Exploring the roots of participatory action research: An interview with Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz

Introduction

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz (b. 1926) is known for her extensive international career as a renowned anthropologist and development researcher. She completed her Master's and Licentiate degrees at the University of Helsinki and in Turku and after five years of research in Tanzania she got a Doctorate (1970) from the Theological Faculty of Uppsala University in Sweden. Her extensive research career started in 1965 and has included vast topics such as the relationship between theory and practice of development and the societal role of Tanzanian women. She has worked as a teacher in various fields, social and cultural anthropology, development studies, ethnology, and the study of religion. Her numerous accomplishments include being a pioneer in the development of participatory research methods. This article presents Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's perspectives into the different phases and challenges of developing participatory action research (PAR) as a method and approach to science.

Interview context

The interview took place on 14 October 2015 at the University of Helsinki's campus located in Kruununhaka area, in the center of Helsinki. The interview was conducted in the newly renovated Discipline of Development studies building, formerly known as the Institute for Development Studies. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz was the first acting professor of the discipline and the head of the Institute in 1982–1988. The discussion lasted for 2 h 30 min and it was conducted by one of the authors, Minna Mayer. The questions were coordinated between the authors and shared with the informant prior to the interview. The spirit of the interview was very warm because of Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's honesty and willingness to generously share stories from her career and experiences with her own research topics, subjects, as well as university politics.

The discussion with Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz begins with analyzing her overall career and her thoughts on the popularity of participatory research methods. She humbly states that she is not proud of her accomplishments, but pleased and content with the opportunities she has had to do this kind of work. She states that her career has included good but also challenging phases, and while some efforts have ended up in failures, she has no regrets. The only disappointment comes from the feeling of not having been completely accepted by academia because of the perceived weak role of PAR. But this too she sees as a blessing in disguise, because it has opened up different possibilities for her to do research in various other academic contexts and environments, which also ensured not getting stuck in any part of her career. When asked if she could do it again, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz answered “I do not need to do it again because with experience I could be too critical of everything. I am very happy that my life has been very rich but at the same time, I would not want to start again.”

Personal history

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz was born in Kuopio, Northern Savonia of Finland and was one and a half years old when her family moved to Kokkola in Western Finland. She lived there until she was nine years old, when her family moved to the capital city Helsinki. She states that the time spent in Kokkola has influenced her life tremendously. She was 13 years old when the Winter War broke out in 1939 with the Soviet attack on Finland. During the war, she states that girls worked just as boys did. In the end of war, she was part of the first and only group of women who actually received training in the use of fire arms.

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz completed her Master's degree in Finnish language, literature, and folklore. Two weeks after finishing, she left for England to stay with a family for one year to master her skills in English language. This particular family had been missionaries in Persia and their connections and outlook on life opened up the wider world to her. She networked with people through the Christian student federation and was also able to attend leadership conferences, as well as create contacts with people from all over the world. During this time, she learned that there was a massive shortage of teachers in Africa. There was a teaching position open in a girls' teacher training college in Tanganyika for which to qualify she took exams in English language and education theory and did practice teaching. She had a scholarship and spent eight months in a seminary in the United States, during which time she also met her future husband, Reverend Lloyd Swantz. Getting engaged did not stop her from taking the position she had signed up for, while Lloyd moved to England starting a conference and training center for Lutheran refugees from countries occupied by Soviet Union. The teaching position in Tanganyika was the starting point for Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's career and also an inspiration for her research later on.

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz published her dissertation in 1970 based on the five years she spent with the Zaramo villagers who influenced her life the most.

There is no question about it that my five years with the Zaramo influenced me more than anything else. With the changes that have taken place people find it difficult to understand when I talk about it. I became familiar with a traditional healer Salum who adopted me as his daughter. He had understood that even when I spoke good Swahili I could not become part of the community if I was not related to people there. So he said, “I will adopt you as my daughter and then you will be part of the community.” And after that I was always called there binti Salum, Salum's daughter, even when these old people had died people there would recognize me as binti Salum. My relationship was deep so that much later on my visits to the city I tried to get rides to visit the aged Salum and his blind wife, one of the two wives had died. When I then went there after he had died a neighbor came to me and said, “Mama, old Salum was asking why binti Marja did not come.” It made me feel bad that when I came to Tanzania for other research, lacking transport, I had not taken the taxi to go to see him again.

