Democratic encounters? Epistemic privilege,power,and community-based participatory action research

Introduction

Participation in research and development takes a number of forms including: participatory action research (PAR), action research (AR), participatory/empowerment evaluation, community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), participatory rural assessment, inclusion research, and participatory development (PD). Although these approaches are semantically and operationally distinct, they share a commitment to democratic praxis with people and communities most affected by the issue of inquiry. The extant literature suggests that these participatory approaches hold the potential to democratize and decolonize knowledge production (Cornwall, 2008; Flicker, 2008). Yet few authors have interrogated the warrant of these emancipatory claims beyond conceding that power and decision-making remain weighted toward academic partners (Boser, 2006; Castleden, Morgan, & Lamb, 2012; Oliver, 1997; Stoecker, 2009). While acknowledging the promise of these research alliances, it is imperative that we explore the full range of effects, including the ways in which participatory approaches re-inscribe academic epistemic privilege. Furthermore, if practitioners are to move toward more democratic, critically reflexive and responsible participatory praxis, then the social relations of CBPAR must be interrogated to reveal how power is negotiated in these epistemological encounters.

This paper will argue that postcolonial readings of community-based participatory action research provide a productive lens with which to trouble the discursive claims, material practices, subject positions and spaces of collaborative knowledge work. Theoretical inquiry will be woven with critical reflections on the author’s experiences with two empirical CBPAR projects. The paper begins by outlining the gaps in theorizing power in the CBPAR literature and the utility of postcolonial theories for addressing those gaps. Next, the epistemic techniques of producing difference, as well as paradoxically inculcating different knowledges into the “sameness” of academe, are outlined to reveal how both re-inscribe privilege to the academic knower. In the following section, CBPAR’s claims to “authenticity” and “giving voice” to community knowers are deconstructed for the ways in which they de politicize and subordinate nonacademic knowledge. Then the dislocation of knowledge work/ers from space and bodies is scrutinized to reveal the careful manufacture of CBPAR imaginaries that obscure relations of privilege. These critiques aim toward what Cahill, Quijada Cerecer, and Bradley (2010) refer to as “critical hope,” which recognizes that while collaborative knowledge work with multiple, divergent constituencies is full of contradictions, it is also full of possibilities. Therefore, this paper concludes with two modest proposals for more democratic, decolonized knowledge work.

Community-based participatory research literature and theorizing power

Several taxonomies of CBPAR have evaluated participation by nonacademic knowledge workers and report significant shortfalls in realizing CBPAR’s claims to democratic praxis (Catalani & Minkler, 2010; Guta, Flicker, & Roche, 2013; Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998). As Coombes (2012) critiques, most scholars frame the problems of CBPAR as one of removing barriers to communication and representation, which fail to address how CBPAR practices preserve the privilege of academic partners. Coombes (2012) and Stoecker (2009) highlight the scant theorizing of the power asymmetries of CBPAR. While Coombes suggests revisiting Freirian radical pedagogy, Stoecker, as well as Guta, Flicker, and Roche, propose a Foucauldian framework for understanding the operations of power in participatory knowledge work. Stoecker notes that the CBPAR literature tends to implicitly adopt a sovereign understanding of power that is limited to the repressive rather than productive effects of the knowledge-power loop. He cautions that a purely repressive understanding of power leads to claims that power might be “given up” by academics to less powerful community participants. However, as McWhorter (2005) points out, unless we put sovereign power into question and document how power operates in nonintentional networks then we are left with the untenable project of divesting ourselves of privilege—a project that sustains, even strengthens, the very hierarchies it seeks to disrupt.

