Why Don’t we do More Participatory Research?
Randy Stoecker
Keynote Address prepared for:
Creating Knowledge and Building Community: The First CSU Conference on Community-Based Teaching and Research, 2006.
[draft]
The more I have thought about the title of this talk, the more it has intrigued me. And that’s not just me being self-absorbed, because the title was a collective project with Chris Fiorentino, Debra David, and Jerry Eisman. So what I’ve been doing these past few weeks is trying to figure out what it means. And it’s been great fun.
It’s an intriguing title to me because it has that M.C. Escher quality of presenting itself as one thing at first glance, but then urging you to look at it a second time, differently. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, it dares you to attempt to reconcile and integrate the two things you see.
The title expresses both a theoretical question and a concrete invitation. On the one hand, it asks “why are we not doing more participatory research?” A research question.. But the title is also issuing an invitation, such as “why don’t we dance,” using that strange form of English grammar that sounds like it is challenging the invitee to an intellectual argument upon which the acceptance of the invitation will hinge.
And that seems like a reasonable enough way to organize what I would like to say here. I will begin by outlining what is so hard about participatory research. Then I will try to convince you that, even though you will have to reject most of what you have been taught about knowledge, you will have to learn bunches of new skills, you will have to risk your professional reputation, and you will have to endure the possibility of failure, it is the most fun you can possibly have as a community engaged academic. Finally, in the end, we will reconcile the fear of the first title and the exhilaration of the second.
Sound good?
But First
Probably the first thing I should do, however, is talk about what I mean by participatory research and justify why someone like me would be brought all the way out here to tell you about it.
You may have heard about this thing called community-based research, or CBR, or perhaps community-based participatory research—CBPR—or participatory action research—PAR—or any of the other 31 terms that Petty and colleagues (1995) identified for naming the process. You may have also heard about the debates between those who take a social change approach and those who take a social service approach to community-based research (Stoecker 2003). Across all that diversity, however, are two common principles. One is that the research should be for the social good. Another is that the people affected by the research should participate in the conduct of the research. In general, then, those of us who do this practice agree that our research should have some real impact and that the people impacted should be involved in it somehow. As we will see, however, the terms “impact” and “participation” are open to widely varying interpretations.
So what’s the connection between participatory research, which is the term I prefer, and service learning? Since the late 1990s, there has been growing dissatisfaction among many people both inside and outside of the service learning movement. In the worst cases we saw poor communities exploited as free sources of student education (Eby, 1998). In the next worst cases we became concerned that the “charity” form of service learning was reinforcing students’ perceptions of poor communities as helpless (Kahne and Westheimer, 1996; Brown, 2001 Marullo and Edwards, 2000), and that the connection between what was happening in the classroom and what was happening in the community was tenuous at best. And we became increasingly concerned by all this emphasis on student learning with so little attention to community outcomes. In fact, to this day, there are only a handful of studies looking at the extent to which communities do or do not benefit from service learning (Bacon 2002; Bridsall, n.d.; Bushouse, 2005; Cruz and Giles 2000; Ferrari and Worrall, 2000; Jones, 2003, Jorg, 2003, Tice, 1994; Vernon and Ward, 1999, Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2000).
At the same time that the service learning critique was growing, the revival of a practice from the 1960s—participatory research—was gaining ground. For the most part, however, the practice involved researchers collaborating with community and nonprofit organizations on research projects that supported the organizations’ work. Students were relatively absent from such partnership projects. And then, kind of like the old “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” commercial, the two practices started to combine.