Inspiration and influence to succeed

After I had done my Doctorate I have had several people who deeply influenced me and my work. I did not actually in the way follow any definite scholars' line of thought; of course it is wrong to say so, since I did a lot of readings as you now see of the under-linings when you look at the shelves of my books. Now counted in numbers 3300 to be sent to the Library of the University of Dar es Salaam. I have lots of philosophy; I have lots of theory and methodology, so I have done a lot of reading. But somehow I actually wanted to create a different way of doing research and so I did not base it on specific theories but looked for ideas how to make people co-researchers and aware of the significance of their own ways of conceiving ideas and making use of their sources of knowledge. But the scholars who influenced and encouraged the way of thinking when I was doing the research were Professors Bengt Sundkler, with whom cooperation continued over years, Terence Ranger, whose seminars I sat in the University of Dar es Salaam. I attended his research seminars in African history, and Marcia Wright, who became a close friend. There was no anthropology in any of the universities I related with; the way had to be found through personal contacts such as with Professor Mary Douglas. Many other well known scholars attended the seminars held locally and internationally and influenced my way of doing research. Marcia Wright was teaching history in UDSM and part of the time even stayed with me in our home on the beach. We became friends while she was teaching history in Dar es Salaam and she had a long time influence on me.

Getting PAR started

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz names the relationship between theory and practice as one key area of interest for her. She pointed out that research these days is often too distant from the level of practice. Through the strenuous process of getting a good education, many lose contact with practical issues because the role of theory is so strong in most educational programs and research projects, “We are stuck because the level of learning is now more theoretical, there is less contact with reality.” Researchers become often isolated and separated from the people and phenomena they study. They make research plans before they know where they are going and what they are going to do. This problem has been exacerbated by the high demands and efficiency requirements present in today's universities. For that reason, there is a gap between theory and practice. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz noted that this gap between theory and practice has been a major limiting factor for the development of PAR in academia. Despite all this Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz acknowledged that she has been surprised by the fact that the practice of PAR has spread so quickly all over the world, emerging in various forms, first in Asia and Latin America as well as in Africa. The success of PAR arises from the fact that in participatory research one engages with the locals, knows what their problems are, what they are striving at, and what their country wants them to do; the researcher becomes part of the action or engages the actors in continued thinking process thereby marrying theory to practice (Swantz, 2008).

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz acknowledged that the groundbreaking work in linking theory and practice was the Jipemoyo project she conducted in Tanzania. Jipemoyo was a PAR project, which was started in 1975 and lasted until 1979. The project took place in the Western Bagamoyo district in Tanzania as a cooperative project between Finnish and Tanzanian scholars as part of the program of the Research and Planning Department of the Ministry of National Culture and Youth and the Academy of Finland's Department of Humanities (Swantz, 2014a). Jipemoyo encouraged villagers to take the initiative in solving their own problems by using their own resources. The time was opportune for the researchers to join the villagers in common pursuit of solutions to problems as the government's nationwide program of “villagization” was in progress, with the aim of facilitating social, health, and school services for all. Project achievements brought administrators and struggling pastoralists into dialog, producing concrete solutions and procedures for reconciling conflicting interests, and making Tanzanian cultural officers aware of participation as a tool of development and cultural promotion. Jipemoyo has been seminal in introducing a participatory approach in development programs, as a similar methodology using the participatory paradigm was applied later by other development research projects. The project gave researchers opportunities for reflection within the university circles and for contributions to international discussions on PAR (Swantz, 2014a).

How have your perspectives toward using PAR changed throughout the time period you have applied it?

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz stated that what you are doing and the results you want to accomplish determine your approach to participatory methods. She postulated that usually different programs require different approaches based on the objectives of the project. “It changes with the task you have,” she said. Without diverting from the principles of participatory methods each researcher incorporates his or her own approach to doing participatory projects based on the objectives of the study. She emphasized that even though she treated each project differently “according to who had to learn what” her basic approach remained the same. This aligns with Bergold and Thomas's (2012) argument that as researchers become more involved in the number of studies their approaches also improve and this is mostly guided by the quality of the data produced and interpretations from previous projects. Challenges encountered on previous projects may require researchers to be more analytical about their approaches in order to prevent mistakes on future research projects (Bergold & Thomas, 2012).

Furthermore, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz claimed that the participants who are collaborators in the research process have an effect on the researcher's approach to each participatory project. The emphasis on “participation” means that coresearch partners should be involved throughout the research process even though they may not be professional researchers. Therefore, during the planning phase, researchers should be critical about what they want to achieve using participatory research and the ability to help participants identify and solve their situations. More so, the researcher should understand that societies consist of individuals with different ideas and it is important to use an approach that ultimately enables the consolidation of those ideas to create a meaningful action that makes an impact on people's lives.

When Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz did a participatory project with university students in Rufiji district, Tanzania she said that it was a total experiment since no one had done such research there. Neither the participating students nor the villagers were familiar with participatory research with such action, which meant that they were not very experienced in identifying and solving their own problems this way. The objective of the project was to guide young people toward work after they graduated from school. She stated,

So, I had thirteen students as research assistants, part of them were educational students who came for half of the time and some of them would continue during breaks. The topic was on school leavers because I had written in my paper when I was teaching in Teacher Training questioning what happens to them after they finish school. I thought this was an opportunity to start with these students in the villages so they learn how to do something useful. So I made contact with the village elders and those that had started carpentry and also reached out to different ports for support. The project was fairly successful and the students actually wrote reports individually how they saw this work. So it was totally an experiment, I felt I had something to teach, training the students to understand this. It was learning to do something with the students on the ground on how to they did it. And after this phase the university students wrote their reports and the head of the university got these letters and sent a letter around to the heads of departments and said, “Please learn from this experience. Read this what the students wrote about what they had done.” So the first period was a learning process already.

However, her approach shifted when she did a malnutrition program in Tanzania with a different set of collaborators who were more knowledgeable in doing research. The objective of the program was not to use PAR method as a teaching tool but to implement a program. The program involved organizing seminars in different parts of Tanzania. In this case, she was not experimenting but was actually distributing helpful information to the local people to address malnutrition problems, working in collaboration with Norwegians from the health department of Oslo University and a representative from Great Britain.

What is and what is not action research and advice to novice researchers

I have attended the Action Research World Conferences, one in Australia. Very strangely, I got money to travel from the Chancellor of Helsinki University. It was in 2000. And then I attended in 2003 one in Pretoria, South Africa. Australia had started Action Research and what they called Action Learning and that came together with participatory learning. When we were in Pretoria, some of us who were engaged in participatory research were sitting together and saying that we really have to have something different because this Action Research is not really what PAR is. The difference is that you think you know what the action is when you get started and you become part of the action. Whereas in PAR you start with the people, and then you with them learn to know what their problems are, and what they are striving at, and now what this country wants you to do, and what it is that you want to do. And the whole idea to you as researchers is to help the officers to see what the problems are and what you have to listen to.

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz pointed out that the disconnection between researchers and participants is mostly noticeable among highly educated people who go into the field with preconceived ideas about participants' life experiences, hence their failure to learn from local knowledge. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz blames these highly educated people for being too scientific and not able to work with practical life. She cited some projects she witnessed that were not very participatory in nature even though they were regarded as PAR. “When we did a research with Finnish technology, it was so obvious that the highly educated people were not useful there.” Another example, which she only observed and did not participate in, was the mining project in Tanzania where geologists from a notable mining industry were completely disconnected from the communities. The engineers in the water project were supposed to help provide clean water yet they totally excluded the people affected, who only dug ditches for pipes. As a learning process, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz gave the example of Robert Chamber's method of participatory rural appraisal which he and his coworkers used for rural development projects. Chambers emphasized direct learning from local people. Villagers participate through the action of walking, drawing, and writing on the ground or on paper in dialogs and are involved in debates with political leaders and researchers (Chambers, 2008; Swantz, 2014b).

Therefore, based on this failure to understand whether a particular project fits the criteria of PAR, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's advice to novice researchers is that they should understand the process of doing PAR as well as the ethical challenges involved and how to tackle them. She advised that doing participatory research projects is very demanding, challenging, and time consuming because the researcher is involved in enacting a change in people's lives. Bringing about a change means that the researcher has to be critical about the whole process. They need to be patient, being able to prepare a sound plan, and possess good practical implementation skills. The next process is to have a better understanding of the objectives of what they want to do and then determine if the approach they choose suits the criteria of PAR.

