relations (Tuck & Guishard, 2013).
There is a burgeoning literature focused on participatory ethics that offers richly detailed accounts of ethical quandaries of partic-
ipatory research, providing meaningful insights for practice and theory, including developing ethical protocols for community-
based research that affirm the epistemological and ontological commitments of PAR. This scholarship suggests that a participatory
ethics might provide insights for reforming ethical review board structures in order that they encourage, rather than restrict
community-based and collaborative research determined by the participants.

Engaging in the PAR Process: Methodological Considerations and Principles

Engaging in PAR changes the doing of research in practical ways that inform the role of researcher, methodological designs and
timelines, building coresearchers’ capacities to participate, and perhaps most importantly, creating the conditions for collaboration,
as we detail below.
A collaborative research process necessarily shifts the role of the academic researcher. In some contexts such as Latin America, the
researcher is often identified as a “facilitator” or “animator,” to describe the role of supporting critical inquiry in a research collec-
tives, with the goal of becoming unnecessary as proficiency in research is developed. In other contexts, participatory researchers may
identify instead as “allies,” working in solidarity within social movements, joining existing collectives in service of existing political
imperatives. The politics of these relationships are the subject of critical scholarship concerned with the challenge of how to produce
 Participatory Action Research 13

a democratic space of radical inclusivity across differences of power and positionality. There is a need for more self-critical evalu-
ations of PAR research processes that address these challenges, in particular to highlight and make explicit structural intersectional
differences of race, class, gender, immigration status, etc.
Placing an emphasis upon process involves an attention to temporality that connects with recent calls by feminist scholars for
slow(er) scholarship. At its heart, PAR is about relationships and this takes time. It takes time to iteratively engage with core-
searchers throughout the stages of a project, including collective reflection, analysis, and developing presentations of the findings
for broader publics. There may also be temporal exigencies to address urgent concerns at the local level through the research and/
or activism (e.g., respond to a pressing policy issue), which may not be in sync with the relatively slower pace of academia’s
calendar or the delays of the peer review process (notwithstanding the imperative to “publish or perish”). What this means is
that participatory research involves a timeline that may require flexibility for both immediate local responses and long term
engagement.
With regard to methodological design, what distinguishes PAR is the commitment to open up the research process to collabo-
ration and build the capacity of coresearchers to participate, not a particular method. PAR designs are eclectic and context-specific
involving quantitative and qualitative approaches. In practice, the key is to develop methods that can be used by community part-
ners/coresearchers who may have limited previous experience doing research. Some of the most creative methodological innova-
tions have been developed by researchers working with young people and across language differences. Participatory
methodologies may include (but are not limited to) surveys, interviews, focus groups, archival data, mapping (including GIS),
oral histories, digital stories, drama, participatory video, photo-voice, participant observation, social media, guided tours, textiles,
“stats in action,” and “sidewalk science.” Usually PAR projects engage multiple methods for documenting the interconnections
between the personal, social, and geopolitical scales of the issues being studied.
While PAR projects are methodologically quite diverse, what they share is an orientation to collective decision-making
throughout the research process. What this means in practice is that participatory coresearchers may be involved in all stages of
the research from shaping the questions to be investigated, designing the research, collecting the data, analyzing the findings,
and developing presentations of research. Limitations on participation at any given stage might include the researcher’s willingness
to contemplate it, the participants’ capacity or interest to engage, and any project-specific logistical obstacles that cannot be circum-
vented. While PAR projects may involve different degrees of participation, we argue that it is crucial to consider in which domains of
research and action are participants involved in (or excluded from) and why? Reflecting upon the uncritical deployment of partic-
ipatory research as a tool kit, rather than an epistemological commitment, we note that there is a significant difference between
a project in which coresearchers are intimately involved in framing research questions and one in which they just assist in the collec-
tion of data (as in the World Bank example discussed earlier).
Most significantly then, PAR projects are characterized by a dedication to creating conditions of collaboration within research
collectives. The Public Science Project created a list of principles for participatory researchers that help translate the epistemological
and ontological commitments of PAR into practice (see Box 1).

Action! Purpose and Publics

What is the purpose of research and who is the intended audience (or public)? Much academic research has very few
readers, and too often ends up being an exclusive conversation between “us” about “them.” PAR follows in a long tradition
that urges researchers to make meaningful contributions to social change beyond an “armchair revolution” (Freire, 1970)
and which, after Marx, suggests that “the point is to change the world, not only study it,” Patricia Maguire (1987). Informed
by feminist, post- and decolonial research approaches, grassroots activism, and critical pedagogy, PAR raises from the start
questions about who produces knowledge, and who will benefit from and use the research. Indeed, a PAR collective may

Box 1 Participatory Action Research principles (as identified by the Public Science Project, www.publicscienceproject.org).