You and I, today, are part of the peanut butter and chocolate process. Many of you likely started with the idea of service learning, and now have arrived at the idea of participatory research. I, in contrast, started with the idea of participatory research, and have slowly been arriving at the idea of service learning. For over a decade I had been working with neighborhood-based organizations, helping them do research and strategic planning to support their work. And while I involved the occasional highly-skilled student in those projects, it was for the purpose of meeting the organization’s needs, not the student’s needs. Then I became involved with the Corella and Bertram F. Bonner Foundation, during a humid, foggy late night walk with their vice president, Bobby Hackett. I had just finished facilitating a planning session for a new program at Guilford College in Greensboro North Carolina to link campus and community that the Bonner Foundation was funding. They had been thinking of this new program as service learning, but had brought me in because they had begun wondering about participatory research, and we started to mix their peanut butter and my chocolate. I discovered, on that long walk with Bobby, that Bonner was funding ten other schools to do the same thing, and they found some money for me to document their efforts. The project lasted for five more years, and by the end of it we had a new model combining service learning and participatory research, which we called community-based research or CBR, and a pretty good idea of the challenges involved in mixing peanut butter and chocolate.
Why peanut butter and chocolate? And by the way, for those of you who love those peanut butter cups, I should admit that I can’t stand peanut butter and can’t imagine the two tastes together (well, actually, I can, but imagining it grosses me out so badly that I avoid it at all costs). Since my focus has always been on serving communities and their organizations, and service learning always seemed so student-focused, sometimes to the point of being contemptuous of community, service learning has been my peanut butter. As you will see however, I have recently begun to change that perception. Now service learning is more like gooey caramel—it tastes a lot better than peanut butter but carries the risk of pulling out your fillings.
You might sense my difficulty here. We have two models of connecting campus and community that may not be compatible. One has historically emphasized student outcomes, the other, community outcomes. One focuses on co-producing new knowledge, the other on providing examples of existing knowledge. One is historically curriculum-directed, the other supposedly community directed. So the question is, can the two be combined—are they really two great tastes that taste great together—or must one give way to the other? And with this question we enter the topic of why we don’t do more participatory research.
The Challenge
It may seem odd to ask why we don’t do more participatory research, because it seems like everyone is doing it. Community-Based Research, or CBR, and the public health version called community-based participatory research, or CBPR, are all the rage in higher education today. The question, however, is whether either is really participatory research. I recently analyzed 232 CBR concept proposals sent to the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, on whose board I sit, to find out (among other things) how much community participation was being planned into the proposed projects. I used the model of the basic steps in any research project: choosing the question, designing the method, collecting the data, analyzing the data, and using the results. I found that those affected by the research were mostly included in the research only as free labor. They were rarely invited to help choose the research or design it (Stoecker, 2006). For the most part, then, this newly popularized CBR and CBPR suffers from the same lack of community control that has plagued service learning.
If we use a strict definition--the one proposed by Kerry Strand, Sam Marullo, Nick Cutforth, Pat Donohue and myself in our recent book—that the “community” (or at least some segment of it) must control the generation of the project, not very many of us, including myself in some cases, are doing participatory research. On Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of participation we are stuck somewhere between the very bottom of the ladder, at the level of manipulation, and the middle tokenism section. In manipulation, we merely use communities as sources of either information or data collection labor. In the worst cases, this becomes colonizing research (Smith, 1999), where researchers extract knowledge from a community and use it to create changes that have not been agreed upon by the community and advance the career of the researcher.
I suspect much of the problem comes from the culture of service learning, whose origins in the 1980s was influenced by liberal faculty becoming increasingly distressed at the perceived increasing conservatism of their students. They believed that finding ways of confronting students with real poor people would help reverse the trend, and the focus of service learning on changing students, rather than changing communities, was born. Community-based research has become popularized within that same historical cultural framework, distracting us from the goals of community control and community empowerment. We then do participatory research without participation because doing the participation part is beyond our skills, outside of our experience, and contrary to our professional socialization.
It is very interesting to me that, in the one situation I know of where community-based research has preceded service learning—the Trent Center for Community-Based Education in Peterborough Canada—community control is not as difficult as in the United States. The TCCBE is, in fact, expanding their community-based research program to service learning and implementing it with the same insistence upon community control as for their CBR program.
But when you make the process truly community-controlled, where community organizations tell the academics what they want rather than the academics saying what they are willing to offer, you also invoke an entirely different set of skill requirements for students and faculty. And here is where the challenges develop.
