Moving with the movement: Collaboratively building a participatory action research study of social movement learning in Ada,Ghana

Abstract

While participatory research methods, especially participatory action research, are a recognized approach to the study of social movement learning, the way in which this participatory relationship is framed and designed has deep implications on the collaborative nature of the research. Studies overly framed and designed by academics, as opposed to collectively designed with movements, run the risk of mining movements for information as opposed to contributing to their goals and learning. This paper describes a co-owned design process, based on established relationships, with a social movement in Ghana where being based in movement-articulations helps the research move with the movement. This co-owned process sets the stage for the emergence of movement embedded knowledge democracy.

Keywords

Participatory action research design democratization of knowledge social movement learning Ada Ghana women’s leadership artisanal salt production

Participatory action research (PAR) has been positioned for some time as an important methodology for changing the nature of research ethics and relationships. Edwards (1989), for instance, describes it as a crucial way for development studies research to reconfigure power relations within the development industry. And yet, critics such as Cooke and Kothari (2001) point to the dangers of participation that is merely another form of stabilizing populations. Crucial then for participatory action research processes is not just the label, but the politics, ethics and the very manner in which this action research process emerges. This paper argues that a crucial feature of a PAR process that opens the possibilities Edwards hoped for, and avoids the critiques raised by Kothari and Cooke, is the process through which the research is framed. The openness and mutuality of the way PAR is designed, then, ultimately speaks to the democratic nature of the knowledge it generates.

In 2004, in a meeting to develop a series of social accountability processes that would later emerge as a publication entitled, “Community Voices” (Gariba & Langdon, 2005), the two authors met. Larweh, the station coordinator for Ghana’s first community radio station—Radio Ada—told Langdon of a struggle in his hometown, Ada. Langdon was working as the Research Coordinator of Ghana’s Institute for Policy Alternatives at the time. Larweh described how the artisanal salt production process in Ada, emerging from West Africa’s largest salt-yielding lagoon, the Songor, was being transformed away from communal access to individual control through social and economic pressures, called “atsiakpo” locally. Crucially, this artisanal practice is the backbone of over 60,000 Adas’ livelihood. Over the coming years, Langdon would work with Larweh, as well as a number of other Ada-based activists who formed part of a resource-defense movement called the Ada Songor Advocacy Forum (ASAF), to deepen discussions around this resource and what this movement was trying to do to stem the tide of individualist and, ultimately, neoliberal incursions. During the course of these discussions, this group began to explore building a collaborative research process that would at once study the movement’s engagements and create a space for the emergence of reflections and learning on these engagements. This space became the center of ASAF’s project to democratize knowledge within itself, and within the broader Ada population. This paper describes how this dialogue and eventual framing process emerged, and why, ultimately, this type of relationship-first and movement-owned process is important, not only in terms of contributions to research on understanding movement learning, but more crucially in contributing to movement goals.

In the sections that follow, the context of this movement/struggle is introduced, along with a more detailed description of the process that has helped enable the research to “move with the movement”; key to this is the notion of research contributing to movement praxis (action and reflection). To illustrate what the process of action and reflection looks like in ASAF, the example of women’s emergence as the main analytical and organizational power of the movement will be described. Marginalized from the previous iteration of the movement, a women’s core within the movement articulated an agenda, acted upon it, and learned from these actions—as did the rest of the movement. Key to this praxis was democratic widening of knowledge and dialogue over the struggles over salt. The article will conclude by discussing how this approach to design has deep implications for research with social movements. Before both of these sections though, some exploration of the literature on PAR, the study of social movement learning, knowledge democracy, as well as the arguments in favor of movement embedded research needs to be introduced.

