Summary
Participatory action research (PAR) is research done with the people it concerns, who help set the questions, interpret the findings and act on them. The Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda developed it with peasant organisations in the 1970s and named it in the early 1980s. The historian Juan Mario Díaz-Arévalo describes his path as a move from “a participatory model for the people, to one carried out by the people, to one where the researcher works with the people”. Aid agencies later took up the methods, and critics say the participation thinned. The Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s ‘Decolonizing Methodologies’ (1999) adds that research, for Indigenous peoples, has a colonial history.
Rationale
Part 2 imagines a neighbourhood inquiry whose participants “could begin with a deep disposition they care about”. PAR is the craft for that: residents hold the questions and judge what changed, visiting researchers assist.