Handbook on Participatory Action Research and Community Development

✍ Scribed by Randy Stoecker (editor), Adrienne Falcón (editor)

• Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 475
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This Handbook is a critical resource for carefully considering the possibilities and challenges of strategically integrating participatory action research (PAR) and community development (CD). Utilizing practical examples from diverse contexts across five continents, it looks at how communities are empowering themselves and bringing about systemic change.

Chapters provide models for sustainably integrating the two practices and explore the transformative potential of decolonizing innovations and incorporating community organizing. With contributions by leading scholars and practitioners from the global south and north, the Handbook explores ways to build infrastructure to bring PAR and CD together, how to use PAR and CD to build people’s power and capacity, and how to integrate PAR and CD in relation to community and organizational capacity building. It further gives practical advice and academic analysis on youth PAR, how to use PAR and CD in crisis situations such as earthquakes and pandemics, and envisions radically alternative PAR and CD approaches.

This is a timely resource for social science scholars looking to better understand PAR as an important research method. It rethinks the theories underpinning both PAR and CD, offering important lessons for community development practitioners and non-profit professionals, as well as higher education professors interested in community engagement.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Contributors
1. Introduction: reflecting upon the development of participatory action research and community development efforts
PART I STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES FOR INTEGRATING PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
2. Flipping the script: community-initiated urban research with the Liberal Arts Action Lab
3. Toward a community development science shop model: insights from Peterborough, Haliburton and the Kawartha Lakes
4. Elevating community voices
5. Sociocultural intervention as a resource for social transformation in Cuban communities of the twenty-first century
PART II ORGANIZING COMMUNITIES
6. Community organizing for environmental change: integrating research in support of organized actions
7. The birth of a community of practice in Québec to support community organizations leading participatory action research as a tool for community development: what it teaches us
8. The centrality of storytelling at the nexus of academia and community organizing in rural Kentucky
PART III BUILDING ORGANIZATIONS AND NEIGHBORHOODS
9. Putting theory into practice: leveraging community-based research to achieve community-based outcomes in DeLand, Florida
10. From mission to praxis in neighborhood work: lessons learned from a three-year faculty/community development initiative
11. Early childhood wellness through asset-based community development: a participatory evaluation of Communities Acting for Kids’ Empowerment
12. The complexities of participatory action research: a community development project in Bangladesh
PART IV GROWING YOUTH POWER
13. Youth participatory action research as an approach to developing community-level responses to youth homelessness in the United States: learning from Advocates for Richmond Youth
14. Volunteerism as a vehicle for civil society development in Ukraine: a community-based project to develop youth volunteerism in a Ukrainian community
15. Design Your Neighborhood: the evolution of a city-wide urban design learning initiative in Nashville, Tennessee
PART V RESPONDING TO CRISIS
16. Rethinking participatory development in the context of a strong state
17. Tracing power from within: learning from participatory action research and community development projects in food systems during the COVID-19 pandemic
18. The information and knowledge landscapes of mutual aid: how librarians can use participatory action research to support social movements in community development
PART VI EXPANDING OUR THINKING
19. Be and build the city: an experience of sociopraxis in Cuenca, Ecuador
20. Leading with locally produced knowledge: development in Jemna, Tunisia
21. Relationship as resistance: partnership and vivencia in participatory action research
22. Re-storying participatory action research: a narrative approach to challenging epistemic violence in community development
Index