Emancipatory Goals Research Articles

CO-LEARNING IN YOUTH-ADULT EMANCIPATORY PARTNERSHIPS: THE WAY FORWARD?

Youth engagement continues to be a priority issues for Canadian governments and policy-makers. The focus on young people often negates the critical role that adults play in the process and implementation of youth engagement activities. The following article examines the evolution of youth engagement in Canada, and identifies the key theories and ways of thinking about involving youth that currently guide the field. The article attempts to examine how well-meaning adults concerned with genuine youth engagement re-imagine the possibilities of youth-adult engagement by exploring the ideas of adults and youth sharing civic learning outcomes, emancipatory goals, and iterative forms of reciprocal co-learning.

Governing through community allegiance: a qualitative examination of peer research in community-based participatory research

The disappointing results of many public health interventions have been attributed in part to the lack of meaningful community engagement in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of these initiatives. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as an alternative research paradigm that directly involves community members in all aspects of the research process. Their involvement is often said to be an empowering experience that builds capacity. In this paper, we interrogate these assumptions, drawing on interview data from a qualitative study investigating the experiences of 18 peer researchers (PRs) recruited from nine CBPR studies in Toronto, Canada. These individuals brought to their respective projects experience of homelessness, living with HIV, being an immigrant or refugee, identifying as transgender, and of having a mental illness. The reflections of PRs are compared to those of other research team members collected in separate focus groups. Findings from these interviews are discussed with an attention to Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, and compared against popular community-based research principles developed by Israel and colleagues. While PRs spoke about participating in CBPR initiatives to share their experience and improve conditions for their communities, these emancipatory goals were often subsumed within corporatist research environments that limited participation. Overall, this study offers a much-needed theoretical engagement with this popular research approach and raises critical questions about the limits of community engagement in collaborative public health research.

Critical Realist Grounded Theory: A New Approach for Social Work Research

This article explores the potential for grounded theory to be adapted for use within a critical realist paradigm. Critical realism can provide a solid philosophical framework for social work research, but its lack of connection to a familiar research methodology may be limiting its application. Grounded theory is one of the most widely used and well-described methodologies in the social sciences. Its recent adaptation by constructivist and critical researchers demonstrates the ways in which concerns about the methodology's empiricism, individualism and focus on induction might be resolved to meet the needs of critical realist inquiry. Critical realism and grounded theory then become highly compatible, sharing a focus on abduction and commitment to fallibilism and the interconnectedness of practice and theory. Attending to evidence and meaning, individual agency and social structure, theory-building and the pursuit of practical emancipatory goals, the resulting approach is ideally suited to social work research.

Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory

Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory Christopher Lee (bio) In 1974, the newly established Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, submitted “A Proposal for the Establishment of the College of Third World Studies” to the university’s Provost. In its proposed structure for a major in Asian American Studies, the committee recommended that students concentrate on one of three areas in addition to taking a set of core courses: community studies, social sciences, or humanities. While the first two concentrations are clearly designed to contribute “to the body of direct experimental knowledge of the conditions in the Asian American community” (A18) and promote “service to the Asian American people” (A17), the humanities concentration is marked by a noticeable lack of content and cohesion. Only two courses, one on Asian American literature and a creative writing workshop, are listed in the proposal, and this lack of structure is reflected in its provisional tone: That Asian students be encouraged to venture into the humanities is obvious; what form self-expression will take in the context of the Asian American experience and Asian American Studies is yet to be seen. It is certain that the student with a concentration in the humanities will be given the freedom to explore Asian American and Third World literature, art and dance, and creative writing. At the same time, however, the same amount of rigor and depth of understanding [End Page 19] of the Asian American experience expected of the major in the other two areas of concentration will be asked of the student in the humanities. The proposal goes on to clarify the role of the arts in Asian American Studies: “Of particular importance will be the student’s responses to the question of the flow and interchange between life and art. This last point is of considerable importance since it will help to give the individual the clarity of vision necessary in delineating between what is truly an Asian American assertion and what is a replica of what exists, clothed in Oriental paraphernalia” (A21). Even while the proposal embraces the arts as a means of actualizing the emancipatory goals of Asian American Studies, it seems unsure of what constitutes suitable artistic content and identifies the humanities as an area in which courses and methodologies remain to be developed. In charting future directions for research and teaching, it suggests that barriers between the study and production of culture need to be broken down, a task that resonates with their desire to integrate theory and practice. Moreover, the proposal argues that art and literature must not be “only for the purposes of glorifying the individual writers or artist” but rather must “serve the broader needs of our people.” To this end, it insists that the humanities must be driven by political commitment in order to oppose the colonial legacies that have “denied the right [of Third World Peoples] to express themselves in creative ways” (A26). In short, it is only by entrenching the humanities within a larger political project that it can acquire the “clarity of vision” needed to dismantle Orientalist and racist misrepresentations. Reading this report some thirty-five years later, one cannot help but notice the contrast between its tentative engagement with the humanities and the current status of the humanities within Asian American Studies. Asian American cultural criticism, of which a large portion is concerned in some way or another with literary expression, has flourished in the last two decades and constitutes one of the largest components of an interdisciplinary field. New scholarship on the humanities is being produced at a healthy rate, while courses in Asian American literature are regularly offered at many universities and colleges, which in turn affects the training and hiring of new faculty with expertise in literary and cultural studies. These developments have reconfigured the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences, producing an ongoing tension between methodologies that emphasize theoretical speculation and textual analysis on the one hand and empirical analysis on the other. Yet the issues raised by the 1974 Berkeley proposal continue to be relevant for Asian American literary studies today. After all, [End Page 20] students and scholars...