Participatory action research on social movement learning and democratizing knowledge

Participatory and collaborative research approaches in general, and PAR in particular, have been identified as being an important and synergistic method for studying social movement learning (SML) (Hall & Turray, 2006). Yet, the way these approaches are framed and, ultimately, constituted has deep implications on the nature of the collaboration: whether, for instance, it replicates extractive forms of research that mine movements for data, or parallels and reinforces movement processes and deepens movement reflections, leading to what Foley describes as a “complex… basis for future strategies” (1999, p. 143). Key to this process of framing and constituting participatory research is the research design process. As Kane (2001) and Choudry and Kapoor (2009) note, it is the way research relationships are formed, and the way these relationships are embedded in movement-articulations that determine whether the research is positioned to be a synergistic addition to movement processes—a moving with movements—or an extractive process for academic purposes. This speaks directly to whose knowledge counts and how this knowledge is used—a valuing Gaventa (2013), building on Visvanathan, calls cognitive justice.

Hall (2005) and Fals-Borda (2006) have each written reflective pieces on the history of participatory action research and its connection with adult education, in the case of the former, and, in the case of the latter, its connection with an anti-Eurocentric desire to stop the studying of exotized “others”, and rather generate spaces of mutual meaning-making. As Irving (2013) has recently argued, spaces of mutual meaning-making—such as the space at the center of this research—are crucial components in the generation of democratic knowledge. Similarly, Visvanathan’s concept of cognitive justice (2005) and its link to contesting the primacy of eurocentric thought not just through the inclusion of marginalized people’s voices, but through their ways of knowing and being also echoes Fals-Borda’s original conception of PAR. In this sense, PAR resonates well with desires to generate plural and democratic knowledge on issues that concern and mobilize people and movements, for as Gaventa and Bizen note, “Producing democratic knowledge require[s] a democratic process” (2014, p. 9).

And yet, Fals-Borda (2006) notes how participatory action research (PAR)—a term he coined—has become institutionalized in thousands of research bodies with very little acknowledgement of the Southern origin of the term. Fals-Borda expresses a worry much more forcefully articulated by Jordan (2003) that PAR is being co-opted away from its desire to make research mutually constituted and owned by researchers and communities/groups/movements. Jordan (2003) notes how this cooptation, exemplified by the World Bank’s adoption of the term, runs the risk of turning participatory action-research processes designed to help marginalized communities gain better control over their own definition of reality, into a mere stabilizing process of “inclusion” without any substantive changes in power dynamics. Vincent (2012) has shown how this idea of participation is often used by those external to communities to construct collectivities that undermine histories of struggle—further evidence of the importance of working from within locally constituted movements.

Nonetheless, Hall and Turray (2006) reveal how integral participatory action research processes have been, and continue to be for movement research in adult education circles. This stream of research, known as social movement learning, has a strong tradition of PAR and, yet, as Walter (2007) has pointed out, the majority of these studies are dominated by Euro-American dichotomies drawn between Old Social Movement (Marxist and labor movements) and New Social Movement (identity based movements, such as the LGBTQ movement) theories of organizing (c.f. Finger, 1989; Holford, 1995; Holst, 2002). Echoing Fals Borda to some extent, Kapoor (2008) has underscored the dangers of assuming the portability of this dichotomy in Southern contexts. He, like others (c.f. Foley, 1999; Walters, 2005), advocates a strong connection to context when analyzing social movement learning. This echoes warnings of Eurocentric dominance in critical theories by those writing from an African context, such as Mamdani (1996) who argues for using context rich approaches to analyzing African phenomena.

Drawing these strands of thought together, Choudry and Kapoor (2009) have argued that participatory research, and PAR in particular, must be owned by the movements at the centre of social movement learning studies, rather than being used by academics—especially in the North—carrying out studies ultimately more concerned with extracting information than in responding to movement needs and priorities. This echoes notions of knowledge democracy (Hall, 2011) that are about ensuring widespread access and usability of knowledge. Choudry and Kapoor (2009) note that the relationships that frame such research, along with the way in which the research is conceived (i.e. is it owned by the movement from the outset) is critical to avoid this type of extractive relationship. This echoes Fine (2007) and Fine et al. (2004) who have expanded on the importance of mutually defined and owned participatory processes and goals, especially in contexts of struggle. These points in many ways echo some of the early proponents of PAR (e.g. McTaggart, 1991) that saw a deep ownership of the whole research process being the definition of participation, not a thin version that was either more concerned with academic outcomes, or in stabilizing participants through coopted processes. Common to these early proponents was the idea of collective design.

