Participatory Research

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Author: search.filters.author.Tandon, RajeshSubject: search.filters.subject.SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

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    Bridging knowledge cultures: Rebalancing power in the Co-Construction of knowledge
    (Brill, 2024) Lepore, Walter; Hall, Budd L; Tandon, Rajesh
    Establishing truly respectful, mutually beneficial, and equitable knowledge creation partnerships with diverse communities poses significant challenges for academia. Bridging Knowledge Cultures provides valuable insights into the dynamics involved and the obstacles encountered when attempting to establish meaningful research partnerships between different knowledge domains. This book goes beyond exploration by offering practical recommendations to overcome these challenges and forge effective collaboration between mainstream research institutions and community groups and organizations. This book includes ten compelling case studies conducted by research and training hubs established through the global Knowledge for Change Consortium. These case studies encompass community-university research partnerships across various geographical locations, tackling a wide range of societal issues and acknowledging the wealth of knowledge created by local communities. The overarching goal of this book is to inspire the next generation of researchers and professionals to embrace the richness of diverse perspectives and knowledge cultures. By advocating for the construction of "bridges" through practical approaches, the book encourages a shift from competition to collaboration in research. Ultimately, it aims to foster an environment where different forms of knowledge can intersect and thrive, leading to a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the world around us.
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    Understanding design of organisation
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 2001-08-25) Tandon, Rajesh
    This text by Dr. Rajesh Tandon presents a comprehensive analysis of the structure and process of understanding organizations and NGOs and navigates strategies to their management. The text describes models as conceptual tools for analyzing organizational behaviour, emphasizing the organization as an open social system and provides a systems theory for it. It explains missions and purposes of an organisation and lists its required inputs and desired outputs. The text further identifies and describes five key components of organizational design, technology, tasks, human resources, formal organizational structure, and informal organization. It analyses the concept of congruence, arguing that organizational effectiveness depends on the degree to which these components fit together and presents the congruence hypothesis arguing that greater the fit between components, the more effective the organization will be in achieving its mission. The text identifies types of NGOs and addresses several critical issues for NGO management such as compatibility with organizing elements, size and informal structure, hierarchy, and organisational changes. It further discusses the differences arising from different ideologies and operational strategies and the need for NGOs to manage relationships with multiple constituencies. The text concludes that organizations are complex social systems requiring analysis at multiple levels and aspects and that a successful organisation requires effective division of work and integration of efforts.
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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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    Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research, and higher education
    (UCL Press, 2017) Hall, Budd L; Tandon, Rajesh
    This article raises questions about what the word ‘knowledge’ refers to. Drawn from some 40 years of collaborative work on knowledge democracy, the authors suggest that higher education institutions today are working with a very small part of the extensive and diverse knowledge systems in the world. Following from de Sousa Santos, they illustrate how Western knowledge has been engaged in epistemicide, or the killing of other knowledge systems. Community-based participatory research is about knowledge as an action strategy for change and about the rendering visible of the excluded knowledges of our remarkable planet. Knowledge stories, theoretical dimensions of knowledge democracy and the evolution of community-based participatory research partnerships are highlighted.
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    Society for participatory research in Asia
    (1999) Tandon, Rajesh
    This press release is about the Bhopal Sammelan, a three-day gathering held in November 1999 that brought together about 1400 people from over 400 organisations and elected panchayat leaders across sixteen states. Organised by the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) with its partners, and hosted by Samarthan in Bhopal, the event drew social activists, development workers, trade unionists, tribal and women leaders, students and youth to build solidarity through cross-state exchange. Discussions were held around five themes: citizenship, empowerment, new leadership, accountable local self-governance and participatory social development. The Sammelan planned actions to hold public officials accountable, educate citizens on their rights, recognise emerging leadership among women, dalits and adivasis, and push for local control over land, forests and water. The event also marked the release of the India findings from the global study Citizens and Governance, conducted by PRIA and partners across ten states.
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    Creating knowledge: A monopoly? Participatory research in development
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1982-06) Hall, Budd L; Gillete, Arthur; Tandon, Rajesh
    This book is about participatory research as a political process bound up with questions of power and knowledge production, rather than merely a set of methods. It opens with the Jamaican Drama for Progress literacy project, where a shift from delivering pre-written messages to villagers toward enabling them to write and perform their own material captures the move from research done on people to research done with them. Drawing on the Latin American tradition of investigación acción and Paulo Freire's thematic investigation, the collection questions who is authorised to produce knowledge about poverty and underdevelopment. Five theoretical essays address participation, power and alternative methods, followed by seven case studies from Indonesia, Senegal, Tanzania, England, Chile, Canada and India, and a concluding section of critical reactions. Rather than success stories, what emerges are unresolved questions about initiating participatory work, sustaining ties with political organisations, and balancing theory with praxis in research committed to social transformation.
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    How to conduct participatory research among women
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 0000) Tandon, Rajesh; Vijay, Kanhere; Gothoskar, Sujata; Lugo, Oriando
    This document compiles three didactic bulletins from PRIA's series on Women's Participation in Development, each addressing a different facet of enabling and organising grassroots women through participatory processes. The first, frames participatory research as a method through which poor and rural women, including those who are illiterate, analyse their own situations and take collective action. In “How to Communicate Effectively with Grass-Roots Women”, the authors analyse two-way versus one-way exchange, the pitfalls of talking up or down to women, and aids such as patience, trust-building and tolerance for silence. The third bulletin, traces the process of forming durable women's groups, from the first organiser's motivations through indicators of stabilisation. All three draw on real, anonymised field experiences from India.
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    Participatory research: Main concepts and issues
    (1982) Tandon, Rajesh
    Dr. Rajesh Tandon examines participatory research as an alternative to the classical social science tradition, which he argues has created an ethically problematic separation between the researcher and the researched. Tracing the historical roots of this crisis through Western epistemology and its uncritical transplantation into Indian academic institutions, the paper contends that conventional research has rendered knowledge generation largely irrelevant to marginalized communities. In contrast, participatory research repositions actors in a social setting as joint owners of the knowledge process, sharing control over problem identification, methodology, and outcomes alongside the professional researcher. The paper distinguishes this approach from academic, policy-commissioned, and action research while acknowledging its ideological commitment to the weakest sections of society. It also underlines the organizational and methodological challenges this entails in the Indian and third-world contexts.