Community-Based Participatory Research

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    Challenges in the co-construction of knowledge: A global study on strengthening structures for community university research partnerships
    (0000) Hall, Budd L; Tandon, Rajesh; Tremblay, Crystal; Singh, Wafa
    What does it mean to institutionalise the co-construction of knowledge between universities and communities at a global level? This paper begins from the premise that knowledge democracy requires moving beyond expert driven models towards collaborative processes that recognise the knowledge generating capacities of each human being and of every community. Community university research partnerships are presented as a key pathway for this shift, as they create structures through which research questions, methods, processes and outcomes can be shaped jointly. Drawing on a global survey and national case studies across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, the authors examine the histories, discourses and institutional forms that support or constrain such partnerships. This paper further analyses models such as Science Shops, centers of community-based research and national policy frameworks, while identifying tensions and practical challenges in embedding such work within universities. It highlights the importance of facilitative structures, supportive leadership, transnational networks and sustained institutional commitment. In doing so, it argues that institutionalising community-based research is not only a technical exercise but a political and ideological process that reshapes how universities understand knowledge, partnership and their responsibilities to society.
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    The power of collaboration, creativity and art in knowledge mobilization: Reflections from international work
    (2020) Tandon, Rajesh; Hall, Budd L
    In this paper, Dr. Budd Hall and Dr. Rajesh Tandon examine how knowledge mobilization (KMb) can become a more effective tool for social transformation when it is integrated throughout the research process rather than treated as a final dissemination activity. Drawing on over four decades of community-based participatory research (CBPR) across the global South and excluded North, the authors contend that KMb is most powerful when embedded in research from the outset, rather than added after the fact. Working within a knowledge democracy framework through the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, the paper explores how creative and arts-based methods have served as powerful vehicles for sharing research with communities, policymakers, and the broader public. Through four case studies—domestic workers in India using a hand-stitched saree to document sexual harassment, waste recyclers in Brazil producing participatory videos for policy advocacy, immigrant women in Toronto presenting through spoken word at City Hall, and a community health fair in rural South Africa the paper illustrates how art reaches people and places that conventional academic outputs cannot. The paper concludes that creativity is not decorative in KMb; it is essential, particularly when research aims at social transformation and meaningful community change.
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    Beyond epistemicide: Knowledge democracy, higher education and the path towards pluriversality
    (UNESCO Chair, 2016) Hall, Budd L
    How have our knowledge systems been shaped by histories of colonisation, enclosure and dispossession, and what might it mean to move beyond them? In this lecture delivered in Brighton, Dr. Budd L. Hall traces how contemporary knowledge systems are rooted in long histories of land theft, colonial expansion and epistemicide. Beginning with a personal account of his family’s migration to Canada and the acquisition of Indigenous land through illegal and immoral means, he situates his own access to higher education within the material histories of dispossession that financed universities and consolidated Western knowledge systems as dominant. Drawing on David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept of epistemicide, Hall argues that universities have functioned as sites of enclosure, determining who is authorised to produce knowledge and whose knowledge systems are dismissed. Through examples from India, Uganda, South Africa and beyond, the lecture highlights alternative knowledge systems that persist despite marginalisation. It calls for transforming knowledge systems through knowledge democracy, co-creation and a sustained commitment towards epistemic justice.
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    Global trends in training community-based research in higher education institutions and civil society organizations
    (UNESCO Chair in Community-based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, 2015-07) Lepore, Walter
    Across the world, the practice of community-based research is growing, yet the ways in which people learn and are trained for it remain uneven and often informal. This report draws on a global survey of practitioners and institutions to explore how CBR knowledge is acquired, what gaps exist in training, and what possibilities are opening up. The findings suggest both the strength of informal learning networks and the challenges of building more structured opportunities, particularly in regions where resources are scarce. By mapping these trends, the study raises important questions about how future generations of researchers might be supported, and what it would take to make training in CBR truly global and accessible.
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    Asian regional participatory research network: A note
    (1985) Tandon, Rajesh
    Dr. Rajesh Tandon's 1985 note reviews seven years of the Asian Regional Participatory Research Network, outlining its theoretical orientation and administrative structure. He argues participatory research in Asia has become part of the organized struggles of local people, challenging expert authority and helping communities build their own strength. The work has centered on five group-, workers, the rural poor, tribals, women, and urban slum dwellers, approached from a clear position alongside the oppressed rather than through debates over methods. On the administrative side, he records decisions from the December 1983 Manila meeting: regional coordination staying with the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, New Delhi, and patchy communication between regions. The note closes by asking someone else to take over as international coordinator after his three years in the post and calls for more inter-regional collaboration, possible residency exchanges, and a better networking system.
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    PRIA's engagements with higher educational institutions (HEIs): Initiatives in community based research (CBR)
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 2014) Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA)
    PRIA has engaged with academia in a multitude of interventions, bringing community and practitioner knowledge into the portals of traditional research institutions and processes. By doing this, PRIA has helped Higher Educational Institutions (HEls) realize their social responsibility towards a community's needs and aspirations. This document traces PRIA's work in promoting community engagement within HEls in India and beyond. The experience, garnered over three decades, have been classified into six categories to highlight the different forms PRIA's interventions as a facilitator have taken to build bridges between the world of formal research, the practitioner knowledge of civil society actors and the experiential knowledge of local communities. The experiences discussed in this paper are not intended to be comprehensive; a few specific interventions are described under each category to illustrate the nature of the engagements fostered and the practices promoted.
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    Who is driving development? Reflections on the transformative potential of asset-based community development?
    (Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University, 2003-10) Mathie, Alison; Cunningham, Gord
    Arising out of a critique of needs-based approaches to development, Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) offers a set of principles to mobilize and sustain community economic development. This paper draws attention to the connections between these principles and practices and (i) current interest in sustainable livelihoods as a conceptual framework, (ii) the concept of social capital, (iii) the social psychology of mobilization, (iv) the enhancement capacity and agency to engage as citizens with the entitlements of citizenship, (v) the role of multiple stakeholders; and (vi) the issue of control over the development process. Finally the paper points to the challenges for NGOs employing an asset-based, community-driven approach given the needs-based, problem-solving paradigm in which they operate.
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    Institutionalizing community university research partnerships: A user’s manual
    (PRIA and University of Victoria, 2015) Tandon, Rajesh; Hall, Budd L