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Re-merging Interest for Participatory Action Research Kees Biekart & Rosalba Icaza Activist and participatory research has always been an important focus within the ISS. In recent years we have seen an increase in Research Papers with topics related to social movements, alternative forms of knowledge co-production, and the application of creative, and new participatory tools. For the past two years the ISS curriculum has also offered a new Research Techniques course on Participatory Action Research, responding to this tendency.
There appears to be an uneasy relationship between the tense practice of protesting and being involved in activism on the one hand, and the relative peace and space for reflection in the academic realm on the other. When you are in the middle of a fierce street protest, or a campaign, or part of a semi-legal activist group, it is very hard to maintain the necessary distance to your cause, which is the typical academic attitude. However, the tension between the academic and the activist practice can also be a source of great creativity. It can stimulate critical self-reflection on mainstream notions of academia as a space for reason and the production of ‘objective’ knowledge, which is disconnected from power and dominant constructions of reality. It can open up the possibility of understanding academia as a site of resistance and of activism, as well as a site in which knowledge-practices are being generated. This is typically a perspective of ‘action research’. Activism has, in a way, also re-entered the ISS. In 2012 ISS started running a specialization in Social Movements and
Action Research Techniques (SMART). This is a sub programme of the Major ‘Social Justice Perspectives’, which also oversees the specializations on Human Rights, Gender Studies and Security and Conflict. The new SMART specialization is indirectly a successor of the PAD (‘Politics of Alternative Development’) specialization, which also focused on issues of social justice, political economy, and collective action. Starting in the early 1990s, the PAD programme was one of the largest ISS specializations, attracting many practitioners, often from activist backgrounds. Looking at the titles of their Research Papers, PAD graduates (such as Rui Cordeiro from Brazil, with a blog elsewhere in this issue) generally used their MA studies to theoretically reflect on their professional practice in order to be even better equipped with analytical and practical skills when returning home. About five years ago, PAD student numbers gradually declined. This was caused by a number of developments, such as a changing interest of applicant students, but also by the sharp reduction of scholarships available for
Latin American students, a historically strong group within PAD. Additional reasons were that other specializations emerged from PAD, such as the specializations on international political economy (IPED), governance and democracy (G&D), as well as the new specialization on human rights. Maybe the idea of ‘alternative development’ had also become a more mainstream idea, as the phrase was also appearing in official World Bank documents. Therefore, it is really encouraging ‘that’ after ‘see’ the new Participatory Action Research’ (PAR) course is so successful. This course has been offered as one of the optional Research Technique courses for MA and PhD students at ISS since 2012. We actually had to limit the number of participants in order to keep the course really participatory. About a decade ago a similar course on participatory approaches was running under the auspice of Marlene Buchy, but when she left ISS to work in the United Kingdom the course was unfortunately discontinued. We decided to redesign the ‘participatory approaches’ course and to insert more attention to ‘action