Democratic encounters? Epistemic privilege, power and community-based participatory research !

CITATION AND LINK TO ONLINE FIRST PUBLICATION: Janes, J. (2015).(Post) Colonial Encounters: Epistemic Privilege and Community-based Research. Action Research. 0(0)- 1-16. DOI: 10.1177/1476750315579129 ! !!

Corresponding Author: York University School of Social Work

Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies York University

South Ross 8th floor 4700 Keele Street

Toronto, ON Canada M3J 1P3 PH: 416-736-2100 ext. 20521

FAX: 416-650-3861 Email: julia.janes@nicenet.ca !

!!!!!!

Abstract The literature suggests that community-based participatory research holds the potential to

democratize and decolonize knowledge production by engaging communities and citizens

in the research enterprise. Yet this approach, and its associated claims, remain under theo-

rized, particularly as to how power circulates between and among academic and community

knowledge work/ers. This paper puts forth a postcolonial analysis of participatory tech-

niques that sustain academe’s epistemic privilege through producing, subordinating and as-

similating difference; claiming authenticity and voice; and dislocating collaborative knowl-

edge work from the historical, political, social and embodied conditions in which it unfolds.

Postcolonial readings of community-based participatory action research offer a powerful

theoretical framework for interrogating the divide between the discursive claims and mater-

ial practices that undermine this democratic project. Drawing on critical reflections on two

community-based participatory action research projects, this paper offers modest proposals

toward (re)placing community-based knowledge work/ers in space, time and bodies. Al-

though this paper presents a critique of community-based participatory action research, it is

not in pursuit of revealing “bad” participatory praxis or recuperating a better practice, but

rather seeks to open up dialogue on the circulation of power in the campus/community en-

counter.

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Keywords

Community-based participatory action research, postcolonial, democratic knowledge pro-duction, power, epistemology !

!!!Introduction Participation in research and development takes a number of forms including: partici-

patory action research (PAR), action research (AR), participatory/empowerment evaluation,

community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), participatory rural assessment,

inclusion research, and participatory development (PD). Although these approaches are se-

mantically and operationally distinct, they share a commitment to democratic praxis with

people and communities most affected by the issue of inquiry. The extant literature sug-

gests that these participatory approaches hold the potential to democratize and decolonize

knowledge production (Cornwall, 2008; Flicker, 2008). Yet few authors have interrogated

the warrant of these emancipatory claims beyond conceding that power and decision-mak-

ing remain weighted toward academic partners (Boser, 2006; Castleden, Morgan and Lamb,

2012; Oliver, 1997; Stoecker, 2009). While acknowledging the promise of these research

alliances, it is imperative that we explore the full range of effects, including the ways in

which participatory approaches re-inscribe academic epistemic privilege. Furthermore, if

practitioners are to move toward more democratic, critically reflexive and responsible par-

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ticipatory praxis, then the social relations of CBPAR must be interrogated to reveal how

power is negotiated in these epistemological encounters.

This paper will argue that postcolonial readings of community-based participatory

action research provide a productive lens with which to trouble the discursive claims, mate-

rial practices, subject positions and spaces of collaborative knowledge work. Theoretical

inquiry will be woven with critical reflections on the author’s experiences with two empiri-

cal CBPAR projects. The paper begins by outlining the gaps in theorizing power in the

CBPAR literature and the utility of postcolonial theories for addressing those gaps. Next,

the epistemic techniques of producing difference, as well as paradoxically inculcating dif-

ferent knowledges into the "sameness" of academe, are outlined to reveal how both re-in-

scribe privilege to the academic knower. In the following section, CBPAR’s claims to “au-

thenticity” and “giving voice” to community knowers are deconstructed for the ways in

which they de politicize and subordinate nonacademic knowledge. Then the dislocation of

knowledge work/ers from space and bodies is scrutinized to reveal the careful manufacture

of CBPAR imaginaries that obscure relations of privilege. These critiques aim toward what

Cahill, Quijada Cerecer and Bradley (2010) refer to as “critical hope,” which recognizes

that while collaborative knowledge work with multiple, divergent constituencies is full of

contradictions, it is also full of possibilities. Therefore, this paper concludes with two mod-

est proposals for more democratic, decolonized knowledge work.

!Toward an implicated inquiry: Situating the knowledge work and workers

This paper pursues a CBPAR praxis that is critically reflexive and complicit. As

Hilsen (2006) suggests, a move toward more democratic praxis requires reflections on our-

selves and our practices. Heron and Reason (2008) propose that participatory research en-

gage in an “extended epistemology” of ‘ experiential, presentational, propositional and

practical ways of knowing’ (p. 366). While this paper draws on experiential knowing ac-

crued during years of CBPAR practice, it privileges propositional knowledge through its

aim to engage with the conceptual and theoretical developments that inform my doctoral

work exploring the social relations of collaborative knowledge work.

