Taylor, Charles. (1994). In Amy Gutmann (Ed.)., Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 25-73). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I. (Genesis of recognition)
In this discussion of the politics of multiculturalism, Taylor calls for urgent demand for recognition because of its link to identity. He defines identity as "a person's understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being" (p. 25). He asserts that identity is partly shaped by recognition, its absence or misrecognition, thus inflicting harm to, or oppressing, someone. Oppressed construction of identity for generations, according to Taylor, has resulted in self-depreciation, which he regards as the most potent instruments of their own oppression. He states:
[M]isrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need. (p. 26)
Taylor argues that recognition became important with the "the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness" (p. 29) in the eighteenth century. He regards Rousseau as an important figure who articulated this notion, saying,"Rousseau frequently presents the issue of morality as that of our following a voice of nature within us". Thus, Taylor writes, "Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves" (p. 29). While looking for the moral ideal, we can come down to ourselves, true to ourselves, from this perspective. This leads to defining ourselves. It is the ideal of authenticity that Taylor calls.
[It appears to me that by authenticity Taylor means inward measurement with respect to morality, that constitutes modern consciousness, instead of seeking outward conformity.]
Taylor thinks that the ideal of authenticity is partly due to an offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society, where identification was primarily socially derived. Refusing socially derived identification, the ideal of authenticity regards one being inwardly generated, Taylor denotes.
However, Taylor contests that there is no inward generation. He asserts that we become full human, understanding ourselves and defining identity, by acquiring rich human languages of expression through exchanges with our significant others. He states:
"We don't just learn the languages in dialogue and then go on to use them for our own purposes. We are of course expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances toward things, and to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, like the definition of our identity. We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us." (pp. 32-33)
In this vein, Taylor emphasizes that our identity is defined and continuously redefined through dialogues with our significant others. He says that, although we cannot liberate oneself completely from the early childhood experience, we should strive to define ourselves on our own, getting certain control over our dependency. Warning against the adherence to monological ideals that shun dialogues, he writes:
"It forgets how our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love; how some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment...If some of the things I value most are accessible to me only in relation to the person I love, then she becomes part of my identity." (33-34)
Thus, identity is negotiated. Taylor stressed that important to this inwardly derived, personal and original identity is that this identity is not always recognized. Taylor states:
"Yet inwardly derives, personal, original identity doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail. What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recofnition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. That is why the need is now acknowledge for the first time." (34-35)
He states that the topic of recognition is much owed to Hegel. Taylor identifies two spheres of recognition: the intimate sphere and the public sphere. In the intimate sphere, we form our identity through continuous dialogue and struggle with our significant others. In the public sphere, a politics of equal recognition plays a bigger role in society. As suggested at the outset, Taylor put an emphasis on recognition of identity by regarding the withholding of recognition as a possible form of oppression.
II. (About the politics of equal recognition of identity)
Taylor compares two modern Western politics, politics of dignity and politics of difference. According to him, the politics of dignity, grounding in universalism, emphasizes the equal dignity of all citizens, being blind to differences among them, whereas the politics of differences stresses the recognition of unique identity of an individual or group and their distinctiveness from each other. Thus contrasting to the politics of universal dignity that is favor of forms of nondiscrimination that is blind to difference, the politics of differences sees nondiscrimination as a requirement of differential treatment for distinctions in order to preserve and cherish the distinctness 'forever'. Taylor points out that such reverse discrimination is not a temporary apparatus to level the playing field, but rather a mechanism to maintain the difference.
Taylor asserts that the politics of dignity is based on the idea that all humans are equally worthy of respect. Important to this idea, he denotes, is that it is a universal human potential, a capacity that all humans share, not individual persons might have made of, that calls for respect. Taylor underpins the universal potentiality in the politics of difference as the potential for "forming and defining one's own identity, as an individual, and also as a culture" (p. 42). He continues to write, "This potentiality must be respected equally in everyone. But at least in the intercultural context, a stronger demand has recently arisen: that one accord equal respect to actually evolved cultures" (p. 42).
Thus, the two modes of politics, both based on the notion of equal respect, come into conflict, Taylor writes. While the first criticizes that the other violates the principle of nondiscrimination, the second reproaches the politics of dignity for their negation of individual identity. With this respect, Taylor states:
"The claim is that the supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture. As it turns out, then, only the minority or suppressed cultures are being forced to take alien form. Consequently, the supposedly fair and difference-blind society is not only inhuman (because suppressing identities) but also, in a subtle and unconscious way, itself highly discriminatory." (p. 43)
Liberalism, which assumes universal, difference-blind principles, is on attack. With this respect, Taylor himself casts doubt on the principles of liberalism. He writes:
"The charge leveled by the most radical forms of the politics of difference is that 'blind' liberalisms are themselves the reflection of particular cultures. And the worrying thought is that this bias might not just be a contingent weakness of all hitherto proposed theories, that the very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal." (p. 44)
III. (the emergence of the politics of equal dignity)
Taylor finds in Rousseau (and Kant) the emergence of the politics of equal dignity in Western civilization and explains as follows: Rousseau refuted the society of honor, where people are in competition in a hierarchical society. Instead, caring about the esteem in his republican model, he insisted that all citizens are to be equally honored regardless of their differentiation or distinction with one another. Thus he spawned the age of dignity.
Taylor sharply points out that Rousseau's new politics of equal dignity is flawed not only because it failed to recognize any differentiation, but also because it required a very tight common purpose, or general will, by rigorously excluding the differentiation. This perspective, Taylor notes, has been the formula for the most terrible forms of homogenizing tyranny, extending to the totalitarian regimes of our century.
IV. (A confrontation of the two conceptions rights-liberalism in a Canadian context)
Taylor examines the confrontation of the two conceptions--one is a liberalism of equal rights or politics of universal dignity and the other is due acknowledgment to distinctness. He sees this examination as related to diversity and multicultural society, which he regards as inevitable.
Reflected on the Canadian Charter of Rights in 1982, the conflict became a real issue, he writes. According to him, it follows American precedent that ratified "equal protection" for all citizens under the laws in the Fourth Amendment.
Against Quebeckers' demand for collective goals, English Canada argues that (1) the collective goals restrict individual rights and (2) espousing collective goals on behalf of a national group can be inherently discriminatory because all under the same jurisdiction belong to the same national group.
Taylor finds in the thought of Immanuel Kant the profound philosophical assumptions underlying this view of liberalism, which is that individuals can determine a view of the good life in autonomy. Based on the view of Kantian philosophy (grounded in self-determining human agents), a liberal society is drawn that must remain neutral on the good life and only ensure that the state deals equally with all. Taylor explains that Quebec, a society with collective goals, violates this model because its policies, aimed at survival, actively seeks to create members of the community. He writes:
"It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it. This might be seen to be the goal of some of the measures of federal bilingualism over the last twenty years. But it also involves making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create [sic] members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers. There is no way that these policies could be seen as just providing a facility to already existing people." (pp. 58-59)
Taylor describes a Quebec version of liberal society, where the nature of the good is to be sought in common through public policy, and yet accommodating minorities who do not share the public definitions of the good. Taylor argues that a society with collective goals as such can be liberal on the two conditions: (1) it is capable of respecting diversity and (2) it can offer adequate safeguards for fundamental rights.
V. (The politics of equal respect)
In contrast to the politics of equal rights, which he calls inhospitable to difference, Taylor calls for the politics of equal respect, which is cleared of homogenizing difference.
He critiques that "liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges", "liberalism can't and shouldn't claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed" (p. 62). The reason for this is, he explains, that it requires a scheduling of rights. (One get a precedence over another.)
He calls attention to recognizing the equal value of different cultures in an affirmative way, that is to say, "we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth" (p. 64) He brings Frantz Fanon as an exemplary figure who called for a struggle to purge themselves of the depreciating self-images imposed by colonizers in order to begin with struggle for freedom.
Taylor writes "[T]here is perhaps after all a moral issue here" (p. 73) and seeks "something midway between inauthentic and homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth, on one hand, and the self-immurement within ethnocentric standards, on the other" (p. 72).
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Women, Art and Ideology
: Questions for Feminist Art Historians. Pollock, Griselda. (1983). Woman's Art Journal, 4(1), 39-47.
In this article Pollock examines how feminism--she explains that it has steadily grown in art history since 1974--positions itself in relation to both mainstream art history and its radical critiques. She critiques Marxist cultural theory in its lack of insight into sexist exploitation and writes:
"Inasmuch as society is structured by inequal relations at the point of material production, so too is it deeply founded on inequal relations between the sexes. The nature of the societies in which art has been produced has not only been, for instance, feudal or capitalist, but in
historically varied ways, patriarchal and sexist. Neither form of exploitation, moreover, is reducible to the other." (p. 39)
In her refusal of the predominant art historian's myth about masculine creativity and feminine inferiority in art, she argues that feminism in art history is a political struggle contesting the dominant forms of social knowledge and the ideology of sexes.
With regard to the fact that even feminist art historians classify women artists as a gender representative, Pollock argues that such category not only has been pejorative but also dangerous because it may assume certain ideological supposed essence of womenless regardless of individual artists' situatedness.
She writes "art is a part of social production" (p. 43) in that it is productive and produces meanings, thus constitutive of ideology. Looking at films in particular, Pollock writes that in certain cases images of women in films are reflectors or representations of women's identities or social model, however, her emphasis is given to its signifying practice, i.e. actively producing meanings and reproducing certain ideological representations.
In this article Pollock examines how feminism--she explains that it has steadily grown in art history since 1974--positions itself in relation to both mainstream art history and its radical critiques. She critiques Marxist cultural theory in its lack of insight into sexist exploitation and writes:
"Inasmuch as society is structured by inequal relations at the point of material production, so too is it deeply founded on inequal relations between the sexes. The nature of the societies in which art has been produced has not only been, for instance, feudal or capitalist, but in
historically varied ways, patriarchal and sexist. Neither form of exploitation, moreover, is reducible to the other." (p. 39)
In her refusal of the predominant art historian's myth about masculine creativity and feminine inferiority in art, she argues that feminism in art history is a political struggle contesting the dominant forms of social knowledge and the ideology of sexes.
With regard to the fact that even feminist art historians classify women artists as a gender representative, Pollock argues that such category not only has been pejorative but also dangerous because it may assume certain ideological supposed essence of womenless regardless of individual artists' situatedness.
She writes "art is a part of social production" (p. 43) in that it is productive and produces meanings, thus constitutive of ideology. Looking at films in particular, Pollock writes that in certain cases images of women in films are reflectors or representations of women's identities or social model, however, her emphasis is given to its signifying practice, i.e. actively producing meanings and reproducing certain ideological representations.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Feminist Theory
:From Margin to Center. hooks, b. (2000). (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
In this book first published in 1984, hooks interrogates gender experiences interlocking with race and class. In the preface to the second edition, hooks remarks dialectic critique and exchange in feminist theory and practice in the past and states:
"There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information" (p. xiii)
[It is a caution that self-reflexivity should not turn to self-indulgence or sentimentality. The notion of oppression/empowerment and the complexity of personal experience should be thoroughly examined in multiple dimensions.]
Black women: shaping feminist theory (1-17)
Critiquing middle-class white women oriented feminism in the United States, hooks refutes women's experience of oppression common to all and insists on the complexity interlocked with race and gender.
"While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forge ' a common bond among all women.' There is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share--differences that are rarely transcended." (p. 4)
Defining oppression as the absence of choice, she continues to argue:
"Many women in this society do have choices...They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against."(p. 5)
Countering informed-feminist based on scholarship, hooks brings to light the lived experience of the oppressed, poor black women, as a site for acquiring their awareness of patriarchal order as well as their resistance.
"[White feminists] do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis)." (p. 11)
hooks validates black women's lived experience as a vantage point from which "to criticize the dominant racist, classist and sexist hegemony as well as to create a counter-hegemony", because "This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs fro those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system)" (p. 16)
Feminism: a movement to end sexist oppression (pp. 18-33)
hooks warns the co-optation of liberal feminist movement in that it eventually contributes to maintaining the status quo by limiting feminism to women's attainment of social status equal to men. Instead, defining feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, hooks calls attention to its political struggle to eradicate domination and transform society.
hooks criticizes the slogan, "the personal is political", writing "[It] became a means of encouraging women to think that the experience of discrimination, exploitation, or oppression automatically corresponded with an understanding of the ideological and institutional apparatus shaping one's social status" (p. 26). hooks demands collectivity in addition to individual experience in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of women's political reality:
"Feminism defined in political terms that stress collective as well as individual experience challenges women to enter a new domain--to leave behind the apolitical stance sexism decrees is our lot and develop political consciousness." (p. 27)
[Here it seems that by collectivity hooks means massive feminist movement that encompasses colored or underprivileged women.]
The significance of feminist movement (34-42)
She argues that the feminist position devaluing the importance of family has been easily co-opted to serve the interests of the state by giving the impression that feminism breaks down families. In this regard, she sharply points out different perspectives on family between white women activists and many black women: while white women regard family as an oppressive institution, many black women think that it is the least oppressive one. She emphasizes that family ties are in fact the only sustained support system for exploited and oppressed people, thus she calls ridding family life of the abusive dimensions caused by sexist oppression while sustaining the value of family.
Stressing the development of political consciousness to end sexist oppression, hooks contests that feminism is more than for women:
"The fight against sexist oppression is of grave political significance--it is not for women only. Feminist movement is vital both in its power to liberate us from the terrible bonds of sexist oppression and in its potential to radicalize and renew other liberation struggles."
Sisterhood: political solidarity among women (43-67)
hooks repudiates the prevalent idea of common oppression among all women:
"The idea of common oppression was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices." (p.44)
The motivation of Sisterhood, thus, is different among women. hooks criticizes that shared victimization, which is the bonding basis for bourgeois women's liberation, reflects male supremacist thinking: sexist ideology teaches women that to be a woman is a victim. On the other hand, hooks sheds light on the power and resistance among less privileged, colored women for the basis of Sisterhood:
"Women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives. They cannot afford to see themselves solely as 'victims' because their survival depends on continued exercise of whatever personal powers they possess...They bond with other women on the basis of shared strengths and resources. This is the woman bonding feminist movement should encourage. It is this type of bonding that is the essence of Sisterhood." (p. 46)
hooks states that racism is fundamentally a feminist issue because of their interconnectedness with sexist oppression. Observing the discussion of racism in feminist movement in recent year, she writes:
"In more recent years, racism has become an accepted optic in feminist discussions not as a result of black women calling attention to it (this was done at the very onset of the movement), but as a result of white female input validating such discussions, a process which is indicative of how racism works." (p. 52).