Communication: Participatory research requires much more continuous and honest communication between researcher and community than does most service learning. And really good communication is dependent on really strong relationships. Community and organization folks need to feel like they can be fully honest with the researcher and hold that researcher accountable throughout the process. If no one is telling you what you are doing wrong, then you don’t have good enough relationships. I am currently in the midst of a project assessing community organization perspectives on service learning in Madison, Wisconsin. As part of the process we organized a core group of organization representatives to guide the research process. A few weeks ago I sent out a draft of the interview questions we wanted to use and got a forcefully worded response from one representative that we had not made communication between faculty and organization a central question, which was, for this representative, “an essential issue.” It is always quite reassuring to be told what I am doing wrong because it signals to me that we have a relationship.
Community organizing: Real participatory research, with real participation, is dependent on people turning out for meetings, volunteering their time, and learning new things. This isn’t easy. Research methods are not the most exciting topic for a community meeting, and the only way to get people back for the multiple meetings involved in a project like this is to build such strong relationships that they feel connected and believe that together we can grow something from this. How many of us are skilled in recruiting participants, facilitating meetings, organizing tasks, and pulling together disparate ideas? Probably the most important part of my education has come from hanging out with community organizers, who have taught me how to encourage and support participation, how to get people to a meeting, how to arrange the chairs for the meeting, how to write an agenda for a meeting, how to keep the meeting flowing, how to inject excitement into the meeting, how to get people to complete the tasks they commit to at the meeting, and how to get them back to the next meeting. Running a good meeting, from my experience, requires far more skill than running a good regression equation. And you all know, just by your own experience in higher education, how abysmally bad academics are at running meetings. And then someone has to organize participants to take action, and most of us academics haven’t a clue about how to proceed from a research project to a social action project. So your research shows that the bank isn’t lending money in your neighborhood. Now what?
Rethinking knowledge: Someone has to bring all those people to meetings, and get them to volunteer their time, and educate them in the practice of research. This is not like teaching. We are not the smartest person in the room. In fact, one of the skills many of us academics have forgotten is how to listen. Yes, we will listen to other people with letters after their names, but how many of us know how to listen to people with only an eighth grade education, who come from an historically oppressed racial group, and a less privileged class background? It is an entirely different kind of listening, not rooted in thought but in action. I didn’t learn how to lay ceramic tile by reading about it, but by apprenticing with a university maintenance craftworker whose formal education stopped at high school. Then there are basic things like working on a schedule set by others that sometimes lasts only weeks rather than months and where the deadline, because it is set by a grant cycle or a government policy hearing, is absolute. Perhaps the most powerful example of the need for rethinking knowledge is from the lessons learned by the Centers for Disease Control a couple of decades ago. When healthy adults in the Navajo Nation began suddenly dying from a mysterious flu-like illness, the CDC sent in their researchers to collect data from the still grieving families, asking insensitive questions with total disregard for cultural norms. Family members supplied them with junk data in return. And people continued to die. But then a Navajo public health official, working with a Navajo medicine man, looked into the so-called “myths” of the Navajo, among which was the warning that, if a mouse ran across your blanket during the rainy season, it was bad luck and you must burn it. This “myth” led them to investigate the rodent population, where they found the mouse-born hantavirus.
Shifting perspective: We academics approach research as research, rather than as social change. Because we don’t have the relationships, we don’t know what the community or group is trying to accomplish, and we don’t have a good idea of how to integrate research into their work. We also approach learning very differently from many community folks. One of the reasons we are academics is because we were good book learners. When we are out there in the community, however, we are often working with people who are not good book learners, and who distrust us because they have been cheated and lied to by people who use words for a living—bosses, bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers. Through their eyes, we look much more like the enemy than an ally. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as researchers, or even as teachers. And if we give up those two roles, what is left? The last that is left is service—that much maligned and wobbly third leg of the academic stool--that is often itself limited solely to sitting on departmental or institutional committees. There is no role called “participatory researcher.” And it is impossible to overstate just how much shift in perspective is required to be a participatory researcher. We have to give up control over the knowledge process. We have to include forms of knowledge, such as oral history, that would normally be seen as illegitimate. We have to think of ourselves as learners rather than teachers. We have to think of ourselves as only one role in a complex process.
