Locating my project within the field of inquiry: Grounding in space and time

Geographic situation of inquiry into the Inuit art knowledge community

The geographic space encompassed by this research project stretches north and south to include northern hinterlands and southern heartlands. The producers of Inuit art reside mainly in hamlets that sparsely dot the landscapes of Labrador, Nunavik, Nunavut and the Western Arctic. However, most published material is produced, disseminated and consumed by and for outsiders in the south. For the initial period constrained in time by the requirements of a PhD, I will narrow both the geographic region and the scope of the knowledge communities to a more contained research space. Iqaluit and Ottawa have become by default the physical focal centres of the northern and southern parameters of the research.

Introducing the setting: Reflections on the Side of the Road from the Road to Nowhere The Road to Nowhere is officially marked on maps of Iqaluit, Nunavut, and included on taxi tours of this northern capital. The self-mocking de-locational indicator 'nowhere' is turned on its head becoming the Road to Everywhere, when viewed from the standpoint of a circumpolar map.

The Road to Nowhere winds up and over the hills that nestle the hamlet. In the spring it attracts Iqaluitmiut for weekend hikes, flying kites or rock collecting. The thin, worn, seemingly fragile carpet of undergrowth covers the granite hills. Dwarf willow and lichen cling closely to the spongy earth. Caribou droppings reveal their presence in the hills. The blue sky is piercing. A snow bunting flits by. Its clear melody cuts deftly into the tufts of wind. The panorama from the side of the road reveals Koojesse Inlet, still frozen under several metres of ice. Snowmachines have traced a complicated web of trails leading from these hills through the hamlet, onto the ice and off into the distance. Some are out for an afternoon of touring while others are equipped with hunting rifles and komatik. Some venture as far as Kimmirut or Pangnirtung, one, two or three sleeps away. The snowmobile trails encircle the cluster of small islands in the Bay, including Dog Island where sled dogs were once kept during the summer months. The layers of hills beyond Koojesse Inlet appear and disappear with the shifting winds and veils of clouds, mist and snow.

As we wandered over the hills with a gaggle of children, I asked my friend how she managed to keep the delicate balance, remaining healthy inside while remaining actively involved in her community. We had just heard of yet another in a recent series of youth suicides. She replied that she came to the Road to Nowhere, to this place with the children. She climbed the hills until she was far enough away that she could no longer see the city. And she collected rocks with the children and looked forward to the summer when they would be camping out on the land.

This friend, who was also one of a group of adult students in the sociology course I was teaching, intends to continue university courses as they are offered in Iqaluit. As I read the literature on Participatory Action Research, I imagine a collaborative team for my upcoming doctoral research project on communal memory and archives and Inuit art knowledge communities. Ideally, she would be an integral part of such a team! But her work is more urgent. And her focus unwavering. She knows herself well, her strengths and her goals. She is unique and yet I have met her many times in different isolated communities. The literature on Participatory Action Research portrays a community of victims, of the oppressed. The real people I was meeting as fly-in lecturer, were often ‘strong women with big trucks' who had overcome major obstacles in order to embark on long-term, demanding university programs while remaining fully engaged in family and community commitments and full-time employment as managers, administrators, policy analysts, counsellors and front-end workers.

They were not always women. As he sat sipping coffee in our sun-lit living room, with a film crew visiting from Iceland, David Audlakiak, wondered out loud how things could change for his hamlet, Broughton Island. The level of poverty and the problems faced even by his family members, left him feeling overwhelmed at times. Nunavummiut are dealing with widespread poverty, a housing crises, crime, unemployment, substance abuse and a high youth suicide rate. David commented on these social issues: "No wonder we have problems: seven churches and a road to nowhere!"

Scenic lookouts are strategically placed to hide the unsightly and celebrate nature. But from the Road to Nowhere and other lookouts in Iqaluit, other stories appear in embarrassing nakedness, stripped of all political puck passing. Across Koojesse Inlet, smearing every sunset and imposing itself on every image, is the thick column of white smoke from the constant communal burning of hamlet garbage. At times it rises vertically into a narrow path defined by the chillingly cold air. Or it rises then bends at a right angle, turning north, south, east or west depending on the winds spreading its toxins in every direction. Are there too many layers of government to deal with this? Has growth exceeded infrastructure?

Record high tides of Koojesse Inlet constantly crunch and crack ice crevices leaving behind mini-mountains creating detours for skidoos navigating the ice trails. Beyond the Breakwater and the Inlet, farther out from shore the ice forms a flat surface that is like an endless, startling white highway. However, with the spring melt, as the ice rots, all along the Beaches, the pastel blues, pinks and even azure colours that play on the white ice, darken to an intense black. Some explain that it is due to dust from the traffic. But a lingering doubt leads me to question the oil spill from one of the cargo ships in the Inlet last summer. Flying over Iqaluit the black outline ends abruptly outside the outer limits of the hamlets. Whatever has sullied the ice and therefore the water, is not naturally occurring elsewhere along the northern shores, bays and inlets.

To keep pace with the time-starved south, the Nunavut government is working at an accelerated tempo to construct institutions capable of governing and guiding its diverse and rapidly growing population. Two million square kilometres of frozen desert is home to 28,000 Inuit and other northerners. Some qabloona have lived in the north for thirty years, others just thirty days. New arrivals appear at the airport constantly as Iqaluit experiences a boom period that rapidly outgrew its housing capacity. Among these other northerners, refreshing accents reveal a diversity of origins. Many are first generation northerners. Some came from the east, from Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Finland, Russia and the Faeroe Islands. Others came north from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. There are devoted northerners whose families originated in India, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. One of the larger communities within the northern community speaks French. Almost all the taxi drivers and construction workers come from Quebec. There is a French school. Environment Canada in Iqaluit provides blizzard warnings in two languages, English and French... not Inuktitut.

Governance and identity: The Bathurst Mandate

In Nunavut issues of governance confront sensitive issues of identity on a daily basis. There is a tremendous palpable sense of potential and possibility for a renewed relationship between Inuit and Canada. However, decades of institutionally imposed bureaucracies have carved a western way of doing (and even thinking) into almost every aspect of northern life. This window of opportunity has been pried partially open. The Bathurst Mandate has mapped the landscape of future documents. Unfortunately, mildewy ideas recycled from southern institutions, are still being used in many departments and ministries. While the pivotal role of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and elders is written into the Mandate, there is only one community where an elder's presence at the Ministry is daily, constant, salaried and ensures an ongoing impact.

Eyes on Nunavut: Knowledge collisions

The Bathurst Mandate is a syncretic document on governance of a modern, complex society incorporating Inuit values. What will be of interest to indigenous peoples globally is the dynamic between Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and the pragmatics of policy-makers. In a very real sense this is a collision of knowledge systems.