Across our work we agree:

• to include knowledges and expertise that have been historically marginalized and delegitimized;
• to exchange expertise and share resources within the research collective;
• to an ongoing negotiation of issues of power, and attention to vulnerability, within the participatory collective and created by the research and associated actions;
• to the creation of a research space wherein individuals and the collective can express their multiplicity and use this multiplicity to inform research questions,
design, and analyses;
• to excavate and surface disagreements in the interest of consensus as a lens into larger social/political dynamics informing the research;
• to conduct intersectional analyses at the individual, social, historical, cultural, and institutional levels;
• to conceive multiple forms of action over the course of the PAR project;
• to an ongoing negotiation of conditions of collaboration.
14 Participatory Action Research

form in the first place to address urgent concerns as determined by those who are most affected by the issues. Throughout
the research process, participatory researchers may revisit questions of purpose, as this informs the research design, intended
publics, and desired outcomes.
Lifting researchers’ gaze “beyond the journal article” (Cahill and Torre, 2007), PAR shifts accountability to how research might
be useful to communities, PAR engages diverse publics (academics, policy-makers, community members), to rethink the way they
understand and act in the world. Questions that PAR collectives may ask as part of the process include “what is the research trying to
accomplish” and, “how might the research best communicate to a specific audience?” In Box 2 we include questions that might be
raised throughout the PAR research process.

Box 2 Questions PAR researchers ask through the research process (as identified by Cahill and Torre, 2007):

Who has the “authority” to represent a community’s point of view? Who should speak for whom? Who should we speak to? Is there a “we” within the community being
represented, or within the participant research team that can be represented? In what language should research be communicated? What kinds of research products
speak to what kinds of audiences? How do we engage new audiences with our research? Should some audiences be privileged? How might the research provoke
action? And, further, do the methods and practice of participatory research create enough of a shift in traditional research to “dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde,
1984, p. 112) and contribute to social change?

Engaging these questions PAR collectives attend to the contextually specific parameters of their research, taking seriously the
politics of knowledge production and potential impacts. Questions of representation are implicitly engaged as coresearchers nego-
tiate the thorny and intertwined issues of purpose, publics, and presentations of the research. Presentations of research can take
multiple forms including academic and public-facing products, such as scholarly articles, policy reports, testimonies at public hear-
ings, data posters, infographics, websites, social media campaigns, documentaries, performances, archives, and maps. The exact
nature of the presentations adopted will depend on earlier discussions about who is the intended audience, and what action/impact
is sought.

Future Directions and Questions

PAR offers an opportunity to engage as activist scholars within and beyond our universities. This activism can take place within our
classrooms through the teaching and practice of PAR, and through our research collaborations with communities beyond the
university. Disrupting the unhelpful boundaries between researcher and researched and between community and university,
PAR opens spaces for new knowledge and ways of being in the communities we study. Significantly, PAR may also help facilitate
transformation of the academy and our professional relations and practices as academics. Fulfilling the potential of PAR to address
structural transformation involves addressing the political economic context of the neoliberal university. Participatory geographers
have been prominent in recent debates urging colleagues to consider the ways in which they facilitate social justice and change in
and through their labors within the academy.
We join other critical scholars in underlining the significance of the epistemological and political commitments of PAR
and resisting participation’s incorporation and deradicalization within current neoliberal regimes. PAR potentially offers
a critical lens through which to view debates about what constitutes “good” research practice, but we remain wary of
the danger that “impact” and community engagement may be commodified and subverted within neoliberal university
audit frameworks in ways that undermine rather than recognize the contribution of PAR. Related to this, critical adminis-
trative and political issues of funding, tenure, promotion, and timetabling must be addressed within the university if PAR is
to develop across the disciplines and in geography in particular. Although there is growing interest and enthusiasm for PAR,
especially as it connects with the push for civic engagement initiatives as the public face of the university, there are obvious
tensions between PAR’s commitment to collaboration (in the form of multiple-authored publications, such as mrs. c.
kinpaisby-hill and community-based research products that are not in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles), and
the neoliberal university’s individualized audit-regimes. This said, we note that the robust support for community-based
PAR in the discipline of Public Health offers one promising model. As such, as PAR moves from the margins into main-
stream research practice we suggest there is a need for ongoing vigilance around claims of participatory praxis in the
academy, and a persistent need for critical reflexivity in relationships, processes and research outputs if PAR’s radical origins
are to continue to provoke and support social justice and transformation.
To conclude, as scholars, activists, and people in the world, we are urgently concerned about the ongoing intertwined crises of
widening structural inequality, the devastating impacts of racial capitalism and related austerity policies, mass migrations around
the planet, climate crisis, and the many ways that these issues take shape at the local level in communities. We believe that PAR may
be one way to address the issues that we collectively face in our world and to engage and work with communities, each other, and
our students to cocreate more grounded, democratically produced knowledge to respond to the social, spatial, and environmental
injustices of this political moment.
 Participatory Action Research 15

Further Reading

Appadurai, A., 2006. The right to research. Glob. Soc. Educ. 4 (2), 167–177.
Arnstein, S.R., 1969. A ladder of citizen participation. J. Am. Inst. Plan. 35 (4), 216–224.
Askins, K., 2018. Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place. Gend. Place Cult. 25, 1277–1294.
Askins, K., Pain, R., 2011. Contact zones: participation, materiality, and the messiness of interaction. Environ. Plan. Soc. Space 29, 803–821.
Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010. Making strategic interventions: the messy but necessary world of scholar activism inside, outside, and against the neo-liberal university.
ACME 9, 245–275.
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Banks, S., et al., 2011. Community-Based Participatory Research: Ethical Challenges. AHRC Connected Communities.
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Relevant Websites

http://www.pygywg.org Participatory Geographies Working Group (PyGyWG) of the Royal Geographical Society, UK Home page.
www.dur.ac.uk/socialjustice/ Center for Social Justice & Community Action (Toolkits, Guides & Case Studies).
http://www.publicscienceproject.org – The Public Science Project.
https://justspace.org.uk/history/research-protocol/ Just Space.