Chataway, Cynthia Joy

Cynthia Joy Chataway (1963–2006) was a Canadian social psychologist who made many enduring contributions to the field of action research in her short lifetime. Chataway earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in 1987. She then left Ontario to pursue doctoral work at Harvard University, working with the eminent conflict resolution and social research ethics psychologist Dr Herbert C. Kelman. Chataway's dissertation, from which most of her completed academic writing stems, utilized Participatory Action Research to investigate the decision-making process and perceptions of justice among members of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community. Chataway later returned to Canada, attaining the rank of Associate Professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto.

Of the many conceptual gifts Chataway imparted to action researchers, arguably her most significant were her frank writings about the challenges of conducting participatory research with deep commitments to social justice, uprooting knowledge hierarchies and the conduct of ethical collaborative research.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is commonly construed as an orientation to collaborative inquiry rather than being pigeonholed as a specific methodology. PAR embodies a continuum of research activities that employ varying modes of participation and control between community-based entities and academic researchers. Ideally, however, PAR aspires to initiate transparent, democratic inquiry that is collaboratively designed, conducted, analyzed and disseminated in the context of equal partnership between scientists and people who are more often the subjects of research than they are perceived as knowledge bearers.

In early academic writings about PAR, there existed a gap between the ideals and epistemology of participatory research discussed in theory and the practical realities of attempting to co-create and sustain unconventional relationships between researchers and communities. In her seminal work, On the Constraints of Mutual Inquiry, published in 1997, Chataway filled this gap by providing a much needed example of the micro-dynamics of participatory research years before discourse on the particulars of PAR became more widely discussed. In detailing the many challenges of her collaborative journey with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk people that she encountered, and where her intentions as a non-indigenous, English-speaking, White Canadian woman were repeatedly questioned, Chataway improved our understanding of several notions that are central to action research: the political nature of PAR, what constitutes knowledge in research, [Page 92]reflexivity and mutual vulnerability as an ethical obligation in collaborative inquiry.

Chataway's early writings on PAR occurred at a time when most participatory research scholarship was abstract, directive and lacking in rich description. In Negotiating the Observer-Observed Relationship: Participatory Action Research, published in 2001, Chataway's findings were not solely an explanation of how her original research questions and hypotheses were answered using particular methods, utilizing text and/or statistics as evidence. Her examination of the degree to which, through collaboration, she was successful at interrupting unequal relationships between the observer and the observed if read as a traditional results section would read as a failure. Another way to read Chataway's self-critical reflections on the highly political nature of the participatory process with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community while struggling with idealized prescriptions of action research is as an instance of writing that broke with the tendency many social scientists have to detach the process of discovery from the finished products of research. Chataway's highly self-reflexive writing style also influenced future PAR practitioners to think critically about negotiating trust, attending to power asymmetries, self-protection and silence among co-researchers, the many forms participation can take and what inclusivity means in their respective projects.

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