Critical Participatory Action Research

Critical Communities in CPAR

CPAR involves commitments which only participants themselves can enact in practice. CPAR as an approach creates the conditions for practitioners to do the following:

• 1.
  Understand and develop the ways in which practices are conducted ‘from within’ the practice traditions that inform and orient them
• 2.
  Speak the language, use the interpretive categories and join the conversations and critical debates of those whose action constitutes practice
• 3.
  Participate in and develop the forms of action and kinds of interaction in which the practice is conducted
• 4.
  Participate in and develop communities of practice through which the practice is conducted, both in the relationships between different participants in a particular site or setting of practice and (in the case of a professional practice) in the relationships between people who are collectively responsible for the practice (whether as members of a professional body or as researchers into the practice)
• 5.
  Contribute to the individual and collective transformation of the conduct and consequences of the practice to meet the needs of changing times and circumstances by confronting and overcoming what the participants themselves regard as

  • a.
    irrational, incoherent or contradictory in their understandings of a practice;
  • b.
    unsustainable, unproductive or unsatisfying in the activities and work of the practice and
  • c.
    unjust or harmful in the relationships among the people and groups involved in and affected by the practice

Participants in CPAR create critical communities to focus attention on legitimate concerns about their individual and collective work and lives, agreeing to work together to understand their work and lives more clearly, to act and work more constructively and to relate to one another and the world more sustainably. They form groups and networks that are ‘public spheres' (inside and outside institutions) in which people participate (e.g. as speakers, as listeners, as observers or by absenting themselves) voluntarily, aiming to establish a critical distance from the formal structures of institutions and interest groups, in order to study problems and issues that arise in their work and lives and the conditions that shape their work and lives. In these public spheres, participants collectively aim to assist one another to establish the intersubjective [Page 209]validity and legitimacy of their sayings, doings and relatings in their efforts to overcome whatever is irrational, unsustainable or unjust in the conduct or consequences of their practices. Participants in critical communities in CPAR decide together what they will explore (research) and what they will change (action). They understand their communal work and lives as socially constructed through people's actions in history that can be socially reconstructed, when needed, by people acting together, wisely and prudently, to construct new histories.

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