Description
I) Participatory Action Research (PAR) seeks to provide researchers and marginalised communities with tools to work in engaged partnerships and authentic commitment. This politically engaged research poses several practical, methodological and ethical challenges for scholars. An extensive scholarship highlights PAR's practical, methodological, and ethical challenges when working with the communities, such as being time-consuming, difficulties building trusting relationships, limited possibilities of obtaining financial support, navigating power dynamics, and going beyond rhetorical participation. In this contribution, we argue that besides these challenges, junior participatory action researchers face significant challenges dealing with academia and funding agencies' demands and when reporting their research in the neoliberal university and its conventional academic spaces. These conventional spaces usually require objectivity, standardised methods, and replicability, which is opposite to the PAR paradigm. Therefore, junior researchers looking for legitimacy and credibility sometimes adapt their discourse to comply with these mainstream narratives. Sometimes, they even question their achievements and undervalue their work and accomplishments. This manuscript uses autoethnography to provide deeply personal reflections on the difficulties of navigating the neoliberal university as junior engaged scholars applying PAR in our PhDs. Although we hold different positionalities and our experiences come from different contexts and themes, we share similar struggles. These struggles involve navigating methodological and ethical dilemmas. Looking for credibility and legitimacy, we tend to hide our activist side, political engagement, and emotions to avoid being blamed for being biased, encapsulating the participatory processes and the messiness in structured and rigid frameworks, erasing the richness of the processes instead of emphasising its value and unique approach.Period | 13 Nov 2024 → 14 Nov 2024 |
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Event title | OpenLab Conference 2024: Creating knowledge through participatory research |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Brussels, Belgium |
Degree of Recognition | International |