Transcending the new woman: multiethnic narratives in the Progressive Era

The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today.This book is the first study to focus solely on multiethnic women writers' responses to the ideal of the New in America, opening up a world of literary texts that lend new insight into the phenomenon. Charlotte Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women's experiences of both public and private life in the Progressive era.Rich focuses on the work of writers representing five distinct ethnicities: Native Americans S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, African American Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American Sui Sin Far, Mexican American Maria Cristina Mena, and Jewish American Anzia Yezierska. She shows that some of their works contain both affirmative and critical portraits of white New Women; in other cases, while these authors align their multiethnic heroines with the new ideals, those ideals are sometimes subordinated to more urgent dialogues about inequality and racial violence.Here are views of women not usually encountered in fiction of this era. Callahan's and Mourning Dove's novels allude to women's rights but ultimately privilege critiques of violence against Native Americans. Hopkins' novels trace an increasingly pessimistic trajectory, drawing cynical conclusions about black women's ability to thrive in a prejudiced society. Mena's magazine portraits of Mexican life present complex critiques of this independent ideal of womanhood. Yezierska's stories question the philanthropy of socially privileged Progressive female reformers with whom immigrant women interact. These writers' works sometimes affirm emerging ideals but in other cases illuminate the iconic New Woman's blindness to her own racial and economic privilege.Through her insightful analysis, Rich presents alternative versions of female autonomy, with characters living outside the mainstream or moving between cultures. Transcending the New Woman offers multiple ways of transcending an ideal that was problematic in its exclusivity, as well as an entree to forgotten works. It shows how the concept of the New can be seen in newly complex ways when viewed through the writings of authors whose lives often embody the New Woman's emancipatory goals - and whose fictions both affirm and complicate her aspirations.

The Power of “Small Stories:” Narratives and Notions of Gender Equality in Conversations about Sport

This study examines narratives by young adults about sport and gender in relation to equality. Specifically, we explore how focus-group participants used small stories to situate male and female athletes and Title IX. The U.S. law has been credited for increasing opportunities for girls and women but is considered a source of tension for gender relations. Our findings suggest that participants’ stories ultimately did not support emancipatory goals for girls and women because they positioned equality as a right women had not earned. We argue that feminists cannot underestimate the need to inject counternarratives into public discourse at every level, including stories shared with children about sport. These narratives must address misconceptions about equality and gender equity and, ultimately, challenge gender ideology.