Two discourses of power dominate the CBPAR literature: those that place the work outside of power and those that acknowledge there is no “outside of power” but maintain that this unevenness can be remedied if power is “given up” by some and “taken up” by others. As Healy (2001) notes, the egalitarian discourse of the power adverse CBPAR scholars obscures the privilege of the academic researcher in these partnerships. While Galuppo, Gorli, and Ripamonti (2011) acknowledge the enduring power dissymmetries in action research, the authors maintain that power can be re-distributed in ways that suggest a sovereign understanding of the malleability of power. Travers et al. (2013: p. 412) reflect on the limits of their engagement with power and conclude that it might be better addressed: “were this to become a problem”, through specific processes and spaces to negotiate power differences, which suggests that these inequalities are neither inevitable nor inherently problematic. Hilsen (2006) expands on the discourse of distributive power by attending to both its enabling and constraining effects. However, within Hilsen’s proposal that “we act out mutual and interdependent power relations” (p. 301) and her discussion of reciprocity is the suggestion of an evenness. Although these latter scholars embrace poststructural, particularly Foucauldian notions of power as relationally constituted, they tend to hold out the possibility of a flattening that does not account for the structural forces that shape the historical, political and social conditions where knowledge work unfolds.

Postcolonialism makes clear that there is no space or subject position outside of power and offers a theoretical framework with which to re-constitute power relations in CBPAR as deeply contextual, inevitable and uneven, not easily manipulated yet still dynamic. Memmi (1969) and later postcolonial theorists (Chowdhury, 2006; Loomba, 1998) reject the possibility that privilege can be revoked or reduced regardless of one’s position or feelings about oppressive hierarchies. While the term postcolonial is a contested term that is troubled by theorist’s who document colonial continuities that cannot be consigned to history (MacClintock, 1992; Smith, 1999), the “post” is understood in this paper, not as a temporal marker, but as a theoretical positioning of its alignment with other epistemologies (i.e. postmodernism and poststructuralism) that attend to the knowledge to power loop.

Mignolo (2000) stresses that the epistemological break that postcolonial theorizing proposes is to re-politicize and re-locate knowledge production in the particular contexts of escalating social inequalities. Mignolo (2000), and Castro-Gomez and Martin (2002), note that what is erased in the epistemic encounter is a privileged knower who is male, western, White, heterosexual, middle/upper class, and abled. What is also erased is the embodiment of the community knower who is assigned a number of ambiguous, subordinate subject positions. Postcolonialism goes beyond a critique of the oppressive features of these subjectivities and spaces to inquire into the specific participatory techniques that re/produce epistemic privilege.

Participatory techniques of epistemic governance

For postcolonial theorists, epistemic governance is not only a discursive site of contestation, but a form of symbolic and material violence. Catro-Gomez and Martin (2002) suggest that the link between knowledge and discipline is evident in institutional arrangements that determine whose knowledge counts. These arrangements, Castro-Gomez and Martin argue, are a “technology of power that persists today, founded on the ‘knowledge of the other’” (p. 276). The centrality of knowledge to relations of power provokes Mignolo (2009) to argue that epistemic governance is the crucial site to struggle against modern/colonial dominance. He warns that to neglect epistemic governance is to enact reformations at best, reproductions at worse, of the parameters of privilege.

Knowledge production is, thus, framed by postcolonialists as anything but neutral and instead, as essential to projects of rule and a site of rule itself in the form of epistemic governance. Although CBPAR proposes an emancipatory epistemology, knowledge hierarchies persist and are in fact, produced through the binary subjectivities, spaces and social relations of the campus/community collaboration. This paper traces some of the ways in which epistemic privilege is sustained through participatory practices including: the production, subordination and assimilation of difference; claims to authenticity and “giving voice”; and spatial dislocations and disembodied subjectivities that obscure power.

Epistemic governance I: The production, subordination and assimilation of difference

Epistemic governance often takes the form of two interlocking practices: the production of difference and its other “face”: the inculcation of difference into the “same.” Ahmed (2000) argues that the production of difference is the work of research, where: ‘Knowing strangers…transform[ing] those who are recognized as strangers into knowledge’ (p.73). Therefore, in the role of “professional strangers” academics desire, require and produce difference. However, the production of difference depends on welcoming strangers into the research project and CBPAR takes this welcome very seriously. CBPAR proposes a radical solidarity with communities that hide the assimilation of their knowledge. Despite the centrality of constituting difference to CBPAR, indeed all research, few authors attend to its production. Notably, Kapoor (2005) along with PD critics: Cooke and Kothari (2001) argue that participatory techniques re-inscribe epistemic authority to the academic/development actor through the assignment of difference to the community knower. Interestingly, these critiques of participatory development are rarely acknowledged in the Anglo-American CBPAR literature—signaling a severance of local and global praxis that warrants attention in a future paper.