None of us got taught these things in PhD school. And even when we do develop such skills, rethink what knowledge is, and shift our perspective, we have to contend with institutional contexts that insist that we stop teaching at the end of 16 weeks, give the institutions, rather than community organizations, 40% or more of the grants we receive for that magical concept of “overhead”, and squeeze our community work in between publishing in professional journals and teaching huge introductory courses.
Going up against all this can be terrifying. Plus, think about the consequences of getting it wrong. It’s scary enough to write something in a journal that might be criticized by one or two people with letters after their names. But imagine writing something that may affect someone’s ability to vote, or earn a living, or get a decent education, or receive a home loan, or even lose their life to a death penalty obsessed government. It’s an awesome responsibility. How much easier it is to simply make profound progressive utterances in class, even if there are right wing spies taking notes.
Geez, no wonder we don’t do more participatory research. But could it really be that bad?
Why Don’t We Dance (or do more participatory research)?
So now we arrive at the invitation. Why don’t we, eh? Come on, it’ll be fun! Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t.
You don’t know how? You’ve got two left feet? You’ve never taken lessons? You don’t know where to start? It sounds too hard? Well, we can overcome all that!
The first thing we all need is a good theory. Better than experiential education, better than charity service learning. Our theory will be the theory of the social relations of knowledge production. Here’s how it works. Anisur Rahman (1991:14) says that the gap between "those who have social power over the process of knowledge generation, and those who have not, has reached dimensions no less formidable than the gap in access to the means of physical production." John Gaventa (1997), one of the world’s participatory research powerhouses, picks up this idea, emphasizing the inequalities that are created and reinforced when only a small group has access to the “means of knowledge production.” Remember the old proverb about giving someone a fish versus teaching them how to fish? It’s the same thing with knowledge production. In contrast to physical production, however, which often requires expensive machinery and a massive array of skills, the means of information production are much more easily captured by the poor and excluded. All you need is access to a computer and training in research methods. When people have the capacity to do their own research, they have the ability to counter the lies told to them by corporations, governments, and churches. When we use our positions to help excluded and oppressed communities take control over the means of knowledge production, by constructing their own research questions, designing their own research methods, collecting their own data, conducting their own analysis, and putting the resultant knowledge to use, we not only have helped them impact one issue, but have also helped them take on the next issue they confront. This theory tells us that we need to use participatory research projects to enhance the community’s control over the means of knowledge production.
The next thing we need is a good methodological framework. Just like there are different dances for different occasions, there are different forms of participatory research for different situations. Understanding what situation you are in requires understanding the community-based social change process. That process is fairly basic. It starts with diagnosing some community condition—where crime is coming from, why people can’t get home loans, why children are doing so badly in school. The next step is to develop a prescription that fits the diagnosis—what are the best practices, what are the needed policies. Once the group chooses a prescription, it is time to implement it, and then to evaluate it. Knowing where you are in the community change process will help you understand what kinds of research you need. At the diagnostic stage, needs assessments, environmental testing, health screening, asset mapping, SWOT analyses, and other methods are appropriate. At the prescription stage, policy research and best practices research are useful. At the implementation stage, depending on the project goals, there may also be research opportunities. For example, perhaps the goal is to bring youth and elders together in the community, and the chosen strategy is an oral history project. At the implementation stage, then, youth with video cameras go out and interview elders. Then, finally, in the evaluation stage you collect data to determine the extent to which your chosen intervention is achieving the goals you set for it.
Finally, there is the participatory researcher skill set. Continuing with our dancing metaphor, it’s not enough to know, in the Mambo for example, to step forward with the left foot, rock back onto the right foot, bring the left foot next to the right foot, step back with the right foot, rock forward onto the left foot, and bring the right foot next to the left foot. You have to be able to actually do it, and with a certain amount of grace and style. Likewise, to recruit people to a participatory research planning meeting, it’s not enough to know that you have to call them two weeks before the meeting, send them a reminder one week before the meeting, and then call them two days before the meeting to actually get them to attend. You have to actually do it, and with enough skill to get people to actually show up. Thankfully, like dancing, it is a learnable skill (actually, for me, it’s far more learnable than dancing). I’ve learned it by hanging out with people who do it for a living. I also ask for advice from community insiders on how to get a particular group of people to a particular meeting. And when I get really lucky, I don’t have to do it at all, because I’m working with a community organizer who can do that part of the job. Then, of course, the meeting has to be fun and exciting, where once again you can ask advice of those who know the group and are good at working with it.
