Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1997

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Sociology

Major Professor

John Gaventa

Committee Members

Asafa Jalata, Faye Harrison, Helen Lewis

Abstract

Participatory research is an empowerment strategy whereby powerless people can actively participate in research, education, reflection, and social action. In the process the collective production of knowledge is used to build participatory democracy and mobilize and empower grassroots individuals and collectives to transform oppressive social institutions and structures. The study uses the cultural capital of forty popular researchers to analyze various propositions about participatory research, individual empowerment, and social structural transformation. Analyses were conducted on information developed from in-depth interviews, discussions recorded during a three-day workshop on participatory research, and eleven oral illustrative case examples.

The central concern of the study is to show how participatory research can help powerless people challenge power in terms of decision-making, the mobilization of bias and non-decisions, and control of consciousness. The experiences of project collaborators show that participants produced and used instrumental, interactive, and critical knowledge to learn about the concrete social and physical world in order to actively sustain it; to know what others think, feel, and experience, and to be able to empathize with the other, and then to understand the self as other; and to actively participate in a democratic process along with others to change unjust social conditions. What participatory research offered to the participants in each of the case examples was the chance to become empowered and to actively resist domination based on popular knowledge and culture that they developed themselves.

Five significant aspects of successful participatory research emerged from this study: (1) the work must be committed to the self-determination and emancipation of subordinated groups within society; (2) people must be seen as self-conscious political actors capable of changing themselves and social structures; (3) loyalties must be developed and maintained in terms of people, not institutions; (4) the endeavor must help people to learn to critically analyze individual and collective experiences and to transform consciousness in ways that foster progressive social action; (5) the process must be about facilitating learning through practice that is based on peer teaching in which all persons learn with and from each other.

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