Ahmed (2000) suggests that the production of difference is obscured by an ontology of difference, which is naturalized to the community Other. Attending to how difference is produced makes transparent how the community knower/knowledge “comes into being” and is authorized and subordinated by the academic subject. The CBPAR literature is largely silent on the epistemic operations that assign particularity to the community knower and universality to the academic. This division became apparent in the H2h project, when I struggled with both wanting to invert the status hierarchy between experiential and academic knowers and to reject the hierarchy altogether by subverting the processes by which these different sites of knowledge are assigned value. Although attempts were made to remove any “status markers” during the H2h knowledge exchange forum, our failures signaled that the ability to mark and unmark oneself as different, what Spivak (2005) refers to as “self-synecdochising,” is a privilege not available to most community knowers.

A variant on this privilege is that of marking others as different, then assimilating them into the “same.” This assimilation is evident in CBPAR’s inculcation of community knowers into discourses and practices of academe. Healy (2001) contends that the CBPAR often takes the form of ‘finding the most appropriate participatory ways to convince the “uneducated” of the merits of [our] own educated convictions’ (p. 98). There are many ways in which this inculcation takes place: some explicit such as the scripting of nonacademic knowledge workers that occurred in our early media encounters, and other more subtle activities such as the discursive and material practices of capacity building.

Capacity building appears in the CBPAR literature as a key activity and objective. Although positioned as a important step toward community self-determination, it is crucial to ask who benefits and in what ways from the aim of building community capacity to conduct research? While acquiring research skills can be one tool toward social change, we may be overly focused on its currency and cursory in our training efforts. During the two CBPAR projects referenced in this paper, as well as other projects I collaborate on, I have led training sessions where research methods are taught in the span of a few hours to a few days. Academics train for years, so why would I anticipate that others can glean something useful in such a short time? Also, even if some research skills are learned, how can these be leveraged for future employment or community mobilization? Addressing these questions may lead us to reassess our claims to building capacity in communities and revise our practices of engaging community researchers.

Even more troubling is that capacity building discourses suggest that the community “lacks capacity” or that it “lacks the right capacity,” which according to CBPAR practices are academic knowledge and skills that subordinate community knowledge by situating it within the “sameness” of academe. The colonialism of discourses of capacity building is thoroughly critiqued by First Nations authors who argue that claims of “Aboriginal non capacity” are levied to maintain academe’s epistemic privilege (Schnarch, 2004). Although a few authors have suggested the need for capacity building for academic partners (Minkler, 2004; Travers et al., 2013), most of the training is targeted to nonacademic knowledge workers or students. Furthermore, as Roche (2005) suggests, the focus on fostering academic discourses and practices subverts the complementary, yet distinct, knowledges nonacademics bring to CBPAR.

Epistemic governance II: Claims to authenticity and “giving voice”

The subordination of community knowledges frequently operates in CBPAR discourses that valourize community knowledges as more “authentic”. This quest for unmediated representation not only obscures the labour of community knowers, but the labor of their elite partners. Kindon, Pain, and Kesby (2007) critique the reification of community knowledge as more “authentic” for the ways in which it situates CBPAR outside of power relations. This valorizing of the local also obscures that dominant discourses are reproduced by community, as well as elite, knowers. A postcolonial approach recognizes that the multiple (though not mutual) constitution of binaries such as local/elite, community/academic, and dominant/subordinate are socially produced and relational rather than fixed to particular spaces or bodies. The CBPAR literature’s tendency toward naturalizing these binaries is revealed in Smith, Bratini, Chambers, Jensen, and Romero’s (2010) surprise at the degree to which dominant ideologies are reproduced by their community partners. Assuming that community knowledge is somehow inherently resistant, more “real” and less hierarchical does not account for how power relations operate within, as well as across, research locations.