In the effort for unlearning racism, hooks calls for political commitment beyond individual psychological acknowledgment of personal prejudice and recognition of difference, different cultural codes. On the other hand, hooks is more critical about classism embedded in feminist discourses and writes:
"Until women accept the need for redistribution of wealth and resources in the United States and work towards the achievement of that end, there will be no bonding among women that transcends class" (p. 60).
hooks demands more vivid confrontation among women to build solidarity among women in lieu of support:
"If women always seek to avoid confrontation, to always be 'safe', we may never experience any revolutionary change, any transformation, individually or collectively." (pp. 66-67)
Men: comrades in struggle (68-83)
hooks warns anti-male sentiments prevalent in bourgeois women liberation movement:
"Anti-male sentiment have alienated many poor and working-class women, particularly non-white women, from feminist movement. Their life experiences have shown them that they have more in common with men of their race and/or class group than with bourgeois white women." (p. 69-70)
On the other hand, she denotes that the solidarity between women of color and men and those women's recognition of common resistance have contributed to creating political bonding between men and women and attending to the transformative potential of feminism.
hooks refutes separatist ideology that women alone can make feminist revolution because they are the primary agents maintaining and supporting sexist oppression, thus calling for working together.
Changing Perspective on Power (84-95)
hooks refutes one of the prevailing feminist idea that women are different from men, think and act differently, thus having a different value system. She argues that, because women accept the value system of the culture overall, they passively absorb sexism and willingly assume a pre-determined sex role. In other word, they don't conceptualize power differently. She writes:
"The suggest that women must obtain power before they can effecitively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These power cna be used to advance feminist struggle." (p. 92)
hooks quotes Elizabeth Janeway from her work, Powers of the Weak:
"By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behavior, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events."
Thus hooks emphasize that "Failure to exercise the power of disbelief made it difficult for women to reject prevailing notions of power and envision new perspective" (p. 93). She writes:
"Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed the strength or exploited it. Recognition of that strength, that power, is a step women together can take towards liberation."
One example of power exercised by women is the power of consumption. By boycotting purchasing certain products, women may impact society, hooks argues.
In this book first published in 1984, hooks interrogates gender experiences interlocking with race and class. In the preface to the second edition, hooks remarks dialectic critique and exchange in feminist theory and practice in the past and states:
"There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information" (p. xiii)
[It is a caution that self-reflexivity should not turn to self-indulgence or sentimentality. The notion of oppression/empowerment and the complexity of personal experience should be thoroughly examined in multiple dimensions.]
Black women: shaping feminist theory (1-17)
Critiquing middle-class white women oriented feminism in the United States, hooks refutes women's experience of oppression common to all and insists on the complexity interlocked with race and gender.
"While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forge ' a common bond among all women.' There is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share--differences that are rarely transcended." (p. 4)
Defining oppression as the absence of choice, she continues to argue:
"Many women in this society do have choices...They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against."(p. 5)
Countering informed-feminist based on scholarship, hooks brings to light the lived experience of the oppressed, poor black women, as a site for acquiring their awareness of patriarchal order as well as their resistance.
"[White feminists] do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis)." (p. 11)
hooks validates black women's lived experience as a vantage point from which "to criticize the dominant racist, classist and sexist hegemony as well as to create a counter-hegemony", because "This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs fro those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system)" (p. 16)
Feminism: a movement to end sexist oppression (pp. 18-33)
hooks warns the co-optation of liberal feminist movement in that it eventually contributes to maintaining the status quo by limiting feminism to women's attainment of social status equal to men. Instead, defining feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, hooks calls attention to its political struggle to eradicate domination and transform society.
hooks criticizes the slogan, "the personal is political", writing "[It] became a means of encouraging women to think that the experience of discrimination, exploitation, or oppression automatically corresponded with an understanding of the ideological and institutional apparatus shaping one's social status" (p. 26). hooks demands collectivity in addition to individual experience in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of women's political reality:
"Feminism defined in political terms that stress collective as well as individual experience challenges women to enter a new domain--to leave behind the apolitical stance sexism decrees is our lot and develop political consciousness." (p. 27)
[Here it seems that by collectivity hooks means massive feminist movement that encompasses colored or underprivileged women.]
The significance of feminist movement (34-42)
She argues that the feminist position devaluing the importance of family has been easily co-opted to serve the interests of the state by giving the impression that feminism breaks down families. In this regard, she sharply points out different perspectives on family between white women activists and many black women: while white women regard family as an oppressive institution, many black women think that it is the least oppressive one. She emphasizes that family ties are in fact the only sustained support system for exploited and oppressed people, thus she calls ridding family life of the abusive dimensions caused by sexist oppression while sustaining the value of family.
Stressing the development of political consciousness to end sexist oppression, hooks contests that feminism is more than for women:
"The fight against sexist oppression is of grave political significance--it is not for women only. Feminist movement is vital both in its power to liberate us from the terrible bonds of sexist oppression and in its potential to radicalize and renew other liberation struggles."
Sisterhood: political solidarity among women (43-67)
hooks repudiates the prevalent idea of common oppression among all women:
"The idea of common oppression was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices." (p.44)
The motivation of Sisterhood, thus, is different among women. hooks criticizes that shared victimization, which is the bonding basis for bourgeois women's liberation, reflects male supremacist thinking: sexist ideology teaches women that to be a woman is a victim. On the other hand, hooks sheds light on the power and resistance among less privileged, colored women for the basis of Sisterhood:
"Women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives. They cannot afford to see themselves solely as 'victims' because their survival depends on continued exercise of whatever personal powers they possess...They bond with other women on the basis of shared strengths and resources. This is the woman bonding feminist movement should encourage. It is this type of bonding that is the essence of Sisterhood." (p. 46)
hooks states that racism is fundamentally a feminist issue because of their interconnectedness with sexist oppression. Observing the discussion of racism in feminist movement in recent year, she writes:
"In more recent years, racism has become an accepted optic in feminist discussions not as a result of black women calling attention to it (this was done at the very onset of the movement), but as a result of white female input validating such discussions, a process which is indicative of how racism works." (p. 52).
In the effort for unlearning racism, hooks calls for political commitment beyond individual psychological acknowledgment of personal prejudice and recognition of difference, different cultural codes. On the other hand, hooks is more critical about classism embedded in feminist discourses and writes:
"Until women accept the need for redistribution of wealth and resources in the United States and work towards the achievement of that end, there will be no bonding among women that transcends class" (p. 60).
hooks demands more vivid confrontation among women to build solidarity among women in lieu of support:
"If women always seek to avoid confrontation, to always be 'safe', we may never experience any revolutionary change, any transformation, individually or collectively." (pp. 66-67)
Men: comrades in struggle (68-83)
hooks warns anti-male sentiments prevalent in bourgeois women liberation movement:
"Anti-male sentiment have alienated many poor and working-class women, particularly non-white women, from feminist movement. Their life experiences have shown them that they have more in common with men of their race and/or class group than with bourgeois white women." (p. 69-70)
On the other hand, she denotes that the solidarity between women of color and men and those women's recognition of common resistance have contributed to creating political bonding between men and women and attending to the transformative potential of feminism.
hooks refutes separatist ideology that women alone can make feminist revolution because they are the primary agents maintaining and supporting sexist oppression, thus calling for working together.
Changing Perspective on Power (84-95)
hooks refutes one of the prevailing feminist idea that women are different from men, think and act differently, thus having a different value system. She argues that, because women accept the value system of the culture overall, they passively absorb sexism and willingly assume a pre-determined sex role. In other word, they don't conceptualize power differently. She writes:
"The suggest that women must obtain power before they can effecitively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These power cna be used to advance feminist struggle." (p. 92)
hooks quotes Elizabeth Janeway from her work, Powers of the Weak:
"By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behavior, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events."
Thus hooks emphasize that "Failure to exercise the power of disbelief made it difficult for women to reject prevailing notions of power and envision new perspective" (p. 93). She writes:
"Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed the strength or exploited it. Recognition of that strength, that power, is a step women together can take towards liberation."
One example of power exercised by women is the power of consumption. By boycotting purchasing certain products, women may impact society, hooks argues.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge.
Introduction (pp. 1-7)
Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.
Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.
In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:
"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)
Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.
"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"
Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.
[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]
From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.
[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]
Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.
Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:
"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)
Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.
Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.
In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.
One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com
Introduction (pp. 1-7)
Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.
Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.
In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:
"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)
Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.
"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"
Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.
[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]
From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.
[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]
Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.
Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:
"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)
Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.
Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.
In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.
One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com
Introduction: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture
The authors define "intersectionality" as the political imperative that discourses addressing social oppression acknowledge the complexity of how identity actually functions as we navigate the world and engage with others.
"Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States" Lisa Gail Collins.
Principles for Participatory Action Research
McTaggart, Robin. (1991). Adult Education Quarterly, 41(3), 168-187.
McTaggart ascribes that the modern concept of PAR is a convergence and coalescence of theoretical and practical traditions in many fields such as agriculture, social work, education, heath, community development, etc., and it is often characterized with communitarian politics.
Analyzing the cyclic nature of Lewinian action research, McTaggart asserts that group decision and commitment to improvement are central to the approach. He sharply points out, however, that Lewin’s approach did not consider the commitment of all the participants to research, which is fundamental to PAR, thus this lack of insight to participation and its power dynamics became a confusing factor in identifying the nature of PAR.
Within this context, McTaggart distinguishes participation from involvement, writing “People are often involved in research, but rarely are they participants with real ownership of research theory and practice” (p.51).
Criticizing often reoccurring imperialistic relationships of researchers with participant in PAR, McTaggart attributes them to academic command of particular specialized discourses and deference and uncertainty of participants (workers in his term) who have been forced hegemonically to accommodate what they were told to do. To counter this, he emphasizes the practice of ideology critique to maintain its reciprocity and symmetry of relations….
McTaggart ascribes that the modern concept of PAR is a convergence and coalescence of theoretical and practical traditions in many fields such as agriculture, social work, education, heath, community development, etc., and it is often characterized with communitarian politics.
Analyzing the cyclic nature of Lewinian action research, McTaggart asserts that group decision and commitment to improvement are central to the approach. He sharply points out, however, that Lewin’s approach did not consider the commitment of all the participants to research, which is fundamental to PAR, thus this lack of insight to participation and its power dynamics became a confusing factor in identifying the nature of PAR.
Within this context, McTaggart distinguishes participation from involvement, writing “People are often involved in research, but rarely are they participants with real ownership of research theory and practice” (p.51).
Criticizing often reoccurring imperialistic relationships of researchers with participant in PAR, McTaggart attributes them to academic command of particular specialized discourses and deference and uncertainty of participants (workers in his term) who have been forced hegemonically to accommodate what they were told to do. To counter this, he emphasizes the practice of ideology critique to maintain its reciprocity and symmetry of relations….
Participatory video in geographic research
: A feminist Practice of Looking? Kindon, Sara. (2003). Area, 35 (2), 142-153.
Criticizing the predominant masculinist gaze, Kindon explores possibilities of using participatory video as a means of achieving a feminist practice of looking in geographic research for more equitable outcomes and transformation for research participants.
Citing Sarah Pink's note, "the use of video as a method of qualitative research and representation has become 'revived' as a topic in discussions of qualitative methodologies" (p.586), Kindon maintains:
"[U]sing video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193)." (p.145-146)
In her criticism of the use of video for empowerment, Kindon sharply points out that, while such video enables researchers to discuss participants' self-reflexivity, it does not acknowledge reseachers' influence on the research or encourage their own reflexivity, which makes researchers effectively remain invisible in the video they make. [This is a paradox that Kindon draws from the practice of participatory video.] She continues that by rigorously participating alongside participants, the research method may destabilize conventional power relations between researcher and researched, observer and observed, and documentarians and documented.
Kindon compares cons and pros of using video for research. She writes about the potential benefit of using video, "[G]reater attention can be paid to the corporeal aspects of knowledge production by focusing on everyone's body language, use of and movements through space" (p.148). She cites other negative practices, such as confidentiality (negative impact on researcher-subject relationship) and access (the limitation of context-dependency). Kindon denotes that the same problems arose even in the participatory video project she involved with when those who were not directly involved with the research project were requested for an interview. However, she evaluates that participatory video transformed the relationships and the nature of research as shown in the discussion of the use of created video, which implies ownership, individual experience of empowerment, and a process of disruption of researchers' assumption.
Lastly she sheds light on the (time) commitment necessary to render the potential of transformation and empowerment that PV may bring to participants as well as researchers.
[Pink, S. (2001). More visualizing, more methodologies: on video, reflexivity and qualitative research. The Sociological Review, 49, 586-99.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London.]
-----------
I do this through a consideration of how participatory video may offer a feminist practice of looking, which actively works to engage with and challenge conventional relationships of power associated with the gaze in geographic research, and results in more equitable outcomes and/or transformation for research participants. (p. 143)
I then discuss how a form of participatory video was employed in a bi-cultural research project with a group of Maaori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This project was developed to explore
the relationships between place, identity and 'social cohesion' in communities in the district.
videos produced were not designed to travel outside of the iwi or be used for advocacy purposes, but were part of a process of internal capacity building and knowledge sharing. (p. 144)
Yet, using video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being (p. 145) framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193). (p. 146)
Criticizing Ruth Holliday's video diary, Kindon argued:
They enable researchers to discuss participants' self-representations and reflexivity, but do not always acknowledge the influence of the researcher, or encourage their self-reflexivity. The researcher effectively remains invisible and reinforces conventions associated with documentary film and scientific observation. If the recordings generated are then treated as 'untainted realities', rather than as representations and/or performances produced in the context of social relationships and strategies of self representation (Pink 2001 b, 87), they may perpetuate unequal power relations and assumptions about objectivity within the research process.
