Social Media for Social Change

Some Things We’re Reading

Posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 8:55 pm by Jeremy in research | 1 Comment

A few things we’re reading to help with our understanding of community organizing and how our research project intersects with current thinking about participatory research…

“Advancing Community Organizing Practice: Lessons from Grassroots Organizations in India”
By Kavitha Mediratta and Clay Smith

Mediratta and Smith have compiled a valuable survey of three grassroots organizations in India—the Self Employed Women’s Association, the Dalit Jagruti Samiti/Rural Education and Development Society, and the Young India Project—with the express purpose of drawing out applicable lessons for community organizing in the United States. The impetus for their research comes from working as community organizers in New York City and needing to adopt other organizing models for more effective organizing. Particularly instructive for us is this brief account of community organizing in India, a rich history dating back to the turn of the last century and perhaps made most well known in the independence movement and Gandhi’s leadership in the first half of the 20th century. Clearly, that massive grass-roots organizing effort has continued into present day and gives important context to our project. In fact, Gandhi established two important ashrams in Ahmedabad during the independence movement, and the administrative offices and co-op of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) are located there, which we hope to visit.

What is interesting for us and pertinent to our design problem is this apparent paradox: with this rich history of community organizing in India, why are Young Educated Indians (provisional label for this stakeholder group is ours) having such difficulty in organizing themselves in order to do effective volunteer service in their communities? Which factors might hinder them? the class system and its inherent barriers and biases? their official education? geographical boundaries? We bring these questions (along with so many others) with us to India in hopes of discovering their answers.

Nota bene: at this point, we must confine this question to the specific situation that has been presented to us by our colleagues at Darpana—that is, Young Educated Indians who have seen their Unsuni performance and been inspired to do service work are having difficulty communicating and organizing with each other. It would be imprudent to extrapolate this problem to all of India.

“CBR and the Two Forms of Social Change”
By Randy Stoecker

Randy Stoecker is a professor in the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin and from 1997-2006 was editor of papers archived at COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development. This very brief article serves as a valuable introduction to the concept of community-based research (CBR), which Stoecker further expands into an exploration of two forms of social change affected by CBR: action and participation. He describes successful action-oriented research as that which connects to specific community campaigns for social change and is integrated into the goals of community organizers. Participatory research involves community members in the process—along side so-called academics and experts—in order to transform them into “independent and empowered knowledge producers.” (I’m reminded here of Paulo Freire’s concept of conscienticization, or critical consciousness—that deep understanding of one’s historical condition rooted in praxis: reflection and action, theory and practice.) To develop CBR’s in the service of these two forms of social change, they must be created in response to specific and achievable community goals, must support leadership development within the organization, and must assist in building the organization’s capacity.

While our project has not been developed according to the model of community-based research—I’m just beginning to become familiar with the literature—this approach resonates with many of the questions we have been asking about our research methodology and the extent to which we can engage those affected by our work. I am hopeful that we will benefit from an understanding of participatory research, however imperfect and belated our application of some of its main principles may be.

“Participatory Research and Community Organizing”
By Sung Sil Lee Sohng, Ph.D.

I followed a bibliographic reference from the Stoecker article above to Sue Sohng’s excellent “Participatory Research and Community Organizing.” Sohng is a member of the Social Welfare Doctoral Faculty in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her article goes much further in defining participatory research, first touching upon the political economy of post-industrial society, then carefully charting the primary aspects of participatory research and the roles that both researchers and community participants fulfill within its practice. Sohng writes: “Participatory research is a means of putting research capabilities in the hands of deprived and disenfranchised people so that they can identify themselves as knowing actors; defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, and transforming their lives for themselves.” I think she is particularly keen in her reconfiguration of the relationship between researcher and researched. Drawing from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (which I highly recommend), she advocates for open, reflective dialogue between all parties: “Participatory research challenges practices that separate the researcher from the researched and promotes the forging of a partnership between researchers and the people under study.” Following from this, the “researcher’s reflexivity” is essential to the methodology; “their class, culture, ethnicity, gender assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors must be placed in the frame of analysis and in the research report.”

Many of the students’ and my conversations have drifted in and out of thinking about our role, our preconceptions, our biases, etc. as the design “experts,” as well as anticipating how we might address such factors present in the others we work with during the project. Given my own interest in participation as a privileged component in much of my art practice, and given the lessons I’ve learned about the difficulty and importance of participation in community activism, I’m excited to encounter the issue in a design context with the students, who seem equally excited. However, in contrast to my past engagements with participatory work in an art context, the stakes seem higher in this design project because we do hope to come to the end of this process with something useful and replicable to offer.

One Response to “Some Things We’re Reading”

1. # On February 2nd, 2009 at 9:51 am Sara MacDonald wrote:

   Jeremy, I love that you followed the bibliography to find other sources. Rock on through the thread of information sharing.