Locating my project within the field of inquiry: Introducing the unfolding narrative: Written pictures

I want to talk about art and things that are not said. In the end it’s the telling of the story that will count. It’s about how it is told, in what voice and to which audience. With a partially drawn constructivist, interpretivist road map in hand, I attempt to write the visual as a source of communal memory and cultural archives in the age of the Internet. For this project and even for this paper I was searching for new ways of telling stories. This includes uncovering and exploring new technological and conceptual tools. It involves being cognisant of different languages with their constituent parts including genres and chronotypes. There is the metalanguage of the social sciences and the multi-levelled everyday language of social lives. There is the vernacular of students, colleagues and friends. There is a cacophonic chorus of neoliberal discourse emanating from the mainstream media and markets that drowns out more reasoned, complex and robust conversations. Within each of these there are layers of literacy that impede or improve communication. It is Rabelaisian cacophony in a Trade Fair in Iqaluit.

Reversal of sequence: back to drawing the cognitive road map

What started as an investigation of a specific methodology ended as a reversal of sequence. The reflexion led back to the most fundamental theoretical questions of the nature of these voices and the agency of subjects. I was pulled into the vortex which led back to the cognitive road map itself, the paradigm.

Paradigm, a cognitive road map that encompasses ontology, epistemology and methodology

The paradigm encompasses ontology (the nature of reality); epistemology (how we know and the relationship between the knower and the known) and the methodology (how we gain knowledge about the world, of which PAR is one approach). A paradigm is socially constructed and depends on a basic set of beliefs that guide action. It is a worldview, a basic set of beliefs that define the nature of the human subject, the relationships between human subject and the world. Paradigmic beliefs depend as much on faith as any philosophical belief. Paradigms can be so inclusive that they encompass worlds within worlds or as narrow as orthodox positivism. (Denzin, 1994)

Resonances between PAR and a Constructivist, interpretivist paradigm

This paper then deals more with the resonances between the participative, constructivist, interpretivist world view adopted by PAR practioners and the world-view and cognitive road map that I am currently exploring on this journey of inquiry.

"[A] participative methodology needs to rest on a participative world-view. It is not possible simply to tag co-operative inquiry or participatory action research onto a world-view that is primarily forged in a positivist or modernist perspective, with its deep rooted assumptions about the separation of knower from what is known..." (Reason 1994:1)

Feminism and PAR

Before I began to investigate PAR I had already engaged with literature on feminist research that had led me to adopt a highly reflexive stance. Feminist researchers are keenly aware of subject/subject relationships in research, the researchers relationship to participants including an awareness of the hidden structure of oppression inherent in the role of researcher and participant. Questions of “Whose knowledge counts?” and “Who can be a knower?” are fundamental to both PAR approach and feminisms. (Denzin and Lincoln 1998:302).

A feminist approach to PAR

Patricia Maguire’s germinal work revealed how even PAR practitioners continued to mute female voices by neglecting to account for gender and racial differences in approaching social inquiry. Concepts such as community, the people, the marginalised, the exploited, or the poor were treated as neutral and therefore reflected only a male perspective. (Maguire, 1987)

Why investigate PAR for my project?

PAR has been recommended by the Nunavut Research Institute (NRI), the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Canadian Research Institute for The Advancement of Women (CRIAW) as the preferred research model for collaborations between academics and indigenous peoples. PAR has been highly praised in feminist literature as a research method that contributes to social change by providing a forum for muted voices.

My teaching work in aboriginal communities had confirmed basic beliefs that I found echoed in Maguire and Whitmore. My personal experience corroborates the literature on aboriginal education that success in teaching, learning and research is enhanced when the actors involved negotiate relationships based on mutual respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility (Castellano,2000, Maguire 1993, Whitmore 1998).

"The decision, then, to attempt participatory research grows out of a deep belief in the ability of people, ourselves included, to grow change, challenge injustice and oppression, and take increased control of our lives and communities through collective action, however small. Yet we live within the very structure we seek to transform. It is not a neat intellectual exercise. Collective work is messy and time-consuming. People may decide not to take action. They will surely not become empowered, liberated or transformed on our schedules." (Maguire 1993::176)

Writing sociology with pictures

Among the boxes of reading material that accompanied me on my trips to Iqaluit I found examples of writing sociology with pictures that were unique and intriguing. I wanted to keep the faces of my students and the images I have collected as immediate and present as those found in Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America (Stewart 1996).

Snapshots of turbo economies and poverty superimposed on resource-rich Appalachian hills

Stewart narrates a story of the "Other America," of the disadvantaged communities of Appalachia. Her vivid, descriptive language was like a voice walking beside me, pointing to the left and right, to visual evidence of another way of living in America. The contrast between the resource-rich hills and the impoverished people was starkly revealed in a series of verbal snapshots clicking perfectly formed images in my mind. Their clarity cut through layers of narratives of nationhood that fuel the American people into turbo economies.

Bridges and barriers, missing archives and community memory

To tell this story of bridges and barriers, of missing archives and community memory, of perspectives and panoramas in a world view flipped on its head, I have taken pictures. I wanted to carry with me the snapshots that would bring me back to moments of lived experience. The images themselves conjure up feelings, smells, sounds, fleeting thoughts, snatches of conversations and relationships that thicken the moment. I have begged, bullied and cajoled people into standing outside while I capture their digital imprints. I have stood on the breakwater jutting out into the frozen inlet with cold winds cooling the air to minus thirty degrees. I stood red-nosed as frozen fingers clicked images of the pressure ice and puffs of mist escaping through cracks. When blizzards blew in I went out. Bracing myself against buffeting winds, tiny diskettes were filled with a collection of unforgettable moments. As I read Jackson, Hall, Reason, Selener, Giddens, Maguire and so many others, either in Iqaluit or back in Ottawa, the brilliant orb of sun breaks through the blizzard, streams onto the pressure ice and backgrounds my laptop screen. As I write I produce and view pictures.

Locating my project within the field of inquiry: Introducing the unfolding narrative: Cyber tools and memory

Picture a Dell Inspiron laptop with a background screen of an Arctic ice-scape complete with blue sky, long blue shadows cast by the peaks of eye-piercing white pressure ice on Koojesse Inlet, tufts of mist here and there and a warmly dressed man waving to me and you. Picture the cold hands, fogged glasses and red nose of the person taking the picture with a Kodak digital camera in -35 degree temperatures. Picture the over-heated but very comfortable, small home office-bedroom in Baha'i House, Iqaluit where pictures are instantly downloaded. Picture the images and text spun into the web in cyberspace with a mouse click. Picture the laptop being carried from airport to archives, from home to office. Picture the computer screen updated with images with filenames like Arctic sunset at three pm, Road to Nowhere and Blizzard No. 3, Iqaluit, January 2002. Picture the Dell perched on my blanket-covered lap as I sit huddling near the fire for warmth in my small over-crowded living room in a small house buried in fresh spring snow left by Sheila's brush in rural Quebec. Picture the laptop on a desk in a minute shared university office on a university campus in the spring and summer, an office worth a small fortune in academic capital but temporarily and generously loaned to me for free. Picture the wires connecting mouse, modem and electricity to the screen, keyboard and memory. Picture stacks of photocopies displaced from one pile to another as they are mined for resources. Picture aisles and aisles of library stacks and more books with text emptied in paragraphs into EndNote data base. Picture the images of the digitally trapped portrait snapshots of those authors sharing screen space with the smiling faces of students, family members and friends. Picture multitudes of mugs of coffee and conversations about the process. Picture memory that is virtual, real and a work in process. Picture a multitude of open Windows accessed by a well-placed light touch that lasts a minute second. Picture a tool kit filled with EndNote, Explorer, Netscape, MS Word, WordPerfect, Adobe, ACDC, HTML and all the other invisible aids that work on finger gymnastics to make it possible for me to do perform intellectual gymnastics. Picture a Notepad filled with text and HTML script that allows me to be the author. Picture a Netscape Explorers window that allows me and my imagined audience to be readers.