I have in fact found that the most important skill I have is my ability to admit to my own ignorance. A couple of weeks ago I was called in to help a community change effort choose an initial project. I had been given a little background by the staff member responsible for organizing the group, but had never met anyone in the effort before, and had two days notice with a three sentence list of the issue priorities the group had chosen at the last meeting. The only time we could find to meet and prepare for the community meeting was the hour before the community meeting. So we got together and started talking about how I might facilitate the discussion. But we had barely started getting down to the details when people started arriving early and engaging the staff member in conversation. I started to sweat, not just figuratively. Then, 20-some people entered the room: two fully uniformed and fully armed community police officers, the president of the local hospital (also in full uniform, though of a different kind), community residents, city council members representing sections of the neighborhood, and others. All were quite obviously skeptical of this braided outsider in their midst, and I was supposed to help them choose a starter project to help get the group off the ground. So, it was time for a little introspection—where was my fear coming from? Well, mainly it was coming from the fact that I knew almost nothing about this group and its community. And I was the professor—ignorance is not how I got all those letters after my name. But then I thought, well, if I know I’m ignorant and they already suspect I’m ignorant, let’s go with that. So I had them teach me—to fill in the details about the three priority issue areas—housing, crime, and youth—that they had chosen at the last meeting. After a half hour we had not just some abstract issue statements, but concrete symptoms around which programs could be built. Now I could see where we were headed, and my fear started to become exhilaration. There were some issues around which it would be easy to build programs—others around which it would be more difficult. And I asked the group to come up with some easy ones. They latched onto a project to do a spring clean-up and after another hour had committed themselves to it.
When we stop being the professor, the teacher, the expert, and instead become the listener, the learner, the collaborator, we can truly begin to build, rather than just transmit, knowledge. And here is where we must return to the dancing metaphor. I will admit that up until I started writing this talk I was nearly completely ignorant of social dance. I still am, but I figured I had to do a little research if I was going to use the metaphor. And then, as luck would have it, I was doing a workshop at a service learning conference in Wisconsin a couple weeks ago. We went around the room to tell what we were passionate about. One woman expressed her passion for the Argentinian Tango and during a break I asked her about some of what I was reading about how feminism was influencing the Tango (Trenner 1998). Most social dance, including the Tango, requires a leader and a follower. Where tradition had previously dictated male leadership, however, the advent of feminism now introduced negotiation of leading and following on the dance floor. The conversation with this service learning coordinator was instructive. Switching leaders in the middle of a dance requires very sophisticated communication not just to avoid an argument, but also to avoid a trip to the emergency room. And, it appears, the practice is injecting energy into the Tango, both because of the sparks of controversy it causes and the innovations it produces. And that is what really good participatory research is like. The partners know when to switch the lead in the dance, and can do so fluidly.
But enough of the metaphors. They’ve been fun, but we need to end this by getting down to work. Hopefully, by now, some of you are craving some thoughts on where to start, how to proceed, what to do. So here are my lessons on participatory research. Those of you who have ever watched David Letterman’s late night show know that one of the things he is famous for is the top ten list. So, since we are in show biz land, even if we are on the wrong coast, I thought I would steal the Letterman method. So here are the top ten ways to get into participatory research:
10. Take a community worker to lunch. Or maybe just coffee. Or maybe just meet in their office. In fact, let them suggest the location. Ask them about their work. Tell them you are interested in the work they are doing, as you are looking for ways you might be able to support grass roots social change in your community. Tell them what kind of work you do. You don’t have to make a commitment on the spot. But if you don’t, make sure you buy their lunch or coffee or whatever. You may even be able to network them a little bit to other resources. I know it seems like they are hard to find, but they’re not. Most of them are in the phone book. The others you can find by calling people who know people. Remember, the vast majority of the people you are going to partner with are in the helping professions. They’ll be happy to help you find good matches if they’re not the one.