Postcolonial understandings of oppositional constructions, whether in the form of valorization (e.g. authentic, unmediated and “truer”) or devaluation (e.g. primitive, raw and experiential) of community knowledges, raise important questions regarding CBPAR’s (dis)engagement with the complexities of multiple knowledges. These complexities were apparent during the planning of dissemination forums for H2h and BAWA, when I asked community colleagues to speak in “their own words” despite their desire to articulate more “persuasive” academic discourse. Although I initially resisted this desire, I have since revisited how insisting on “community voice” was yet another way to re-inscribe knowledge hierarchies.

Closely linked to claims of authenticity are the discursive and material practices of “giving voice,” which are quite commonly referenced in the CBPAR literature (see reviews by Dick, 2010 and other years). In my early collaborations with members of the homeless community, I adopted a “speakers bureau” model to convey first person narratives that attempted to complicate homelessness, housing and home. These narratives invoked risky disclosures by the speakers that were often re-traumatizing in the telling. Later on, in an attempt to mitigate the effects and consumption of painful testimonials, hybrid vignettes were crafted that integrated personal and community experiences to highlight policy and program failure, rather than individual failure. Postcolonial critiques of “giving voice” reveal the subordinating logic that orients the telling of “authentic” experiences. As Razack (1993) suggests, storytelling obscures the power relations at play between tellers and listeners. Srivastava and Francis (2006) explored this dynamic in their inquiry into anti-racist/homophobia workshops, where people of color and marginalized sexualities are called upon to be experts in their own domination. This not only reproduces relations of privilege, but invokes a performance that Hartman (1997) describes as a “staging” of suffering, which displaces these narratives from their social, political, and historical contexts.

Epistemic governance III: Dislocating and disembodying knowledge work

Postcolonial theorists, such as Escobar (2001), argue that locating epistemic communities is critical to rethinking Eurocentric knowledges. Locating is not exclusively about place, but about postcolonial understandings of space as a social construct that is both a means of producing identity and community, as well as a means to exercise power (Bhabha, 1994). This conceptualization of communities articulates to issues, interests and belongings that transcend geographical location. Postcolonialism’s attention to the production of space offers a critical lens to inquire into the making of CBPAR’s spatial imaginaries. For example, Korf (2010) uses the term “provided spaces” to describe how participatory development is disconnected from postcolonial regimes in a carefully regulated space outside of political and historical fault lines.

The impermeability of these spatial imaginaries was evident in my negotiations of compensation for community colleagues working on the BAWA project who lived on limited income assistance. The funder was reluctant to provide honoraria for certain activities that they framed as training rather than research activities (even though it was the community researchers who facilitated the workshops). The irony of a funding envelope that seeks to foster the socioeconomic inclusion of women, but resists compensating women living in conditions of poverty was disturbing. However, institutional regulation of CBPAR space precluded consideration of the socioeconomic conditions of community knowledge workers and the asymmetrical compensation of academic versus community researchers.

These highly regulated spaces are also theorized by postcolonial authors as sites of surveillance. For example, Kapoor (2005) notes that PD functions as a means of monitoring community activities, and re producing existing patriarchal and racialized power relations. This panoptic space is sustained through the proximity required by participative knowledge work and is alleged to be consensual. Kapoor maintains that these regulated spaces silence opposition, naturalize consensus as an unquestioned good, and smooth out the racialized, gendered, classed dimensions of participation. These consensual spaces not only obscure power between research constituencies but within them. While the CBPAR literature emphasizes consensus building (Israel et al., 1998; Wallerstein & Duran, 2006), the everyday realities of working along side of community colleagues who have histories and presents of trauma requires a more complex alchemy of contestation and collectivizing toward a common goal. For example, during a H2h focus group that I co-facilitated with community colleagues, a composite scenario was presented to community members and policy makers from the municipal public housing corporation. The barriers to adequate housing outlined in these vignettes were vigorously debated by community participants, some of who were tenant representatives. This latter group subverted proposals that conflicted with housing policies supported by the housing staff present. This articulation of both official and resistance discourses by community members stands in contrast to imaginary of the consensual community. However, while thinking through and engaging conflict within community, it is crucial to acknowledge that conflict exists among academics, as well, and to consider the how concepts such as “horizontal hostility” (Travers et al., 2013) pathologize community dissensus.