The design process

This logic very much informed the framing of the participatory action research described below, but what is so interesting here is the way that collective framing led the very design process to become a site of movement knowledge-generation and action. In this sense, the very design of the PAR became part of an emerging knowledge democracy. In saying this, we are thinking particularly of how, as will be shown, the research design opened a space for an ecology of knowledge (de Sousa Santos, 2009) concerning the Songor lagoon: the very act of debating the design democratized knowledge about the context, as more and more people came to know more and more about the resource struggle, even as the radio station also took the lead in broadening this knowledge base through programs disseminating these discussions. The issue of whose knowledge counts also came into this, as women especially, and younger people who had generally been excluded from any planning processes in the past, devoured the emergent knowledge, and added their own voices and direct knowledge to the research design process. In fact, as the examples from the research shared below show, this open approach not only allowed a womens’ analysis and agenda to not only flourish, but to become the central analysis of the movement. In this sense, knowledge democracy has come to mean re-centering the struggle based not on only including voices traditionally marginalized, but framing the struggle based on their analysis.

To give an opening picture of this from a methodological point of view, before turning to more fully describe the context, the participatory action research design process took place in 2010, after initial conversations held in 2008 where Langdon was invited by Larweh and other members of the movement to add Ada’s story to his doctoral thesis on social movement learning in Ghana since Ghana’s return to democracy in 1992 (Langdon, 2009a). This initial conversation led to a further invitation by movement members to explore questions of learning in the movement, as well as emerging challenges, in a longer participatory action study. Thus, four meetings were held over the course of Ghana’s 2010 wet season (June, July, and August)—the period when no salt could be collected and therefore the best time to discuss Songor issues; each of the meetings was attended by 30 to 40 members of the movement (with roughly half coming from communities around the Songor Lagoon and half from the capital of the district). These meetings were entirely in Dangme (the Ada language) and were open-ended, with discussions of the research prospect quickly becoming only a minor part of the focus. Indicative of the democratic knowledge space that was central to this research, these four meetings became preoccupied not with what a future research process might look like, but rather what were the multiple understandings people had of the issues confronting the Songor. Thus, the central question of the design process, “what themes and processes should frame a potential longer-term study of movement learning in the Ada movement?” was reconfigured to the question, “how do we achieve a similar and collectively determined understanding of what our struggle is today and how best to tackle it?” As an illustration of the way the process was movement owned from the outset, members of the movement leadership and Radio Ada opened the very first meeting not by stating why they had all gathered together, but rather by asking each person to share how they had come to be involved in the Songor struggle. This provoked lengthy discussions as to what the major problems facing the lagoon were, and routes there might be to solve them—all embedded in people’s mutual recognition of their commitment to the cause. At another of these meetings, the third, virtually the entire time was spent discussing what people thought they were pushing for, and who should decide this. Though this was a discussion that has never entirely been resolved, as the movement maintains a crucial democratic internal tension, the consensus that day was that the movement should focus on defending communal access to the lagoon, and that this was something all Adas, not just those who live around the Songor have a stake in.

These meetings were held in the open-air studio of the local community radio station, Radio Ada, and as such anyone passing could listen in. In the 3 years of the PAR process that followed, this openness, and the fact that the participatory process began by mutually educating each other on how people understood the Songor context made the actions of the movement, as well as the research that moved with it consistently able to side-step accusations that it was pushing a secret agenda. This was in stark contrast to the way local and national elite operated – a point that surfaced again and again as the reason ASAF and Radio Ada should be trusted. In these 3 years, every wet season would see a series of these open-ended reflective and mutual-education oriented meetings come about, at the open air studio as well as in several of the Songor-surrounding communities, where focus group discussions of older men, older women, young men, young women, and girls and boys would generate broad based discussions of challenges facing the resource, and then would debate these views back in plenary. In all, it is our estimate that these participatory movement discussions on Songor issues engaged with roughly 4300 people over the last 5 years (3400 people in community discussions, and 900 at the open-air studio meetings). This is alongside the listening audience who would tune into Radio Ada’s programs on the Songor generated from these discussions and phone-in with comments. It is this type of openness and engagement that is the basis of claims made here that this is an example of knowledge democracy in action.