The Social Constructionist Challenge to Primacy Identity and the Emancipation of Oppressed Groups: Human Primacy Identity Politics and the Human/‘Animal’ Dualism

In a recent issue of this journal Mike Homfray asserted that social constructionism challenges emancipatory politics based in essential conceptualisations of identity. Thus for Homfray the concept of identity as associated with the pre-deconstructed subject is central for the emancipatory goal of oppressed groups like the lesbian and gay movements. In this paper I offer a distinction between radical identity politics that seeks to liberate oppressed groups, and what I have called primacy identity politics in which primacy identity is used to preserve the subjugation of those who are oppressed. In so doing I put forward a challenge to Homfray's somewhat wholesale rejection of the capacity for a critique of identity to work for emancipatory politics by focussing on primacy identity politics rather than on radical identity politics. In making an argument for the deconstruction of identities for emancipatory purposes I refer to my work on the human oppression of nonhuman animals. In this work I turn my attention away from those who are oppressed to the oppressors because this transfer of attention shows how useful the deconstruction of identity could be for the emancipation of oppressed groups. My examination of discourses used by the pro nonhuman animal experimentation lobby group Pro-Test shows how primacy identity politics can effectively be challenged by a social constructionist critique of essential identities and thus, contra Homfrey, I conclude that the deconstruction of identities can strengthen emancipatory causes.

Transition to Democracy and Citizenship Education in Portugal: Changes and Continuities in the Curricula and in Adolescents’ Opportunities for Participation

The intense historical transformations in Portugal during the last 30 years have had a profound impact on the educational system and on its role in citizenship education. During this period, Portugal experienced dictatorship, the last socialist revolution in Europe (1974) (Barreto, 2002), the end of colonial empire and of colonial wars, the stabilization of a democratic regime and the entrance in the European Economic Community later to be transformed into the European Union. Such deep social and political transformation had strong implications in education and its mission in promoting democratic citizenship has been intensively discussed, with fears of ideological inculcation and a tension between conservative vs. emancipatory goals underpinning the curricular decisions in the field. This paper considers these transformations and articulates them with the perspective of adolescents in basic and secondary education regarding citizenship, politics and civic engagement and the actual opportunities for participation they feel they have in the family, the school, and the community. The bases for this discussion are two studies with Portuguese adolescents: the IEA Civic Education Study (CivEd 2000-2001) that involves three national representative samples of students from grade 8, 9 and 11; and a longitudinal study (2005-07) with adolescents from grades 9, 10 and 11. Results from both studies show a tendency for a dissatisfaction/distrust that young people have in relation to key-institutions of democracy (government, political parties) but, at the same time, the valuing of active citizenship and the emergence of new forms of participation. That oxymoron appears as a challenge to both researchers and teachers that might take advantage in being more aware of the quality of youngsters’ participation experiences in their various life contexts.

Reply to: “Analysing accounting discourse: avoiding the ‘fallacy of internalism’”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a response to “Analysing accounting discourse: avoiding the ‘fallacy of internalism’”, an article by Ferguson in which a work by Gallhofer et al. is critiqued.Design/methodology/approachThe paper responds to critique by Ferguson that one of their papers does not consider the “social‐historical contexts of text production, transmission and reception”. It also looks at Ferguson's challenge of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and its political motivation.FindingsThe paper defends Gallhofer et al. in that they chose to “promote critical discourse analysis respecting the focus of accounting and finance” and that the aim of their work was pedagogical. They chose to focus on the production of the texts rather than their reception because the work wanted to gain insights into how accounting texts are read and mobilised by radical activists in pursuance of their emancipatory goals, especially through CDA.Originality/valueThe paper provides a defence of a previous paper of the authors, which was concerned with emancipatory change, evident in Fairclough's version of CDA.

Diffusion, Decolonializing, and Participatory Action Research

Miki Takasuna describes knowledge transfer between elite communities of scientists, a process by which ideas become structurally transformed in the host culture. By contrast, a process that we have termed knowledge transfer by deelitization occurs when (a) participatory action researchers work with a community to identify a problem involving oppression or exploitation. Then (b) community members suggest solutions and acquire the tools of analysis and action to pursue social actions. (c) Disadvantaged persons thereby become more aware of their own abilities and resources, and persons with special expertise become more effective. (d) Rather than detachment and value neutrality, this joint process involves advocacy and structural transformation. In the examples of participatory action research documented here, Third World social scientists collaborated with indigenous populations to solve problems of literacy, community-building, land ownership, and political voice. Western social scientists, inspired by these non-Western scientists, then joined in promoting PAR both in the Third World and in Europe and the Americas, e.g., adapting it for solving problems of people with disabilities or disenfranchised women. Emancipatory goals such as these may even help North American psychologists to break free of some methodological chains and to bring about social and political change.

