Co-Construction of Knowledge
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Item The funding and development of community university research partnerships in Canada: Evidence-based investment in knowledge, engaged scholarship, innovation and action for Canada's future(OCBR, University of Victoria; Community Based Research Canada, 2009-10) Office of Community-Based Research, University of Victoria; Community Based Research CanadaThe purpose of this report is to map out the sources and types of funding that have been created to support community university research partnerships, describe the current state of development of arrangements between public post secondary institutions and community organizations, to collaborate in research and knowledge mobilization, and suggest some conclusions as to how effective partnership work of this kind might be strengthened in the future.Item Participatory impact assessment: A pilot programme in South Asia.(Voluntary Agencies Support Scheme (VASS), 2002-03) Quinn, Marion; Clark, KevinThis report documents a South Asian pilot programme on Participatory Impact Assessment and argues that evaluation must move beyond expert-led measurement of outputs toward a continuous and democratic process in which communities themselves analyse change, define priorities, and shape future action. Drawing on experiences from India and Bangladesh, it shows how participatory approaches deepen both the quality and meaning of impact assessment by placing people’s lived realities at the center. Through methods such as group discussions, mapping, interviews, ranking, and reflective exercises, communities were able to examine shifts in confidence, leadership, access to services, household decision making, and collective organisation. The process also brought forward unintended outcomes, local constraints, and concerns that are often overlooked in conventional evaluations. A key contribution of the report is its insistence that impact assessment should happen throughout the project cycle rather than only at the end. When undertaken in a participatory manner, evaluation becomes not just a tool of measurement but a means of learning, accountability, and institutional improvement. It strengthens community capacities, deepens ownership, and helps organisations remain responsive to changing realities. This report is an important resource for understanding how people centered approaches can make development practice more accountable, reflective, and meaningful.Item Knowledge as a commodity and participatory research( Prospects, UNESCO, 1979) Hall, Budd LWhat is knowledge? How is it formed? Who has the authority to “make” it? and who does it ultimately serve? These are the central questions Dr. Budd Hall raises in this article. He critiques the way traditional intellectuals such as scientists and scholars, often trained in elite universities and supported by international funding agencies, are institutionally positioned as the legitimate producers of knowledge. Embedded within particular class locations, this group often produces knowledge that serves its own class interests and maintains dominant social relations. In this process, organic intellectuals engaged in critical reflection and grassroots organising are sidelined as knowledge makers. Drawing on the works of Freire, Mao and others, Hall reflects on the role of intellectuals. He advances a systematic critique of survey research and outlines the guiding principles of participatory research. The article is a critical inquiry into the nature of knowledge within the new international order. It calls for moving beyond viewing knowledge as intellectual commodities such as papers and conferences and toward recognising and valuing local and indigenous knowledge systems, while developing more decentralised ways of legitimising people as producers of knowledge.Item National level orientation programme on strengthening urban governance in india a Participatory research intervention, October 9-11, 2000, Reading material no. 2 and 4(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 2000) Gill, Harbans Singh; PrajaHarbans Singh Gill examines the capacity-building challenges facing India's urban sector at the turn of the century. The paper traces the rapid pace of urbanization, noting the fourfold rise in urban population over four decades and the growing concentration of people in large settlements above one lakh persons. It documents persistent gaps in access to basic services such as drinking water, electricity, sanitation, and solid waste management, with smaller towns and less developed states bearing the heaviest burden. Gill identifies the widening distance between demand and supply of urban infrastructure as the central concern, compounded by weak municipal finances following the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act. To address this, the paper works through small and medium town development, municipal finance reform and sustainable city planning, proposing for each- a cycle of research, training and policy seminars- that can turn identified problems into concrete action plans.Item Transformative learning through environmental action: An overview of an IDRC sponsored project(1995) Hall, Budd LDr. Budd L. Hall presents an overview of a research project on transformative learning in environmental action, carried out with colleagues at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, York University, and partner organizations in Brazil. The project grew out of work around the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the Treaty on Environmental Education for Sustainable Societies and focused on what people learn through environmental campaigns linked to food production, distribution, and consumption. Drawing on case studies from India, Sudan, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and El Salvador, along with an international survey and a collective workshop, Hall and his co-researchers look at what needs to change in current systems, including life conditions, power relations, and ways of thinking, and set out ten principles of transformative learning, among them recovering a sense of place, reconnecting with nature, and recognizing historical struggles. The paper also describes practical methods used across the case studies, such as community meetings, learning from elders, and seed festivals, along with possible indicators of success. Hall notes that although computer networking was planned as a central tool, it ultimately played only a minor role in the project.Item 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, WafaWhat 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.Item A river of life: Learning and environmental social movements(Interface: A journal for and about social movement, 2009) Hall, Budd LWhat and how can we learn from social movements? According to Dr. Budd Hall, social movements are intense locations for knowledge to come together and for learning to happen. They are seen as one of the best routes to social transformation because they bring together action, learning and social change. In this 2009 paper, Dr. Hall reflects on the epistemic value of social movements in the creation of knowledge. He begins by exploring what a social movement is and outlines its characteristic features as discussed by different schools of thought. The paper is a collaborative effort involving teams from three organisations and presents qualitative analyses based on case studies of environmental social movements from countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Sudan, India, Canada and many more. From these cases, the paper formulates key principles of environmental social movement learning, including seeing humans as part of nature rather than separate from it, deconstructing power relations in our relationship with nature and with each other as a first step toward transforming them, and several other interconnected insights. Through both theoretical reflection and grounded case studies, Hall argues that social movements, while leading to social transformation, also facilitate deep personal transformation by creating powerful spaces for learning.Item In from the cold? Reflections on participatory research from 1970 - 2005(Convergence, 2005) Hall, Budd LParticipatory Research is a term which was first articulated in Tanzania in the early 1970s to describe a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge. Taken together these approaches combine social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process. The International Council for Adult Education provided a home in 1976 for what became the International Participatory Research Network, the means by which the ideas and practices of participatory research became more widely visible. Participatory research was a concept which, unlike most contemporary research paradigms, originated in the majority world. It originated in the rapidly expanding networks of non-governmental organisations in the 1980s and 90s. It has been the research approach of choice in many of the social movement interventions of the past 20 years. Participatory research and its sister concept participatory action research have in the past 15 years been taken up in many universities around the world both as a teaching subject and as a research method for graduate studies. One might say that, participatory research has come “in from the cold”, that it has come in from the margins to become an accepted member of the academic family.Item From clarity to anarchy: Participatory research approach (A critique of "The methodology of the participatory research approach")(1979) Tandon, RajeshIn 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.