Turning to discuss the context of the struggle, as well as share an example of praxis, it should be noted that the Ghanaian example expanded upon here represents an important addition to social movement learning PAR discussions as research on African movements is severely lacking in the literature (Hall & Turray, 2006). In the discussion below, not only will the context be shared, be we aim to illustrate how knowledge democracy has emerged through social movement learning processes embedded in the movement owned research. Thus, the framing of the research described above is illustrated in the explication and examples that follow.

Knowledge democracy, social movement learning, and the struggle for communal access to West Africa’s largest salt-yielding lagoon

Hark Almighty, put on the sun light; I say Almighty Radio Ada, put on the sun light forever. Whatever is under water through you comes to light. Whatever is underground through you comes to light. […]

Look behind us, there comes Government after us [Ada] Okor People. I repeat, turn and look behind Dangme People, Government is catching up with us. But what is the issue? Atsiakpo¹ is consuming the whole Songor. And all attempts to stop it have proved futile, the fire rages on. Government could not help but to step in. They told our Elders, they are going to take over Songor, to quell conflicts so that we live in peace. Radio Ada heard of this development, took on their broadcast armour, mobilized us; we entered the communities and started informing the people; we are spreading it.

Whatever the consequences, we shall overcome. Whatever the consequences, Okor descendants, we shall overcome at all cost. Let’s put our breath into one trumpet and sound it loud to the ears of Government. That guns and guns came against Songor, axes upon axes came after Songor; I mean Government should know that guns and guns came; axes upon axes came after Songor. […]

What someone does not know; I say, what one doesn’t know, someone knows! (Repeat emphatically). (Audience response): What someone does not know; what one doesn’t know, someone knows! What someone does not know; I say, whatever one doesn’t know, someone knows! (Repeat emphatically). (Audience response): What someone does not know; what one doesn’t know, someone knows!

Hail Goodwill; (response) come Goodwill! (Applause).

- Akpetiyo, song from one of the first meetings of the PAR that emerged from the collaborative design process

(translated and transcribed by Larweh)

It is important to begin this section with the voice of Akpetiyo, one of the key emerging women leaders of the current struggle in the Songor salt-yielding lagoon. In many ways she personifies the process through which this research came to be embedded in and owned by the ASAF movement; at the end of the collaborative planning sessions in 2010 (described above), she complained we had talked too much and did not act enough (she wore red armbands that day to emphasize the point). Not only did this statement resonate with the action-reflection process of PAR, this was an important critique on the largely reflective process described above—despite how her song indicates the importance of ‘spreading’ the knowledge. In fact, her songs, including the one above, have further spurred the movement on to action internally, even as they spread word of the deepening analysis of the movement through broadcasts by Radio Ada. Over the next three years the women’s agenda that came out of this particular meeting (discussed further below) would become central to the movement’s analysis, including Akpetiyo’s point that reflection must come with action.

While the import of Akpetiyo’s words will become clearer throughout this section, the last part of the song should be briefly dwelt on as it is symbolic of the way the design process, and research that followed democratized knowledge. Consistently, as the story below will show, uncovering the knowledge “someone knows,” including secret plots on Songor development by local and national elite, has been the hallmark of the movement’s knowledge democratization strategy—spreading knowledge and debate about these plots throughout the 12 major Songor communities² through dialogue meetings, and the rest of Ada through the radio. Thus, Akpetiyo’s voice and her song is a critical frame through which to begin to discuss this participatory action research study. Beginnings matter (Langdon, 2009c), not just in process—as the description of the design process above shares—but also in the way the story is told.