Criticizing the predominant masculinist gaze, Kindon explores possibilities of using participatory video as a means of achieving a feminist practice of looking in geographic research for more equitable outcomes and transformation for research participants.
Citing Sarah Pink's note, "the use of video as a method of qualitative research and representation has become 'revived' as a topic in discussions of qualitative methodologies" (p.586), Kindon maintains:
"[U]sing video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193)." (p.145-146)
In her criticism of the use of video for empowerment, Kindon sharply points out that, while such video enables researchers to discuss participants' self-reflexivity, it does not acknowledge reseachers' influence on the research or encourage their own reflexivity, which makes researchers effectively remain invisible in the video they make. [This is a paradox that Kindon draws from the practice of participatory video.] She continues that by rigorously participating alongside participants, the research method may destabilize conventional power relations between researcher and researched, observer and observed, and documentarians and documented.
Kindon compares cons and pros of using video for research. She writes about the potential benefit of using video, "[G]reater attention can be paid to the corporeal aspects of knowledge production by focusing on everyone's body language, use of and movements through space" (p.148). She cites other negative practices, such as confidentiality (negative impact on researcher-subject relationship) and access (the limitation of context-dependency). Kindon denotes that the same problems arose even in the participatory video project she involved with when those who were not directly involved with the research project were requested for an interview. However, she evaluates that participatory video transformed the relationships and the nature of research as shown in the discussion of the use of created video, which implies ownership, individual experience of empowerment, and a process of disruption of researchers' assumption.
Lastly she sheds light on the (time) commitment necessary to render the potential of transformation and empowerment that PV may bring to participants as well as researchers.
[Pink, S. (2001). More visualizing, more methodologies: on video, reflexivity and qualitative research. The Sociological Review, 49, 586-99.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London.]
-----------
I do this through a consideration of how participatory video may offer a feminist practice of looking, which actively works to engage with and challenge conventional relationships of power associated with the gaze in geographic research, and results in more equitable outcomes and/or transformation for research participants. (p. 143)
I then discuss how a form of participatory video was employed in a bi-cultural research project with a group of Maaori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This project was developed to explore
the relationships between place, identity and 'social cohesion' in communities in the district.
videos produced were not designed to travel outside of the iwi or be used for advocacy purposes, but were part of a process of internal capacity building and knowledge sharing. (p. 144)
Yet, using video makes the gaze explicit within a research process. It highlights the relationship between researcher/researched, observer/observed, drawing attention to who is in control of the viewing technology, what is being (p. 145) framed and how the images are being produced or represented. In particular, participatory video demands critical attention to the exercise of power within research relationships, it challenges us to explore reflexive ways that enable us to, 'join with another, to see together without claiming to be another' (Haraway 1991, 193). (p. 146)
Criticizing Ruth Holliday's video diary, Kindon argued:
They enable researchers to discuss participants' self-representations and reflexivity, but do not always acknowledge the influence of the researcher, or encourage their self-reflexivity. The researcher effectively remains invisible and reinforces conventions associated with documentary film and scientific observation. If the recordings generated are then treated as 'untainted realities', rather than as representations and/or performances produced in the context of social relationships and strategies of self representation (Pink 2001 b, 87), they may perpetuate unequal power relations and assumptions about objectivity within the research process.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Ways of Seeing
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.
Chapter 1 (7-34)
Largely drawing ideas from Walter's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Berger asserts that the authority of art is being destroyed through the modern means of reproduction and art begins to permeate among the masses. Thus, he argues, different use of the language of images would confer a new kind of power and we could begin our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate--he succinctly writes, Seeing comes before words--and this experience is characterized not only with personal one but also historical one in relation to the past, which gives meaning to the present and enables us to be active agents.
"If we new languages of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in area where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experiences, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents." (p.33)
Chapter 3 (45-64)
Berger reads the social presence of a woman through nude painting, where he asserts women are the principal, ever-recurring subjects in European oil painting. Writing, "Nudity is a form of dress," he argues that naked women are depicted for their spectator as a sign of their submissiveness and for the spectator's pleasure. In this regards, he explains the contradictory condemnation portrayed in the painting, "Vanity" (by Memling 1435-1494):
"The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of women. The moralizing. however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting, "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure." (p.51)
Berger denotes that such tradition continues to diffuse today widely through media such as advertising, journalism and television, without changing the essential way of seeing women because the ideal spectator is assumed to be male and the image of a woman is designed to flatter to him.
[This indicates that women is a more oppressed entity for their subjectivity in the domain of visual media, whereby more vigorous subversive action needs to be taken.]
Chapter 1 (7-34)
Largely drawing ideas from Walter's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Berger asserts that the authority of art is being destroyed through the modern means of reproduction and art begins to permeate among the masses. Thus, he argues, different use of the language of images would confer a new kind of power and we could begin our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate--he succinctly writes, Seeing comes before words--and this experience is characterized not only with personal one but also historical one in relation to the past, which gives meaning to the present and enables us to be active agents.
"If we new languages of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in area where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experiences, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents." (p.33)
Chapter 3 (45-64)
Berger reads the social presence of a woman through nude painting, where he asserts women are the principal, ever-recurring subjects in European oil painting. Writing, "Nudity is a form of dress," he argues that naked women are depicted for their spectator as a sign of their submissiveness and for the spectator's pleasure. In this regards, he explains the contradictory condemnation portrayed in the painting, "Vanity" (by Memling 1435-1494):
"The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of women. The moralizing. however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting, "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure." (p.51)
Berger denotes that such tradition continues to diffuse today widely through media such as advertising, journalism and television, without changing the essential way of seeing women because the ideal spectator is assumed to be male and the image of a woman is designed to flatter to him.
[This indicates that women is a more oppressed entity for their subjectivity in the domain of visual media, whereby more vigorous subversive action needs to be taken.]
Friday, December 4, 2009
Doing Participatory Research: a feminist approach
Maguire, P. (1987). Doing participatory research: A feminist approach. Center for International Education, School of Education, University of Massachusetts.
Maguire describes three core activities of PR--investigation, education and action--and emphasizes that these activities are collective processes, denoting that it is collective inquiry that builds group ownership of information while carrying out research. With regard to action, Maguire stresses the fluid time frame of action, writing "While direct community action is an intended outcome of participatory research, people may also decide not to act at a particular point in time. The important point is that those involved in the production of knowledge are involved in the decision making regarding its use and application to their everyday life" (p.37). Hence, she defines PR as "a systematic approach to radical social transformation grounded in an alternative paradigm world view" (p.37).
She finds the origins of PR in three domains: international economic development in the 60s and 70s, alternative adult education and social science communities: (1) radical and reformist reconceptualizations of internatinal economic development assistance by including the poor into full participation in development decisions, processes, and benefits, (2) the reframing of adult education as an empowering alternative to traditional educational approaches: Freire, for instance, emphasized the importance of critical consciousness, conscientization, for social change, and this consciousness is developed by taking actions. Bud Hall brought PR practices to adult education on the ground that adult learners participate actively in the world while adult education regards them as passive entities. (3) an ongoing debate within the social sciences, challenging the dominant social science paradigm.
Maguire delineates the underlying assumptions of PR as follows: (1) PR begins with the premise that knowledge the single most important basis of power and control and only one particular knowledge, scientific knowledge, became validated in society, excluding other types of knoweldge, in particular, knowledge developed by the ordinary. (2) PR emphasizes the partnership between researcher and participant, insisting on their further learning through collaboration. (3) PR assumes that ordinary people, provided with tools and opportunities, are capable of critical reflection and analysis. (4) The principle of shared power is central to PR to the extent that it attempts to shift the power and control of decision making to participants. (5) PR conceives social change by returning the power of knowledge production to the ordinary.
Maguire sharply points out the androcentricity of PR: PR, breaking the positivist monopoly of knowledge creation, appears to collude with the predominant male bias of the social sciences by rendering gender indistinguishably through generic terms such as "people", "oppressed", "the community", etc.
(p.61)
[CONTINUE]
She finds the origins of PR in three domains: international economic development in the 60s and 70s, alternative adult education and social science communities: (1) radical and reformist reconceptualizations of internatinal economic development assistance by including the poor into full participation in development decisions, processes, and benefits, (2) the reframing of adult education as an empowering alternative to traditional educational approaches: Freire, for instance, emphasized the importance of critical consciousness, conscientization, for social change, and this consciousness is developed by taking actions. Bud Hall brought PR practices to adult education on the ground that adult learners participate actively in the world while adult education regards them as passive entities. (3) an ongoing debate within the social sciences, challenging the dominant social science paradigm.
Maguire delineates the underlying assumptions of PR as follows: (1) PR begins with the premise that knowledge the single most important basis of power and control and only one particular knowledge, scientific knowledge, became validated in society, excluding other types of knoweldge, in particular, knowledge developed by the ordinary. (2) PR emphasizes the partnership between researcher and participant, insisting on their further learning through collaboration. (3) PR assumes that ordinary people, provided with tools and opportunities, are capable of critical reflection and analysis. (4) The principle of shared power is central to PR to the extent that it attempts to shift the power and control of decision making to participants. (5) PR conceives social change by returning the power of knowledge production to the ordinary.
Maguire sharply points out the androcentricity of PR: PR, breaking the positivist monopoly of knowledge creation, appears to collude with the predominant male bias of the social sciences by rendering gender indistinguishably through generic terms such as "people", "oppressed", "the community", etc.
(p.61)
[CONTINUE]
Considering More Feminist Participatory Research
: What Congruency Got to Do With It? Maguire, P. (1996). Qualitative Inquiry, 2(1), 106-118.
Mcguire begins her inquiry about the contribution of feminism to the development of PR with the questions, who benefits from the research? and whose interests are served?
Mcguire argues that, because gender oppression takes place in the web of all kinds of oppression, feminism(s) and PR hold in common transformative and liberatory intentions, yet PR often neglected ‘gender’ oppression through androcentric filter.
“Participatory research highlights the centrality of power in the social construction of knowledge. But it is feminist research that calls attention to the centrality of male power in that social construction of knowledge. This power and its manifestations are too often ignored in PR projects and debates. Likewise, there is still little attention paid to the manifestation of male privilege in the everyday relationships and workings of PR and its advocates. Participatory research, while championing Freire’s observations about man’s alienation in the world, is still struggling with grasping women’s alienation from that man-made world in research and beyond.”(p.111)
Mcguire denotes that, whereas PAR contributes to valuing personal experience as part of research process, it is feminism that recognize personal is political, thus leading us to narrow the gaps between personal politics and public practices and examine/challenge our institutions, organizations and our practices and relationships within them.
Mcguire defines PR as a combination of research, education and action. Referring the fact that both feminism and PR are concerned about empowerment, she points out the ontological convergence between the two (Stanley & Wise, 1990).
Thus, she calls for more feminist participatory research by incorporating certain feminist research aspects such as considering redistribution of power, emphasizing shared life or people’s organizational entity, including large-scale studies often utilized in feminist studies, and sharing flaws and shortcomings of PR.
Mcguire begins her inquiry about the contribution of feminism to the development of PR with the questions, who benefits from the research? and whose interests are served?
Mcguire argues that, because gender oppression takes place in the web of all kinds of oppression, feminism(s) and PR hold in common transformative and liberatory intentions, yet PR often neglected ‘gender’ oppression through androcentric filter.
“Participatory research highlights the centrality of power in the social construction of knowledge. But it is feminist research that calls attention to the centrality of male power in that social construction of knowledge. This power and its manifestations are too often ignored in PR projects and debates. Likewise, there is still little attention paid to the manifestation of male privilege in the everyday relationships and workings of PR and its advocates. Participatory research, while championing Freire’s observations about man’s alienation in the world, is still struggling with grasping women’s alienation from that man-made world in research and beyond.”(p.111)
Mcguire denotes that, whereas PAR contributes to valuing personal experience as part of research process, it is feminism that recognize personal is political, thus leading us to narrow the gaps between personal politics and public practices and examine/challenge our institutions, organizations and our practices and relationships within them.
Mcguire defines PR as a combination of research, education and action. Referring the fact that both feminism and PR are concerned about empowerment, she points out the ontological convergence between the two (Stanley & Wise, 1990).
Thus, she calls for more feminist participatory research by incorporating certain feminist research aspects such as considering redistribution of power, emphasizing shared life or people’s organizational entity, including large-scale studies often utilized in feminist studies, and sharing flaws and shortcomings of PR.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Traveling Companions
:Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research. Brydon-Miller, M., Mcguire, P., & McIntyre, A. (Eds.). (2004). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Introduction (Mcguire, Brydon-Miller, & McIntyre, pp. ix-xix)
Despite the initial enthusiasm of feminists for PAR as a counter-hegemonic approach to knowledge creation through the collaborative process of inquiry, education and action, the authors denote, the androcentrism of PAR marginalized feminist issues as manifested in 1997 Cartagena World Congress. In response to the marginalization, the authors initiated a movement that connects feminist scholarship and PAR since then, including the publication of this book.
The authors explain that PAR and feminism shares its common ground that knowledge is produced in the context of human relationships where hierarchical power is embedded, thus, both feminist researchers and PAR practitioners attend to the dynamics and mechanics of researcher/participant relationships and attempt to reconstruct them. In this regard, the authors sharply point out that feminist-informed PAR embraces the notion of multiple positionalities/identities and multiple ways of being oppressed and oppressing. Within this context, they state that third-world feminist, Women of Color, contributed to challenging a monolithic or universal feminist perspective. The authors also argue that PAR will contribute to providing a framework to translate feminist insights into tangible action for social change.
Understranding Muslim Women's Self-Identity and Resistance to Feminism and Participatory Action Research (Barazangi, Nimat Hafez, 21-39)
She criticizes mainstream Western approach that have marginalized the world-view of Muslim women "by both dismissing their views as 'religious' and taking, unknowingly. the prevailing Muslim male elites' views at their face value" (p.23). Thus she calls for a genuine dialogue between western feminists and Muslim feminists.