The dynamic and somewhat messy process of uncovering materials that would inform my own research praxis took place in archives and air planes, in classrooms and coffee shops, in the urban heartland and in small, isolated hinterland communities with friends and strangers, colleagues and students. This paper is informed by extensive, but not comprehensive, reading and by my own personal experience and observations as contract lecturer with Off-Campus Aboriginal and Inuit programs. My PhD project involves teaching, learning and research in a cross-paradigm and cross-cultural location.

The shadow side of modernization

In choosing to work with Aboriginal, Metis and Inuit communities in a subject/subject emphatic relationship between adults, I take risks of being deeply shaken by shared experiences. Life crises, such as youth suicides, are an integral part of the shadow side of modernization in Canadian aboriginal and Inuit communities. I am unable and unwilling to deny entry of the pain of the real peoples' lives with which I become involved. During this period of teaching as a fly-in professor, I have felt stunned by the deeply disturbing ‘pictures’ of the highly complex social context in which contemporary Inuit artists live and work today.

Dilemma of disenchantment with PAR

My disenchantment with using a PAR approach for my own project was a gradual process. I realized that a PAR approach may not allow me to investigate more deeply embedded assumptions that were non-discursive. By the spring of this year, I expressed concern that my eventual project could no longer be a PAR project ( unless I could work on a course on Inuit art that would involve Inuit students and elders. Ideally this would be similar to the “Interviewing the Elders” project at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Unfortunately the Nunavut Arctic College Inuit Studies program involved in this fascinating project show no interest in selecting art as a topic of studies.) I wondered if my PAR comp was still valid. I had to accept the fact that the topic that had chosen me, that inhabited me, did not elicit curiosity in those with whom I would have wanted to work as collaborators. I could choose a more visibly socially-urgent issue, such as homelessness or wife abuse. Or I could continue to investigate topics that continued to fascinate and intrigue me — issues of memory and the missing archives — but with a less participatory approach. Echoes of “arrogant outside researcher” persisted, reminding me of an emotional CRIAW workshop session in November, 2000 where academics and community workers attempted to articulate a space for PAR in their collaborations.

Experience responding to theory

Throughout this entire year, each attempt at producing a comprehensive has ended in my own rejection of the papers! The web page on PAR I had begun in September was full of outdated radical Marxist rhetoric that I did not espouse and, as I finally acknowledged, deeply rejected. In an aboriginal and Inuit setting a materialist view that entirely eliminates spirituality from the conversation is awkward. I realized after a couple of months that the second comprehensive on Critical Language Awareness was too narrow for the aboriginal communities in which I was working. Both assumed that the subjects were oppressed. People I worked with in these aboriginal and Inuit communities were regularly submerged with life crises that far outnumbered and out-weighed those experienced in other Canadian communities. The people I met were disadvantaged but not oppressed by a definable oppressor. They were in most cases already politically aware and informed of local issues. (Although there was definitely not an agreement on this. It was openly and energetically discussed in many classes with Social Conflict theory attracting much interest.) The web page paper that I had presented in March seemed irrelevant by May! When the fourth youth suicide claimed the life of my friend’s son, the paper as I had written it, seemed distant and out of context. After I returned from the funeral in Pangnirtung, I began yet another draft of the comprehensive whose closure consistently evaded me. In each case it involved a re-examination of the ontology of the human subject, a space for some universal values based on shared spirituality and the dynamics of hierarchical relationships in teaching and research.

An entire cohort of PAR practitioners three decades later: a testimony to the robustness of the approach

My disenchantment with PAR as potential approach for my research did not diminish my admiration for PAR practitioners. I was drawn to the individual life stories of Swantz, dian marino, Deborah Brandt, Edward Jackson, Patricia Maguire, Budd Hall, Peter Reason, McTaggert, John Gaventa, Orlanda Fals-Borda and particularly Julius Nyerere. The fact that an entire cohort continued to work with PAR methodologies contributing to development and popular and adult education for over three decades is a testimony to the robustness of the approach.

Locating Participatory Action Research: Names, labels and definitions

Semantics or semiotics

In 1977 a group of PAR practitioners gathered World Symposium on Action-Research and Scientific Analysis in Cartagena, Columbia in Aurora, Ontario. They produced a working definition of Participatory Research. PR involves a researcher who self-defines as a militant activist and committed participant working with dis-empowered communities in the definition, analysis and resolution of a selected area of research. Ideally it is the community that targets an area of research. The principal goals of research are to improve the social reality of community members, to encourage self-reliance. This group argued that PR was a more scientific method of research. The participation of the community in the research process facilitates a more accurate and authentic analysis of social reality. (Hall 1999)

What are some components of an ideal PAR model?

An ideal PAR model entails complete involvement of communities in research which would include instigation of the research, research design, choice of research methods, collection and analysis of data, control and use of results. Some of the products of PAR include self-reliant consciousness, indigenous knowledge and practical plans.

What are some assumptions that underlie participatory approaches to research and evaluation?

By 1998 Bessa Whitmore updated understanding of various aspects of PAR situating the approach within a constructivist paradigm and articulating concepts from the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. She stressed the ontological and epistemological aspects of PAR. Research and evaluation are political processes which . Someone gains from the process and products of inquiry. Science is a contextualized, cultural product. She dealt with the questions of “Whose knowledge counts?” and “Who can be knowers?” She dealt with the validity of different knowledge systems. (Whitmore 1998)

Peter Reason provides some of the more in-depth analysis of the ontological underpinnings of PAR. His definition builds on the 1970s definition while recognising PAR has a double objective.

