The Ethics of Participatory Action Research with People Living in Poverty

Abstract

This article is based on the webinar “The Ethics of Research on Poverty” held in April 2018. Coauthored by the four presenters of the webinar, it brings together perspectives on poverty from lived experience in the United States, academia, the District Six Museum in South Africa, and the Joseph Wresinski Centre for Archives and Research in France. The article argues that the ethical principles of participatory action research (PAR) are too generic to address the specific characteristics of research projects conducted with people living in poverty. PAR projects on poverty require, in addition to the relevant general ethical principles of PAR (i.e., leading transformational PAR, treating all participants as co-researchers, nurturing respect for the individual and the group, and raising awareness on the level of literacy of each participant), specific ethical guidelines. For PAR to address the needs of people living in poverty, the choice of words on poverty should be aimed at reducing symbolic and epistemic violence, questions should be framed so as to encourage knowledge to be shared, research should yield direct benefits to participants and outweigh risks, and researchers should aim at eradicating extreme poverty. Researchers failing to apply these principles may find themselves guilty of committing unintended symbolic or epistemic violence to the thinking of people in poverty or fall for the soft bigotry of low expectations that inevitably triggers underperformance. To bridge the divide between narratives of people in poverty and interpretations of these narratives , researchers should be aware of their own biases and remain open to being challenged.