Just as community is constituted in ways that erase its heterogeneity, so is the campus. Postcolonial analysis reveals how the campus/community binary extracts the university, as not only separate from the surrounding community, but separated from the possibility of constituting itself as a community. This spatial rationale also conceals the complexities of insider/outsider research. While Loomba (1998) and Ma-Rhea (2002) acknowledge the problematics of the Western white spaces of academe, they argue that scholars are generating decolonizing knowledges, while at the same time reproducing Western disciplines. This double bind of working against and within spaces that reproduce relations of dominance is well documented in the postcolonial literature (Spivak, 1988, 2005) and complicates CBPAR spaces by avoiding essentializing either the community or campus. The complexity of negotiating this spatial divide is evident in my ambivalence over disclosing my “insider” status in the context of H2h, after community colleagues argued that any “gains” associated with this disclosure were offset by the loss of the power associated with outsider status. Reflecting on this impasse from a postcolonial perspective, it becomes clear that it is as important to strategically leverage power for social change, as it is to struggle against its inequitable effects by claiming greater proximity.

A parallel technique to the dislocated spaces of CBPAR is the production of disembodied subjects. Community knowledge workers are assigned multiple, ambiguous subject positions including: “participant” (Blair & Minkler, 2009), “partner-stakeholder” and “peer” (Flicker, 2008), “co-researcher” (Smith et al., 2010), “community researcher” (Minkler, 2004), and “volunteer” (Doyle and Timonen, 2010). These subjectivities, Godway and Finn (1994) suggest, articulate to dominant discourses that position the nonacademic as a disembodied “other.” Postcolonial theorists (Mignolo, 2000; Spivak, 2005) would suggest that the goal is not only to contest these subjectivities, but to understand the processes by which they come into being and their material effects. This attention to the production of subject positions is useful to inquiring into the ways in which the CBPAR academic remains largely unmarked, while the nonacademic is overdetermined with so many varied, subordinate subjectivities.

The overdetermination of the nonacademic is evident in the productive slippage of “participant,” which may be understood as respondent, advisory group member, or co-researcher. The multiplicity of positions constituted as “participant” is one mechanism by which CBPAR can make diverse claims regarding participation without revealing the particularity of material practices. Related to the slipperiness of this subject position is the widespread use of service providers as community researchers. In my work with communities experiencing homelessness and insecure housing, community members often had contested relationships with service professionals. From this perspective, the representation of those that prefer to think of themselves as “inappropriately served” rather than “hard to serve,” by those who “serve” has significant ethical dimensions that go unnoted in the CBPAR literature.

Inquiries into the academic subject are rare in the CBPAR literature, who remains monolithic and monochromatic, except perhaps in her femininity. However, certain discursive themes mark the CBPAR researcher: she is a “good” alternative to the “parachute in and parachute out” researcher who mines community knowledges for professional gain (Healy, 2001; Stoecker, 2009). Her “goodness” is articulated through claims to being “useful” and “empowering” (Dick, 2010; Israel et al., 1998). Postcolonial readings reveal how these characterizations obscure the constitution of the “good” academic against the community knowledge worker in need of improvement. A postcolonial framework also resists homogenizing the elite knowledge worker, by recognizing the anti-colonial knowledge work of scholars of color and complicating a simplified White reading of CBPAR’s subject positions.

The production of the “good” academic requires a discourse that can account for the divide between discursive claims and material practices. A divide that is frequently mediated through discourses of guilt and apology. For example, Doyle and Timonen’s (2010) “confess” their failure to realize more substantive participation of older adults and in Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey’s (2009) collection on activist scholarship, the apology for being “not participatory enough” is pervasive and the liberatory potential of CBPAR is described as a “pretty fiction” (p. 31). These apologist discourses, according to Kapoor (2005), recuperate the goodness of speaker without the need for substantive action.