“One aim is to produce knowledge and action directly useful to a community - through research, through adult education, and through socio-political action. The second aim is consciousness raising or conscientization, to use a term popularized by Paulo Freire (1970): to empower people through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge, so they learn to 'see through' ways in which the established interests monopolize the production and use of knowledge for their own benefit. PAR aims to help people move beyond immersion in a parochial world-view and a culture of science, and also beyond the adoption of a scientific or technical view imported from the dominant culture, and towards the creation of knowledge systems based on people's needs." (Reason 1994:48)

“Co-operative inquiry, participatory action research, action science are all “participative approaches to inquiry in the human sciences and management.” In these forms of experiential action research all those involved in the inquiry process are co-researchers, contributing both to the thinking that forms the research endeavour and to the action which is its subject. This moves the inquiry process well beyond the subject-object split of orthodox positivism and also offers an alternative to deconstructive postmodernism. I am particularly concerned to find ways to fully integrate action and reflections, seeing that the purpose of research is not contribute to an abstract "body of knowledge" but to develop practical knowing which contributes to the flourishing of human communities and the eco-systems of which we are a part."(Reason 2002)

A History of PAR

The 1990s have been described as the decade of participatory action research. (IDS 2000) There is a profusion of second and third wave literature which strays far from the origins of PAR in Tanzania and Columbia. There is no one history of PAR. At least four major strands have emerged over the past three decades. These have been thoroughly described in Selener.(Selener 1997) Ontological origins, epistemological assumptions, and practitioners can be both radically divergent and intricately interwoven. There are no self-contained, autonomous strands that tidily stayed put. The strand that attracted me for the richness of ideas it offered and the many fruitful branches that have evolved and grown over the decades, emerged out of Africa. It is part of a story of the end of colonialism and the beginnings of national sovereignties.

Nyerere-Swantz-Friere

The Canadian, Budd Hall and Finn, Marja Liisa Swantz and Kemal Mustapha, trace the origins of their lifelong influential careers in participatory action research to Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Nyerere was Tanzania's first president following its independence from Britain in 1961. He promoted ujamaa, a policy that supported the participation of citizens' organizations in development. Tanzanian researchers, who started investigating participatory models in the 1970s became catalysts worldwide in the participatory action research network. (Swantz 2001)

Nyerere unfulfilled vision Ujamaa

Nyerere did not succeed in carrying out the practice of people's participation. For two decades he attempted to guide development based on Afro-centric, economic development that incorporated African forms of humanism and socialism. Ujamaa is a philosophy of communal self-reliance, interdependency and a humane form of community development. When he could not nurture Ujamaa through consensus, he imposed it. He measured his steps against those taken by his neighbour, Kenya where he witnessed the emergence of an African man-eat-man society which he abhored. Nyerere proclaimed that Ujamaa ni utu. However, his prescient work prepared the ground for the full acceptance of the participatory development movement in Tanzania in the 1990s. (Swantz 2001)

Marja Liisa Swantz

Marja Liisa Swantz was a Finnish social scientist working with University of Dar es Salaam’s Bureau for Land Use and Productivity (BRALUP) in the 1960's and 1970's. She incorporated aspects of Nyerere’s ujamaa in her work with students and women village workers in the Tanzanian coastal region. She called her methodology Participatory Research. In a 1971 visit to Tanzania, Paulo Freire observed Swantz' methodologies which he then introduced to international social scientists. (Hall 1994, 1997)

Budd Hall

Budd Hall worked at the Institute of Adult Education of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 1970 until 1974. Hall described how he and many co-workers were transformed by the Nyerere’s "...ideas, strategies and programmes.” When Hall left Tanzania he spent a year as visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. While at Sussex he met international researchers like Francisco Vio Grossi from Chile and Rajesh Tandon from India, who shared his research interests. His entire career has pivoted around PAR. (Hall 1997)

The International Council for Adult Education (ICAE)

In Canada in the 1970s the potential of adult education was already recognised. The International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) was founded in 1973 with a mandate to promote adult education to benefit communities and individuals and to encourage participation in economic, social, political and cultural development. The Council would eventually become one of the prime advocates of participatory action research. Since 1968, their journal Convergence: the International Journal of Adult Education, has been providing a forum for topical exchanges between researchers and practitioners on an international scale. In 1988 an entire issue was devoted to participatory action research. In 1977 the International Council of Adult Education supported the initiation of a global network in Participatory Research that brought together the work of a growing number of practitioners/scholars already engaged participatory research practices in different parts of the world. (Hall 1997, Fischer 1996)

European rebellion against university scholarship

The 1960s and 1970s brought an unprecedented revolution in thinking in academia. Kuhn introduced the general academic world to postpositivist or postempirical conceptions of science. In Europe in the 1960s a rebellion against university scholarship developed particularly in Germany, where students undertook action research, Aktivierende Befragung, by instigating conversation door-to-door inviting participants to reflect on issues such as youth vandalism in their neighbourhoods. By the 1970s critiques of positivistic research paradigms emerged in the work of Habermas, Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

PAR as iconoclastic in the 1970s

PAR activists abandon institutional posts for militant activism

1977 World Symposium on Action-Research and Scientific Analysis in Cartagena, Columbia

At the 1977 World Symposium on Action-Research and Scientific Analysis in Cartagena, Columbia the theories of Antonio Gramsci offered new insights into participation.. This event was organised by Orlando Fals-Borda and Columbian institutions along with other national and international bodies. (Fals-Borda 1992:15) Hall asserts that Fals-Borda originated the term "Participatory Action Research." Budd Hall recalled that this Symposium "totally and efficiently dismissed for once and for all the pretension of detached positivist science." (Hall 1999, 1997)

PAR Network in five countries by 1978

By 1978 there were five nodes in the Participatory Action network: Toronto; New Delhi-Rajesh Tandon, coordinator; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - Yusuf Kassam, coordinator; Netherlands - Jan de Vries, coordinator; Caracas, Venezuela - Francisco Vio Grossi, Coordinator.(Hall, Budd 1997). In 1979 there were meetings in New Delhi organized by Rajesh Tandon, at Highlander Research and Education Centre hosted by John Gaventa.(Hall 1997)

In the 1980s PAR approach was used in urban environments

By 1982 at the 20th World Congress of Sociology in Mexico City, Participatory Action-Research expanded its scope from the "micro, local and peasant community to the complex, urban, economic and regional." (Fals-Borda 1992:16)

During the 1980s there was a shift in development strategies

In the 1980s there was a shift in development strategies. A new development strategy shifted from a theoretical assumption of expansion of the production of economic and physical resources towards a more sustainable development which included human resources as a major factor. (Brown 1985)

PAR methodologies in Canada

Jackson provides an excellent summary of the history of the use of PAR methodologies with and by aboriginal communities in Canada. He separates the period into four phases. PAR methodologies were widely implemented by and with Aboriginal and Inuit communities in Land Use and Development research projects in the 1970s. (Jackson 1993) First Nations communities availed themselves of new opportunities for communication and organisation in preparation for their emergence in the arena of modern politics. Faced with increasing threats of separation from their lands and greater limits to hunting and fishing rights they were forced into forging new social relations with larger capitalist communities. (Abele 1980)

Berger Inquiry: gathering testimonies of a thousand witnesses

A pivotal example of this first phase of PAR implementation is the Berger Inquiry prompted by the post-Prudhoe Bay fossil energy rush which originated in 1968. Justice Berger and his team journeyed to communities throughout the Western Arctic gathering testimonies of a thousand witnesses. This fuelled debates about future energy development in the unique and vulnerable arctic ecosystem of the Northwest and postponed the Mackenzie pipeline project. White public servants, employees of the mining industry and of the oil and gas industry and their families were temporary northern residents who intended to return south, but accounted for roughly half of the population of the Mackenzie Valley and Western Arctic. Berger felt that the Aboriginal permanent residents, who were the other half of the population should have a greater input into the discussions on land use. The Berger inquiry revealed that hunting, fishing and trapping contributed far more to Aboriginal peoples' economy than had previously been attributed. This contradicted and weakened arguments that Aboriginal peoples' survival depended on their being subsumed into the industrial economy of capitalist society. In 1977 Justice Berger called for a “kind of progress that has a place not only for industrial advance but also for native rights and environmental values.” (SLUPB 2001).