9. Read the literature on participatory research. This practice is no longer marginal to higher education. There are now journals dedicated to participatory research, and every day another disciplinary journal accepts an article about participatory research, or where the data is drawn from participatory research. Participatory research has theories, methods, and findings. When your colleagues look down their noses at it, ask them if they are familiar with the work of internationally acclaimed experts Paulo Freire, John Gaventa, Rajesh Tandon, Augusto Boal, and I can get you others. Watch them try to pretend they’ve read that stuff and then engage them in a conversation about the concepts to really embarrass them. Of course, for those on the fence, you can gently and clandestinely slip them an article or two, and perhaps they will then have the courage to take the next step.
8. Start small. Don’t start with a project to take on a multinational corporation polluting the local water supply unless you’re tenured, have a solid relationship with a strong activist organization, and are up for the fight. If you are just starting out, choose a small project that can be accomplished in a few weeks, and allows both you and your partner organization a chance to test out the relationship. My colleague Nick Cutforth says it’s like dating. You start by having coffee. If that works out, maybe you have dinner together. Then you go steady. Each step involves a longer and deeper commitment.
7. Find a community organizer. Remember, this is not about doing a research project. It’s about creating social change. If there isn’t someone out there organizing the affected community, then the research will be useless. Don’t think that just because you have a PhD behind your name that the powers that be will listen to you. If that was the case, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have never been more than overpaid bad actors. Change happens by linking your research with the community’s organized voice. That requires highly skilled community organizers to recruit people, get them to meetings, turn them out for actions, and create the pressure that forces change.
6. Learn community organizing. If you can’t find the organizer, then you have to be the organizer. I used to say I wouldn’t touch a project that didn’t have an organizer attached to it, because my organizing skills were lousy. I still prefer to have an organizer to work with, but I am finding that I am learning some of those skills through osmosis, and through attending organizer training. Probably the two most important participatory research projects for my own skill development have involved ACORN organizers. For those of you unfamiliar with ACORN, it stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and is one of the country’s national community organizing networks. They also have a reputation for being the most militant and the most willing to work with the poorest communities. I had the honor of being the “evaluator” on two projects involving ACORN. I not only learned most of what I know about community organizing through working with them, but also learned how to transform top-down evaluation research into bottom-up participatory evaluation.
5. Think action. It’s not about the research. It’s not about the research. It’s not about the research. Well, actually, it is, but in service of the action. Always ask, “how is this research related to the social change goals and strategies?” If you can’t answer that question, you are doing the wrong research. Your community partner should also be able to answer that question. And if you have different answers, then see the number three way to get into participatory research, coming up.
4. Teach a class on participatory research. You and I know the dirty little secret of teaching. The best way to learn something new is to have to teach it to others. It’s the same for participatory research. Thankfully, there are a bunch of participatory research syllabi out there. Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, the COMM-ORG website I manage, and your basic Google process will turn up bunches of syllabi—881 hits and counting. Remember too, teaching a class that is actually doing a participatory research project is one of the best ways to deal with the scheduling pressures involved. The best participatory research projects can get you credit for service and teaching and research, leading us to the number three way to get into participatory research.
3. Contribute to the literature on participatory research. Want to do participatory research but you need to get tenure? There has been a lot written about participatory research, but there is a lot more that can be written. There are now dedicated journals you can publish in: Action Research International, Action Research, The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning for those of you doing participatory research with students, and others. A few years ago we also started compiling a list of disciplinary journals that would consider articles generated through participatory methods, but then the list got so long that it became unnecessary. When you seek to publish this work, however, consider your community partners. Make sure you have an explicit agreement on what can and cannot be published. In most cases, your community partner sees the information as belonging to them. Don’t make the rest of us look bad by not getting their permission or involving them in the writing process as co-authors. I have now even offered co-authorship to community members who have contributed oral information, thinking that I wouldn’t have much to write if they weren’t speaking, though so far none have taken me up on it.
