Knowledge Democracy / Participatory Research

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://192.9.200.215:4000/handle/123456789/123

Welcome to the Knowledge Democracy / Participatory Research Community. This community serves as a comprehensive repository of resources on participatory approaches, community-based research, and collaborative inquiry methods. Our mission is to foster knowledge sharing and support initiatives that empower communities to contribute to research, ensuring their voices shape the knowledge that impacts their lives.

Explore a wealth of materials, including case studies, policy papers, training guides, and research publications that highlight the practice and principles of participatory research worldwide.

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A review: The participatory research project
(Learning, 1978) MacNeil, Teresa
MacNeil (1978) critically reviewed the Participatory Research Project of the International Council for Adult Education’s through an examination of three working papers by Budd Hall, Rex Jackson, and Bonnie Cain. The review focused on participatory research as a type of inquiry where communities participated in the research process. MacNeil acknowledged the contribution of the communities as active agents of change through their empowerment, learning, and exchange, as well as the research itself, and its role and relationship with social change. However, she noted several shortcomings, such as an absence of a clear methodological direction, a definition of participatory research as opposed to other types of research, and questions related to the communities’ ability to undertake action based on research. Throughout the review, MacNeil used examples, such as the Dene’s participation in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, to illustrate her points. In the final section, she concluded that participatory research could contribute to expanding knowledge production and community participation while also recognizing the need for conceptual clarity and methodological precision to achieve these goals.
Background document for the University of Victoria Task Force on civic engagement
(University of Victoria, 2017-09-15) Dragne, Cornelia
The purpose of the report is to identify and review the best strategies used by other universities to coordinate their civic/community engagement practices, as they are reflected in the literature dedicated to the topic. The focus of the report is on North American universities. The report seeks to: 1)present a brief background on university-community engagement 2)identify universities that promote civic/community engagement, case studies of coordinating models in place 3)identify evaluation methodologies 4)identify principles and structures that could serve as a model for UVic, lessons learned and recommendations in the literature.
Building in dialogue between consumers and staff in acute mental health services
(Systemic Practice and Action Research, 1998) Wadsworth, Yoland; Epstein, Merinda
This paper describes some aspects of the methodology, material, and findings from a lengthy participatory action research engagement by a consumer organization in Australia, which was undertaken in collaboration with staff at a major public psychiatric hospital and then went on to involve "players" throughout the local state, and national mental health services system. A small first phase established a dialogic methodology for the exchange of experiences and thinking between staff and consumers. The purpose of the second phase of the research was to explore how consumers' voices might be heard, and how staff-consumer communication about that feedback, might be "built in" to ongoing organizational structure and culture. Systems thinking about defensive routines, silences, and voice-as-discourse is reported as offering a possible way of cracking the puzzle of the closed-loop cycle of claim/blame-defense-and-counter-claim/blame-defense that has been characteristic to date.
Challenging the master’s tools: Pedagogies of community-based participatory research
(2014) Hall, Budd L; Etmanski, Catherine
Conscientizing the evaluator
(1979) Etherington, Alan
This document aims to discuss the political and social aspects of the assessment of non-formal education and community programs. The text claims that social research and evaluation are intrinsically linked to politics since determining goals, methods, values, and priorities is inevitably connected to power relations. This document tries to demonstrate that traditional or dominant forms of research are intrinsically linked to oppressive social relations because they simplify social change, separate individuals from their environment, impose quantification, and favor evaluators. Therefore, it is essential to take a more emancipating approach that would allow the participants to realize their values, judgment, and power through reflective dialogues, reciprocal conversations, and shared learning. Moreover, Freire’s approach requires engaging in action research, understanding connections and interactions through the lens of oppression and power, asking who benefits and who loses from the research, and taking a holistic view of the object of research. The text also mentions that evaluators should make their assumptions and power positions over the communities assessed clear, as community projects seeking social change require critical awareness of how their evaluators contribute to the change.