Context of struggle – Contesting Ghana’s democracy

While many (e.g. Baofo-Arthur, 2007) have written of Ghana’s impressive emerging democratic tradition, Ninsin (2007, p. 87) provides a critical account of this emergence, calling the version of democracy in Ghana “elitist.” Ninsin documents the way in which neoliberal market-led processes were not questioned in the official democratization process, despite them forming a major part of the struggle that led to this change. Echoing this analysis, Abrahamsen (2000) has pointedly documented how activism around the growing penetration of global capital through neoliberal access to resources was a major source of mobilization during the struggle to return to democracy in Ghana, and has continued to be a key rallying point for social struggles since. This point has also been underscored by Prempeh (2006) and Langdon (2009b), who have argued that movements such as ASAF are spaces that are reconceiving and challenging what democracy means in Ghana through their knowledge generation processes.

Paralleling this history, ASAF emerges from decades of struggle to defend communal access to West Africa’s largest salt-producing lagoon—a struggle that is under greater and greater internal and external market-based pressures (Langdon, 2010). This has far reaching implications considering the salt yield from this resource is a critical part of livelihoods of over 60,000 people in this area (Amate, 2000; Babesgaard, 2013; Manuh, 1994). The history of struggle goes back to pre-colonial and colonial times (Amate, 2000), with a contrast between local natural resource management that allowed even outsiders to win salt, and a constant threat from outside forces aiming to seize the resource from the Ada, or “Okor,” people who have been its custodians (Manuh, 1994). This history of conflict was renewed in the post-independence period, especially heightened by the ecosystem impact of Ghana’s major hydro project, the Akasombo dam (Ada Salt Cooperative Committee, 1989; Manuh, 1994). For a period of 14 years, two companies managed to enclose the salt resource through duplicitous tactics and prevent communal access. This led to major local mobilization into a resistance movement that resulted in a return to access for the population (Ada Salt Cooperative Committee, 1989; Manuh, 1994). It is this lastprocess of mobilization that informs the latest instance of movement mobilization, the ASAF.

The ASAF emerged to contend with the two most recent challenges to communal access, the first of atsiakpo, mentioned at the outset of this article, and the second that began with Ghana’s discovery of oil in 2008.

Atsiakpo – The challenge to communal access from within

This first challenge is from within rather than without, and echoes pressure on communal assets resultant from neoliberal natural resource pressures, where all aspects of life become increasingly commodified (c.f. Vincent, 2012). The community is being fractured through a balkanization of the resource, as atsiakpo enclosures of salt-pans are being built and claimed by individuals—forcing especially women into alienated labor relations as opposed to owning their own production under communal access. These astiakpo are often either funded or permitted for a price by the resource’s traditional custodian authorities. This internal challenge has put new pressure on the ASAF, for in the past the movement could easily identify those who threatened communal access as they came from outside the community (Ada Salt Cooperative Committee, 1989). Therefore, the period in which the collaborative design process took place was a time of flux, introspection, and dialogue on what to do to try and deal with this latest challenge. At the heart of these concerns were questions over the very composition of the largely older male dominated movement—especially considering it is women and young men who are most impacted by recent changes within the lagoon. Manuh (1994) also notes how previous struggles in the lagoon had excluded women in leadership roles. It was into this complex time of soul searching that Larweh and other movement members invited Langdon and colleagues involved in other movement contexts in Ghana to begin working with the movement on documenting this learning, as well as contributing to its deepening. This led to the research framing and design process elaborated above.