In addition, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz encouraged us novice researchers to learn from people that had done it before, “Find people who understand what you are trying to do so they can direct you on the right path.” Seeking help from experienced researchers or critical friends would guide us through the research process and expand our knowledge of using PAR as a methodology. Experienced researchers help with defining the methods, research problems, and data outcomes of the study. What really made Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz successful on her projects was that she was completely ready when she started the Tanzania projects in partnership with the women. As novice researchers, we learn that even though she did not follow anyone's footstep since she wanted to create something of her own, she learned from distinguished scholars like Terence Ranger, a history teacher in Dar es Salaam, through attending several of his seminars and the people that provided mutual support like Mascarenhance, who as the director of the research institute supported her approach, “I wanted people who believed in me.” She approached the right people who whether by reading their scholarly work or attending their conferences and whatever contacts she had with them; she gathered helpful ideas to begin her own participatory research projects. In addition to getting advice, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz stated that she also did a lot of reading and she urged novice action researchers to do the same, if they are to be successful researchers who can make an impact on people's life experiences.

Main challenges and successes encountered using PAR

Even though her projects were successful Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz could not rule out the fact that there were many challenges she encountered along the way. Among the challenges she reiterated was the lack of recognition and support on PAR projects by the academia as a fully fledged research method which does not conform to the scientific tradition, “I am not saying that there should not be science, but it is the links with reality while also making it more and more theoretical learning.” Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz mentioned that universities were very skeptical about PAR as a method and were reluctant to introduce it in the Department of Social Sciences. In support of her argument, Bergold and Thomas (2012) argued that the criticisms leveled against PAR as a method included the failure to formulate a hypothesis that can be tested for results. The collaborative relationship between the researcher and participants, where knowledge is shared, was assumed to prevent scientific norms which require separating the researcher and the researched for data analysis and interpretation of results. Issues such as the time frame of the project could not be determined before going into the field, failure to formulate questions in advance which is required when presenting a budget for funding, all contributed to the lack of recognition by the academy (Bergold & Thomas, 2012).

The criticisms leveled against PAR resulted in little access to funds to help with projects. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz referred to scholars like Davydd Greenwood who had written extensively for more than 40 years applying action research but still had trouble being accepted at his university. Referring back to her own experiences, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's participatory projects were not well perceived because there was no Department of Anthropology at University of Helsinki and no one was doing PAR and could not recognize it. Fortunately, the negative reception failed to impinge on her passion in doing PAR projects.

It never came to the way that I was disappointed because I was never felt accepted in university. When this professor of Ethnology would have wanted to have me, that person who had no contact with anywhere was accepted, and I had done all this research already. So I was disappointed that this did not fit into the mainline of Anthropology.

Doing PAR as an outsider and the ethical challenges encountered

I was not an outsider. I was accepted but you will not be accepted in every situation. You go to another place and with other people and the higher educational level the people are, the less they are ready to accept you. I mean, that is sort of natural to human beings. They press where there are no hindrances in between any walls. The higher you get the more you are aware of this all. I wonder what he/she thinks, how ready are you to open yourself up. And so it is not a question of culture as such, it is how you can envision somebody's culture and how you can become part of it. After all I started as a missionary and when you go to such a society you influence the people but it comes as an influence through communication. With Tanzanians language is the key importance and I happened to speak good Kiswahili. But what I must say is, it becomes different if you had no previous contact, so it is not in the same way easy to go to every place and be accepted.

To overcome ethical challenges Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz understood the differences between her culture and the Tanzanians and her job as an outsider was to fully engross herself into the language and culture of the local people. Having previously taught in Swahili language she was fluent in the language, which removed communication barriers which the majority of researchers struggle with. She emphasized mostly about learning the people's cultures, traditions, and language before working with them.

I had been part of the women. I taught at women's college in Swahili for four years. So I had both language and knowledge of the people. I had given birth to three girls when I started doing research and they were growing up in Tanzania. Fortunately there was a helper Aiya, who could look after the smallest. That was an opportunity for me to do it. I was unfortunately sidelined from the Parish women who had their own woman director who did not like someone like me on their side. But then Emma, who came from a remarkable Zaramo family and who lived in Bunju invited me to visit her. I did not know that she had prepared me to meet the women there. There were 25 women or something like that. She took me to them and she told them, “This mama is here and she is going to do with you anything you think that you would need.” And so they said, “We would want to learn to read.” It was at the time when there had not been any school since the German times. So they said they would like to read and it was the time when literature was in the country program and they did not know how to read. We took turns with Emma who had been to the Bible school for a year and had started working with these women. So I had a person who introduced me to the people.

How about as a woman doing research. Have you encountered some preconceptions regarding what you are like?

