Participatory Research

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    Participatory Research in Asia
    (1980) Tandon, Rajesh
    This volume represents a major step in the Participatory Research Project (PRP) in Asia and is the first publication of its kind in the region. It has now been a little over two years since the project was started by the International Council for Adult Education. The PRP has been implemented through the creation and strengthening of five regional networks, and I have been acting as the coordinator of the Asian Regional Network for the past 18 months. A statement of the objectives of the Participatory Research Project and Network is included as an appendix. This volume draws together emergent theoretical concerns of Participatory Research (PR) in Asia, a set of case studies illustrating some of the under-lying principles and methodologies, some short discussion notes, and key reports from regional and sub-regional meetings. The purposes of this volume are manifold: first, this volume will present to the members of the network as well as those interested in PR, the current 'state of the art' in PR: it is intended to initiate a series of such volumes in Asia which will reflect the evolving character of PR as a concept and methodology: second, this volume is intended to stimulate further writing on and documentation of PR. I believe that a significantly greater amount of work is going on in Asia than is represented here. This is a weakness of the present volume: it is heavily biased in favour of some countries, especially India, than others. I do believe that other countries of Asia have a lot of exciting material to contribute to PR. I hope this volume will stimulate a more active circulation of already existing materials. Finally, this volume is intended to be a report on what has been happening in PR in Asia through exchanges across the region. Already four meetings/workshops have been organized on PR in Asia, and it is planned to hold many more within and across the region in the coming years.
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    Relevance of community‑based participatory research in community medicine training
    (Indian Journal of Community Medicine, 2020) Krishnan, Anand; Tandon, Rajesh; Nongkynrih, Baridalyne
    Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is an approach in which researchers undertake research in partnership with those affected by the issue being studied, for the purpose of taking action or effecting so-cial change. It can also incorporate those who will use the results to change practice and inform policy. The practice of CBPR is primarily fo-cused on "Knowledge for Change." Most research projects in such CBPR partnerships are funded through the academic partners. In many situations, academic and professional researcher institutions and researchers find it difficult to share the information and resources or to di-rectly engage with local community and other local stakeholders. In practice, finding an intermediary partner who has good rapport with lo-cal community and local government can be very effective. While there are good initiatives in selected medical colleges for community orien-tation of medical undergraduates and postgraduates in community medicine, these are not immersive enough to cause an attitudinal change. It is time that we exposed our graduates and postgraduates to CBPR concepts and practice
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    Participatory research as a methodology of development
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 0000) Tandon, Rajesh
    This paper questions how development research has usually been done. It points out that classical research keeps a firm line between the researcher and the people being studied, treats the researcher's own values as something to be kept out of the picture, and leaves control of the whole process in the researcher's hands alone. Participatory research is put forward as a way of working that sets these assumptions aside. Here the problem to be studied comes from the community itself, the people affected take an active part in the inquiry, and the researcher works alongside them rather than above them. Three examples from India carry the idea forward. In West Bengal, sharecroppers were registered through village camps under what became known as Operation Barga. In southern Rajasthan, twelve tribal families built a shared irrigation system by reviving an old local practice of water-sharing. In Maharashtra, an organisation called Shramik Sanghatana brought together landless labourers and tribal women around wages, land rights and the effects of alcoholism on their households. Through these cases, the paper highlights some of the more challenging issues that participatory research raises, such as its closeness to political action, the difficulty of applying it in unorganized communities, and the need for a researcher's personal perspective before people are willing to trust the process.
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    Participatory research in Asia
    (1980) Tandon, Rajesh
    This book, edited by Rajesh Tandon and published in 1980 for the Asian-South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education, gathers the first two years of work under the Participatory Research Project coordinated through the International Council for Adult Education. He opens the collection with his own essay mapping the character of participatory research as it had taken shape across Asia by the late 1970s, tracing its overwhelmingly rural base, its entanglement with social action, and the political risk that came with working alongside landless labourers and tribal groups in states not always tolerant of organising. The theoretical section that follows sets contributors against each other rather than in agreement: Zafrullah Chowdhury reads decades of foreign-funded medical research in Bangladesh as a continuation of colonial control dressed up as philanthropy, while other papers by Banerjee, Ghosh and Das question participatory research's claims to method and rigour from more sceptical angles. The case studies, left largely unedited from their original submissions, cover a literacy programme in Mehrauli, the Shramik Sangathan's organising among agricultural workers, the Gonoshasthaya Kendra health centre in Dacca, and projects in the Philippines and Rajasthan, closing with reports from four regional meetings and a note on the project's founding objectives.
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    Promoting fair and equitable research partnerships to respond to global challenges
    (Rethinking Research Collaborative, 2018) Fransman, Jude; Hall, Budd L; Hayman, Rachel; Narayanan, Pradeep; Newman, Kate; Tandon, Rajesh
    This research report presents the findings from a programme of strategic research, funded by UKRI through the GCRF. The research sought to elicit a 'partners' perspective' on participation in UKRI-funded research by generating data from three groups of partners: i) academics based in the global South; ii) civil society practitioners based in the global South; and iii) international NGOs and research capacity providers based in the UK. Drawing on this data, the report identifies eight principles for understanding and improving fair and equitable research collaboration which form the basis of a series of targeted learning modules for 6 groups of stakeholders: UK-based research funders; UK-based academics; research brokers and capacity providers; international NGOs; academics based in the global South; and civil society practitioners based in the global South.
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    Ideology and political economy in inquiry: Action research and participatory research
    (Sage Publication, 1983-09) Brown, L. David; Tandon, Rajesh
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    From clarity to anarchy: Participatory research approach (A critique of "The methodology of the participatory research approach")
    (1979) Tandon, Rajesh
    In this paper, Rajesh Tandon responds to a critique of a paper on the methodology of the participatory research approach, presented at the African Regional Workshop on Participatory Research in Tanzania in 1979. A central fallacy runs through the original argument that the wide range of political activism within PRA produces naive idealism and methodological adhocism. Participatory research is not an invention of the seventies; only its label is new, since people organising the rural poor had long practised its elements without naming them. Two vantage points inform the approach, the activist's and the professional researchers, and reconciling them forms the real challenge. Classical research confines inquiry to thinking alone, while PRA treats feeling and acting as equally valid modes of knowing. A genuine risk of subjective, superficial analysis remains, addressed through joint analysis between researcher and people. PRA's apparent anarchism reflects unfamiliarity and variety rather than incoherence.
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    Dialogue as inquiry and intervention
    (1981) Tandon, Rajesh
    This article by Dr. Rajesh Tandon presents dialogue as a method of integrating inquiry and intervention in social systems. It starts by presenting a case study from Dr. Tandon's two-year fieldwork among small and marginal farmers in Western India. The dialogue took place with 25 peer group leaders, during which interactions led participants to analyse the problems they had experienced. The article talks about some critical implications from this case study. First, it argues that dialogue has a mutual impact, affecting both the researcher and participants. Second, it states that the data-collection process that is most relevant to both parties should determine its validity. Third, dialogue is noted to be inherently political and ideological. The abstract concludes with the final implication that studying under-organized systems eventually organizes them through change generated by dialogue.