Participatory action research: Reflections on being ‘inside’ the research
Navigating multiple roles and responsibilities
What is participatory action research (PAR)? While there is no one definition, PAR can be understood as a participative, relational, and emergent approach to research that seeks to make a change in the world by putting knowledge into action (Bradbury, 2015). PAR troubles the lines between researchers and participants, situating participants as co-inquirers who are learning and building capacity both individually and collectively to address an issue (Ibid.).
The workshop series I am observing and co-creating with Don and Chloe can be understood as PAR. The workshop design is emergent, meaning that it is being developed as the facilitators respond to and learn from/with participants. My project could also be described as critical participatory action research in that the facilitators and I have explicitly political aims – namely to support decolonial and reconciliatory change within the Canadian conservation sector.
In this PAR process, I am ‘inside’ the research because I am playing multiple roles and fulfilling multiple responsibilities. I am providing administrative support which includes organizing and convening the workshops, drafting email correspondence on behalf of the facilitators, developing the introductory materials for the participants, managing finances to ensure the facilitators are getting paid, and securing additional sources of funding. I am a collaborator and co-conspirator; I participate actively in debriefs with the facilitators where I share my observations, curiosities, questions, concerns, and potential directions the workshops could take. I am also a researcher; I take careful field notes, engage in participant observation, consider the interplay between theory and practice to generate new knowledge, and ensure compliance with research ethics protocols.
At times, I find it tricky to navigate between these multiple roles. I wonder if and when I should draw a boundary between observing the workshops and trying to help shape them. I am concerned that the workshops are creating a space for the mainly white settler participants to feel too much comfort and safety, and critical decolonial scholars have advocated for pedagogies of discomfort and ‘unsettling’ pedagogies to advance decolonial futures (Zembylas, 2018; Ragan, 2012; Hillier, 2017). I also think we could be pushing workshop participants to consider the power dynamics within the sector, to understand the connections between decolonization and environmental health/wellbeing (Whyte, 2018), and to critically interrogate their roles in upholding settler colonial relations. The participants tend to focus on their own futurity as individuals and organizations, and I would like to see that troubled more consistently (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Sometimes a participant offers something really interesting to the group, like a question about the future of the sector, and the facilitators will leave that thread hanging without tugging on it to see where it might take us. I have also not seen the facilitators directly challenge the participants yet, even when they express resistance or share something that needs to be challenged. For example, one organization disclosed that they accept funds from wealthy philanthropists who hold racist colonial beliefs, and the facilitator did not push them to interrogate the rub between that practice and their organization’s stated commitment to support Indigenous-led conservation. I worry that by leaving a statement like that without addressing it, there is an implicit assumption that we are endorsing that practice.
As a collaborator in this project, I helped shape the initial idea for the program, and have helped secure short-term and multi-year base funding for this work. The project is also part of my work plan for the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), and has been endorsed by the CRP’s leadership circle during our fall strategic retreat. This means I am accountable to the partnership for the program and have a responsibility to help ensure it meets the objectives of the partnership - to help transform colonial conservation and elevate Indigenous-led conservation. Because I am invested in the workshops and their success, I find it challenging to observe these things and not step in. At the same time, I also want to respect the lived experience, expertise, and processes of my colleagues because, as facilitators, they are leading the learning. For now, I have decided to share my observations and concerns with the facilitators during our debriefs as if feels appropriate. Otherwise, I step back so they can lead the process with the group. However, in writing this reflection, I have decided to ask my collaborators for their feedback about how they see my role and if they would welcome more direct interventions from me during the workshops.
Shifting subjectivities: Faithful witnessing of others and self as decolonial praxis
I have also been reflecting on my own subjectivity, and how I relate to the research participants. Coulthard (2014) argues that “the subjective realm of colonialism must be the target of strategic transformation along with the socioeconomic structure” (pg. 33). For Indigenous resurgent scholars like Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michael Wildcat, and Jeff Corntassel, the key to both structural and subjective transformation, particularly for Indigenous peoples, is decolonial praxis - the everyday enactment of Indigenous grounded normativities (Coulthard, 2014, Simpson, 2018). While these scholars focus on subjectivity transformation for Indigenous peoples, I am extending their logic by arguing that settlers must also undergo psychoaffective (subjective) transformation to help bring about decolonial futures.
