Fals Borda, Orlando

Orlando Fals Borda was a leading Colombian sociologist and a key advocate and theorist of Participatory Action Research (PAR) within Latin America and globally. He was the founder of the Faculty of Sociology at the National University of Colombia, where he later served as academic dean and then as professor emeritus. He was also a member of the Colombian National Constituent Assembly, where he played a very important role in the National Assembly that gave birth to the Colombian constitution of 1991. Born in 1925, he died in Bogota in 2008 at the age of 83.

In his early years as a sociologist in Latin America, Fals Borda was widely known for his work on and with peasant communities in Colombia and also for his work on social movements and social change. Building on this work, Fals Borda also became known internationally for his pioneering work on the theory and practice of PAR, the method of linking social investigation to popular participation in order to bring about social change as well as to contribute to knowledge. In 1979, he published one of the first essays on this theme in English, titled ‘Investigating Reality in Order to Transform It: The Colombian Experience’.

Within Colombia, one of his best pioneering works on the importance of peoples' knowledge was symbolized by his four-volume book titled the Historia doble de la Costa (Double History of the Coast), published from 1979 to 1986. The book was unique because it was published in two columns, one growing from the peasant knowledge and peoples' history of the region, [Page 336]the other from the more academic and theoretical studies on the same topic. Fals Borda argued that a good PAR researcher should learn to write in multiple forms, depending on whether the lessons are addressed to peasants, activists or intellectuals.

Building on this work, for the next three decades, he continued to apply the approach in his own work in Latin America and to spread the approach to other countries. In 1991, he co-edited with Mohammad Anisur Rahman (a leading Bangladesh thinker and activist) one of the first international collections on participatory research, titled Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly With Participatory Action Research.

In 1997, he was the principal leader and organizer of an international conference on action research in Cartagena, which brought together over 1,800 people from around the world, representing dozens of intellectual streams of action research. For a number of years before this conference, Fals Borda had played a global networking role, travelling around the world to identify people working in various ways on action and participatory research. For instance, he was a key participant in one of the first international meetings on PAR, organized in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, by the International Council of Adult Education and UNESCO.

In 1995, Fals Borda gave the keynote address to a meeting of US sociologists, titled ‘Sociology and the Pursuit of Social Justice’. For Fals Borda, the event was a kind of ‘homecoming’. He had received his sociology training in the USA, working first with Nelson Lowry at the University of Minnesota and later with T. Lynn Smith at the University of Florida, where he received his doctorate in 1955. Yet, as he observed in his address, this was the first time he had returned to the USA in some 40 years, to attend a US sociology meeting. On the whole, American academia had shunned his activist participatory methods and his activist approach. And his links to militant peasant movements in Colombia had caused the US State Department to refuse him entry visas as well. His return was a symbolic moment, for it also showed the growing willingness of US academics to learn from the approaches of international colleagues.

...