Early childhood care and development programs as hook and hub for community development: Promising practices in first nations
(University of Victoria, 2004) Ball, Jessica
This report traces a year-long investigation into how Lil'wat Nation, Tl'azt'en Nation, and six First Nations of the Treaty 8 Tribal Association built their capacity to deliver early childhood care and development programs rooted in their own cultures and languages. Working with the University of Victoria's School of Child and Youth Care, these communities trained members through a two-year post-secondary program and went on to establish child-care and Aboriginal Head Start services on reserve. Four years after training ended, nearly all graduates were working in their home communities, and every program had grown, with waitlists and plans for expansion. The report follows what made these transitions succeed, from community-driven training design to long-term investment and strong governance. It also outlines the "hook and hub" model, where childcare draws families in and then connects them to wider health, cultural, and social supports, offering promising practices for other Indigenous communities pursuing similar goals.
Everything old is new again: The importance of engagement to University-based Adult Education in Canada
(2010) Hall, Budd L
What place does engagement hold in the history and future of university-based adult education in Canada? In this paper, Dr. Budd L. Hall traces the historical roots and contemporary revival of engagement within Canadian adult and continuing education. Beginning with the British extramural tradition and early extension movements at institutions such as the University of Alberta, St. Francis Xavier, McGill and Toronto, he situates adult education as deeply embedded in community life and democratic practice. He reflects on the professionalisation of adult education in the 1960s and 70s, alongside the growth of academic research and national scholarly networks. Hall then examines the emergence of community–university engagement as a renewed and institutionalised force, highlighting initiatives such as the SSHRC Community University Research Alliance, Service aux Collectivités in Québec, and newer community-based research structures across Canadian universities. Drawing on historical analysis, institutional developments and diverse scholarship, he argues that engagement is not a new add-on but a return to foundational commitments. The paper encourages adult educators to reclaim and strengthen their role within this growing movement toward democratic, community-engaged higher education.
Fabric crafts and poetry: The art of development education in Canada
(Centre for Global Education, 2006) Hall, Budd L; Clover, Darlena E
This article by Darlene Clover and Budd Hall traces how development education in Canada has drawn on arts and crafts as tools for critical learning. It begins with the field's roots in the 1960s and 70s, when CUSO volunteers came home questioning accepted narratives about poverty and global trade, then traces its decline once government funding dried up in 1994. The authors turn to two case studies: a group of women on Vancouver Island who used collective quilting to protest a gas plant and the Iraq war, and a University of Victoria poetry course that turned students into poets and peace activists over five weeks. Drawing on both cases, they make the case that arts and crafts belong in development education: they open oppositional imagination, work through metaphor where dialogue alone falls short, use humour as resistance, and ask real risk of participants, as the censored quilts themselves proved.
Fathering in the shadows: Indigenous fathers and Canada's colonial legacies
(Sage, 2009-07) Ball, Jessica
A study of Canadian Indigenous fathers' involvement conceptualized a temporal horizon within which to situate challenges and opportunities for caring for children following decades of colonial interventions that have diminished men's roles. Through five community-university partnerships, conversational interviews were held with eighty First Nations and Métis fathers in British Columbia, Canada. Using a grounded theory approach, a conceptual model was constructed identifying six key ecological and psychological factors that combine to account for Indigenous men's experiences of fatherhood: personal wellness, learning fathering, socioeconomic inclusion, social support, legislative and policy support, and cultural continuity. Indigenous fathers' accounts bring into focus systemic barriers to positive fathers' involvement, including socioeconomic exclusion due to failures of the educational system, ongoing colonization through Canada's Indian Act, and mother-centrism in parenting programs and child welfare practices. Policy and program reforms are suggested to increase Indigenous fathers' positive and sustained engagement with their children.
Higher education, community engagement, and the public good: Building the future of continuing education in Canada
(Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, 2009) Hall, Budd L
This article is about the potential for university-community engagement to serve the public good by transforming the health and well-being of our communities. It documents contemporary expressions of and renewed calls for community university engagement. It includes a detailed treatment of community based research, discussed in the overall context of community-university engagement. The article also explores some other important and growing dimensions of community university engagement, including the development of structures for the support of community-based research and community-service learning. It concludes with an argument that university-community engagement, while not the only current trend in higher education that affects our work in continuing education, is nonetheless a very important new development in which continuing education has much to offer and much to gain.