Testimonio: Bridging feminist and Participatory Action Research Principles to Create New Spaces of Collectivity (Brabeck, Kalina. 41-54)
Looking into Testimonio, an indigenous literary genre that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, Brabeck associates principles of feminism and PAR that converge in the genre. First, she asserts that feminism, despite variations, addresses issues of power and gender, calls attention the ways in which patriarchal oppression shapes women's experiences and perceptions of reality, intend to create a feminist consciousness and to be self-reflexive (in her explanation, it is, e.g.
"to reflect upon, examine critically, and explore analytically both the research process and one's own self" (p.43).
Within this context Barbeck outlines the common ground between feminism and PAR as follows:
1) Both regard subjective experience as a basis of knowledge production. PAR, aiming real-life change through the collective research-participant knowledge creation, calls attention to the researcher's subjective experience, self-reflexivity, to interrogate her assumptions, biases, privileges and power positionalities.
2)Both reappropriate silenced voice and agency of the oppressed. In order to do so, PAR explicitly move people from objects to subjects in their own research process. Feminist researchers seeks feminist perspectives and representation by challenging traditional, male-oriented research biases and distortions.
3)Both seek commitment to political action: While PAR attempts to change oppressive social structure as well as the positions of both researcher and participant, feminist researchers engage in action to achieve social justice for all.
4)Both encompass a commitment to collaborative work and solidarity among peoples: Like PAR, feminist research methods focuses on inclusive, accessible and creative dialogue between participants as well as shared process of discovery, expression, interpretation. Thus, self-reflexivity, that explores the power relationships between researcher and participant, is an important aspect for both. In particular, Lyke exclusively delves into this discourse--a (powerful) us and a (powerless) them (Lykes, 1997, "Activist Participatory Research Among the Maya of Guatemala: Constructing Meanings from Situated Knowledge").
Weaving Words and Pictures in/through Feminist Participatory Action Research (McIntyre, A., & Lykes, M.B. 57-77)
Reckoning the Photovoice projects both in Northern Ireland and Guatemala, McIntyre and Lykes describe the emergence of a third voice through their collaboration with research participants. Regarding the projects as a process of re-storying their realities towards a better and more just future, they conclude that it is building the relationships with each other that contributed to the research projects, and defines their roles as facilitators to the process of insiders' description of their realities whereby previously marginalized voices have generated stories within and beyond their communities.
Reflecting on her own experience in the research project, McIntyre writes recurring discussions about guidance as her own involvement in the research. In this regard, she writes,
"More often than not, we responded to the challenges with sarcasm, friendly banter, and/or by simply ignoring the problem...These behaviors can be distancing at times. Yet they are behaviors that we forged in our relationships as women, friends. and researchers." (p.66)
Lykes defines a third voice as "a dialectic wherein indigenous knowledge and academic research strategies inform knowledge construction within relationships across differences" (66-67). Particularly interesting in her account about the research is the development of a story through multiple reiteration. The example she brings up is a photo of a village girl, who collected wood to sell in the hope of getting a chocobanana. The original photographer incorporated narrations of her group's analysis into her original story when she presented in a conference in the U.S., and the story was transformed again in the final book. Tracing this process, Lykes describes,
"Personal desire and singularity have been deconstructed and resituated in a discourse of childhood characterized by poverty, human pain, and children's rights. The voice represented in the final phototext was coconstructed through negotiated relationality both in Chajul and on tour in the United States--relationships that shifted throughout the nearly three years of this project." (p.73)
Introduction (Mcguire, Brydon-Miller, & McIntyre, pp. ix-xix)
Despite the initial enthusiasm of feminists for PAR as a counter-hegemonic approach to knowledge creation through the collaborative process of inquiry, education and action, the authors denote, the androcentrism of PAR marginalized feminist issues as manifested in 1997 Cartagena World Congress. In response to the marginalization, the authors initiated a movement that connects feminist scholarship and PAR since then, including the publication of this book.
The authors explain that PAR and feminism shares its common ground that knowledge is produced in the context of human relationships where hierarchical power is embedded, thus, both feminist researchers and PAR practitioners attend to the dynamics and mechanics of researcher/participant relationships and attempt to reconstruct them. In this regard, the authors sharply point out that feminist-informed PAR embraces the notion of multiple positionalities/identities and multiple ways of being oppressed and oppressing. Within this context, they state that third-world feminist, Women of Color, contributed to challenging a monolithic or universal feminist perspective. The authors also argue that PAR will contribute to providing a framework to translate feminist insights into tangible action for social change.
Understranding Muslim Women's Self-Identity and Resistance to Feminism and Participatory Action Research (Barazangi, Nimat Hafez, 21-39)
She criticizes mainstream Western approach that have marginalized the world-view of Muslim women "by both dismissing their views as 'religious' and taking, unknowingly. the prevailing Muslim male elites' views at their face value" (p.23). Thus she calls for a genuine dialogue between western feminists and Muslim feminists.
Testimonio: Bridging feminist and Participatory Action Research Principles to Create New Spaces of Collectivity (Brabeck, Kalina. 41-54)
Looking into Testimonio, an indigenous literary genre that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, Brabeck associates principles of feminism and PAR that converge in the genre. First, she asserts that feminism, despite variations, addresses issues of power and gender, calls attention the ways in which patriarchal oppression shapes women's experiences and perceptions of reality, intend to create a feminist consciousness and to be self-reflexive (in her explanation, it is, e.g.
"to reflect upon, examine critically, and explore analytically both the research process and one's own self" (p.43).
Within this context Barbeck outlines the common ground between feminism and PAR as follows:
1) Both regard subjective experience as a basis of knowledge production. PAR, aiming real-life change through the collective research-participant knowledge creation, calls attention to the researcher's subjective experience, self-reflexivity, to interrogate her assumptions, biases, privileges and power positionalities.
2)Both reappropriate silenced voice and agency of the oppressed. In order to do so, PAR explicitly move people from objects to subjects in their own research process. Feminist researchers seeks feminist perspectives and representation by challenging traditional, male-oriented research biases and distortions.
3)Both seek commitment to political action: While PAR attempts to change oppressive social structure as well as the positions of both researcher and participant, feminist researchers engage in action to achieve social justice for all.
4)Both encompass a commitment to collaborative work and solidarity among peoples: Like PAR, feminist research methods focuses on inclusive, accessible and creative dialogue between participants as well as shared process of discovery, expression, interpretation. Thus, self-reflexivity, that explores the power relationships between researcher and participant, is an important aspect for both. In particular, Lyke exclusively delves into this discourse--a (powerful) us and a (powerless) them (Lykes, 1997, "Activist Participatory Research Among the Maya of Guatemala: Constructing Meanings from Situated Knowledge").
Weaving Words and Pictures in/through Feminist Participatory Action Research (McIntyre, A., & Lykes, M.B. 57-77)
Reckoning the Photovoice projects both in Northern Ireland and Guatemala, McIntyre and Lykes describe the emergence of a third voice through their collaboration with research participants. Regarding the projects as a process of re-storying their realities towards a better and more just future, they conclude that it is building the relationships with each other that contributed to the research projects, and defines their roles as facilitators to the process of insiders' description of their realities whereby previously marginalized voices have generated stories within and beyond their communities.
Reflecting on her own experience in the research project, McIntyre writes recurring discussions about guidance as her own involvement in the research. In this regard, she writes,
"More often than not, we responded to the challenges with sarcasm, friendly banter, and/or by simply ignoring the problem...These behaviors can be distancing at times. Yet they are behaviors that we forged in our relationships as women, friends. and researchers." (p.66)
Lykes defines a third voice as "a dialectic wherein indigenous knowledge and academic research strategies inform knowledge construction within relationships across differences" (66-67). Particularly interesting in her account about the research is the development of a story through multiple reiteration. The example she brings up is a photo of a village girl, who collected wood to sell in the hope of getting a chocobanana. The original photographer incorporated narrations of her group's analysis into her original story when she presented in a conference in the U.S., and the story was transformed again in the final book. Tracing this process, Lykes describes,
"Personal desire and singularity have been deconstructed and resituated in a discourse of childhood characterized by poverty, human pain, and children's rights. The voice represented in the final phototext was coconstructed through negotiated relationality both in Chajul and on tour in the United States--relationships that shifted throughout the nearly three years of this project." (p.73)
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
Johnston, Claire. (2006, reprinted). In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist Film Theory: a reader (pp. 31-40). New York: NY University Press. (Originally from Johnston, C. (1973). In Notes on Women's Cinema. London: Society for Education in Film and Television (pp.24-31))
Johnston criticizes that, despite changes in the image of man in cinema, the primitive stereotyping of women remained with little modification, which she relates to sexist ideology in cinema. As a result, she argues, the dominant ideology inscribes women as ahistoric/eternal/unchanging entity while placing men inside history. Therefore Johnston asserts that women as women are absent in cinema and their fetishistic images are only portrayed in relation to male narcissism. Further, she writes that the star system relies on the fetishisation of woman, arousing the collective fantasy of phallocentrism.
Within this context, Johnston proposes the concept of counter-cinema as an alternative strategic use of film as a means to disseminate feminist ideas. Looking at emerging feminist cinema, Johnston sharply notes that women's cinema has taken its aesthetics from television and cinema vérité techniques (e.g. Three Lives, Women Talking, Portrait of Jason), which is depicting images of women talking to camera about their experiences, with little intervention by the film-maker. [This approach is very similar to PV] Refuting the possibility of capturing the reality, Johnston emphasizes in expressing women's oppression that "It has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film (p.37)". In this way, she warns the danger of developing a non-intervention cinema. She argues such cinema promotes a passive subjectivity at the expense of analysis.
On the other hand, she writes, "[A] desire for change can only come about by drawing on fantasy" (p.37). With this respect, she delineates the counter-cinema as a collective work for a desire for change by sharing skills and developing sisterhood. Through the collective methods, she argues, one may truly come to understand how cinema works and demystify the workings of ideology.
Johnston criticizes that, despite changes in the image of man in cinema, the primitive stereotyping of women remained with little modification, which she relates to sexist ideology in cinema. As a result, she argues, the dominant ideology inscribes women as ahistoric/eternal/unchanging entity while placing men inside history. Therefore Johnston asserts that women as women are absent in cinema and their fetishistic images are only portrayed in relation to male narcissism. Further, she writes that the star system relies on the fetishisation of woman, arousing the collective fantasy of phallocentrism.
Within this context, Johnston proposes the concept of counter-cinema as an alternative strategic use of film as a means to disseminate feminist ideas. Looking at emerging feminist cinema, Johnston sharply notes that women's cinema has taken its aesthetics from television and cinema vérité techniques (e.g. Three Lives, Women Talking, Portrait of Jason), which is depicting images of women talking to camera about their experiences, with little intervention by the film-maker. [This approach is very similar to PV] Refuting the possibility of capturing the reality, Johnston emphasizes in expressing women's oppression that "It has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film (p.37)". In this way, she warns the danger of developing a non-intervention cinema. She argues such cinema promotes a passive subjectivity at the expense of analysis.
On the other hand, she writes, "[A] desire for change can only come about by drawing on fantasy" (p.37). With this respect, she delineates the counter-cinema as a collective work for a desire for change by sharing skills and developing sisterhood. Through the collective methods, she argues, one may truly come to understand how cinema works and demystify the workings of ideology.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Voice and the Eye
Touraine, A. (1981; Originally published in French as La Voix et le Regard in 1978). Cambridge, MA(?): Cambridge University Press.
Touraine delineates the concept of social intervention in relation to social collective action and redefines sociologists’ roles. In particular, he sees society as a system of action and maintains that intervention is the method to define the analysis of social movements that such actions constitute. To him, it is also intervention that makes actors face their opponents, bring out their struggles and social movements. Thus, he writes, “intervention is not a technique but the implementation of a conception of society and of sociological knowledge” (p.219). In his caution of the danger of liberation, cultural and social movements becoming another ruling power, he emphasizes the importance of social intervention as a mechanism for the voice of the people to be heard against that of the new masters. In this regard, he defines the sociologist’s roles: he is a man without power, however, “if the sociologist’s intervention exerted an influence, this would mean that the ideas of society and collective behavior would again be interconnected, thus opening up the way for the renewal of social theory and the renaissance of social movements” (p.220). He writes that intervention aims to raise the level of conflicts and revivify historical action. Thus, “the social movements which are making their new voices heard are calling for a new type of analysis, a sociology of action, and a new method of study—sociological intervention” (p.222).
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Action Research and Minority Problems
Lewin, Kurt. (1946). Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34-46.
In carrying out research on inter-group relation, Kurt calls action-research, which will help practitioners. He criticizes that survey-based research is limited in that is it rather superficial of poll taking and such diagnosis should be complemented by experimental comparative studies for the effectiveness of various techniques of change. Thus he emphasizes that studies about social inter-group relations should proceed "in a spiral steps each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action" (p.38). In an experiment on minority problems, he illustrates the potential of cooperation between practitioners and social scientists. Thus he writes, "it seems to be crucial for the progress of social science that the practitioner will understand that through social sciences and only through them he can hope to gain the power necessary to do a good job" (p.44).
Overall PAR may owe much to him about the concept of the methodology, however, it seems that action research in Lewin's context values the cooperation between practitioners and social scientists to bring about a desirable result, thus leaving out the grassroots participation.
In carrying out research on inter-group relation, Kurt calls action-research, which will help practitioners. He criticizes that survey-based research is limited in that is it rather superficial of poll taking and such diagnosis should be complemented by experimental comparative studies for the effectiveness of various techniques of change. Thus he emphasizes that studies about social inter-group relations should proceed "in a spiral steps each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action" (p.38). In an experiment on minority problems, he illustrates the potential of cooperation between practitioners and social scientists. Thus he writes, "it seems to be crucial for the progress of social science that the practitioner will understand that through social sciences and only through them he can hope to gain the power necessary to do a good job" (p.44).
Overall PAR may owe much to him about the concept of the methodology, however, it seems that action research in Lewin's context values the cooperation between practitioners and social scientists to bring about a desirable result, thus leaving out the grassroots participation.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Bridging Theory and Practice
: Using Reflexive Cycles in Feminist Participatory Action Research. Williams, J. & Lykes, M. B. (2003). Feminism & Psychology. 13(3). 287-294.
