Hale what is activist research

It is thought to be a way to involve users or stakeholders in a meaningful way, and is considered an inherent good. See Cooke, B. Participation: The new tyranny? Zed Books. Participatory Action Research PAR : The main characteristic of PAR is that research questions, design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination are done with communities in control.

Rather than research subjects, people in PAR become full collaborators. This means that research is usually done to address a local problem, and is designed for action. Why action research? Action research , 1 1 , Note that the World Bank and other neoliberal institutions have begun using participatory development methods in the global south since the advent of the methodology in the s.

This site is so incredible. What an amazing resource. Her book, Digital Dead End is also one of the best books written using activist research! Like Liked by 1 person. Thank you so much for making this site! I have a few professors and advisors that are sympathetic to activism in academia, but the department, nor the greater university, has any structure for guiding those with a pasion.

Thank you again! Like Like. This has very helpful thinking and resources. We created a task force process in Oakland, California during which people participated in 41 task forces to research, report and act on policies from land use to public safety to education. With that proviso, let me suggest a rough preliminary description of the terrain under discussion here. In my understanding, then, activist research: a helps us better to understand the root causes of inequality, oppression, violence and related conditions of human suffering; b is carried out, at each phase from conception through dissemination, in direct cooperation with an organized collective of people who themselves are subject to these conditions; c is used, together with the people in question, to formulate strategies for transforming these conditions and to achieve the power necessary to make these strategies effective.

Finally, the practice of activist research asks us to identify our deepest ethical-political convictions, and to let them drive the formulation of our research objectives. Many social science graduate training programs have precisely the opposite inclination: to become a professional researcher requires one to suppress those convictions, or at best relegate them to a separate realm of civic responsibility or community service.

Despite the growing acknowledgment that all research is positioned and that our convictions do tend to seep in to inform our analytical frameworks, the emphasis in mainstream academia still is on keeping that seepage to a minimum. Activist research endorses the contrasting tack of making our politics explicit and up-front, reflecting honestly and systematically on how they have shaped our understanding of the problem at hand, and putting them to the service of our analytical endeavor.

They are rarely achieved completely, but if any one of them is completely absent, the broader purpose of activist research may not be met. Arriving at research questions and objectives : Activist research requires a process of dialogue and collective work with the subjects of study prior to the finalization of the research design. Through collective work you identify a common set of problems, analytical puzzles, gaps in existing knowledge that the people in question are genuinely and explicitly interested in addressing.

In any given GSC-related topic, for example, there are aggrieved or relatively powerless groups of people who will care intensely about the issues and questions at stake. The activist scholar will have, or develop, particular affinities with one such group of people or at times more than one , and give special priority to the dialogue with them.

Building on affinities in this way does not require one to neglect alternative or contrasting perspectives; it does not assume that the group is completely unified or free from internal division; nor does it prevent stepping back to take in the big picture—indeed the research design must involve precisely that.

It does provide some assurance that the research objectives, from the outset, coincide at least in part with what actors in the processes under study think it is important to know and to understand. Data collection methods : Activist research draws on the entire range of methodological tools available in conventional social science endeavors. The principal methodological mandate involves some form of participation among interested subjects, groups or communities in the research process.

The goal is to carry out the research such that a specified group of people can actively participate, thereby learning research skills themselves, contributing to the data collection, taking an active role in the process of knowledge creation. PoLAR: political and legal anthropology review 28 1 , , Annual Review of Anthropology 26 1 , , Social Science Research Council 2 , , Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 1 , , Articles 1—20 Show more.

Help Privacy Terms. Does multiculturalism menace? More Information Less Information. Enter the password to open this PDF file:. Cancel OK. File name: -. File size: -. Title: -. Author: -.