Intimate details : Participatory action research in prison

Michelle Fine and María Elena Torre. (2006). 4 (3), 253–269. doi: 10.1177/1476750306066801

For the authors, "participatory action researchers have an obligation to reveal, when possible, the intimate details of PAR undertaken in difficult social institutions" (p. 255)

"In communities, schools or prisons, PAR projects document the subterranean pools of collective dissent by aggregating and making public ‘private’ troubles among very different youth, women and men. Revealing the common, public roots of these ‘private’ troubles (Mills, 1959), PAR demonstrates the differentiated consequences of social oppression, distributed unevenly (but not only) by race, ethnicity and class. PAR shatters the false consensus of neo-liberal institutional life by challenging the everyday banality and seeming inevitability of injustice. More specifically, participatory action research lifts the multiple stories and counter stories dwelling within any complex institution or social arrangement, privileging in particular those perspectives that age on the bottom of social arrangements, where the lies, the ghosts, the buried memories, the disposables, the traitors and the silences gather." (p. 255)

Fine continues to use and stresses the word PAR.

[Fancy descriptions and cautious uses of words in this article]