Cornell Participatory Action Research Network

This narrative of the development of the Cornell Participatory Action Research Network (CPARN) is offered with multiple goals: (a) introducing the organization, (b) narrating its history and present status and (c) sharing the experience of trying to maintain action research within more traditional, conservative and expert-centric academic environments.

In the spring of 1992, a series of conversations on action research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sparked heated debates among graduate students, faculty and staff about how to support such work, and within a year, a small group of students and faculty established the CPARN. In the 20 years since, the network has waxed and waned—at times vibrant, at other times dormant. The current members of a revived CPARN are looking back on this history, but not to reminisce. Current members are looking back for the issues addressed, structures built and information gathered by CPARN's alumni to inform a vision of CPARN's future. The following paragraphs seek to both celebrate and critically reflect upon that inherited legacy.

In collecting this 20-year history, it is difficult and perhaps unnecessary to separate the public role that CPARN played within the global action research community from the personal role it played as a scholarly home for its members. CPARN's broader impact on the action research community is what warrants its inclusion in this encyclopedia, but this entry hopes to also shed light on the more personal side, the side that generated so many strong personal commitments.

The network began as a means to collect and distribute information on action research. During the early years of CPARN, literature on action research was not widely available, and the building and maintenance of the PARchives, begun by Davydd Greenwood and continued by Carla Shafer, Richard Simpson and Nimat Hafez Barazangi, was a direct response to that need. The collected information was essential for Cornell students and faculty and was made broadly available for distribution to other institutions and organizations. PARnet, a website founded in 1993 by CPARN member Carla Shafer, gave the PARchives a larger user-generated electronic presence and a common connection point to reflect on the global picture of action research. At its height, PARnet had over 600 user-generated resource references. The goals of this collection included the identification of trends and common elements as they emerged within the action research literature. At PARnet, users could find descriptions and discussions of shared concepts. Most critically, it provided a readily available way for action research scholars to find materials they did not otherwise have access to. It was the first action research website on the Internet. This experiment in information collection and distribution may be CPARN's largest historical contribution to the action research community. During the 1997 ALARA World Congress in Cartagena, Colombia, CPARN took the lead in cataloguing and archiving all of the material Orlando Fals Borda had collected and made it available for distribution. CPARN's participation in subsequent World Congresses in 2000 and 2003, in local and regional conferences and as invited guest lecturers all contributed to the network's growing wealth of information, resources and relationships.

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