Collaborating for Change

A Participatory Action Research Casebook

Susan D. Greenbaum, Glenn Jacobs, Prentice Zinn, Susan D. Greenbaum, Glenn Jacobs, Prentice Zinn

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978801172
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Across the U.S. immigrants, laborers, domestic workers, low-income tenants, indigenous communities, and people experiencing homelessness are conducting research to fight for justice. Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook documents the stories of a dozen community-based research projects. Academics and their partners share authorship about the importance of gathering credible evidence, both for organizing and persuading. The emphasis is on community organizations involved in struggles for equality and justice. Research projects directly engage community partners in all phases of the research process. Finally, the stories capture how the research changes the roles of researchers and those being researched. The book is designed for students, but also for community organizers, social justice activists, and their research allies; it offers real stories and real projects that show how democratizing research supports social change and heightens our understanding of complex social issues.

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Introduction

Susan D. Greenbaum

This volume explores the potentials and contradictions of grassroots collaboration with academic researchers. We implicitly critique patronizing neoliberal “service learning” efforts designed to expose students to life “on the other side of the tracks.” We explicitly attempt to correct ideas about the presumed cultural and personal shortcomings of poor people, especially those of color, who are often thought to be responsible for their own lack of success. In contrast, we offer stories and analysis of participatory and egalitarian research projects that have bridged class divides and can erase misconceptions about poverty and injustice.

Don’t mourn; organize. Joe Hill issued that charge prior to his 1915 execution, falsely convicted of murder but killed for his labor agitation. His message resonates today. Confronting a gathering storm of menacing political forces, we critically need a surge of progressive organizing and effective action. This volume speaks to a part of that task. It is about projects undertaken by activist organizations and academic researchers in the United States who work together to marshal evidence in support of humane policies and progressive change.

Data that are made credible by the professional credentials of researchers form a necessary, if insufficient, condition for achieving policy and political goals. Researchers who work with community-based organizations can provide valuable ammunition, and they can benefit their own scholarship in the process. Of equal importance are possibilities for cross-class alliances that can help remedy fundamental imbalances in power. Despite this potential, forces at all levels may dilute or discourage cooperation. Generalized political resistance to reform and increasingly corporatized university governance often conspire to defeat joined efforts to alter the status quo. Faculty performance metrics, institutional pressures to desist, and various punitive obstacles may hinder faculty from getting involved. Interactional tensions, unfamiliar frames of reference, and cultural differences can make it hard to forge authentic and comfortable partnerships. History has demonstrated the difficulty of this work but also the amazing human achievements it has many times helped bring about.

Our book offers examples of social justice projects that involve explicitly coequal partnerships and deliberate efforts to achieve organizational democracy and societal transformation. All were funded by the Sociological Initiatives Foundation (SIF). The foundation began in 1998, with origins in the journals Sociological Abstracts and Language Learning and Behavior Abstracts and the radically progressive views of its founders. Proceeds from their sale to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts were placed in an endowment fund from which SIF awards small grants to support collaborative research-driven activism. Priorities are to address problems affecting low-wage workers, immigrants, ethnic and gender minorities, the homeless, and other powerless groups. Also supported are projects for linguistic issues such as language maintenance or revitalization, second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and literacy. Since its inception, SIF has awarded grants to scores of organizations, initiating or augmenting a variety of projects. Several grantees have won substantial and remarkable victories benefitting local communities and society at large. The dividends of these efforts, often bought with temporary setbacks, include valuable lessons for activists, researchers, students, and others interested in progressive social change. Important insights also have been gained from less successful projects, where the obstacles were greater and achievements more modest. Evolving strategies for making change require both kinds of interrogation.

The chapters present varied examples of activist research that is collaborative through all phases of the work (often referred to as participatory action research, or PAR). SIF’s emphasis on participatory methods is epistemologically sound, tactically smart, and ethically imperative. PAR helps ensure that research questions are framed and measured appropriately and those affected by likely outcomes have maximum input about, and comprehension of, both results and interpretations. To succeed, activist research must be rigorous enough to withstand skepticism; to be effective, it must reflect and include perspectives that may not be taught in conventional research methods courses. Taking on contested areas of reform greatly amplifies the crucial importance of doing sound and defensible research. Mixed methods and carefully triangulated designs aid in meeting that standard without sacrificing inclusion.

Core benefits in this approach to research include enhancing skills of inquiry for both researchers and community partners and building vital trust and cohesion among actors engaged in the arduous process of effecting social change. Internal dynamics of class, ethnicity, and gender can bedevil such arrangements. Relationships that go sour, or complaints that researchers fail to assist communities where they collect data, are frequent stumbling blocks to establishing effective university-community engagement. Based on both experiences and analyses, several authors present ideas and methods for resolving and overcoming such obstacles. Our volume offers substantive examples across a spectrum of place and purpose, situated in discussions of both theory and method and aimed at readers who are, or wish to be, doing this work. We challenge manipulative neoliberal ideas about community engagement and conventional beliefs that rationalize and sustain the idea that researchers must maintain social distance and functional control to ensure “objectivity.”