Phases 2 and 3

The second phase in the late 1970's, included Aboriginal-initiated, community-directed research on water, sanitation, health, housing and social services. These studies used qualitative methodologies. (Jackson 1993:50, 53)

"The alarming rise in the incidence of alcoholism, crime, violence and welfare dependence in the North in the last decade (1967 - 1977) was closely bound up with the rapid expansion of the industrial system and with its intrusion into every part of the aboriginal people's lives: their economy, their values and self-respect, and the close link to their past." (Synopsis of the Berger Inquiry )

In the third phase in the early 1980's groups such as the Council for Yukon Indians (CYI) and the Kayahna Tribal area focussed on using PAR methodologies to explore Alternative Economic Strategies. (Jackson 1993:50)

Looking back at the Berger Inquiry

At a recent conference the impact of the Berger Inquiry was studied. It was recognised that the Inquiry

“set a number of precedents that have impacted on research with aboriginal, Metis and Inuit communities over the past twenty five years. Besides the body of recommendations produced from this research, Berger also developed a new and innovative research methodology and introduced a new concept of intervener funding.” (CARC 2002)

1990s: the Decade of Participatory Action Research

Throughout the 1990s participatory methods have been adopted by governments, funding agencies, international aid organizations and even industries, worldwide. Canada’s own Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was considered to be the largest PAR project undertaken. (Jackson 1993) . Its scope now encompasses issues of policy and governance. There has been a profusion of labels produced to accommodate the increasing diversity of projects spanning disciplines and sectors. (IDS 2000) PAR methodologies are routinely taught in university settings. They are among the most widely accepted methods of working with aboriginal communities.

PAR removed from its origins

The 1991 publication entitled Participatory Action Research (Whyte 1991) dealt mainly with the use of participatory methods in improving the industry’s productivity/cost ratio in Xerox operations and in those of a Norwegian shipping company. There was no mention of oppressor/oppressed. While this has raised questions of co-optation, PAR can no longer be considered to be marginal and operating in opposition to established institutions.

Post-Development: a critique of PAR

Majid Rahnema is one of the most outspoken critics of orthodox development models, among which he includes PAR. Rahnema’s recent publication, The Post-Development Reader, has been vaunted as one of the most widely read academic texts in the United Kingdom. In 2001 he was key note speaker at “International Cooperation Days: The Shifting Realities of International Development” hosted by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in Ottawa.

Modernization Theory: the need to know key concepts

From 1967 to 1971 Rahnema, inspired by the Paulo Freire’s popular educational movement, founded an Institute for Endogenous Development Studies and worked at the village level on alternative, bottom-up methodologies to development. His critical examination of the PAR model of development, undertaken in a small, seminomadic, semi-agricultural Iranian town, Alashtar, uncovered hidden assumptions that predefined concepts of ‘needs.’ The final outcomes were more closely linked to towse-'e or development than to âbâdî, a prosperous, caring and convivial village.

Underdevelopment as ontological inferiority

An unchallenged Modernization Theory of development assumes that underdevelopment indicates ontological inferiority. Progress involves disrupting vernacular societies replacing outmoded life styles with modern education and ways of thinking and doing. Needs are imputed based on indicators from urban, industrial areas.(Rahnema and Illich 1997)

"No wonder the gap we had once thought to fill increased at an exponential rate. The obsessive race to "catch up" with the most advanced countries has reduced the complex search for a just, prosperous and more humane society to a simplistic choice between different brands of the same economistic and uniformizing plans. As such, it has produced a sad atrophy of social imagination and creativity."(Rahnema and Illich 1997)

Unlike many of his cohort, schooled in this tradition, Rahnema came to agree with the highly critical stance of life long friend, Ivan Illich. Illich, a radical humanist, is concerned with the realization of man's full potential which includes the physical, spiritual and intellectual not just the enrichment of homo economicus.

In a well-known 1968 diatribe provocatively entitled, "To Hell With Good Intentions" Illich questioned American altruism in development work. He described them as,

"... products of an American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately consciously or unconsciously" salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideals of democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from these. . . . Ideally, [the American altruists] define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.'" (Illich 1968)

Living, endogenous words from the vernacular

Illich’s language reflects the revolutionary mood of the 1960s. Rahnema, offers a restorative, language for civil society involvement. This includes the regeneration, investigation and use of living endogenous, words from the vernacular. This would nurture a redefinition of concepts, such as 'needs' and the reassessment of more holistic goals. This would counteract the narrow, exclusive perceptions based solely on material science at the expense of the more holistic view espoused by most people. This was practised by Nyerere in Tanzania with the use of the concept Ujamaa. It is also reflected in the Bathurst Mandate and the incorporation of Inuuqatigiittiarniq, the healthy inter-connection of mind, body, spirit and environment. This is similar to âbâdî, a prosperous, caring and convivial village.

Finally Rahnema calls for a renewed form of spirituality, of the development of the healthy, spiritual inner worlds devoid of fundamentalist, subversive tendencies.(Rahnema 1996) An indigenous paradigm also incorporates spirituality as an integral part of a holistic worldview. “Up until very recently, American and other Western intellectuals tended to define spirituality in institutional terms (i.e., religion) and to view it suspiciously as something inherently separate from human affairs."(Stanfield 350-2)

In this section on the impact of Modernization Theory on development projects including PAR, it was argued that Modernization theory assumes ontological hierarchies that are complete with unchallenged definitions for such concepts as ‘needs’. Critical language of the 1960s sounds confrontational, counter-productive and outmoded in 2002. Rahnema’s valuable insights informed by honest reflection on previous development work, are useful tools that can be adopted in any setting where knowledge collisions intersect with growth and development.

Civil Society homo civici as active, participant and agent of change in a renewed democracy

Rahnema rejects participatory development approaches and calls for a formation of a counter balance to politics and market in the form of Civil Society. This resonates with the work of Habermas, Gramsci, Cohen and Arato who situate Civil Society in modern western societies as intermediary between the State, the Market and citizens. They have rejected the classical dichotomy of State versus Civil Society which prevailed since the Enlightenment, a duality that was reformulated by Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim and Weber.