Pointing out theoretical resonance between PAR methodologies and feminist principles that focuses on empowerment processes and social action against traditional hierarchies of exclusion and PAR methodologies, the authors takes a stance of feminist PAR and discusses challenges and benefits in this article.
Their initial Photovoice project with Mayan women failed because few of the participants took photos. In the quest for solutions to the problem, they adopted role-plays. The authors note that through the re-enactment and reflexive conversations the participants hinted at their gender relations, traditions and community interactions, which were usually inaccessible to outsiders. The participants met once a month for a year and shared photos they took. The authors stress that, while the practices of photovoice allowed the women to give voices to the community members and to gain self-confidence and interpersonal skills, the "iterative praxis" of photovoice afforded the researchers insights into the risks and challenges confronting the women as well as gender/social oppressions within the community.
It is not so clear what the authors refer to as the limitations and strengths of feminist PAR. I assume that
Pointing out theoretical resonance between PAR methodologies and feminist principles that focuses on empowerment processes and social action against traditional hierarchies of exclusion and PAR methodologies, the authors takes a stance of feminist PAR and discusses challenges and benefits in this article.
Their initial Photovoice project with Mayan women failed because few of the participants took photos. In the quest for solutions to the problem, they adopted role-plays. The authors note that through the re-enactment and reflexive conversations the participants hinted at their gender relations, traditions and community interactions, which were usually inaccessible to outsiders. The participants met once a month for a year and shared photos they took. The authors stress that, while the practices of photovoice allowed the women to give voices to the community members and to gain self-confidence and interpersonal skills, the "iterative praxis" of photovoice afforded the researchers insights into the risks and challenges confronting the women as well as gender/social oppressions within the community.
It is not so clear what the authors refer to as the limitations and strengths of feminist PAR. I assume that
Activist Participatory Research Among the Maya of Guatemala
: Constructing Meanings from Situated Knowledge. Lykes, M. B. (1997). Journal of Social Issues. 53(4), 725-746.
Reflecting upon her experience in Guatemala, Lykes discusses strengths and limitations of PAR and in particular explores her "situated otherness within a praxis of solidarity". Realizing that (in)voluntary silencing was a key element that affected post-war life, she attempted to break the silence, and criticizes positivist social science methods that fails to capture the collective nature of individual experience and cultural symbolism that weave such experience. With this context, Lykes proposes activist participatory research, where relationships between researchers and participants constitutes an action. Within this model, Lykes positions herself as situated other and attempts to understand herself through an experience of shared subjectivity.
As a means of embarking on communication, Lykes utilized techniques of popular education, such as art working, dramatization, story-telling, etc. She explains that the use of creative productions as part of research served as texts for further analysis and discussion while creating multiple channels of representation and wider distribution.
As a situated other, Lykes continues to analyze her position in terms of otherness and in particular being female. She summarizes a challenge of PAR as follows:
"[T]he processes engaged toward establishing partnerships and engaging in PAR challenge our basic assumptions of who we and "the other"are. These challenges demand continuing re-visioning not only of the relationships themselves but also of our developing understanding of ourselves and the meanings we are making of the "data" we are gathering." (p.735)
Pointing out word-oriented knowledge distribution, Lykes describes the strengths of using visual images in carrying out research and distributing findings, as seen in Photovoice. She writes that such technique provided a unique tool for documenting women's concerns from their own perspectives. She adds that Photovoice complements other strategies that involves with indigenous resources and facilitates collaborations for further action and wider reaching out to the local communities. She articulates that the strength of photo is also weakness in that multiple-reading may contribute to meaning making but it may challenge participants who have been isolated and silenced for long.
Finally Lykes suggests criteria for evaluating adequate PAR: 1) the method's compatibility with other indigenous resources, 2) the easiness, 3) contribution to action, 4) representing multiple realities, 5) potential for sharing multiple indigenous practices and 6) minimization of risk to the participants.
Reflecting upon her experience in Guatemala, Lykes discusses strengths and limitations of PAR and in particular explores her "situated otherness within a praxis of solidarity". Realizing that (in)voluntary silencing was a key element that affected post-war life, she attempted to break the silence, and criticizes positivist social science methods that fails to capture the collective nature of individual experience and cultural symbolism that weave such experience. With this context, Lykes proposes activist participatory research, where relationships between researchers and participants constitutes an action. Within this model, Lykes positions herself as situated other and attempts to understand herself through an experience of shared subjectivity.
As a means of embarking on communication, Lykes utilized techniques of popular education, such as art working, dramatization, story-telling, etc. She explains that the use of creative productions as part of research served as texts for further analysis and discussion while creating multiple channels of representation and wider distribution.
As a situated other, Lykes continues to analyze her position in terms of otherness and in particular being female. She summarizes a challenge of PAR as follows:
"[T]he processes engaged toward establishing partnerships and engaging in PAR challenge our basic assumptions of who we and "the other"are. These challenges demand continuing re-visioning not only of the relationships themselves but also of our developing understanding of ourselves and the meanings we are making of the "data" we are gathering." (p.735)
Pointing out word-oriented knowledge distribution, Lykes describes the strengths of using visual images in carrying out research and distributing findings, as seen in Photovoice. She writes that such technique provided a unique tool for documenting women's concerns from their own perspectives. She adds that Photovoice complements other strategies that involves with indigenous resources and facilitates collaborations for further action and wider reaching out to the local communities. She articulates that the strength of photo is also weakness in that multiple-reading may contribute to meaning making but it may challenge participants who have been isolated and silenced for long.
Finally Lykes suggests criteria for evaluating adequate PAR: 1) the method's compatibility with other indigenous resources, 2) the easiness, 3) contribution to action, 4) representing multiple realities, 5) potential for sharing multiple indigenous practices and 6) minimization of risk to the participants.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Working Method
: Research and Social Justice. Lois Weis & Michelle Fine (Eds.). (2004). New York: Routledge.
Participatory Action Research: From Within and Beyond Prison Bars (Fine, M., Torre, M.E., Boudin, K., Bowen, I., Clark, J., Hylton, D., Martinez, M., "Missy", Rivera, M., Roberts, R.A., Smart, P., & Upegui, D., pp.95-119)
Fine et al. argue that PAR is grounded in the epistemological assumption that knowledge is rooted in social relations and most powerfully produced in collaboration and action, and note that PAR has been typically practiced within community-based social action projects.
In their cursive history of PAR, the authors point out Kurt Lewin as the genesis of action research in the United States since the 1940s in that he validated participant knowledge for democratic research. The authors find the root of PAR in Gramsci's notion of organic intellectuals, who deeply ground their lives in class struggles and bring about counter-hegemonic knowledge. Thus PAR, according to the authors, constitutes fundamental challenge to Gaventa's "official knowledge", and Habermas's "scientism".
The authors assert that feminist approaches and critical studies took PAR to a new horizon in the recent years. This movement include Lykes's commitment to PAR, Linda Tuhiwai Smith's indigenous studies, Kum Kum Bhavnani's questions of feminist objectivity, which delves into self-conscious subjectivity in the quest for the objectivity.
The authors introduce their own PAR done in a women's prison about the impact of college on women prisoners. The outside researchers offered courses about research methods and conducted the research together with a group of inmates as inside researchers. Highly valuing insiders' knowledge, the authors point out the requirements of successive PAR when outsiders and insiders work together. These are common and complementary skills, trust, respect and understanding.
As insider's dilemma, the authors write self-censoring, which in the case of a study about inmates is almost survival instinct. Another problems that arose during the research is, they point out, unregulated interruptions such as illness, outside commitments, unexpected absences, etc. However, they emphasize that "the extra time we have been afforded through this process has strengthened our sense of being a true research "team", as our relationships have grown over time. Each struggle we have individually and collectively undergone has helped us to better understand one another's ideas and theoretical perspective" (p.115)--It is the process of reciprocity that leads to better understanding.
Another issue pointed out in this article in relation to PAR is intentional ignorance. The authors write, "[W]e have met insider researchers and practitioners who have self-censored, worried that the material was "too hot" and would be used against the community, and feared that the researcher would be shunned, the research attacked, and the story further silenced" (p.117). The authors mention that ultimately they figured out ways to talk about the materials.
One of the advantages of PAR is mentioned in this article. In the authors' expression, they "dance between detachment and engagement". They explain that, while outsiders bring in fresh eyes by asking deliberately naïve questions, insiders know where to get more in-depth material, bring about the complexity of the problem without romanticizing inmates as powerless or victims.
[In this article, it is not clear what sort of actions had been brought about through this research.]
CHECK OUT M. Brinton Lykes (2001). Activist Participatory Research and the arts with rural Maya women. In D. L. Tolman & M. Brydon-Miller (Eds.), From subjects to subjectivities: A handbook of interpretive and participatory methods (pp. 183-199). New York: New York University Press.
Participatory Action Research: From Within and Beyond Prison Bars (Fine, M., Torre, M.E., Boudin, K., Bowen, I., Clark, J., Hylton, D., Martinez, M., "Missy", Rivera, M., Roberts, R.A., Smart, P., & Upegui, D., pp.95-119)
Fine et al. argue that PAR is grounded in the epistemological assumption that knowledge is rooted in social relations and most powerfully produced in collaboration and action, and note that PAR has been typically practiced within community-based social action projects.
In their cursive history of PAR, the authors point out Kurt Lewin as the genesis of action research in the United States since the 1940s in that he validated participant knowledge for democratic research. The authors find the root of PAR in Gramsci's notion of organic intellectuals, who deeply ground their lives in class struggles and bring about counter-hegemonic knowledge. Thus PAR, according to the authors, constitutes fundamental challenge to Gaventa's "official knowledge", and Habermas's "scientism".
The authors assert that feminist approaches and critical studies took PAR to a new horizon in the recent years. This movement include Lykes's commitment to PAR, Linda Tuhiwai Smith's indigenous studies, Kum Kum Bhavnani's questions of feminist objectivity, which delves into self-conscious subjectivity in the quest for the objectivity.
The authors introduce their own PAR done in a women's prison about the impact of college on women prisoners. The outside researchers offered courses about research methods and conducted the research together with a group of inmates as inside researchers. Highly valuing insiders' knowledge, the authors point out the requirements of successive PAR when outsiders and insiders work together. These are common and complementary skills, trust, respect and understanding.
As insider's dilemma, the authors write self-censoring, which in the case of a study about inmates is almost survival instinct. Another problems that arose during the research is, they point out, unregulated interruptions such as illness, outside commitments, unexpected absences, etc. However, they emphasize that "the extra time we have been afforded through this process has strengthened our sense of being a true research "team", as our relationships have grown over time. Each struggle we have individually and collectively undergone has helped us to better understand one another's ideas and theoretical perspective" (p.115)--It is the process of reciprocity that leads to better understanding.
Another issue pointed out in this article in relation to PAR is intentional ignorance. The authors write, "[W]e have met insider researchers and practitioners who have self-censored, worried that the material was "too hot" and would be used against the community, and feared that the researcher would be shunned, the research attacked, and the story further silenced" (p.117). The authors mention that ultimately they figured out ways to talk about the materials.
One of the advantages of PAR is mentioned in this article. In the authors' expression, they "dance between detachment and engagement". They explain that, while outsiders bring in fresh eyes by asking deliberately naïve questions, insiders know where to get more in-depth material, bring about the complexity of the problem without romanticizing inmates as powerless or victims.
[In this article, it is not clear what sort of actions had been brought about through this research.]
CHECK OUT M. Brinton Lykes (2001). Activist Participatory Research and the arts with rural Maya women. In D. L. Tolman & M. Brydon-Miller (Eds.), From subjects to subjectivities: A handbook of interpretive and participatory methods (pp. 183-199). New York: New York University Press.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Action and Knowledge
: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action-research. Orlando Fals-Borda and Mohammad Anisur Rahman (Eds.) (1991). NY: The Apex Press.
Some basic ingredients (O. Fals-Borda, 3-12)
Fals-Borda (and Rahman) does not distinguish participatory research (PR) and PAR strictly and rather specify the action component to emphasize action-research grounding in participation and participatory research tied with action.
Fals-Borda finds practical uses of PAR in a research method, adult education and sociopolitical action in that PAR encompasses the three aspects as an experiential methodology. He explains that experiential methodology is a process of personal and collective behavior and implies knowledge acquisition upon for power construction and social movements for the oppressed.
Fals-Borda lays out as the philosophical ground experience, which allows one to apprehend the essence intuitively, feel and understand reality, and thus place oneself in a wider context. He states that the experience, which contributes to understanding knowledge for change, stems from two different strands: one is Cartesian and academic and the other is experiential and practical. He proposes practical commitment, a form of praxis, as the only resolution to the dialectical tension between the two knowledge strands. He thereby writes,
"Therefore academic knowledge combined with popular knowledge and wisdom may result in total scientific knowledge of a revolutionary nature which destroys the previous unjust class monopoly."(p.4)
His approach to epistemology is grounded in a revolution and change and calls for commitment and praxis. In this regard, he argues that such commitment and praxis leads to a rejection of the asymmetry of the subject/object relationship that characterizes academic research and daily life.
Participatory theory, on the other hand, demands the destruction of the asymmetry and the transformation to the subject/subject relationship through participation, Fals-Borda writes. For him, the essence of participation is voluntary separation from the submission and dependence implicit in the subject/object relationship through experience. He adds that the authentic participation is resplendent with feelings and attitudes of an altruistic, cooperative, communal, thus democratic nature. He emphasizes that the process of participation thereby leads to a rejection of vertical authoritarian structure and exploitation and turns all the involved into organic intellectuals of the working class, who can continue the transformation process without external agents.
Fals-Borda succinctly says that PAR generally proposes a resolution of contradictions in a given region through recourse to endogenous elements and thereby may mobilize people from bottom to up and from periphery to center.
Besides a PAR's implication in a sociopolitical context, Fals-Borda looks into a phenomenological aspect of PAR from the experiences of those involved in PAR. Fals-Borda argues that they learn to "know and recognize" themselves as a means of empowerment by realizing that the science is a cultural production of purposeful and relative knowledge, which serve those who create and control it, thus it is equally possible that people's science is created through an informal and endogenous process. In this way Fals-Borda refuses the universality of knowledge and emphasizes the multiplicity of knowledge and its constructivism.