Objectivity and rigor are not the same, and the reality of the former is open to debate. Few researchers design without expecting, or hoping for, particular outcomes. Researchers and their activist partners who have written these chapters were hoping for justice and expecting change. Their work was intended to expose problems and illuminate issues to change laws, policies, and practices. Rigor in design and implementation are doubly important in such endeavors.

The collaborations described in our book join university researchers and some of the poorest and most badly treated workers in the United States—laborers, restaurant workers, nannies, house cleaners, and dairy and forest workers. Many are immigrants struggling through an era of intense oppression. Others are simply too poor to make ends meet or live indoors. Native Americans fighting to protect their natural resources and cultural heritage are also included, groups who have a freighted history with researchers and a long list of broken promises. This book is about coproducing knowledge, turning it into power, and establishing viable and equitable alliances across divides of class, color, gender, and origin.

Chapters are divided into three parts. Following this introduction, Glenn Jacobs (board chair of SIF) examines the linked issues of methodological rigor and professional credentials in contested political environments and the significance of PAR in achieving valid results and building organizational capacity. We argue that using PAR in these cases yielded better and more accurate research, and the process invigorated organizing and participation among members of the partner groups.

The second part introduces descriptions and narrations about selected projects funded by SIF. Chapters address issues of collaborating openly, fairly, and successfully across wide social distances while challenging power imbalances that both cause and reflect the vast inequities in our society. Stigma and cultural differences are explored in relation to homelessness and the working class. A subtext concerns the strategic use of white privilege and access through social networks. Class Action, a group in Boston, has researched subtle cultural differences incubated in the distances between social classes and wrongly reinterpreted to mean lower-class inferiority. Through varied and creative outreach, Class Action strives to erase misunderstanding and help activists learn valuable lessons from each other. The San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness uses participatory research to fight prejudices against unhoused people in a very expensive housing market and a reputedly liberal political climate but one with cruel measures that vilify and criminalize homelessness. Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson (NLMH) is an organization that began with the Occupy movement against evictions but was persuaded by the grass roots that unaffordable energy was a higher priority. The partnership that grew out of that process bridged class and ethnic differences between Vassar students and Poughkeepsie neighborhood activists and has grown more durable from consensus building that was directed from the ground.

Labor struggles are the subject of the next and largest part. Chapters vary by geography and job description, but problems are remarkably similar. Identifying and achieving solutions are also similar. It takes both solid evidence and effective organizing to prevail in a political climate that prefers to reject claims of discrimination and unfairness. The bottom layer of the labor market in the United States is rife with corrupt and evil practices. These include wage theft, sexual and physical abuse, dangerous working conditions, insecure and unpredictable income, threats of deportation, and scant legal protections. In chapters about immigrant domestic workers in Boston, immigrant forest workers in Oregon, restaurant workers across the United States, day laborers in Nevada, construction workers in Texas, and immigrant dairy workers in Upstate New York, the wider landscape of labor exploitation is made visible. In each of these cases, research anointed by PhDs was a critical component of a much bigger organizational project. These are not typical semester-long service learning projects. Rather, they involve long-term commitments, delicate negotiation and diplomacy on several sides, and careful strategies based on democratic consensus building. The accuracy and validity of the data that are presented and narrative and qualitative contributions that can make statistics come to life are central concerns. These chapters also echo the importance of participatory research in organizing and awareness building.

The final part focuses on activism related to heritage and language. Erasure of cultural traditions and practices constitute a softer form of genocide. Ability to function in the dominant culture is a critical asset that should be achievable without losing birth culture. A major concern of SIF has been to support projects that combat barriers of language, literacy, and xenophobia, as well as those that actively preserve the linguistic and cultural assets of immigrants and Native Americans. Two chapters in this part, both situated in the northwest, deal with environmental threats and language retention. The Nimiipuu (also known as Nez Perce) are fighting with other groups in Idaho against the incursion of huge oil tankers on their territory. Students and faculty at the Northwest Indian Language Institute at the University of Oregon collaborated with high school teachers and students at the Nixyáawii Community School, who together invented and created digital materials in their native languages for the preschoolers at the Tamalut immersion school. A final note: Most of the contributed chapters have multiple authors, partly due to the collaborative nature of this work. Authors’ names are listed alphabetically, and ordering does not reflect relative importance in the project or publication.

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The Epistemology and Hybridity of Participatory Action Research

What and Whose Truth Is It?

Glenn Jacobs

Epistemology. The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.

—The American Heritage College Dictionary

Humanist sociological findings can help push for participatory social arrangements, even to the extent of sweeping revolutionary changes.

—Alfred McClung Lee, Sociology for Whom?