That was very strange, I mean, of course in my career I definitely felt at times that I was not accepted. But I also must say that considering my background in Swahili in general I was well accepted. Only when I applied for the professorship position in anthropology many men supported me, but the three women in the Council did not and there was no reason why they should not have accepted me. And I had made one mistake when I was the head of the research institute and asked a male researcher to serve as the director, when I had a scholarship for doing my research. This person because she was a woman felt that I did not support her because she was a woman. But it so happened that I thought our male friend, who was a member of the communist party, was looked down upon so much as a scholar. So I felt I had to give him a chance, but this woman scholar friend thought that it was because I did not want her, and this had influenced our relationship.

The future of action research

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz believed that action research will continue as it has spread wide enough to continue. She added that, “What contact with the academic research will be and how it will enrich the academic research, this is the question.” She further reiterated that how people perceive it may determine its future. There were people who rejected it at first but are now appreciating it. She gave the example of Professor Jeremy Gould who had been her supporter but initially had not really liked PAR. He invited her to give a lecture to his class in his post in University of Jyväskylä. He had changed his negative perspectives about PAR and had become a greater supporter of her work. “So I think that when you actually get the right understanding of it, it will have a way of coming in,” she said.

Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz stated that the current scientific structure adopted by the academy needs to be reviewed. There is the need to develop a criterion that specifically assesses participatory projects without necessarily linking them to the scientific worldview which emphasizes that projects should formulate hypotheses. Participatory research projects do not test hypotheses as knowledge and ideas are directly generated from the people affected. Therefore, a better understanding of these principles of participatory research would help future researchers to get funding for their projects and increase their publication in journals. Students in universities will also not have to go through challenges when submitting proposals for participatory research projects for their thesis or dissertations.

Much of your work was aimed at improving the role of women in development, could you reflect a little bit on the changes you have seen in this role in general and what would you like to see happen in the future?

I did not do research for development but I got engaged in development because that was the term for everything that was being done as it still is. I did not think I had to accept it because it was the vocabulary, but I believed that in general our concept of development did not arise from the people. Even though there have been some changes, still we have not touched the ground level the way that we should have.

Therefore, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz argued that her role in bringing PAR to development while at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1972 became important in changing the lives of women. Because PAR contrasted with the Millennium Development Goals of poverty alleviation in that it focused on the voiceless, the projects she conducted there positively impacted on women's lives. She postulated that when women are invited as research partners where their participation is not hindered, they have the ability to contribute positively to any development goals (Swantz, 1997; Swantz et al., 2001). For example, one of the articles she coauthored, “Participatory Action Research in Southern Tanzania with special reference to women,” which first appeared in The SAGE Handbook of Action Research (2001) explored how through working together as a team, Tanzanian women were able to critically examine their economic situation and made smart decisions on how to acquire credit for brick production. The article also mentioned another captivating story about a particular woman, Mwanashulu who successfully organized and led a group of fisherwomen in a male-dominated society. Mwanashulu's strong leadership skills helped the other women to understand the power of voice and participation which gave them the courage to take a firm stand for what they believed to be right (Swantz et al., 2001).

In her concluding remarks, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz stated that she was very happy she had the opportunity to speak for the women and encourage their involvement in the process of development. The first conference she was invited to was to represent Finnish women in Norway where the topic was on women's rights. She gave then her first lecture in Swedish in Sweden, where a conference was well attended by academic women and men also from Finland. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz was so proud of the turn out and she said that she never thought she would do it when the academic people there were not yet ready for feminist ideas. She was again chosen the following year to be Woman of the Year and shared a photograph with Queen Christine. She felt she represented the women well because by working with them she had a better understanding of their perspectives for development. Nevertheless, she argued that there is still a long way to go until women can be actively involved. She said that women are knowledgeable but they do not have the chance to express their knowledge through participation. She concluded that PAR should help encourage women to participate actively in expressing their views about their own situations.

We have more ways in the social media to get more from the ground but it comes in a way that it really does not reflect reality. We are speaking for women in the wrong way. Even the people who do the research are often men. Some women are doing action research now and there are some changes but we have not touched the ground the way it should be, there is still a long way to go.

Florence's reflection

Our time with Dr Swantz was very valuable. I was really inspired by the extent to which her participatory research projects created positive contributions to people lives, especially the Tanzanian women. There are four very important lessons I took from the interview which will continue to guide my future participatory research projects.