Civil Society expanding four times faster than the economy

In the most recent literature on participatory research, the term Civil Society is frequently used. Civil Society, or the nonprofit, third sector, with annual expenditures world wide of one trillion dollars, is expanding four times faster than the economy. {Barlow, 2001 #1483} :3) One of the most informative discussions of this rapidly growing sector of society, is found in the 1999 Concise Report of the Debates of the First Convention of Civil Society organised by the European Economic and Social Committee (ESC 1999)

Habermas and communicative action: the power of communication

Changes in contemporary sociological theory over the past three decades have re-formulated concepts, such as human agency, civil society, homo civicus. Through the work of Habermas on communicative action there are new ways of understanding the dynamics at play between homo politicus, homo economicus and homo civicus.

Civil Society’s communicative power: the road to political awareness and democratic participation

Civil Society, homo civicus, exercises a communicative power through which it engages with administrative power/the State/ homo politicus and economic power/the Market/ homo economicus. Civil society forms a communicative sphere, a space where homo civicus develops political awareness which leads to democratic participation. Habermas and ESC. In this way Civil Society, the State and the Market form a triumvirate in which the Civil Society plays a pivotal role in social integration and political participation. By clearly situating civil society as a mediator between State and the Market, Civil Society is not subject to the rules of the market.

PAR subsumed by the language of Civil Society

The language adopted in these debates is a contemporary version of the basic assumptions upon which participatory action research is based. PAR can be located as one of the approaches used in groups that constitute Civil Society. Civil Society provides a communicative sphere in which diverse, autonomous groups determine the pattern of social actions themselves. Some may call their approaches PAR.

Gaventa’s differential participation: homo politicus and homo civicus

In his investigation of the nature of power, powerlessness and the roots of quiescence, Gaventa used the dualities of homo politicus and homo civicus to illustrate the mechanics of differential participation. Gaventa revealed how communities, such as those found in Appalachia, socialize the disadvantaged by limiting access to associations and institutions, effectively depriving them of basic training for democratic participation. Only the power elite can become homini politici. The power elite, who inherit their hierarchal position in closed, narrow social structures, limit access and therefore the opportunity of acquiring experience in self-government. The disadvantaged do not have opportunities to associate in community activities so they are unable to develop or earn trust. In Gaventa’s model homo civici remain outside the system, virtually inactive politically. In the communicative action model, Civil Society provides an outlet for the otherwise disengaged.

Giddens’ human agents, knowledgeable subjects, social actors

Giddens introduced concepts of practical consciousness and double hermeneutics that are useful in adding a fine balance to accounts generated by lay social actors and social scientists. This is particularly useful in collaborative social inquiry such as PAR. It provides a framework for investigating the changing relationship between researcher and researched in PAR.

Structural, positivist paradigm and interpretive paradigm

In structural paradigm society predominates over human subject. In an interpretive paradigm (hermeneutics and phenomenology) the subject predominates over society. Giddens advocates a reworking of this yawning duality. (Giddens 1984:3)

Social scientists asking questions and articulating unspoken but known motivations

Human agents (knowledgeable subjects, social actors) are inherently capable of reflexivity. They understand what they do while they do it. But reflexivity does not always operate on a discursive level. There are many everyday actions that require no reflexivity. They are ‘known’ but rarely or never ‘spoken.’ This tacit knowledge is not discursive. Giddens calls this practical consciousness and describes it as extraordinarily complex. Practical consciousness is a necessary part of routinization providing a form of ontological security in everyday activities that do not require constant questioning. Practical consciousness can become discursive when it is questioned. “What are you doing? and How/Why did you/I/they do that?” This type of question is asked when the action is considered to be unusual, in habitual, unconventional or puzzling. (Giddens 1984)

Unconscious, practical consciousness and discursive consciosness

Practical consciousness lies between discursive consciousness and the unconscious. At one end of the spectrum lies the unconscious, repressed, unintentional and unacknowledged aspects of cognition and motivation. On the other lies the discursive knowing about doing. This is an articulated awareness. In between lies a vast rich area of investigation that orthodox sociology neglects. (Giddens 1984)

Social scientists do not have the monopoly on generating theories about social phenomena

All human agents (knowledgeable subjects, lay social actors) are social researchers who come up with theories. The boundaries between informed sociological reflection and empirical investigations undertaken by lay actors and academic thinkers, specialized social observers, or social scientists are blurred. Lay social actors can and do generate innovative theories. These become the data of academic thinkers, specialized social observers, or social scientists.

Lay social actors are constrained by social context and accessibility of resources

Lay social actors’ social theories may change based on empirical observations of everyday life experience. However, there may be constraints to the extent of that knowledge imposed by the way in which their social world is organized, technologies and resources available to them. (Giddens 1984)

Edifying for lay social actors to have phenomena reiterated in metalanguage of social science

Specialized social observers and academics have access to a metalanguage of social science. This provides them with a toolkit of concepts, theories and case histories that confirm or oppose proposed theories. It provides a language that encapsulates otherwise unnamed phenomena. Lay social actors can articulate their own theories; it is redundant for professionals to merely repeat them. It is more edifying to have these theories and phenomena inserted in a larger framework in this metalanguage.

"Studying practical consciousness means investigating what agents already know, but by definition it is normally illuminating to them if this is expressed discursively, in the metalanguage of social science.” (Giddens 1984)

Two ways of knowing intersect in a double hermeneutics

There are two intersecting frames at work. Lay actors generate meaning unto their social worlds. Social scientists invent metalanguages to clearly articulate those meanings. The hermeneutic process of unravelling meanings is a two fold process that Giddens calls ‘double hermeneutics.’ (Giddens 1984)

Social science metalanguage: a tool kit for understanding our social world

Researchers can share some of these tools with co-researchers from the community in collaborative social inquiry. However, lay social actors usually want more practical knowledge that has some usefulness in their everyday life activities. Some lay actors and front line workers, may be interested in generating macro theories in a metalanguage that would interest a larger knowledge community. Community workers can and do pursue academic studies. (Giddens 1984)

Conclusion

Giddens’ concepts of practical consciousness and double hermeneutics are useful in articulating the changing role of the researcher and researched in PAR.

Academia and communities: building bridges and dismantling and/or acknowledging barriers

Researcher-researched dichotomy

Jackson noted that participatory approaches were enthusiastically adopted by aboriginal communities. PAR methodologies provided a sharp contrast to the “professional researcher-researched dichotomy” which still existed in the 1970s. “[D]is-empowered groups were negotiating land claims with governments and institutions linked directly or indirectly to the outside, professional, non-Aboriginal researcher”. (Jackson 1993)

Phoebe Nahanni, former director of Dene land research for the Indian Brotherhood of the Dene Nation described the researcher/researched dichotomy in these terms:

“We knew that anthropologists and white researchers had previously attempted to integrate a study of our land-based activities into their theses. But our community leaders and community people expressed their dislike of the invasion of their privacy by outsiders who don’t speak their language.