He suggests four techniques of PAR that may cultivate people's countervailing power: 1) collective research, 2)critical recover of history (selective discovery through collective memory of past elements useful in defense of the interests of the oppressed), 3) valuing and applying folk culture (to mobilize people, it is essential to develop techniques based on the folk culture, such as art, music, drama, myths, story-telling, etc.) 4) production and diffusion of new knowledge (for better efficient communication). Fals-Borda elaborate the fourth technique within the concept of knowledge ownership. He argues that there should a systematic way of returning the knowledge to the community and organization in order for them to maintain the ownership.
The Theoretical Standpoint of PAR (M.A. Rahman, 13-23)
Rahman delineates the basic ideology of PAR that "a self-conscious people, those who are currently poor and oppressed, will progressively transform their environment by their own praxis. In this process others may a catalytic and supportive role but will not dominate" (p.13).
Rahman precisely points out domination of masses by elites in controlling material production and means of knowledge production and the validation of knowledge. He asserts that scientific knowledge depends on consensus as to the method of verification, thus there exist different epistemological paradigms with different verification systems. From this perspective, he argues that the mass can ground their scientific knowledge based upon their own verification system, and maintains that an immediate objective of PAR is to bring to the people the legitimacy of such knowledge and the right to use it in order to act upon it.
Rahman finds a reason for growing application of PAR in the crisis of the right and the left, which the wisdom of "vanguards" is challenged, particularly in Eastern Europe. From this angle, Rahman regards PAR as a promotion of people's empowerment for changing their immediate environment at a micro level intervention via-a-vis states' imposing ideas of development. This empowerment, in his analysis, comes from two elements: autonomous/democratic people's organization and the promotion of popular knowledge. These two elements are either side of one coin to Rahman. He stresses that the process of organization is preceded and accompanied by a process of "concientization"--Rahman defines this term as a process of self-awareness raising through collective self-inquiry and reflection, which takes different forms such as dialogues, investigations and knowledge generation. Thus, to him, the transformation of the relations of knowledge is central to the entire task of empowerment.
Rahman also looks at PAR as a macro-level social transformation at a national level and concludes that PAR as the macro-social transformation is characterized as a cultural movement, independent of political movements. He finds the reason for the rise of such cultural movements in the crisis of left that assumed "advanced consciousness" (p.19).
Similar to the argument made by Fals-Borda, Rahman maintains there coexist intellectual/professional knowledge and popular/organic knowledge without dominance of one over another. By noting that the macro-level movements of PAR have been led by those coming from intellectual/professional tradition, Rahman points out negative forces implicated within such practices. Besides the assumed superiority of consciousness of the leaders, he sharply points out the fragility/instability of commitment for change:
"[C]ommitment us subject to transformation with the evolution of one's social existence. It often collapses from defeat, but may also diffuse or degenerate through the attainment of success that brings glory and power, altogether new experiences in one's existence. And commitment has also sometimes shown its fragility in the face of attractive temptations...In any case, there is no assured method of transferring commitment to succeeding generations who have not lived through the struggles from which commitment is socio-historically born." (p.21)
Rahman stresses the possibility that PAR sustains the macro level movements benefiting the initiatives of the people:
"Leaders may emerge to become a part of macro social-transformative efforts and thereby influence their course of progress; the culture of PAR may se a standard for working with the poeple and challenge macro vanguards to demonstrate teir commitment; the deepening of popular awareness, if PAR is successful, may work as a countervailing force against attemps at domination; aand the social formations (aware and assertive people's organizations and popular movements) promoted by PAR may be expected to support the best macro leadership that exists or that may emerge in the society" (p.22-23)
Despite the hopeful speculations of PAR, Rahman emphasizes the implementation of permanent vigilance and self-criticism within PAR. In particular in the face of instability, he stresses the recognition of possible degeneration and open popular analysis of such phenomenon.
A self-review of PAR (M.A. Rahman and O. Fals-Borda, 24-34)
Rahman and Fals-Borda reflect upon PAR for the past twenty years in the early 1990. They pays attention to the World Symposium on Action Research and Scientific Analysis in Columbia in 1977, where Antonio Gramsci became a prominent figure and the notion of participation was revisited. During this period, they summarize that PAR was regarded as 1) a research methodology that emphasizes the subject/subject relationship evolving in symmetrical and non-exploitative patterns of life and 2) social activism that is characterized with commitment to a promotion of people's collective and systematic praxis, which they argue became a primary object of PAR.
Since the early 1980s, they note, PAR advanced from micro and local community issues to complex, urban and regional dimensions while simultaneously becoming subject to cooptation. Examples of cooptation include: widening academic careers in the subject, a growing number of academic discussions and forums, appointments by governments, UN agencies' recognition of PAR as a viable alternative, and NGO's participatory approach.
With this circumstance, the authors emphasize the philosophy and practical results of PAR as a means of countering faulty assimilation. According to them, PAR validates and stimulates popular knowledge--"knowledge existing as local or indigenous science and wisdom, to be advanced by the people's self-inquiry" (p.31)--with their own verification system and its results should be seen in real life. To Rahman and Fals-Borda, PAR is a philosophy of life as much as a method in that PAR as a method for rigorous knowledge search is an open-ended process toward a structural transformation of society and culture, which requires continued commitment, an ethical stand and self-critique.
Rahman and Fals-Borda state that the purpose of PAR is to break up the monopoly of science and culture led by elites and to support people's movements for progress and facilitate their transition to the political dimension. The reason is found in the authors' standpoint of knowledge: they see that unequal relation of knowledge is a critical factor that perpetuates class/elite domination over the people. What is the most important to them with respect to popular action for socio-political change is to break the monopoly of knowledge and stimulate popular knowledge, which they call "a knowledge of life".
Toward a Knowledge Democracy: viewpoints on participatory research in North America (John Gaventa, 121-131)
Gaventa reviews participatory research within the context of democracy in a knowledge society in North America (He notes that participatory research has been explored much in the Third World within the context of adult education and development.) He finds three domains where PR is observed: 1) for the purpose of attaining knowledge of their own, 2) for the purpose of community-based, labor and minority education, and 3) New Left/environmental movements.
Gaventa sheds light on three strategies that are used in popular PR:
1. The reappropriation of knowledge: it is concerned about public access to knowledge/information, which is produced by the dominant knowledge system and shielded from the ordinary by secrecy, privatization and professionalization. The process of people's gaining control over knowledge is an empowering one because it allows people to realize the power structure that exists behind the knowledge control. (Gaventa's assumption is that power has been exercised through the control of knowledge.) An example is found in a research project done in a mining town to see whether chemicals in their water or work place are destroying their health. The participants were taught a basic literacy skill to read medical textbooks and in fact investigated the case. He label the process of people's viewing themselves as researchers and developing unique ways of gaining information "guerilla research". The reappropriation of knowledge contributes to challenging the fallibility of scientific knowledge and grounding action upon the unmasking of power structure, however, it is limited in the sense that it has little to do with creation of knowledge.
2. Development of people's knowledge: Gaventa develops this idea from the notions of Fals-Borda's popular science and Gramsci's intellectual and organic knowledge. Popular science means popular wisdom or knowledge based on empirical and common sense that belongs to the grassroots people and constitutes their culture (Fals-Borda, 1982, Participatory Research and Rural Social Change, Journal of Rural Co-Operation, X(1), 25-40). Fals-Borda's approach to popular knowledge resonates in Gramscian's tradition, which regards everyone as intellectual who can develop a popular and organic knowledge that turns the common sense into "good sense". Gaventa also notes that Robert Chambers in his book Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983) demonstrates that such local knowledge of the ordinary proved to be more useful to them. Gaventa argues that the common approaches to PR are also useful in industrialized western societies in that "Within the Western world, popular knowledge is constantly being created in the daily experience of work and community life. The legitimacy of such knowledge, too, is constantly being devalued and suppressed by the dominant science" (p.128). The limitation of this strategy lies in the fact that the base of popular knowledge stems from people's experiences. What if knowledge required do not come from experience? Do all people need to be experts to participate in the process?
3. Popular participation in social production of knowledge: In the above case, Gaventa seconds a division of labor in a way that a group of people are involved in a decision making of knowledge production through popularly controlled research centers. An example of this approach is found in some research groups in Denmark and Sweden, where "reference groups" of those affected by research are involved with professional researchers in carrying out the projects.
By and large, Gaventa holds the creation of an alternative organization of science and knowledge that "is not only for the people but is created with them and by them as well" (italic from the original text, p. 131) toward genuine democracy.
Remaking Knowledge (O. Fals-Borda, 146-164)
Fals-Borda defines PAR as an autonomous collective investigation different from typical research methods. It is characterized as a "communal enterprise" in which the knowledge is validated socially through people's own verification system. Fals-Borda summarizes three theoretical elements that enrich the process of PAR:
1. the ontological possibility of a popular science: Popular science, which is emancipatory and collective by nature, becomes a tool in the quest for justice and answer to epistemological questions such as knowledge for whom and knowledge for what.
2. the existential possibility of transforming the researcher/researched relationship: Fals-Borda redefine the concept of participation to create a subject/subject relationship. For him, participation goes beyond representative democracy. It means "breaking up intentionally by means of vivencias ("experience") the asymmetrical subject/object relationships of submission, dependence, exploitation and oppression that exist between persons, groups and social classes" (p.152). He stresses that despite the recognition of their otherness researcher and researched interact and collaborate to create an enriched knowledge and achieve social progress, for instance, by outsiders' providing technical expertise, situational analysis or acting as intermediaries while insiders provide specific local knowledge and know-how and act as critics.
3. Autonomy and identity in collective research: this is essential to constructing knowledge democracy and build people's countervailing knowledge and power, civic movement and self-reliance promoting organizations vis-à-vis the state, central power, monopolies and military complex.
The third element seems more important to Fals-Borda. Within this context, he stresses praxis as the technical foundation of PAR for critical recovery of history and culture. Following Hegel and Marx, Fals-Borda emphasizes the practicality of praxis and defines as a "dialectical unit formed by theory and action in which action is cyclically determinant" (p.156).
Among the theoretical convergences between PAR and other schools of thought noted are critical pedagogy and some ethnologists who approach indigenous and local culture with a participatory philosophy. He also points out among sociologists Alain Touraine's method of "sociological intervention" (1978 La voix et le regard), which attempted to bridge the gap between research and action by asking researchers to work with social movements as mediators. Fals-Borda differentiates Touraine's social intervention from PAR in that Touraine warned deeper involvement or commitment although he advocated undertaking collective research. It is notable that Fals-Borda finds the nominal root of PAR in Kurt Lewin (1946, Action-Research and Minority Problems, Journal of Social Issues, 2, 34-46). He criticizes that despite the similarity to PAR, his insights were reduced to small group processes (industrial management) and clinical approaches (veteran's rehabilitation) after his death, however, transcended to Organization-Development school of action research in community work, educational systems and organizational change in the 1970s.
Fals-Borda states as PAR's general trends holistic philosophy, relativist knowledge, interdisciplinary descriptive methods, intuition, daily life phenomena and the human scale, and suggests PAR in terms of a new paradigm in that it calls for general epistemic change in its nature. He connects PAR to Foucault's idea of knowledge rather than Kuhnian principles and intends to develop a system of subjugated knowledge through PAR.
Some basic ingredients (O. Fals-Borda, 3-12)
Fals-Borda (and Rahman) does not distinguish participatory research (PR) and PAR strictly and rather specify the action component to emphasize action-research grounding in participation and participatory research tied with action.
Fals-Borda finds practical uses of PAR in a research method, adult education and sociopolitical action in that PAR encompasses the three aspects as an experiential methodology. He explains that experiential methodology is a process of personal and collective behavior and implies knowledge acquisition upon for power construction and social movements for the oppressed.
Fals-Borda lays out as the philosophical ground experience, which allows one to apprehend the essence intuitively, feel and understand reality, and thus place oneself in a wider context. He states that the experience, which contributes to understanding knowledge for change, stems from two different strands: one is Cartesian and academic and the other is experiential and practical. He proposes practical commitment, a form of praxis, as the only resolution to the dialectical tension between the two knowledge strands. He thereby writes,
"Therefore academic knowledge combined with popular knowledge and wisdom may result in total scientific knowledge of a revolutionary nature which destroys the previous unjust class monopoly."(p.4)
His approach to epistemology is grounded in a revolution and change and calls for commitment and praxis. In this regard, he argues that such commitment and praxis leads to a rejection of the asymmetry of the subject/object relationship that characterizes academic research and daily life.
Participatory theory, on the other hand, demands the destruction of the asymmetry and the transformation to the subject/subject relationship through participation, Fals-Borda writes. For him, the essence of participation is voluntary separation from the submission and dependence implicit in the subject/object relationship through experience. He adds that the authentic participation is resplendent with feelings and attitudes of an altruistic, cooperative, communal, thus democratic nature. He emphasizes that the process of participation thereby leads to a rejection of vertical authoritarian structure and exploitation and turns all the involved into organic intellectuals of the working class, who can continue the transformation process without external agents.
Fals-Borda succinctly says that PAR generally proposes a resolution of contradictions in a given region through recourse to endogenous elements and thereby may mobilize people from bottom to up and from periphery to center.
Besides a PAR's implication in a sociopolitical context, Fals-Borda looks into a phenomenological aspect of PAR from the experiences of those involved in PAR. Fals-Borda argues that they learn to "know and recognize" themselves as a means of empowerment by realizing that the science is a cultural production of purposeful and relative knowledge, which serve those who create and control it, thus it is equally possible that people's science is created through an informal and endogenous process. In this way Fals-Borda refuses the universality of knowledge and emphasizes the multiplicity of knowledge and its constructivism.
He suggests four techniques of PAR that may cultivate people's countervailing power: 1) collective research, 2)critical recover of history (selective discovery through collective memory of past elements useful in defense of the interests of the oppressed), 3) valuing and applying folk culture (to mobilize people, it is essential to develop techniques based on the folk culture, such as art, music, drama, myths, story-telling, etc.) 4) production and diffusion of new knowledge (for better efficient communication). Fals-Borda elaborate the fourth technique within the concept of knowledge ownership. He argues that there should a systematic way of returning the knowledge to the community and organization in order for them to maintain the ownership.