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate. We’ve talked about how hard this is. But it’s a lot easier when you remember you don’t have to do it alone. Yes, it requires us to completely rethink issues of who has knowledge and what counts as knowledge, but once us academics get past that hurdle, it’s a very freeing experience. These days I am spending about 10 hours a week just communicating with people as part of the participatory research projects I am involved in. It certainly does cut into your professional time, but the rewards are worth it. And the costs of not doing it are too high. You talk about what happened at the last meeting, how to organize the next meeting, how to structure the research, how to fix problems you are having in collecting data, what the data means, how to write the report and organize action around it, and much more.
1. And finally, the number one way to get into participatory research: Ask a community worker how you can help. I was just in my second year of PhD school, taking a class in qualitative research methods. The prof assigned us to go out and interview someone so we could practice doing it. At the time I was living in the Cedar-Riverside or West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis, a 1980s, yes 1980s, hippie community full of run-down single family and duplex housing. Some of the housing was getting new roofs, new windows, new insulation, and even total makeovers. I was intrigued by what was going on so I went to the office of the neighborhood organization to ask if I could interview someone about it. There I found Tim Mungavan, part organizer and part architect, and requested an interview. He glared at me and charged that he had been bothered by student after student for interviews about the neighborhood, and none of them had the courtesy of even bringing him a copy of the paper they wrote. He insisted I promise him a copy of my writing in exchange for the interview. I was shaking in my boots and readily agreed. And I thought about what he had said. Why was he so angry? And I started to get an inkling of how much knowledge exploitation academia has been responsible for. So when I brought back a copy of my paper a couple of weeks later, I asked if there was anything else I could do. He looked at me, sizing me up with a twinkle in his eye, and then pointed to a door at the corner of his office, explaining that the door led to a short hallway, and then to the outside. It was also a fire escape route, but had become blocked by boxes of stuff and the fire marshal was insisting it be cleaned. He asked me to clean it. Here I was, a PhD student, being asked to clean a defacto storeroom. But what was I going to do? Say no, and ruin any chance of repairing the damage done by all who had had come before me? So I said yes. When I entered the hallway, the first box I found was filled with old neighborhood newspapers telling the story of the community’s struggle to defend itself against a developer who wanted to level the community. The second box was filled with correspondence between lawyers, activists, the developer, and city hall. Tim knew what I would find. By the time I had finished cleaning up that hallway, I had all my data exactly where I wanted it. I ended up writing my dissertation about this neighborhood that had won against the forces of evil, and then a book, and I continue to return to Cedar-Riverside for regular projects, 20 years later. And I haven’t been able to do a straight exploitive research project, anywhere, since.
In Conclusion
I know what some of you are thinking. You are thinking that this seems like an awful lot to change. It seems like an awful lot of responsibility. It seems like it could lead to a lot of embarrassment. It seems like it requires giving up our cherished disciplinary-bound thinking, our academic authority, and learning a bunch of new skills-- like listening to people--that are really scary. But this is California. In California anyone, and I mean anyone, regardless of age, weight, or sex, can go to the beach in a bikini. California is the place where the causal arrows between fantasy and reality go both ways (remember Captain Kirk’s communicator?). California is where not mudslide, nor brush fire, nor earthquake can deter the rich and the poor alike. And California is the place to which the rest of us always look so that we can say, “look at what those nuts in California are doing.” You have led in good ideas and bad ones (and, if it makes you feel any better, think of how many of those bad ideas caught on in the rest of the country). And California is the place where the challenges of the 21st century--urban air pollution, inter-racial conflict and inequality, the limits of growth, glutinous energy consumption, working class homelessness—and a host of other challenges are rearing up. Participatory research will be essential to those challenges—to counter powerlessness, separate fact from fiction, connect information and action. Many of you are already doing it, but you are not yet known for doing it. Let’s make participatory research another crazy California idea.
Thank you.
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