Merit and Difference

Using the arguments over college admissions as a point of departure, this article analyzes the idea of merit in education. Situating the concept of merit historically and philosophically, it advances the argument that merit should be considered not as an individual construct but as an institutional one. The debates over merit focus on which individual abilities should be privileged in college admissions. But the author argues the merit does not—indeed, cannot—exist outside the institutions that use it. The article suggests that it may be counterproductive for educators to insist upon an individual basis for merit, even when it is linked to furthering emancipatory goals. In other words, the predominant definitions of merit privilege an idea of the individual that itself should be questioned for how it justifies the institutional practices that create difference, practices that ensure that such an idea never materializes in fact.

Merit and Difference

Using the arguments over college admissions as a point of departure, this article analyzes the idea of merit in education. Situating the concept of merit historically and philosophically, it advances the argument that merit should be considered not as an individual construct but as an institutional one. The debates over merit focus on which individual abilities should be privileged in college admissions. But the author argues the merit does not—indeed, cannot—exist outside the institutions that use it. The article suggests that it may be counterproductive for educators to insist upon an individual basis for merit, even when it is linked to furthering emancipatory goals. In other words, the predominant definitions of merit privilege an idea of the individual that itself should be questioned for how it justifies the institutional practices that create difference, practices that ensure that such an idea never materializes in fact.

Answering the emancipatory call: an emerging research approach ‘on the margins’ of accounting

This paper responds to the call by Broadbent et al. [Acc. Aud. Acc. J. 10 (1997) 265] to provide more diverse views about the social reality for those ‘on the margins’ of accounting. It seeks to discuss Maori research methodologies, which encompass a ‘local’ theoretical perspective through which the emancipatory goal of critical theory can be practiced. We here argue that the Western tradition of research has not been sympathetic towards Maori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand, taking for granted the hegemony of its search for knowledge. As a result Maori researchers have sought to develop and promote appropriate methodologies for research for, by and with Maori, now referred to as Kaupapa Maori research. Kaupapa Maori (Maori practices and policies) may be considered a counter-hegemonic approach to Western forms of research. It seeks to ensure that research with indigenous peoples is more respectful, ethical, sympathetic and useful.

Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf's "Kindheitsmuster"

Since 1989 many East German intellectuals and critical writers have been faulted for their accomodationist attitude towards the GDR state and its punitive politics. While accusations and counter accusations were flying, the question emerged: what was it about German culture or, for that matter about intellectuals, about their particular brand of emancipatory cultural politics that made them such blind and willing instruments of repression?1 In an effort to explain the apparent inconsequence of enlightened doubt among intellectuals in the GDR, scholars have pointed to a variety of psychological, political, and historical mechanisms at play.2 Antifascism and its constituent idea of the unity of all social, cultural, and political forces made for a powerful foundational program that implicated intellectuals in a web of power relations which supported the regime and entrapped critical thought. In a 1990 interview Christa Wolf herself asserted that her generation, a generation that had been socialized under fascism, felt reluctant to organize resistance against people who had been in concentration camps during the Nazi period.3 But if it had yielded to a state with a stained history, ruined economy, and demoralized population, how exactly could the antifascist narrative remain cohesive all the way until 1989 when in her speech Fur unser Land Wolf invoked antifascist ideals as the basis of a new socialist East German nation? In other words, as Dorothea Dornhof put it succinctly, how is it possible that intellectuals who pride themselves on an emancipa-tory understanding would not only enter power relations of their own free will but sustain them despite increasing doubts about their ability to realize any of their emancipatory goals? (63). Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster inadvertently points to a profound desire for preservation. Re-writing the state's foundational narrative of antifascism through a discourse of empathy with Jewish victims commonly neglected in the state's symbolic ritualization of communist resistance, Wolfs project engenders a soft dissidence that avoids challenging antifascism as a discourse of power. This is not to say, however, that the text hides its increasing doubts about the legitimacy of the GDR's ideological project. Quite to the contrary, Wolfs novel invests a great deal in a discourse of fear to perpetually regenerate a dilemma of linguistic impotence. This linguistic impasse in Wolfs works has often been read by critics in the context of modernist Sprachkritik, and thus as Wolfs relevant, if limited, contribution to an emancipatory political and aesthetic discourse in the GDR.4 Instead I suggest Kindheitsmuster continuously and quite consciously restages the liminal experience necessary to sustain the peculiar intimacy that lies at the heart of a particularly symbiotic dissidence, a brand of dissidence in which critical writer and state feed on each other.5 Seen in this light, the crucial question is then no longer whether or not the critical GDR writers who decided to stay in their country undermined or legitimized the East German state, but rather how could they do it both at once? How could they both support and corrode the authority of the state? How exactly is a soft dissidence (re)generated and how does it partake in the production of ideology? Kindheitsmuster has entered the canon as the German book exemplary of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.6 Starting out as an examination of the individual and collective psychology of subjugation under socialist conditions, the book carefully reconstructs the coercive mechanisms surrounding the complicity of Wolfs generation with the Nazi past (Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind? Horigkeit. 248). More than any other book of the 1970s, Wolfs novel negotiates, contests, and reworks the different politics of memory that evolved in both East and West Germany since the end of WW II. In contrast to the GDR state's mythologizing of the communist resistance to fascism, Kindheitsmuster suggests that a full and truthful account of Germany's national socialist past would lead to a more conscientious socialist present and serve to guide future-oriented action. …