Returning to Akpetiyo above, the power of an open space for democratic knowledge generation that emerged in the research framing/design process had a transformative effect on the current iteration of the movement, versus the one from the 1980s. Not only did women have access to all the knowledge generated about the Songor, they also became key generators of this knowledge. In fact, by the end of the design process it was their consistent analysis, captured in Akpetiyo’s songs that atsiakpo was bad for Ada that led the movement to focus on defending communal access. This was in the face of some powerful male voices that argued individually owned salt pans were the way to ensure the resource would stay in Ada hands. It was in response to this, that the women articulated the women’s agenda to see atsiakpo banned, and communal access returned. The emergence of the women’s agenda throughout the collaborative design process helps exemplify how this process became democratically owned by and in service to the most traditionally marginalized in the community. In one of our discussions about this article, Larweh noted:

look at the way women, women who have been culturally suppressed, have taken up this whole fight, this whole agenda as their agenda. Now this also links up to the beginning of this whole exercise; Now you remember in the middle of the design process when we asked groups, apart from these meetings you have been attending is there any group, is there any forum where the Songor salt and the way it is affecting livelihoods are being discussed? And people just said “no!” everybody, from the women to the youth to the men to the leaders, the community leaders, even the assembly is not discussing it, even the chiefs are not discussing it. So this is for me the totality of the sign of ownership; you see they are telling you there is no forum where this is discussed and that the research and for that matter the ASAF forum [sic] is the livewire of people’s participation, peoples desire being addressed in this livelihood challenge that they face.

The reconfiguration of meeting agendas to assist in mutual education processes, and through this the emergence of a common understanding of priorities, or knowledge strategies, for the movement, and plans to be implemented is codified in the women’s agenda that emerged. While asserting forcefully Akpetiyo’s point that action was needed and not more talk, the women’s agenda outlined a number of key actions that would be taken in the months and years ahead. These included building ties with Queen Mothers, a new category of traditional leader that gave women’s voice an opening to enter discussions at Ada’s Traditional Council; establishing a popular education program for sharing the history of the struggle over the Songor; adding dissemination of knowledge about the government plans in the past in this education program, and provoking discussion about what a people’s plan for the Songor would look like; and finally, organizing community level action groups to undertake various types of activities to confront atsiakpo, but also to build and maintain nonviolent spaces of dialogue that could focus internal divisions on the source of the problem: decision-makers at the traditional, local and national level. Each of these items has been accomplished throughout the 12 major communities surrounding the Songor. The strength of the commitment to this agenda provided the organizational empowerment for women from these 12 communities to demonstrate at the 2012 Asafotufiami Festival—Ada’s premier cultural and political festival that draws over 10,000 visitors, including Ministers, and often the Vice President or President of Ghana. Although this demonstration was related to the second challenge the movement met, discussed in the following sub-section, the way in which the collaborative design process was appropriated by women committed to this struggle to articulate a plan of action and follow through is inspiring. It also highlights just how thoroughly the participatory action research has been framed by and feeds into movement aspirations and knowledge generation—a quality of the research that was established from the start.

Ghana’s oil discovery – The threat of resource expropriation

As an indication of the strength and rootedness of this research, the first year of the new study met an instant challenge when connecting with ongoing movement activities—as it moved along with the movement. The repercussions of the 2008 discovery of oil in Ghana upon the salt sector only became apparent 2011, as the central government began making moves to expropriate the lagoon resource in order to turn it over to a petrochemical processor (various different salts are important components of petrochemical processes) (c.f. Hinestroza, 2001). Ghanaian academics have already begun making a case for this connection (c.f. Affam & Asamoah, 2011), even as a series of government and donor sponsored initiatives advocate for this approach (c.f. Commonwealth Secretariat, 2009). In May 2011, a delegation from the Minerals commission, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Private Enterprise Foundation (a para-statal entity promoting foreign direct investment in Ghana) came to Ada and told various traditional authorities to prepare those living in the Songor area for relocation, and that they would be offered “alternative livelihoods”—a turn of phrase that later surfaced in secret attestations signed by various members of the Traditional Council without the knowledge of the whole council (reminiscent of Akpetiyo’s statement that someone knows what the rest don’t). Hearing of this, the ASAF shifted from focusing exclusively on the internal threat of atsiakpo, and began to also mobilize against this new external threat. As mentioned above, they took the reflective process to communities throughout the Songor area, sharing with them the information about the plans, but also taking the opportunity to dialogue on the atsiakpo issue. This open space produced clear consensus against the government plan, but also opened up an avenue for communities divided over the astiakpo issue to dialogue. Finally, this also generated space for communities to develop their own activist strategies, deciding independently to protest at Asafotu—though this was ultimately coordinated by the women’s leadership within the movement. Thus, the research easily moved with movement to address this new challenge, and helped deepen reflection and dialogue processes on how to best contest this latest government plan, even as the emergent learning in this new context was documented. Of critical importance for the movement, this democratic reflective process was understood later as being a pivotal component in the successful suspension of the expropriation attempts.