We know from our past experiences that government research by white researchers has never improved our lives. Usually white researchers spy on us, the things we do, who we do them, and so on. After all these things are written in their jargon, they go away and neither they nor their reports are ever seen again.”(Nahanni 1977)

By 1982 enough groundwork had been prepared for the Canadian Journal of Native Studies to publish a special issue on mutually beneficial research collaborations involving non-Aboriginal researchers and Aboriginal communities. Academics can provide the

"... knowledge of the functioning of institutions of the larger society as they impinge on native concerns while community members provide expertise in defining the issues and in culturally and behaviourally appropriate ways of addressing them. Together both groups search for methods of linking resources to communities to solve development issues." (Jackson et al. 1982:5 cited in Jackson 1993:62)

Differential Participation: Aboriginal and Inuit politically-savvy, educated elite

PAR methods have expanded in response to the increased complexities of communities. The lines between the elite and the masses, are not as clearer defined. In Canadian aboriginal and Inuit communities the middle class, which emerged in the 1950s, has reproduced itself. (Jackson 1993 Mitchell 1996) There is a group of politically-informed, educated, skilled professionals, administrators, managers and bureaucrats who share middle class values with non-Inuit and non-Aboriginals.

Coalition building today involves collaborations between diverse groups and communities which are internally heterogenous

Coalition building today often involves collaborations between groups that are already composed of a diverse membership. The uniting factor is an agreed upon set of shared political, social, economic and/or spiritual values and goals.

PAR designed with bridge people in mind

PAR methodologies are designed for social actors who are bridge people (Church 2000:4 in Stratton and Jackson 2001) willing to collaborate with other communities and organizations. The very nature of bridging implies that diversities are respected while commonalities are sought. The reality is not a poster picture of a handshake that spans two landscapes. Individual actors in participatory projects are real people. They are not abstract, self-contained, theoretical essences of imagined categories of people.

Bridge building is a noisy invasive process. It is more clearly represented in the clash of ideas and the ‘collisions of knowledge systems.’ (Stratton and Jackson 2001) When equal research partners hold differing perspectives, conflicting viewpoints is not a tangential but inherent in their robust discussions. (Flaherty 1994)

Knowledge collisions: sparks of differing opinions as creative, constructive energy

How does this groups of inquirers negotiate the inevitable clash of knowledge systems described by Jackson and Stratton (2001) as "knowledge collisions"? How can the sparks of differing opinions ignite constructive not destructive energy? Flaherty described a partnership of equals in which a space for conflict is not a tangential but inherent in any process involving research partners who hold differing perspectives. (Flaherty 1994)

Democratic localism in homogenous communities

Historically, active participation implied involvement in local governments, organizations, voluntary groups and associations. Healthy ‘localism’ promoted a healthy democracy. By active participation in these non-political, non-governmental groups an individual’s values would become evident to those with whom he was working and a relationship of trust could be built. (de Tocqueville 1966) When Tocqueville was writing there was an assumption that the citizenry was part of a homogenous group with shared values. (de Tocqueville 1966:116)

Ontological security and social capital

When Putnam and Coleman wrote about participation and social capital, the urban neighbourhoods and communities were already heterogenous. In these communities, individuals are less involved in social and associational experience. (Castells 1983 Putnam 1995 Coleman 1990) This is not surprising since there is a measure of ontological security in associating with those who share values and lifeworlds. "Confidence or trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity." (Giddens 1984)

Knowledge... abstract or practical? Academic community as part of flourishing human community

Social engagement: dirty hands or unsettling minds

Academic humanists are loudly absent from public discourse (SSHRC 2002) at a time when there is a need for "critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time." (Said, 2001) Said deplores the social disengagement of academics who have adopted post-colonial, postmodern and some feminisms. He describes this reign of silence as a capitulation to existing power structures. (Said, 2001)

SSHRC acknowledges that universities today succumb to economic pressures and often focus on providing market-driven highly specialized skills. Universities attempt to provide education packages that are more utilitarian than humanist.(SSHRC 2002)

How does this impact on the perceptions of PAR practitioners within academia?

1. Knowledge collisions is a phrase used by Stratton and Jackson (2001) to describe the clash of knowledge systems.
2. Differential participation is a phrase developed at length by John Gaventa (1980).
3. For discussion of metalanguage see Giddens (1984).
4. Sled
5. -miut: ‘the people of’
6. The Bathurst Mandate Pinasuaqtavut (that which we've set out to do). The Bathurst Mandate sets out a twenty year and a five year plan for the Nunavut Government based on Inuit values that reflect a desire for healthy communities, simplicity and unity, self-reliance and life long education. This includes a respect for the accumulated wisdom of elders, “examining and evaluating our actions based on both modern knowledge and traditional ways.” “The health of Nunavut depends on the health of each of its physical, social, economic and cultural communities, and the ability of those communities to serve Nunavummiut in the spirit of Inuuqatigiittiarniq; the healthy inter-connection of mind, body, spirit and environment.” "Our education system needs to be built within the context of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit." "It is important to recognize all of the potential teachers in our communities, beginning with elders and in families." (Government of Nunavut 2000)
7. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: (IQ) encompasses all aspects of traditional Inuit culture including values, world-view, language, social organization, knowledge, life skills, perceptions, and expectations." Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC) is now replaced by the new Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK)
8. Constructivist, interpretivist approaches to social inquiry adopt a relativist ontology, a transactional epistemology, and a hermeneutic, dialectical methodology. Data is not collected but interpreted in an attempt to understand meaning, to try to imagine the lay social actor’s accounts of a phenomenon, for Verstehen. Subjective experience is prioritized. Research projects are measured in terms of trustworthiness and authenticity not on orthodox positivist research criteria such as validity and reliability. (Denzin and Lincoln 1998:186) Patti Lather's (1991) concept of catalytic validity which indicates the degree to which research moves those it studies to transformative action, is also of interest in PAR approach. (Denzin and Lincoln 1998:288)

   In both critical theory and constructivism values and ethics have pride of place. The subjects of research as at-risk audiences, the powerless; constructivism sees the inquirer as a facilitator or orchestrator, a passionate participant. (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 214)

9. Maguire also provides invaluable advice for integrating PAR approach with a PhD dissertation.
10. Kathleen Stewart’s evocative text finds resonance in the work of John Gaventa. In Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley Gaventa explores the politics of poverty examining power relations between the power elite and the powerless.

    Gaventa and Stewart locate their work in the region of Central Appalachia, the region known as the 'other America, where there is a high concentration of landless, low and working class, whose ancestors once owned the mountains of black gold and whose only inheritance is an enduring poverty. Although imaged as a region of impoverished backward mountaineers, in reality it is coal-rich, the source of huge fortunes for the owners of coal and land companies. Gaventa uncovers roots of quiescence in the powerless. He examines the role of class-based values in terms of the level of participation of homo politicus, the activist versus homo civicus the non-activist. Gaventa models a role for the academic researcher who breaks the silence of complicity of disengaged academics and embarks on in-depth investigations of "powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance and universal principles of justice and injustice." (Said, E. 2001). Gaventa concludes with a question: How should the power relationships of contemporary society be altered in order to overcome the social and economic deprivations of the disempowered?