The term epistemology conveys the aura of a sequestered preserve of scholars, experts, and technicians. It is associated on the one hand with the language and terminology of abstract philosophy and on the other with the esoteric methodological codes of academic conduct and research design and analysis, both of them associated with the realms of philosophers, experts, and trained scientists whose grasp of how to conduct systematic inquiry is commonly viewed as valid and credible. Moreover, the uncovering of knowledge in scientific work is neither conducted nor written by laypeople and is removed from the subcultures of subaltern groups such as the poor and the homeless and of racial and ethnic minorities as well.

This common view of empirical reality is the nonnegotiable preserve of scientific truth representing a legacy of the Enlightenment and a foundation for extraordinary progress in medicine and technology. That canon represents an ontic distance between the researcher and the objects of research only capable of being understood by the scientific intellect of the researcher. These precepts underlie the related canon of “positivism” composing the “notions of objectivity, expertise, and neutral distance that have long dominated social science,” which are derived from the taken-for-granted know-how of the physical sciences (Sandwick et al. 2018, 477). However, what is true for the latter has remained open to challenge and debate by common sense in the realms of the social sciences.

Nearly a century ago, a founder of sociology in the United States, Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), set forth a key epistemological distinction between physical and social science and, by extension, quantitative versus qualitative sociology. Cooley saw this distinction as composing the fundamentally different kinds of knowledge of the physical and social sciences, labeling them respectively “spatial” and “social” knowledge, each derived by different research methods. The former uses standardized units of measurement and quantification (i.e., statistical methods) and the latter derives from “sympathetic introspection,” or the understanding that ordinary members of society have of themselves and each other based on sympathetic reflection and observation (Cooley 1926; Jacobs 2006, 187–192).

Cooley viewed social knowledge as appropriately studied by participant observation (i.e., ethnographic field methods) now grouped in the social science methodological arsenal with open-ended interviewing, focus group study, and so on. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used in participatory action research (PAR), which gathers “hard” and “soft” data in its mission to implement social change. Following what Alfred McClung Lee calls a “radical interactionist” strategy, the articles herein demonstrate that these sources of data serve the purposes of social action in complementary ways.

Lee counsels sociologists to open their perceptual portals to mind-stretching humanizing experiences by carrying out “extensive participant observation, perceptive listening, and experimental involvement in social action,” which “can take place concomitantly as you break down your own barriers against hearing and understanding . . . in their . . . terms what those interviewed have to tell you.” He notes that “after such humanizing experiences, the stereotyped ideas with which sociologists ‘handle’ a different sort of person start to crumble” (1986, 60, 61). The deceptively simple tactics of “looking and seeing” have tremendous epistemological ramifications.

It is noteworthy that William Foote Whyte, the author of the sociological classic Street Corner Society, a landmark ethnographic sociological study published in 1943, writes that PAR is “a powerful methodology for advancing scientific knowledge” (1989). He notes, “Where the social researcher gets involved in a continuing process of organizational change, the professional expert role is much less useful for generating knowledge or for determining the course of change” (368).

Reflecting on his own earlier work in PAR on the Xerox business setting, he notes that “key informants” who “may become collaborators in the research process . . . may reach the point of joint authorship.” That study reflected a different context than those herein. Workers and management at Xerox were selected to work together and carry out a study “to determine whether Xerox could cut its manufacturing costs sufficiently” to meet an outside bid “and thus save . . . jobs” (371). He concludes that “if professional researchers pursue the PAR strategy, reaching out for technical knowledge and analytical skills among practitioners in fields of action different from our own disciplinary bases, we find mutually profitable ways of combining intellectual forces” (380).

The close association of research methods with social ethics and social action is embodied in Alfred McClung Lee’s Sociology for Whom? (1986). A cofounder of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 1950–1951, he quotes an eminent member of the American Sociological Society who objected to the SSSP’s “anti-systematic, anti-theoretical and anti-quantitative views,” suggesting that the “humanist” qualitative research modality is more likely to recognize elites’ manipulation of social conditions. Thus humanist activist researchers risk paying the price of endangering their academic and professional respectability (Lee 1986, 70, 94–96).

As Lee suggests, positivist sociologists are prone to rationalize social inequality and proclaim that the so-called impersonal ethical neutrality of their findings is “natural.” They therefore “erect a scientistic fabric of symbols which presumably reflects ‘reality.’” Activist researchers clearly disagree with this assertion and recognize that ethical neutrality “is neither possible psychologically nor desirable socially and scientifically” (96–97). In other words, such neutrality betokens sterility. We note that PAR researchers frequently utilize “mixed methods” approaches in their organizations’ campaigns and campaign strategies, underlying our contention that the uses to which research methods are put spill over into the fundamental truth-telling meanings and significance of social action.

Although some may object to calling PAR a distinct method of social science research, the contents of this book testify that the partnership of academics and local ...