Parallel to this reconfiguration of movement focus, the reflective process that emerged even in the design stage has helped connect struggles of the past to the present. For instance, despite the violent conflict with the company over the 1970s and 1980s (Ada Salt Cooperative Committee, 1989), and subsequent victorious regaining of communal access to the resource, no guarantees were put in place to safeguard against the recent rise of the atsiakpo. Further reflection on this failure to guarantee communal access led movement members involved in the previous iteration of struggle to point out that women’s exclusion in prior mobilization around defending communal access undermined its potential impact as they have the most at stake. This analysis was echoed and deepened by the women present, including Akpetiyo. This led to a major shift in ASAF’s current movement mobilization, as emphasis was placed on addressing this power imbalance within the movement—a process still ongoing but rooted in movement reflections and strategic revisions. The commitment to this democratizing analysis born of these reflections is indicated not only by the women’s agenda and follow-through detailed above, but also by the fact that this agenda has been supported by the many male members of the movement. This link between movement reflection and actions is indicative of the synergistic relationship between a mutually owned research process and movement praxis.

As an indication of the centrality of the women’s agenda, and of the growth of women’s leadership in the movement, we return to the events of August 2012, where not only did women from every major Songor community join in a demonstration at the Asafotufiami Festival, but a major popular education and knowledge democratizing effort was also spearheaded by the women’s leadership—and this popular education effort ended up spreading this knowledge to an estimated 3000 Adas and visitors during the festival, and was also used to confront visiting national politicians with the desires of Songor resisdents for equitable use of the Songor. In the lead up to the festival, meetings were held in the open air studio at Radio Ada amongst a number of key women organizers about the festival, even as similar community level meetings were held concerning the women’s demonstration. Both groups had overlapping members that guaranteed dialogue. Just before the festival, the community organizers and those who had been meeting at the station came together to coordinate plans. It was at this point, the women who had been planning at the station revealed they had commissioned a huge canvas painting that depicted the history of struggle of the people of Ada concerning the Songor, which ended with strong imagery associated with the desires for continued communal access to the lagoon, and its use in improving the livelihoods of all Adas. The key starting point of this visual narrative was the Yomo spirit—the figure of an old wise woman who is purported to have shown the first Adas in the area the way to the Songor. By beginning with her presence the women planned not only to share the history of struggle embedded in the cultural foundation narrative of the Adas, but to explicitly wed women’s role to this foundation. A number of women then worked together to develop an oral narrative to share with those viewing the piece (in English, Dangme and two other major Ghanaian languages, Twi and Ga) to walk them through the history and end with this strong message of a vision for the future. These were then the women who met viewers at the festival grounds and walked them through the story. When the visiting national politicians came to view the exhibit, the women stood tall and told their story—a process the community radio station recorded and later broadcast. Again, in our discussion of this article, Larweh noted the importance of the community radio station to democratizing the knowledge generated by the movement:

we are fortunate to have the culmination of circumstances to our benefit like the presence of Radio Ada; Radio Ada’s philosophy and practice has everything to do with this ASAF challenge, where People’s livelihoods are getting lost because of leadership inertia, traditionally, in central government, and in local government; so the only way is to stoke the fire, and get people to really show that this is not the first time an issue like this is coming up; our forbearers have seen it and they have addressed it and they have worked on it – they will wake up from their graves to see us struggling over it and they will say, “what problem are we trying to solve?!?” when they solved the problem for us long ago by declaring that this resource should be communally owned. So what is our problem? We have only woken up now from I don’t know what spell to say that local government is making by-laws, the central government is making laws only to take peoples hands away from the food that is already ready to be eaten by everybody. That to me is the dilemma, and I am happy we have been able to raise the consciousness of people and people have seen that there are some good things in the past that our modern practices are ignoring.