I am a cis-gender, able-bodied, white settler with maternal ties to Williams Treaty territory in central Ontario that go back five generations. I have spent the past five years working in the conservation space, largely under the direction of Indigenous leadership. Most of the learning participants in the ENGO workshop series I am observing are also white settlers and we have been socialized to have similar onto-epistemologic orientations. We were raised embedded in a web of power relations that produced our subjectivities as colonizers - without our explicit knowledge or awareness. In return, we help to (re)produce and maintain colonial structures. As settlers in conservation, we tend to see a division between people/nature; we view parks are places for white, middle-class recreation; terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery are deeply engrained in our psyches; and parks with their emblematic landscapes and charismatic wildlife are an essential part of our identities as Canadians. Through our subjectivities as settler-conservationists, the violence of settler-colonialism and our participation in the continuing displacement of Indigenous peoples through our conservation practices is invisibilized.
In many ways, my project is as much an attempt to understand the participants as it is an attempt to understand myself, and how I have changed/am changing through my own decolonial praxis. I remember a conversation with my supervisor, Dr. Carla Rice, when she helped me understand that one of the central questions for my work is “who are we (as settlers) becoming?”. I am using autoethnography alongside participant observation to help illustrate the dynamic tension between wanting to support subjective change within the workshop participants and wanting to understand change within myself. Autoethnography is useful because it can “help foreground particular subjective knowledge” and is particularly attentive to affect, making “space for sensemaking that defies logic or sites outside language and sometimes conscious awareness” (Adams et al., 2021, pg. 5). To guide my autoethnographic practice, I will draw on Lugones’ (2003) concept of ‘faithful witnessing’ as part of decolonial feminist praxis - a concept that includes a “witnessing on the side of the oppressed and witnessing as the self-witness, the account of events, the witnessing of the process of witnessing, and the witness as human and nonhuman” (Fukushima, 2023, pg. 136). Decolonial feminisms from the global south tend to focus on epistemic resistance and transformation. It is through this process of layered witnessing, I hope to be able to identify and occupy what Lugones calls “decolonial cracks”, or liminal spaces within colonial structures where change may be possible. While I recognize resurgent critiques of recognition, I will try to be careful of the ways in which my gaze as a white settler may reify colonizer/colonized subjectivities in my research and practice. However, through engagement with decolonial feminists like Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldua, I will apply the concepts and practice of faithful witnessing in the hopes of demonstrating epistemic resistance. As argued by Fukushima, (2023), this is powerful because it demonstrates how “even memory can be part of decolonial struggle” (pg. 148).
Works Cited
Adams, T.E.; Holman Jones, S. & Ellis, C. (2021). Introduction – Making sense and taking action: Creating a caring community of Autoethnographers. In Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (Eds). Handbook of Autoethnography. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429431760.
Bradbury, H.. (2015). Introduction: How to situate and define action research. In, Bradbury, H. (Ed). The SAGE handbook of action research, third edition. SAGE Publications.
Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press.
Fukushima, A. I. (2023). A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography. Feminist Formations, 35(1), 134–150. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2023.a902071.
gzhibaeassigae jen meunier. (2019). Breath as research: Finding cracks in the wall. In Wilson, S. & Breen, A. (Eds). Research and Reconciliation : Unsettling Ways of Knowing Through Indigenous Relationships. Canadian Scholars.
Hiller, C. (2017). Tracing the spirals of unsettlement: Euro-Canadian narratives of coming to grips with Indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 415–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241209.
Lugones, M. 2003. Peregrinajes/pilgrimages: Theorizing coalitions against multiple oppressions. Rowman and Littlefield.
Ragan, P. (2011). Unsettling the settler within: Indian Residential Schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press.
Simpson, L.B. (2018). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-‐40.
Whyte, K. (2018). Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125–144. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090109.
Zembylas, M. (2018). Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: decolonial strategies for “pedagogies of discomfort.” Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2018.1428714.