First, I learnt that when doing PAR projects, you become deeply engaged in people's lives. You become part of the whole community and help people fight their struggles rather than remaining an outsider. The people need to trust you in order for them to work with you. Furthermore, what really fascinated me is that the connections you create during your fieldwork do not go away after the research is completed. You continue to work with the people and have the opportunity to assess the effects of the intervention to determine if improvement has occurred. She said,

I had visited a long time Masai leader until his death. He is a good example because he was alert. He knew that things were changing. He was the Chairman of the group. I asked him, “Did our Jipemoyo project really succeed?” He said “No.” This is what I appreciated because he did not try to please me. But they became aware of the problem of how their cows were dying. But he was clever enough to know that the changes they needed were deeper.

Second, I also learnt from Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz that when you influence people's lives positively, you open more doors to imaginable opportunities including getting acquainted with important people for support. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz got the opportunity to get support from the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, and the first President of Zimbabwe Comrade Canaan Banana. “These people have been in our home, the President Julius Nyerere twice, and he has been a great supporter of our work.” Changing people's lives is very difficult especially if their situation involves political influence and with individuals who believe that your project may threaten their positions. For example, I have read several PAR projects that were completed with politically marginalized people as in the case of women living in war-torn nations. These countries are politically controlled and are not easily accessible to researchers and without support from influential people I believe that carrying out such projects would be impossible. Therefore, the major task for us emerging researchers would be to create plans that can catch the attention of these very influential individuals. Personally, I view this as the most difficult step in PAR as it requires the researcher to design an action plan that will make the project possible and convince policy makers the potential for a positive change. For example, careful planning is required for data collection, time, and place as well as the action that needs to be taken.

Third, I liked Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's emphasis on the balance between the knowledge and skills provided by the researcher and that provided by the participants. The idea is that both parties know something which they should share in order to create a change. She cautioned us novice researchers against telling people their problems and sees ourselves as their saviors, but instead, our role is to collaboratively work with them to identify their struggles. This was a very useful lesson for me. When I started preparing my study with Zimbabwean immigrant women, at first I thought I knew everything about their life experiences since we shared the same ethnical background. However, by the time I started conducting my fieldwork, I realized that there was so much I did not know about their experiences. Therefore, it became clear that I and the women knew something but not everything and the collaboration process we created enabled us to share knowledge among ourselves.

Fourth, the final lesson I took from our conversation with Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz is that to be a good researcher requires courage, perseverance, and enthusiasm and these personal qualities can inspire others. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz greatly inspired other researchers by demonstrating the courage to help communities change the course of development and social structures toward a common goal. There is convincing evidence that a number of scholars have been inspired by her work. Some of her articles, “Participatory Action Research as Practice” published in The SAGE Handbook of Action Research 2^nd Edition (2008), a book chapter, “Local actors in development” edited by Omari (1998) and, “Poverty politics in local government in Tanzania: A Rural Development Perspective (2013)” among several of her publications, have been read widely with researchers emulating the way she successfully applied PAR to marginalized communities.

Therefore, I conclude with confidence that regardless of the uncertainty by local development agencies to put PAR principles into practice and the universities to adopt and teach it as a research methodology when it started, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's passion for change laid a foundation for the growth of PAR as a practical method. PAR is today considered a research method that best promotes knowledge transfer and Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's work provides guidance to this community empowerment, and for that reason we are very grateful for her literary contributions.

Minna's reflection

The interview with Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz was truly a memorable one. Her warm spirit, enthusiasm, and deep passion for research are truly admirable. Her career is impressive from numerous perspectives and this interview was such a pleasure. I admire her perseverance and strength to go against the current and follow her own path, even when it clearly has not been the easiest choice. Like many other great researchers, Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz has faced critique and skepticism, but stayed true to what she believes to be important.

For me personally the most important lesson to be learned from her is the importance of being truly present with the people one is studying. When doing research on societies and communities, researchers should not give in to the continuously increasing demands of high efficiency, adopting passive roles, or settling for observing from a distance. Dr Swantz's approach shows that exerting deep care and interest in the lives of the informants is not a risk for objectivity, but a way to find more interesting paths of discovery. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's approach has inspired me to find a better focus and get rid of the feeling of haste that is a continuous disruptive force. Her strong presence at the local level with the people who she studied teaches all of us to think about their own position, the role we give our informants, and what truly is important in our research.

Research today is faced with a great paradox. Results are expected to come fast, but cutting corners deteriorate the quality of research, which in turn in the long run can diminish the societal role of research institutes. Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz's extensive experiences show that there are no shortcuts to happiness. The road to discovery maybe full of potholes and obstacles, but they should not be a reason not to take the journey.