The Theoretical Standpoint of PAR (M.A. Rahman, 13-23)
Rahman delineates the basic ideology of PAR that "a self-conscious people, those who are currently poor and oppressed, will progressively transform their environment by their own praxis. In this process others may a catalytic and supportive role but will not dominate" (p.13).
Rahman precisely points out domination of masses by elites in controlling material production and means of knowledge production and the validation of knowledge. He asserts that scientific knowledge depends on consensus as to the method of verification, thus there exist different epistemological paradigms with different verification systems. From this perspective, he argues that the mass can ground their scientific knowledge based upon their own verification system, and maintains that an immediate objective of PAR is to bring to the people the legitimacy of such knowledge and the right to use it in order to act upon it.
Rahman finds a reason for growing application of PAR in the crisis of the right and the left, which the wisdom of "vanguards" is challenged, particularly in Eastern Europe. From this angle, Rahman regards PAR as a promotion of people's empowerment for changing their immediate environment at a micro level intervention via-a-vis states' imposing ideas of development. This empowerment, in his analysis, comes from two elements: autonomous/democratic people's organization and the promotion of popular knowledge. These two elements are either side of one coin to Rahman. He stresses that the process of organization is preceded and accompanied by a process of "concientization"--Rahman defines this term as a process of self-awareness raising through collective self-inquiry and reflection, which takes different forms such as dialogues, investigations and knowledge generation. Thus, to him, the transformation of the relations of knowledge is central to the entire task of empowerment.
Rahman also looks at PAR as a macro-level social transformation at a national level and concludes that PAR as the macro-social transformation is characterized as a cultural movement, independent of political movements. He finds the reason for the rise of such cultural movements in the crisis of left that assumed "advanced consciousness" (p.19).
Similar to the argument made by Fals-Borda, Rahman maintains there coexist intellectual/professional knowledge and popular/organic knowledge without dominance of one over another. By noting that the macro-level movements of PAR have been led by those coming from intellectual/professional tradition, Rahman points out negative forces implicated within such practices. Besides the assumed superiority of consciousness of the leaders, he sharply points out the fragility/instability of commitment for change:
"[C]ommitment us subject to transformation with the evolution of one's social existence. It often collapses from defeat, but may also diffuse or degenerate through the attainment of success that brings glory and power, altogether new experiences in one's existence. And commitment has also sometimes shown its fragility in the face of attractive temptations...In any case, there is no assured method of transferring commitment to succeeding generations who have not lived through the struggles from which commitment is socio-historically born." (p.21)
Rahman stresses the possibility that PAR sustains the macro level movements benefiting the initiatives of the people:
"Leaders may emerge to become a part of macro social-transformative efforts and thereby influence their course of progress; the culture of PAR may se a standard for working with the poeple and challenge macro vanguards to demonstrate teir commitment; the deepening of popular awareness, if PAR is successful, may work as a countervailing force against attemps at domination; aand the social formations (aware and assertive people's organizations and popular movements) promoted by PAR may be expected to support the best macro leadership that exists or that may emerge in the society" (p.22-23)
Despite the hopeful speculations of PAR, Rahman emphasizes the implementation of permanent vigilance and self-criticism within PAR. In particular in the face of instability, he stresses the recognition of possible degeneration and open popular analysis of such phenomenon.
A self-review of PAR (M.A. Rahman and O. Fals-Borda, 24-34)
Rahman and Fals-Borda reflect upon PAR for the past twenty years in the early 1990. They pays attention to the World Symposium on Action Research and Scientific Analysis in Columbia in 1977, where Antonio Gramsci became a prominent figure and the notion of participation was revisited. During this period, they summarize that PAR was regarded as 1) a research methodology that emphasizes the subject/subject relationship evolving in symmetrical and non-exploitative patterns of life and 2) social activism that is characterized with commitment to a promotion of people's collective and systematic praxis, which they argue became a primary object of PAR.
Since the early 1980s, they note, PAR advanced from micro and local community issues to complex, urban and regional dimensions while simultaneously becoming subject to cooptation. Examples of cooptation include: widening academic careers in the subject, a growing number of academic discussions and forums, appointments by governments, UN agencies' recognition of PAR as a viable alternative, and NGO's participatory approach.
With this circumstance, the authors emphasize the philosophy and practical results of PAR as a means of countering faulty assimilation. According to them, PAR validates and stimulates popular knowledge--"knowledge existing as local or indigenous science and wisdom, to be advanced by the people's self-inquiry" (p.31)--with their own verification system and its results should be seen in real life. To Rahman and Fals-Borda, PAR is a philosophy of life as much as a method in that PAR as a method for rigorous knowledge search is an open-ended process toward a structural transformation of society and culture, which requires continued commitment, an ethical stand and self-critique.
Rahman and Fals-Borda state that the purpose of PAR is to break up the monopoly of science and culture led by elites and to support people's movements for progress and facilitate their transition to the political dimension. The reason is found in the authors' standpoint of knowledge: they see that unequal relation of knowledge is a critical factor that perpetuates class/elite domination over the people. What is the most important to them with respect to popular action for socio-political change is to break the monopoly of knowledge and stimulate popular knowledge, which they call "a knowledge of life".
Toward a Knowledge Democracy: viewpoints on participatory research in North America (John Gaventa, 121-131)
Gaventa reviews participatory research within the context of democracy in a knowledge society in North America (He notes that participatory research has been explored much in the Third World within the context of adult education and development.) He finds three domains where PR is observed: 1) for the purpose of attaining knowledge of their own, 2) for the purpose of community-based, labor and minority education, and 3) New Left/environmental movements.
Gaventa sheds light on three strategies that are used in popular PR:
1. The reappropriation of knowledge: it is concerned about public access to knowledge/information, which is produced by the dominant knowledge system and shielded from the ordinary by secrecy, privatization and professionalization. The process of people's gaining control over knowledge is an empowering one because it allows people to realize the power structure that exists behind the knowledge control. (Gaventa's assumption is that power has been exercised through the control of knowledge.) An example is found in a research project done in a mining town to see whether chemicals in their water or work place are destroying their health. The participants were taught a basic literacy skill to read medical textbooks and in fact investigated the case. He label the process of people's viewing themselves as researchers and developing unique ways of gaining information "guerilla research". The reappropriation of knowledge contributes to challenging the fallibility of scientific knowledge and grounding action upon the unmasking of power structure, however, it is limited in the sense that it has little to do with creation of knowledge.
2. Development of people's knowledge: Gaventa develops this idea from the notions of Fals-Borda's popular science and Gramsci's intellectual and organic knowledge. Popular science means popular wisdom or knowledge based on empirical and common sense that belongs to the grassroots people and constitutes their culture (Fals-Borda, 1982, Participatory Research and Rural Social Change, Journal of Rural Co-Operation, X(1), 25-40). Fals-Borda's approach to popular knowledge resonates in Gramscian's tradition, which regards everyone as intellectual who can develop a popular and organic knowledge that turns the common sense into "good sense". Gaventa also notes that Robert Chambers in his book Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983) demonstrates that such local knowledge of the ordinary proved to be more useful to them. Gaventa argues that the common approaches to PR are also useful in industrialized western societies in that "Within the Western world, popular knowledge is constantly being created in the daily experience of work and community life. The legitimacy of such knowledge, too, is constantly being devalued and suppressed by the dominant science" (p.128). The limitation of this strategy lies in the fact that the base of popular knowledge stems from people's experiences. What if knowledge required do not come from experience? Do all people need to be experts to participate in the process?
3. Popular participation in social production of knowledge: In the above case, Gaventa seconds a division of labor in a way that a group of people are involved in a decision making of knowledge production through popularly controlled research centers. An example of this approach is found in some research groups in Denmark and Sweden, where "reference groups" of those affected by research are involved with professional researchers in carrying out the projects.
By and large, Gaventa holds the creation of an alternative organization of science and knowledge that "is not only for the people but is created with them and by them as well" (italic from the original text, p. 131) toward genuine democracy.
Remaking Knowledge (O. Fals-Borda, 146-164)
Fals-Borda defines PAR as an autonomous collective investigation different from typical research methods. It is characterized as a "communal enterprise" in which the knowledge is validated socially through people's own verification system. Fals-Borda summarizes three theoretical elements that enrich the process of PAR:
1. the ontological possibility of a popular science: Popular science, which is emancipatory and collective by nature, becomes a tool in the quest for justice and answer to epistemological questions such as knowledge for whom and knowledge for what.
2. the existential possibility of transforming the researcher/researched relationship: Fals-Borda redefine the concept of participation to create a subject/subject relationship. For him, participation goes beyond representative democracy. It means "breaking up intentionally by means of vivencias ("experience") the asymmetrical subject/object relationships of submission, dependence, exploitation and oppression that exist between persons, groups and social classes" (p.152). He stresses that despite the recognition of their otherness researcher and researched interact and collaborate to create an enriched knowledge and achieve social progress, for instance, by outsiders' providing technical expertise, situational analysis or acting as intermediaries while insiders provide specific local knowledge and know-how and act as critics.
3. Autonomy and identity in collective research: this is essential to constructing knowledge democracy and build people's countervailing knowledge and power, civic movement and self-reliance promoting organizations vis-à-vis the state, central power, monopolies and military complex.
The third element seems more important to Fals-Borda. Within this context, he stresses praxis as the technical foundation of PAR for critical recovery of history and culture. Following Hegel and Marx, Fals-Borda emphasizes the practicality of praxis and defines as a "dialectical unit formed by theory and action in which action is cyclically determinant" (p.156).
Among the theoretical convergences between PAR and other schools of thought noted are critical pedagogy and some ethnologists who approach indigenous and local culture with a participatory philosophy. He also points out among sociologists Alain Touraine's method of "sociological intervention" (1978 La voix et le regard), which attempted to bridge the gap between research and action by asking researchers to work with social movements as mediators. Fals-Borda differentiates Touraine's social intervention from PAR in that Touraine warned deeper involvement or commitment although he advocated undertaking collective research. It is notable that Fals-Borda finds the nominal root of PAR in Kurt Lewin (1946, Action-Research and Minority Problems, Journal of Social Issues, 2, 34-46). He criticizes that despite the similarity to PAR, his insights were reduced to small group processes (industrial management) and clinical approaches (veteran's rehabilitation) after his death, however, transcended to Organization-Development school of action research in community work, educational systems and organizational change in the 1970s.
Fals-Borda states as PAR's general trends holistic philosophy, relativist knowledge, interdisciplinary descriptive methods, intuition, daily life phenomena and the human scale, and suggests PAR in terms of a new paradigm in that it calls for general epistemic change in its nature. He connects PAR to Foucault's idea of knowledge rather than Kuhnian principles and intends to develop a system of subjugated knowledge through PAR.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Education, Particpatory Action Research, and Social Change
: International Perspectives. Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan (Eds.).(2009). NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Introduction: International Perspectives on Education, PAR and Social Change (pp.1-11)/ (Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan).
Kapoor and Jordan argue that PAR that was initiated for political intents in the global south is being tainted by imperial and colonial ambition tied to Eurocentric knowledge production and interests of capital referred to as globalization. One of the key research interests includes an emphasis on the political nature and contribution of PAR to various international political projects while continuing to rely on its "critical reflexivity concerned with the moral, practical and political ramifications and contradictions of PAR activations" (p. 3). They explain the term, critical reflexivity as a defining ingredient of any PAR process committed to a politics of margins and the constant reinvigoration of participatory research approaches(p.3). Kapoor and Jordan look at PAR in four different ways in this book: 1) co-optation and assimilation of PAR in a global context, 2) from the perspective of knowledge creation and the critique of mainstream social sciences, 3) PAR as social movement learning and 4) PAR as an indigenous methodology.
From a Methodology of the Margins to Neoliberal Appropriation and Beyond: the Linages of PAR (Steven Jordan, pp.15-27)
Jordan argues that PAR, which began in the ground of anticolonial movement of the global south since 1960s, became gradually and insidiously separated from its radical and political origins and slowly institutionalized and co-opt by mainstream social science researchers, private consultants, government bodies, international development agencies, and NGOs.
Tracing back the lineages of PAR, Jordan asserts that PAR itself is a blend of a broad range of research approaches, such as participatory research, action research, feminist praxis, critical ethnography, aboriginal research methodologies, transformative/critical pedagogies and popular community education. But he argues that PAR, more generically participatory research, has not always been aligned to radical/political movements and it has rather increasingly subject to assimilation and co-option to the mainstream research. Within this context, Jordan pays particular attention to the neolibral appropriation of PAR. He argues that such research process contributes to reconstitution of PAR as a tool of capitalist accumulation after all. Thus, he calls attention not to what neoliberal institutions, for instance, World Bank, do, but to who become empowered and under which condition.
Based upon the theoretical critique of PAR, Jordan reclaims PAR within three layers. First, he suggests that PAR should form alliance with research communities following the tradition of critical ethnography, which abandons epistemological positivism. Secondly, he states that PAR practitioners should pursue the stream of learning in social action (Foley, 1999, Learning in Social Action). The reason is, Jordan explains, that learning in social action, which emphasizes informal learning, in particular, through struggle, urges us to pay close attention to the co-option process of informal learning to neoliberal policies and people's resistance. Lastly Jordan calls attention to language and conceptual framework of PAR. It is a question of critical self-examination about questions to pose, research process to construct, and analytical framework to explore. He argues subtle uses of mainstream concepts impact on the research questions, process and analysis.
Participatory academic research (par) and People's Participatory Action Research (PAR): Research, Politicization, and Subaltern Social Movements in India (Dip Kapoor, 29-44).
In his critical analysis of a subaltern social movement, Kapoor distinguishes par from PAR. First of all the ways in which research is done in university settings is different from social movements that originate from living experience and struggle for rights, and it is less flexible. Kapoor writes that a par process is perhaps theoretically engaged but contextually disconnected, and often detailed by a PAR process embedded in a movement dynamic that demands an urgent flexibility. A dividing line between par and PAR is, according to Kapoor, that par relies on academic theoretical construction while PAR relies on reflection that emerges from lived realities in a specific context of engagement. He is cautious of the danger of par, which is its theoretical hearing impairment produced by blind adherence to theorizing and political interest, ruling relations of capital.