The research process was able to move with the movement throughout these actions and reflections, and documented and discussed the emergent learning. There are many scales of action and reflection; this centering and honoring of women’s voices in the movement is long term, and has yielded deeply democratizing and enriching results that embed women’s foundational presence and empowerment not in Eurocentric concepts imposed from elsewhere, but from a process of action and reflection emergent from a local history of struggle and learning.

Conclusion

With these examples in mind, a framing/design process that builds strong relationships of dialogue, along with a design that allows for research to “move with the movement” helps not only the research to contribute to knowledge democracy (internal and external to the movement), improved strategizing and movement articulated goals, but also makes for better, more dynamic research. Dynamic, mutually owned research helps capture the shifts and changes that struggles with neoliberal resource exploitation engender (Langdon, 2009a, 2010), which is both an important site for reconfiguring movement goals, as well as adding an inside view of these shifts to social movement learning literature. At the same time, this dynamic process also contributes to movement reflections on power within its own membership, and to make the movement itself, as well as the knowledge it generates and unearths, more deeply and democratically owned by those most affected by the loss of communal access. This reconceives democratic knowledge as knowledge emergent from spaces democratically designed and mutually owned from then outset. In this sense, enacting Choudry and Kapoor’s (2009) call for movement situated participatory research means locating research in the middle of movement action and reflection processes, rather than merely documenting them from the side. After all, the best place to be able to document as well as contribute to social movement learning is moving along with its on-going processes. The slippage between documentation and being part of the actual reflection process reveals how research can contribute to movement praxis (action and reflection). This slippage also helps ensure that power dynamics within the research relationship are also subject to reflective processes, as they are visible and not trying to remain unseen/hidden. Having the design of this participatory research process claimed from the start by the movement, as well as the way it was reconfigured to match shifts in movement focus, even as the process helped draw out reflections on the past that connect today’s movement with those most affected by threats to communal access, all underscore the way participatory action research as well as knowledge democracy is most synergistic and rooted if collective-ownership begins from the outset.

Thus, this paper shares an important example of how placing movement articulation at the middle of a collaborative research design process made not only the research, but even its design respond to movement needs and priorities. This approach to framing participatory research represents an important contribution to modalities around building research processes that are collectively owned by movements and researchers, and that undermine traditional Euro-American theoretical dominance—an important point of departure for any participatory research, but especially relevant for research in the Global South in general, and Africa in particular.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Davydd Greenwood for leading the review process of this article. Should there be any comments/reactions you wish to share, please bring them to the interactive portion (Reader Responses column) of the website: .

Funding

Canadian Social Science and Humanity Research Council's funding, through a Standard Research Grant, is acknowledged, as are two seed grants from St. Francis Xavier University that supported the collaborative research design process.

Notes

Author biographies

Jonathan Langdon has been working with social movements in Ghana for the last 12 years, and with the movement in Ada since 2008. In all of this work he is preoccupied with the ways in which people contesting power relations learn. He is an associate professor in the Development Studies Program and Adult Education Department at St. Francis Xavier University.

Kofi Larweh is a broadcast journalist, trainer and adult educationist. He was the first station coordinator (manager) for Radio Ada (the first community radio station in Ghana) from its inception February 1998 until March 2009. Preferring working with marginalized groups in their self-motivated liberation efforts, he abandoned teaching mathematics at the Teacher Training College to become a community activist and a founding member of the Ada Songor Advocacy Forum (ASAF). He has been working with Dr. Jonathan Langdon for the past 10 years and is co-author for the paper “The thumbless hand, the dog and the chameleon: enriching social movement learning theory through epistemically grounded narratives emerging from a participatory action research case study in Ghana,” a David Jones Award winner at the 2013 Standing Conference for University Teaching and Research on the Education of Adults, held in Glasgow.

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