11. "In weaving an indigenous paradigm, it becomes apparent that phenomena such as time, space, spirituality and human relationships with nature are culture bound. So are the fundamental configurations and contents of human communication and interaction in a culture. In the Western cosmos, time is linear and is viewed as a commodity - something to be used for profit. Time is also viewed as a horizontal sequence of events, such as the life cycle and the aging process. Space tends to be privatized, individualistic definition and function in Western worldviews. Up until very recently, American and other Western intellectuals tended to define spirituality in institutional terms (i.e., religion) and to view it suspiciously as something inherently separate from human affairs. Thus issues such as relationships with dead ancestors have been viewed in mainstream Western social science as not relevant for serious research. Until the environmental consciousness movement of the post-1970s Western social scientists, steeped in Judeo-Christian presumptions, viewed human beings as separate from and "naturally' dominant over the environments." (Stanfield 1994: 350-2)
12. Multi-sector, cross-cultural and collaborative work between diverse groups requires a language that is robust enough to allow for frankness but civil enough to keep the conversation going. Oppressor/oppressed seems too facile in the year 2002. Dualities exist but they are not as clearly defined. Edward Said recently called for the ongoing investigation of “powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice.” He lamented the use of simplistic language of the basic paradigm of “west versus the rest.” These dualisms reinforce defensive self-pride and impede self-reflexivity and critical understanding at a time when we need informed analysis “of the bewildering interdependence of our time.” (Said, 2001)
13. I want to read more about dian marino and Deborah Brandt who work with images to tell stories of power struggles.
14. Action research is a "...systematic and intentional inquiry about teaching, learning, and schooling carried out by teachers in their own school and classroom settings." (Cochran-Smith 1993).
15. PAR, PR participatory rural appraisal (PRA) are all part of a family of methodologies "... that enable people to express and analyse the realities of their lives and conditions, to plan themselves what action to take, and to monitor and evaluate the results ­ it emphasises processes which empower local people." (IDS 1996:7).
16. Frideres critiques the assumption that PAR provides more accurate data. Unfortunately his references neglect any of the more sophisticated arguments offered in postpositivist and postempirical theory. Like many excellent researchers who contribute to one field, he seems to have bypassed Kuhnian debates. (His research on native peoples of Canada is still a widely used text.) He continues to enjoy an ontological certitude typical of positivist-inspired research which accords better to utilitarian university studies. (Frideres 1992)
17. Action research in social psychology and education traces its ontological roots to pragmatic humanism in the work of Dewey and James. However, it was in 1913 that Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno, an Austrian social philosopher, used group participation in a community development project with Viennese prostitutes. It is argued that he is a pioneer in the field of practitioner research where research involved activism and engagement with social movements. He moved to the United States in 1925 and was quite influential in the social sciences. (McTaggert 1992)

18. One of the people influenced by Moreno’s work was Kurt Lewin, who would later be credited with the title of father of action research. (McTaggert 1992)
19. In the 1940s Lewin developed a theory of action research based on a continuous spiral of research which included planning, action and the evaluation of the result of action to be followed with another spiral of planning, action and evaluation. (Kemmis 1988)
20. In the 1970's through the work of Stenhouse action research became more widely used in the field of education in Britain. He encouraged the concept of the classroom as laboratory, with the teacher as researcher. (Kemmis 1990)
21. Mwalimu means teacher.
22. According to contemporary Kwanzaa there are seven communitarian African principles which celebrate family, community and culture: Umoja (Unity), Kuji-chagulia (Self_determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith). www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/faq.html
23. Nyerere was the first Tanzanian to study at a British university and only the second to gain a university degree outside Africa. Nyerere’s philosophy is syncretic and includes some currents of Fabianism which he encountered during his studies at the University of Edinburgh.
24. For two decades, until the 1990s, land and resources, along with personal freedoms, were under the control of a privileged few.
25. Ujamaa is humane.
26. Nyerere himself a former teacher had written much about the capacity of education to liberate the minds of the colonized. Hall described how “... Nyerere and a generation of articulate and gifted leaders such as Paul Mhaiki in adult education challenged all who were working in Tanzania, national and expatriate alike, to look through a different lens to understand education, agriculture, development, history, culture and eventually for some of us even research and evaluation methods. We were all encouraged to 'meet the masses more' and while on a day to day basis this was difficult to understand, over time many of us were profoundly transformed.” (Hall 1997)
27. The Arctic Gas pipeline, would carry gas from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to American markets. Most of the oil and gas in this fossil-fuel-energy-rich region is believed to lie beneath the Beaufort Sea.
28. Intervener funding refers to the provision of funds to environmental and Aboriginal groups for the purpose of hiring independent experts. Intervener funding concept acknowledges that there is a need for factual balance in research projects where the loss and/or benefit to concerned stakeholders may otherwise impair objectivity of the findings. (CARC 2002)
29. Robert Chambers of the Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex, UK. Has recently undertaken a participatory research project on international poverty which is larger than the RCAP.
30. When described as a Weberian ideal type homo economicus and homo politicus can be characterized as follows: homo economicus (homines economici) is a human maximizing his own ability, guided by his individual preferences and seeking to achieve his goals at a minimum cost to himself. He is opportunistic, calculating and manipulative. Homo economicus usually opposes social, ecological and even economic goals of sustainable development He is not altruistic and accepts no responsibility for others or for the future. Homo economicus has an interest in democracy in as much as it provides a space for market growth and satisfying his needs. Homo economicus maximizes his consumer status and prioritizes his own personal well-being as consumer as over the individual as citizen.
31. In my own teaching and research with aboriginal and Inuit communities, I have encouraged students to increase their own vernacular vocabulary beyond everyday literacy, to include terms that articulate complex concepts that are found in the metalanguage of the social sciences. These can then be shared on web-based glossaries for the next wave of student researchers. It is an imperfect tool and the glossaries constantly need to be negotiated as finer points are found.
32. Giddens provides a view of the human subject as a knowledgeable social actor, not entirely subsumed by societal structures, and inherently capable of reflexivity and generating meaning about social worlds. (Giddens, 1984)
33. The Kantian atomistic, individual, ethical, monadic subject is one that conceives of him/herself as independent of his/her milieu. From this perspective he assumes the perspective of a deity or as Donna Haraway irreverently puts it, the ‘god-trick.’ From this superior vantage point, the atomistic subject feels capable of viewing the social world in which he/she lives objectively. This provides the monadic subject with a haven of monological privilege. A sense of ontological superiority makes the monadic subject assume that his ethics, values and ideas are universally sound. (Pechey 1990 cited in Shields 1996.)
34. The postmodern, post-structural Foucauldian, view of the human subject is impoverished and deterministic. By abandoning the agency of the human subject the possibility of progress is denied. In 2001, Edward Said’s generous concept of the human subject is now based on a humanist life world in which the human actor is capable of empathy, imagination, understanding and free to make ethical choices. (Said, 2001)
35. How does one distinguish between research that begins and ends in words and pure research that has an unexpected beneficial outcome? This is a slippery slope. Certain studies in Philosophy and Mathematics may seem abstract and ultimately useless to a casual witness outside these disciplines. This is why juries of peers review requests for funding in academic research.