When Research becomes a revolution: Participatory Action Research with Indigenous Peoples (Cora Weber-Pillwax, 45-58)
Her PAR came very naturally when she was involved in her organizing experience of providing educational support to aboriginal communities in the 1980s. She describes the project as follows:
"Life and education was continuing. People were learning. People were involved. People were participating. There was anger, there was frustration but there was the excitement of learning. People wanted to be at the meetings, they wanted to participate. They saw hope because they were engaged. As long as these things were in place, PAR was happening. Life was happening. When some people wanted to keep the power, they started to try to control the movement. They put administrative procedures in place to ensure predictability and manageablity. When that happened, the process stopped. There was no longer participation. there was no longer hope, there was no longer anything living and vital about the system. At that point, PAR no longer existed" (pp.56-57).
Weber-Pillwax argues that transformation is a significant principle of PAR at the outset when Freire and Fals-Borda were developing the theory and practice. She adds that they never intended to use PAR outside of community-based research to bring about transformation or change in personal/collective environment.
Critical Complexity and Participatory Action Research: Decolonizing "Democratic" Knowledge Production (Joe Kincheloe, 107-121)
In this examination of the epistemological and ideological foundations of PAR, Kincheloe emphasizes the notion of critical complexity. The assumption of critical complex epistemology is, he explains, that "the mind creates rather than reflects, and the nature of this creation cannot be separated from the surrounding social world" (p. 109). Based upon this epitemological foundation, he criticizes scientific neopositivistic research has neglected diverse perspectives and interpretations of non-dominant groups, such as the poor, women and people from different ethnic backgrounds for the sake of finding the universal truth. He also warns the essentialism often surfacing among PAR that "glorifies the perspectives of the collaborators and community members in a form of left democratic essentialism" (p.112). Ground in these ideas, he propose critical PAR, which emphasize dissimilar interpretations of the world and diverse impacts, and understanding particular nature of phenomenon in people's lived experience or particular sociocultural/educational circumstances. In this way, critical PAR validates the knowledge and expertise of minority groups, uncovers dominant discourses of power and its insidious practices to maintain the status quo, thus challenging epitemological and ideological aspects of Western research.
Reconceptualizing Participatory Action Research for Sustainability Education (E. Lange, 123-136)
Lange finds the origins of PAR in the international development field, the education field, and the community development field and asserts that the purpose of PAR in each case is disrupting hegemony:
1. Predominant in the global south, PAR began to a response to failed northern-inspired development approaches and the limitations of positivist research paradigm in the hope of creating knowledge, educational practices and social action towards inherent transformation in local communities. The approaches taken by Orlando Fals-Borda and Paulo Freire are inspiring examples for Lange. She explaines that, for Fals-Borda, PAR was "a research tool to enable the popular classes (working class and peasants) to identify their issues and generate 'popular' knowledge useful for discerning effective actions for transforming society toward social justice" (p.124). She sheds light on the assertion that Pablo Lapati made, which is there is a tight connection between the popular education methodology of Freire and PAR in that a political commitment to the oppressed of Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed resonates in the spirit of PAR, a political commitment to solidarity with the marginalized towards sustainable social change.
(For Lange, sustainability means maintaining social needs without diminishing the prospects for health and justice for self, others and environment.)
2) On the other hand, Lange notes, PAR, originating from the Action Sociology of the Frankfurt School, is practiced in community social action field in the global north. One significant different between the development PAR and community PAR is that community PAR revolves around a community of interest, not bound geographically. Nevertheless community PAR is characterized collective analysis and organization for social change for the benefit of those involved in the knowledge production and learning process.
3) The third strand Lange introduce is found in educational action research. This approach is more practice oriented--as a living practice--rather than knowledge production. From this perspective, teaching is a social matter that requires collective dialogue, theorizing and action and at the same time, an ethical issue in that it sees great potential. It delves into deep awareness of being on the basis that "who one is becomes completely caught up with what one knows and does" (Carson and Sumara, 1997, p.xvii).
Lange also look at PAR from living systems theory, which sees the world as an undivided wholeness that is continuously shaped by our cognition and action as well as the natural process. Perceived from this theoretical foundation, PAR conveys particular ontological/epistemological/pedagogical assumptions and implications in social transformation.
With regard to the epistemological assumptions, Lange questions whether middle-class individuals with little politicization can be shifted into an active mode to generate knowledge for civic engagement and empowerment. In her response, Lange states that PAR offers a "reflexive practice that engage them in a more penetrating social analysis of their own historical and class position" (p.129). Lange also maintains that PAR attends to "extrarational" ways of knowing such as intuitive knowing which could transform their being.
Lange sheds light on the three dimensions of PAR that Lapati (1988) described: research/education/action dimensions. Through PAR, Lange emphasizes, one can test their own views against others' perspectives and by acting upon them. Lange connects this pedagogical process with Freire's notion of intervening, which enables learners to become curious and unsettled, and with Briton's (1996) notion of a pedagogy of engagement, which stresses on adults' engagement in critical democratic practices and resistance to the modernity that denies their right to make decisions and maintain dignity. Thus, Lange writes, "learning is a personal and political encounter" (p.131).
Her perspective on social transformation in relation to PAR is interesting. She maintains that such social transformation is a reinvention of power in responding to changing contexts and by telling new stories, enacting alternative social processes and redirecting energies. Thus she calls patience so that the transformation reveals itself.
Introduction: International Perspectives on Education, PAR and Social Change (pp.1-11)/ (Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan).
Kapoor and Jordan argue that PAR that was initiated for political intents in the global south is being tainted by imperial and colonial ambition tied to Eurocentric knowledge production and interests of capital referred to as globalization. One of the key research interests includes an emphasis on the political nature and contribution of PAR to various international political projects while continuing to rely on its "critical reflexivity concerned with the moral, practical and political ramifications and contradictions of PAR activations" (p. 3). They explain the term, critical reflexivity as a defining ingredient of any PAR process committed to a politics of margins and the constant reinvigoration of participatory research approaches(p.3). Kapoor and Jordan look at PAR in four different ways in this book: 1) co-optation and assimilation of PAR in a global context, 2) from the perspective of knowledge creation and the critique of mainstream social sciences, 3) PAR as social movement learning and 4) PAR as an indigenous methodology.
From a Methodology of the Margins to Neoliberal Appropriation and Beyond: the Linages of PAR (Steven Jordan, pp.15-27)
Jordan argues that PAR, which began in the ground of anticolonial movement of the global south since 1960s, became gradually and insidiously separated from its radical and political origins and slowly institutionalized and co-opt by mainstream social science researchers, private consultants, government bodies, international development agencies, and NGOs.
Tracing back the lineages of PAR, Jordan asserts that PAR itself is a blend of a broad range of research approaches, such as participatory research, action research, feminist praxis, critical ethnography, aboriginal research methodologies, transformative/critical pedagogies and popular community education. But he argues that PAR, more generically participatory research, has not always been aligned to radical/political movements and it has rather increasingly subject to assimilation and co-option to the mainstream research. Within this context, Jordan pays particular attention to the neolibral appropriation of PAR. He argues that such research process contributes to reconstitution of PAR as a tool of capitalist accumulation after all. Thus, he calls attention not to what neoliberal institutions, for instance, World Bank, do, but to who become empowered and under which condition.
Based upon the theoretical critique of PAR, Jordan reclaims PAR within three layers. First, he suggests that PAR should form alliance with research communities following the tradition of critical ethnography, which abandons epistemological positivism. Secondly, he states that PAR practitioners should pursue the stream of learning in social action (Foley, 1999, Learning in Social Action). The reason is, Jordan explains, that learning in social action, which emphasizes informal learning, in particular, through struggle, urges us to pay close attention to the co-option process of informal learning to neoliberal policies and people's resistance. Lastly Jordan calls attention to language and conceptual framework of PAR. It is a question of critical self-examination about questions to pose, research process to construct, and analytical framework to explore. He argues subtle uses of mainstream concepts impact on the research questions, process and analysis.
Participatory academic research (par) and People's Participatory Action Research (PAR): Research, Politicization, and Subaltern Social Movements in India (Dip Kapoor, 29-44).
In his critical analysis of a subaltern social movement, Kapoor distinguishes par from PAR. First of all the ways in which research is done in university settings is different from social movements that originate from living experience and struggle for rights, and it is less flexible. Kapoor writes that a par process is perhaps theoretically engaged but contextually disconnected, and often detailed by a PAR process embedded in a movement dynamic that demands an urgent flexibility. A dividing line between par and PAR is, according to Kapoor, that par relies on academic theoretical construction while PAR relies on reflection that emerges from lived realities in a specific context of engagement. He is cautious of the danger of par, which is its theoretical hearing impairment produced by blind adherence to theorizing and political interest, ruling relations of capital.
When Research becomes a revolution: Participatory Action Research with Indigenous Peoples (Cora Weber-Pillwax, 45-58)
Her PAR came very naturally when she was involved in her organizing experience of providing educational support to aboriginal communities in the 1980s. She describes the project as follows:
"Life and education was continuing. People were learning. People were involved. People were participating. There was anger, there was frustration but there was the excitement of learning. People wanted to be at the meetings, they wanted to participate. They saw hope because they were engaged. As long as these things were in place, PAR was happening. Life was happening. When some people wanted to keep the power, they started to try to control the movement. They put administrative procedures in place to ensure predictability and manageablity. When that happened, the process stopped. There was no longer participation. there was no longer hope, there was no longer anything living and vital about the system. At that point, PAR no longer existed" (pp.56-57).
Weber-Pillwax argues that transformation is a significant principle of PAR at the outset when Freire and Fals-Borda were developing the theory and practice. She adds that they never intended to use PAR outside of community-based research to bring about transformation or change in personal/collective environment.
Critical Complexity and Participatory Action Research: Decolonizing "Democratic" Knowledge Production (Joe Kincheloe, 107-121)
In this examination of the epistemological and ideological foundations of PAR, Kincheloe emphasizes the notion of critical complexity. The assumption of critical complex epistemology is, he explains, that "the mind creates rather than reflects, and the nature of this creation cannot be separated from the surrounding social world" (p. 109). Based upon this epitemological foundation, he criticizes scientific neopositivistic research has neglected diverse perspectives and interpretations of non-dominant groups, such as the poor, women and people from different ethnic backgrounds for the sake of finding the universal truth. He also warns the essentialism often surfacing among PAR that "glorifies the perspectives of the collaborators and community members in a form of left democratic essentialism" (p.112). Ground in these ideas, he propose critical PAR, which emphasize dissimilar interpretations of the world and diverse impacts, and understanding particular nature of phenomenon in people's lived experience or particular sociocultural/educational circumstances. In this way, critical PAR validates the knowledge and expertise of minority groups, uncovers dominant discourses of power and its insidious practices to maintain the status quo, thus challenging epitemological and ideological aspects of Western research.
Reconceptualizing Participatory Action Research for Sustainability Education (E. Lange, 123-136)
Lange finds the origins of PAR in the international development field, the education field, and the community development field and asserts that the purpose of PAR in each case is disrupting hegemony:
1. Predominant in the global south, PAR began to a response to failed northern-inspired development approaches and the limitations of positivist research paradigm in the hope of creating knowledge, educational practices and social action towards inherent transformation in local communities. The approaches taken by Orlando Fals-Borda and Paulo Freire are inspiring examples for Lange. She explaines that, for Fals-Borda, PAR was "a research tool to enable the popular classes (working class and peasants) to identify their issues and generate 'popular' knowledge useful for discerning effective actions for transforming society toward social justice" (p.124). She sheds light on the assertion that Pablo Lapati made, which is there is a tight connection between the popular education methodology of Freire and PAR in that a political commitment to the oppressed of Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed resonates in the spirit of PAR, a political commitment to solidarity with the marginalized towards sustainable social change.
(For Lange, sustainability means maintaining social needs without diminishing the prospects for health and justice for self, others and environment.)
2) On the other hand, Lange notes, PAR, originating from the Action Sociology of the Frankfurt School, is practiced in community social action field in the global north. One significant different between the development PAR and community PAR is that community PAR revolves around a community of interest, not bound geographically. Nevertheless community PAR is characterized collective analysis and organization for social change for the benefit of those involved in the knowledge production and learning process.
3) The third strand Lange introduce is found in educational action research. This approach is more practice oriented--as a living practice--rather than knowledge production. From this perspective, teaching is a social matter that requires collective dialogue, theorizing and action and at the same time, an ethical issue in that it sees great potential. It delves into deep awareness of being on the basis that "who one is becomes completely caught up with what one knows and does" (Carson and Sumara, 1997, p.xvii).
Lange also look at PAR from living systems theory, which sees the world as an undivided wholeness that is continuously shaped by our cognition and action as well as the natural process. Perceived from this theoretical foundation, PAR conveys particular ontological/epistemological/pedagogical assumptions and implications in social transformation.
With regard to the epistemological assumptions, Lange questions whether middle-class individuals with little politicization can be shifted into an active mode to generate knowledge for civic engagement and empowerment. In her response, Lange states that PAR offers a "reflexive practice that engage them in a more penetrating social analysis of their own historical and class position" (p.129). Lange also maintains that PAR attends to "extrarational" ways of knowing such as intuitive knowing which could transform their being.
Lange sheds light on the three dimensions of PAR that Lapati (1988) described: research/education/action dimensions. Through PAR, Lange emphasizes, one can test their own views against others' perspectives and by acting upon them. Lange connects this pedagogical process with Freire's notion of intervening, which enables learners to become curious and unsettled, and with Briton's (1996) notion of a pedagogy of engagement, which stresses on adults' engagement in critical democratic practices and resistance to the modernity that denies their right to make decisions and maintain dignity. Thus, Lange writes, "learning is a personal and political encounter" (p.131).
Her perspective on social transformation in relation to PAR is interesting. She maintains that such social transformation is a reinvention of power in responding to changing contexts and by telling new stories, enacting alternative social processes and redirecting energies. Thus she calls patience so that the transformation reveals itself.
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