What lies beyond participatory methodology: reflections on power, resources, and knowledge-making among practitioners, researchers, and funders

Participatory action research (PAR) has long been the preferred methodology for facilitating inclusive research processes that seek to dismantle the ivory tower that has typically characterised academic research. In an ideal scenario, participatory action research is a useful transformative tool that integrates practitioners’ advocacy-needs with scientific evidence in accountable and reflexive ways. However, PAR has often been instrumentalised to meet the sometimes-arbitrary requirements of research calls and donor-funded agendas – with the effect of dulling the potentially transformative power of meaningful co-created research processes. The reasons for these shortcomings are complex but can sometimes include a) the lack of participatory design in funding calls for academia-practitioner research opportunities, b) the resource and time intensiveness of co-creative action-oriented research, and c) the seen and unseen power differentials that exist among diverse actors (funders, academics, formal civil society and activists) that undermine the transformative potential of such collaborations. This reflection piece attempts to unpack these dynamics, informed by the experiences of the author and available literature. Drawing from feminist and emancipatory PAR, the paper presents a set of recommendations for how to overcome the challenges that surface when moving from instrumental PAR to transformative PAR – with the goal of enhancing the co-creation agenda to the benefit of decolonial and gender-equitable outcomes

Politics Writing Centre

Funded by OpenUCT.The lesson plans can be divided into roughly four-five categories: parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation and rules surrounding the English language: 1. The parts of speech section is designed to help students refine their understanding of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and the basic parts of speech that create sentences. These ground rules are essential for understanding how to create sentences, which is the next section, sentence structure. These lesson plans are tailored to teach students how to write sentences and include exercises to help students apply what they have learned. 2. Within sentence structure students will be taught how to write complex and compound sentences that are often characteristic of academic writing. In addition, they will be taught how to vary sentence styles in order to avoid tedious writing that is difficult to read. 3. Punctuation is important for students who use it incorrectly and includes a series of lesson plans on commas, semi-colons and apostrophes. Often, students make errors when using this punctuation because they do not understand the rules that govern their use. These lesson plans address this issue. 4. The lesson plans on the rules when writing in English cover topics such as the difference between you’re and your or how to write in active and passive voice. 5. Lastly, the comprehension lesson plan aims to bring together all of the above to test the student’s understanding. Despite their relationship to one another, lesson plans are designed to be able to stand alone. This means that if a student only struggles with using comas, then that can be the only lesson the consultant uses. Once a consultant has identified the different challenges faced by a student, they are meant to create a collection of the lesson plans that best address that student’s needs. Where appropriate, lessons have been numerically organised according to a logical flow, e.g. the lesson plan on types sentences comes before the lesson on fragments. This ordering is merely a suggestion of how you might order the lessons. The Centre is meant to be a ‘fluid’ organization that adapts its teaching material to what students need when it comes to learning English. This is the great advantage of the one-on-one consultations. This series of lesson plans aims to help students who struggle with certain aspects of language and grammar. They have been developed with the Political Studies department at UCT and, as such, contain examples and illustrations from within the field. The nature of the plans means that they can, however, be adapted and used much more widely. The plans should be used selectively to suit the needs of the individual students. The plans are designed for one-on-one or small group consultations