“I AM NOT A PEACENIK”: Adult learning of development education in English-speaking Canada
(Canadian and International Education, 1983) Hall, Budd L
What can development education look like in a changing world order? In this article, Dr. Budd Hall reflects on the meaning of development education and the approaches of adult learning within it. Drawing on thinkers such as Freire, Tawney, Marx and others, he examines their fundamental principles and approaches to education, and considers how adult learning can be understood through their perspectives. He foregrounds the persistent and difficult questions that confront development educators across the world, particularly those related to power, positionality, access, influence and reflexivity. Through examples ranging from Gatt Fly in Canada to educators in Tanzania, he traces common threads across varied experiences. Reflecting on his own work, the experiences of other educators, and major intellectual traditions, Hall reflects upon how development education must respond to the challenges of a changing world order. He also emphasises the interdependence of countries and argues that development education must fundamentally recognise and engage with this reality. Situated in the 1980s, the article offers a critical reflection on the direction and responsibilities of development education.
In the face of neoliberalism and other evil things: Canadian adult education as a social movement
(2016) Hall, Budd L
This review by Dr. Budd L. Hall examines three works on Canadian adult education and argues that the field is best understood as a social movement rooted in struggles for social justice, democracy, and collective learning. Through a critical discussion of Building on Critical Traditions, Lifelong Learning as Critical Action, and Moving Forward Giving Back, Hall traces a shared concern that adult education, whatever pressure it faces from neoliberalism and professionalization, remains alive in communities, in struggles for Indigenous self-determination, in labour organizing, and in everyday acts of learning for change. The review engages Grace's call for lifelong learning as critical action, Nesbit's framing of the field as a social movement, and Silver's account of Aboriginal adult education in Winnipeg, finding in all three a refusal to reduce learning to credentialing or economic utility. Hall argues that adult education in Canada continues to draw its energy from the margins from communities pushing back against inequality, demanding recognition, and building knowledge on their own terms.
Knowledge, democracy, and epistemic in/justice: Reflections on a conversation
(2020) Hall, Budd L; Godrie, Baptiste; Heck, Isabel
The focus of the article is on how knowledge is created, who creates knowledge, how is knowledge co-constructed, whose knowledge is excluded and how is knowledge being used to challenge inequalities and strengthen social movement capacity? This article grew from a fascinating conversation that the three of us had in Montreal in September of 2019. We decided to share our stories about knowledge and justice with a wider audience in part as a way for us to reflect further on the meaning of our initial conversation, but also to invite others into the discussion. The three of us are Baptise Godrie works in a research centre (CREMIS) affiliated with Quebec’s health care and social services system, Isabel Heck with the anti-poverty organization Parole d’excluEs, both affiliated to universities, and Budd Hall from the university of Victoria and the Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based research and social responsibility in higher education.
Looking back, looking forward: Reflections on the origins of the international participatory research network and the participatory research group in Toronto, Canada
(1997) Hall, Budd L
In this article, Dr. Budd Hall looks back on the early history of the International Participatory Research Network, founded in 1976 in association with the International Council for Adult Education. He traces his own path into the work through years spent in Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere's ideas on self-reliance, Marja Liisa Swantz's participant research, and a 1971 visit from Paulo Freire shaped his understanding of research as an act of solidarity rather than a neutral exercise. He describes the 1975 special issue of Convergence that first drew together scattered efforts around the world, the 1977 Cartagena conference with Orlando Fals Borda and other Latin American scholar-activists, and the network's founding commitment to autonomous, horizontally organised nodes across Toronto, New Delhi, Dar es Salaam, the Netherlands, and Caracas. He then considers what role universities should play in a field built on breaking the academy's monopoly over knowledge production and reflects on the structural pressures that work against genuine collaboration between academics and communities. The article closes by asking whether participatory research might extend further, toward co-creating knowledge with the rest of nature.