During the two CBPAR projects referenced in this paper, the multiple demands experienced by community knowledge workers living precarious lives led to my ongoing guilt—for not forestalling the eviction of a community colleague or sustaining legal counsel for another, to name a few. However, my most common source of guilt paralleled the literature: that of “not being participatory enough.” For example, while writing the H2h community action guide, I struggled with collectively writing up the findings from the knowledge exchange. This led to various strategies, all of which authorized me to write more. I have since considered how my guilt over “writing too much” failed to recognize that professionals (including academics) hire ghost writers/editors and that contributions can take many forms beyond the technical exercise of writing. Furthermore, the guilt over this instance, and others, of not being “participatory enough” articulates to blunt measurements of the quantity, rather than the quality, of participation. As my theoretical work on CBPAR evolves, I recognize that the “full model” of participation is not only oppressive but conflicts with a central tenet of the work: engaging the complementarity of different knowledges, skills, interests rather than the tyranny of everyone participating in everything.

Conclusions, limitations, and proposals toward more democratic praxis

This paper has put forth a postcolonial analysis of the ways in which the discursive and material practices of CBPAR preserve epistemic privilege by producing and assimilating the difference of the community knower and then subordinating her knowledges through claims of authenticity and re/presentations of her “voice.” CBPAR’s participatory techniques of capacity and consensus building were deconstructed to reveal how they situate the work outside of the political, social and historical conditions in which it unfolds. A postcolonial analysis of the production of overdetermined, subordinate community subjects and “good” then “guilty” academic subjects was presented to trace how their mutual, yet asymmetrical constitution preserves relations of power. As CBPAR is increasingly instrumentalized as a means of accessing “over researched” communities and appropriating community knowledge and labor, this paper has proposed a theoretical reading, woven with critical case reflections, that alerts to the limits of this potentially liberatory research praxis.

This paper is not without its own limits including: the centering of the academic voice and the focus on academic CBPAR literature, which reproduces the devaluing of knowledge work outside of academe; and the privileging of the discursive, which despite reflections on two CBPAR projects, still aligns with the literature’s inattention to the everyday practices of knowledge work. Further, although the feminization of CBPAR is noted, it was not explored and warrants future inquiry. Finally, the problematic of critiquing a promising praxis that may be appropriated to rationalize less democratic knowledge work creates an imperative to conclude this paper with modest proposals toward a more democratic encounter.

Future CBPAR praxis might subvert its claims to proximity by theorizing distance and a more humble knowledge project. CBPAR typically articulates desires to “get closer” to communities of interest, but what if the distances between differently located knowledge workers were made more transparent? Perhaps, if the in-between spaces were made visible, so too would the circuits of power that sustain them and therefore, be open to scrutiny. Re-claiming distance might take two paths: the academic knower who elects to turn away or does a double turn, first toward herself and then to her community colleagues. Turning away, although tempting in its resistance of colonial relations, ultimately re-inscribes the privilege of an academic knower who can elect to turn, while the community knower may not. Whereas, Ahmed’s (2000) proposal to turn toward the authorized “I” and then toward the Other to engage in the “painstaking labour” of speaking to, not for or even with, each other about the difference and distances in-between research and social locations suggests a transgressive move for the social relations of CBPAR praxis. This dialogue could follow Spivak’s direction to neither “celebrate or deny difference, but find out what specific case of inequality brings about the use of difference and who can deny it on occasion” (2005, p. 484).

Furthermore, this turning toward the community knower requires a less totalizing gaze: what Smith (1999) refers to as “research through imperial eyes,” to disrupt the enduring vanguardism of CBPAR praxis. A similar humility is proposed by Jazeel and McFarlane (2010) who advocate for knowledge production that is both uncertain and emplaced in ways that challenge the notion that knowledge travels seamlessly across borders and bodies. Jazeel and McFarlene suggest that knowledge is “always caught in translation.” These translations ensure that epistemic privilege is never total and reinstate agency for community knowledge workers and allied academics to re constitute the subject positions and spaces of CBPAR. In this humbler proposal, the social relations of CBPAR are not bound by a theorizing of power emanating from dominant to subordinate knowers, but by a more complex sociality that explores how power might flow in both directions.