“I Feel Enlightened Now, But…”: The Limits to the Pedagogic Translation of Critical Social Discourses in Physical Education

The emancipatory goal that underpins critical theories of teaching and learning is built on a theory of rational self-determination. In the context of physical education, critical educators believe that through a process of enlightenment teachers can recognize and transform elements of injustice and inequality that exist, albeit unwittingly, in their practice. However, despite the broad appeal of this orientation there are relatively few empirical accounts of how theories of enlightenment manifest themselves in the practice of emancipation. Propelled by the lacuna that clearly exists between critical theory and critical practice, this paper reports on the introduction of critical social discourses to a preservice PE program. It uses a case study methodology to report on two student-teachers’ engagement with a range of critical social discourses during a year-long PE unit. The paper discusses some of the ways these students engaged with the theory and practice of a critical orientation for teaching and learning in physical education. Aspects of their experiences are then interpreted through Fay’s (1987) critical but postmodern “limits to change” thesis. The paper concludes with tempered optimism about the potential for critical social discourses to guide preservice teachers in practical ways.

Problematic Success: An Account of Top-Down Participatory Action Research with Women with Multiple Sclerosis

This article focuses on the problems encountered while conducting participatory action research (PAR) with women with multiple sclerosis (MS). The term top-down means that the target population was defined and the research design was generated by a research team composed of academics and social services management rather than a grassroots group composed of women with MS. Overall, the research was a success; however, in the authors' experience, top-down–initiated PAR resulted in a number of problems including problematic assumptions, ambiguous relationships, and conflict. Inherent in top-down PAR designs are structural imbalances between professionals and nonprofessionals that are antithetical to the emancipatory philosophy and goals of PAR, imbalances that persist despite a researcher's commitment to PAR philosophy.

Toward Developmental Multicultural Education: Case Study of the Issues Exchange Activity