Participatory research: Canadian adult educators build a global movement
(0000) Hall, Budd L; Jackson, Edward T
What role did Canadian adult educators play in shaping one of the most significant global research movements of the twentieth century? In this chapter, Dr. Budd Hall and Edward T. Jackson trace the history and evolution of participatory research as a major approach in adult education and community-engaged scholarship. The Participatory Research Group was founded in 1976 at OISE and was the Canadian node of the International Participatory Research Network. The group worked with labor, Indigenous organizations, immigrant associations, women’s groups, and other community-based organizations. It also describes important transformations in institutions, including the creation of international research networks, the expansion of community-university partnerships, and the emergence of programs like the Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) and UNESCO-supported initiatives that promote knowledge democracy. The chapter concludes with an analysis on lessons learned from five decades of practice and a reaffirmation of the ongoing relevance of participatory research for the advancement of equity, democratic participation, and socially responsive forms of education.
Policies and practises affecting Aboriginal fathers' involvement with their children
(Thompson Educational Publishing Inc., 2006) Ball, Jessica; George, Ron
This paper, by Jessica Ball and Ron George, is based on interviews with eighty First Nations and Métis fathers in British Columbia about how government policy and everyday institutional practice shape their involvement with their children. Many fathers described coming to fatherhood slowly, after years shaped by residential schools, forced relocation, and child welfare removals that broke the passing down of parenting knowledge between generations. The paper outlines recurring barriers: confusion around paternity registration, parenting programs built around mothers, custody decisions that favour mothers by default, and a maze of overlapping federal, provincial, and First Nations jurisdictions; all made harder by poverty. It ends with a set of recommendations, including acting on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report, simplifying paternity registration, funding Aboriginal-led child welfare and father-support programs, and helping fathers pass on cultural knowledge to their children. The fathers' own words run through the paper, holding both the weight of being excluded and a quiet hope of being recognized as capable and needed.
Recognizing excellence in community engaged scholarship at the University of Victoria. Peer review guidelines for faculty promotion and tenure & impact rubric
(University of Victoria, 2017-05-23) Tremblay, Crystal
This document provides an overview and suggested guidelines for evaluation and documentation in promotion and tenure of Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) at the University of Victoria. Te impact rubric and guidelines are based on a comprehensive literature review and empirical research conducted by the Office of Community University Engagement (OCUE) between August-December 2016 (See Impact Stories, an institutional assessment of CER at UVic). It is the intention that these tools be used to support a meaningful consultation process for reviewing and implementing tenure, promotion and merit policies for Community-engaged Scholarship at UVic.
Social movements and the practice of citizenship: Learning in the canadian and global context
(0000) Aggarwal, Pramila; Hall, Budd L
How can learnings from social movements advance the practice of citizenship? In this paper, Budd L. Hall and Pramila Aggarwal argue that social movements are intensive sites of democratic learning where citizenship is not only claimed but actively practiced. They identify interconnected forms of learning. Informal learning among participants, intentional educational efforts within movements, and broader public learning that occurs as movements reshape public understanding. Knowledge generated in struggle travels beyond direct participants. Hall reflects, for instance, on how insights from the women’s movement transformed his own understanding of power even though he was not directly part of it. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, this paper situates social movements as spaces where learning, agency and structural critique converge. Movements generate new knowledge, identities and capacities for collective action, thereby expanding the meaning and practice of citizenship beyond legality and advancing adult learning as a lived, collective process. The authors posit that social movement learning can serve as vital sites for advancing adult learning and, by extension, deepening democratic citizenship.
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 Canada
The 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.
Towards a knowledge democracy movement
(2016) Hall, Budd L
What would it mean to build a democracy of knowledge in a world marked by deep inequality and exclusion? In this paper, Dr. Budd L. Hall examines the emergence of a knowledge democracy movement, connecting traditions of adult education with practices of community-based research and community–university engagement. Placing his argument within global concerns such as poverty, ecological crisis and democratic strain, he challenges dominant assumptions that position universities as the primary producers of legitimate knowledge. Drawing on institutional experience, international networks and illustrative case examples including the Office of Community Based Research at the University of Victoria and global alliances for community engaged research, Hall combines historical analysis with empirical insights. The paper brings together intellectual traditions in adult education with examples from engaged scholarship to demonstrate how knowledge is created across multiple sites. Hall argues that knowledge democracy requires recognizing communities, Indigenous peoples and social movements as knowledge producers in their own right. By foregrounding plural epistemologies and participatory research, he calls for rethinking the architecture of knowledge to advance social action, citizenship and social justice in the twenty-first century.