Translating “Participation” from North to South: A Case Against Intellectual Imperialism in Social Science Research

Abstract

Participatory action research (PAR) aims for social justice in both the process and the outcome of research. To achieve this aim, PAR must contain and support the social and material conditions necessary for meaningful participation in a research project, particularly by those subordinated within asymmetrical relations of power. What makes PAR participatory, and thus socially just, is contingent on opportunities provided for those involved to exercise their capacities, to express their experiences, and to participate in determining their actions and the conditions of those actions (Young, 1990). The dichotomy between first peoples and settlers (Sissons, 2006) complicates participation in PAR research in northern Canada. As part of its social justice agenda, PAR aims to have local people, that is indigenous peoples in the North, become the experts and agents of the research agenda, rather than being the other and the object of study, as they are often positioned in conventional social science research (Absolon & Willett, 2004). With PAR indigenous knowledges and knowledge practices, as well as indigenous languages and voices, become indispensable to the research (Sinclair, 2003). PAR researchers, in the North and elsewhere, aim to balance attention to the social processes of the research with social outcomes of the research. This means that researchers must not universalize Western processes of knowledge formation, inherited from European intellectual traditions, to northern indigenous communities. For northern indigenous communities, all animate beings, which include the human and the nonhuman as well as the ancestors, generate knowledge within the “spheres of nurture” where they dwell.KeywordsSocial JusticeIndigenous PeopleIndigenous CommunitySocial Science ResearchParticipatory Action ResearchThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.