If teacher educators are to be successful in offering alternatives to the powerful forces of racism and sexism in today's society . . . [they] must challenge student views as well as urge them to recast their view of reality into problems for critical assessment (Ahlquist, 1991, p. 159). In this article, I explore student readiness for substantive study of multicultural education and the place of role-taking experiences in making the more complex dimensions of multicultural education accessible to teacher education students. I describe Issues Exchange, an activity I use in a graduate course, and how this activity (or activities like it) may serve as a central component of developmental instructional approaches to multicultural teacher education. Challenges in Teaching About Diversity Various scholars have analyzed factors affecting students' understanding and appreciation of multicultural education's more emancipatory goals. Among the factors explored are students' knowledge of diversity in U.S. society, their perceptions of the nature of societal inequities, racist and sexist attitudes and beliefs, and students' overall readiness for the study of multicultural education. Ladson-Billings (1991) analyzed preservice teachers' knowledge about U.S. diversity in a study of their knowledge of civil rights and multicultural education issues and found students lacking knowledge of the most elementary facts of U.S. diversity, thus prompting Ladson-Billings to introduce the concept multicultural illiteracy. She described multicultural illiteracy as the inability to be conversant with basic ideas, issues, personalities, and events that reflect the perspectives and experiences of people other than White, middle-class males (p. 151). She concluded that although prospective teachers must learn more about U.S. diversity, courses based solely on the intellectual understandings of multicultural education (i.e., names, dates) are insufficient. Instead, courses must address the substantive exploration of societal inequities and the social visions multicultural education encompasses (p. 155). King (1991) proposed that liberatory teacher education must incorporate multicultural experiences allowing students to analyze their attitudes and beliefs about the nature and origin of societal inequities. She highlighted the phenomenon of dysconscious racism among teacher education students and its implications for understanding multicultural education: Dysconsciousness is an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given (p. 135). King contends that dysconscious racism allows many teacher education students to remain oblivious to substantive issues endemic to the study of multicultural education such as origins of sociocultural inequities and effects of White norms and privileges on the perceptions of many White prospective teachers with no exposure to multicultural environments. She suggested that unchallenged dysconscious attitudes allow many beginning teachers to enter classrooms miseducated and largely unprepared to effect substantive change in a system that historically has been inequitable. King (1991) called for forms of pedagogy and counter-knowledge that challenge students' internalized ideologies and subjective identities (p. 134). Bennett, Niggle, and Stage (1989) proposed that the multifaceted nature of multicultural education may present overwhelming challenges for some teacher education students. They suggested that some students' intellectual abilities may limit their capacity to engage in the critical analyses necessary in a substantive study of multicultural education. Furthermore, because of their intellectual level, some students, without interventions, may acquire only superficial understandings of multicultural education. Bennett et al. found that students whose intellectual levels demonstrated the least dualistic orientations (i. …

Postmodern Perspectives and Action Research: reflecting on the possibilities

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to examine how action research, particularly the emancipatory goals of critical action research, might be reconfigured to take into account the discursive openness of postmodernism. This may require a loosening up of our sense of the purposes and practices of action research to incorporate a more critical gaze than is usually required of modernist projects. Attention is drawn to the possibility of opening up subject positions which allow the modern and postmodern to ‘speak’, so that heterogeneity and the recognition of difference might be better accommodated in the action research process.

INVIGORATING WORLD SYSTEM THEORY as CRITICAL THEORY: Exploring Philosophical Foundations and Postpositivist Contributions

World system theory comprises two distinct lines of inquiry: macro-social studies of historical world-systems and ideological critique. World system theorists often shun ideological critique, but for two reasons I argue it must be foremost. First, without explicit attention to its philosophical foundations, world system theory rests upon several unexamined, uncomplementary, liberal premises. These premises pose conceptual puzzles. World system theorists frequently cast such puzzles as methodological, empirical, or theoretical problems, rather than as symptoms of ideological confusions requiring critique. Second, through explicit critique, theorists may transform implicit philosophical foundations into explicit ontological and epistemological groundings. Such groundings will enable world system theorists to better realize their critical, emancipatory goals and to resolve theoretical puzzles. One such puzzle -- the conceptual distinction between politics and economics -- recurs often, arising in the debates on the relation(s) between the state system and capitalism and thwarting efforts to demonstrate the unity of the world system. I suggest that world system theorists engage in explicit ideological critique to lay equally explicit ideologicalfoundations for their histories. I suggest a critical, conceptually historicist, "constructivist" approach that builds upon postpositivist critiques and introduces constitutive principles. I illustrate the virtue of this approach by demonstrating the unity of the modern world system.

Consciousness raising in participatory research

Nursing practice and research that are grounded in emancipatory inquiry challenge the inequalities and injustices that affect health in this society. Increasing numbers of nurse scholars have explored the use of emancipatory inquiries (particularly feminist theory and critical theory) as philosophic bases for nursing practice and as theoretical or methodologic perspectives for nursing research. This article presents participatory research as a methodology and consciousness raising as a method for nursing research that addresses the emancipatory goals of feminist and critical theories. An example of consciousness raising in a participatory nursing research project is offered. It is argued that participatory research can produce a revolutionary emancipatory knowledge for the future of nursing and health care.