Building emergent situated knowledges in participatory action research

Abstract

Participatory action research (PAR) draws theoretically on the concepts of symbolic interactionism, particularly with regard to the collaborative construction and production of meanings. This article describes how action research builds meaningful theory at the local level thereby enabling researchers, researcher-participants and their local partners to foreground shared local understandings to critique more dominant discourses and policy positions regarding their circumstances. In so doing, this approach to PAR also draws on feminist understandings of standpoint epistemologies and situated knowledges and aligns itself with the politics of post-colonial theory and decolonizing methodologies.