The relational politics of knowledge production are under-interrogated in the CBPAR

literature, where academic authors are largely monological, while other knowledge con-

stituencies are typically (re)presented by knowledge elites. This paper reproduces this

trend and acknowledges the paradoxical move of critiquing the epistemic privilege of acad-

eme, while centring the academic voice in this paper. This paradox is a significant limita-

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tion of this paper, and my thesis work, that arose from a desire create a space apart from my

praxis to deepen my theoretical engagement with CBPAR. The paradox is also informed by

the current institutional context of my work: a PhD program that provides little material

support to collaborative knowledge work. Therefore, this paper focuses exclusively on my

critical reflections and theoretical proposals and attempts to resist the impossible urge to

speak for others.

The theoretical analysis offered in this paper is instantiated through the last two CB-

PAR projects I facilitated before returning to academe: Homeless2home: A Community Ex-

change (H2h) and Bridging Aging and Women Abuse (BAWA). This knowledge work un-

folded between 2008-2010 in the streets of central Toronto, Canada and the in-between

space of an Institute and nonprofit network associated with the University of Toronto. I use

the terms knowledge work and knowledge workers in an effort to mitigate the oppositional

identities and idioms associated with campus and community, as well as to trouble acad-

eme’s purview over knowledge production. H2h brought together youth, middle aged and

older adults, who had been or were homeless, to design and deliver a knowledge exchange

forum focused on ending episodic homeless , then analyze and disseminate the findings. i

BAWA engaged two working groups of older women who had experienced abuse in analy-

sis of data from 17 interviews and three focus groups to develop a cloaked resource for ii

women experiencing abuse and a best practices tool for their allied care professionals. iii

Common to both projects is that the research questions emerged from a community mem-

bers who had worked together on a participatory dissemination project several years earlier.

Members of this initial group worked on H2h and BAWA along with new members, but al-

ways with the inclusion of individuals most impacted by the issues as co-researchers with

secondary contributions by service providers. This strategy created a space for critical ap-

praisal of programs and policies, but sacrificed the sustainability of collaborations with

community-based organizations.

Although at times I was an “insider/outsider” to the issues under inquiry, I do not

claim to share the terrible intimacy with homelessness, abuse and social exclusion that my

community colleagues experience and situate myself as a white, middle-aged, differently

abled, female with a toe-hold on middle class social status. As reluctant as I am to label

others, I will offer a précis of my community colleagues who are: more female-identifying

than male, white than racialized, differently abled than not, likely to be living in poverty,

and feeling the multiple assaults of deepening social inequalities, as well as the risks of

contesting them. The risks they took were significantly greater than mine and no amount of

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acknowledgement, honoraria, good food, and other less tangible supports can begin to hon-

our their contributions nor disrupt the power asymmetries that persisted in our work togeth-

er, despite our best and worst efforts - and because I can walk away.

And so I did, after an encounter several years ago with a community colleague who

told me that I was ‘just like everyone else’ and I was ‘pimping the poor.’ And so I am say-

ing that she is right and that working with community may be neither emancipatory or egal-

itarian but complicated and colonial. This paper proposes that postcolonialism offers theo-

retical purchase to appraise the full complexity of these collaborations and move toward an

implicated, embodied, reflexive and responsible participative inquiry.

!!Community-based participatory research literature and theorizing power Several taxonomies of CBPAR have evaluated participation by nonacademic

knowledge workers and report significant shortfalls in realizing CBPAR’s claims to democ-

ratic praxis (Catalani and Minkler’s, 2010; Guta, Flicker & Roche, 2013; Israel, Schulz,

Parker and Becker, 1998). As Coombes (2012) critiques, most scholars frame the problems

of CBPAR as one of removing barriers to communication and representation, which fail to

address how CBPAR practices preserve the privilege of academic partners. Coombes

(2012) and Stoecker (2009) highlight the scant theorizing of the power asymmetries of CB-

PAR. While Coombes suggests revisiting Freirian radical pedagogy, Stoecker, as well as

Guta, Flicker and Roche, propose a Foucauldian framework for understanding the opera-

tions of power in participatory knowledge work. Stoecker notes that the CBPAR literature

tends to implicitly adopt a sovereign understanding of power that is limited to the repres-

sive rather than productive effects of the knowledge-power loop. He cautions that a purely

repressive understanding of power leads to claims that power might be “given up” by acad-

emics to less powerful community participants. However, as McWhorter (2005) points out,

unless we put sovereign power into question and document how power operates in non-in-

tentional networks then we are left with the untenable project of divesting ourselves of priv-

ilege - a project that sustains, even strengthens, the very hierarchies it seeks to disrupt.

Two discourses of power dominate the CBPAR literature: those that place the work

outside of power and those that acknowledge there is no ‘outside of power’ but maintain

that this unevenness can be remedied if power is “given up” by some and “taken up” by

others. As Healy (2001) notes, the egalitarian discourse of the power adverse CBPAR

scholars obscures the privilege of the academic researcher in these partnerships. While

Galuppo, Gorli and Ripamonti (2011) acknowledge the enduring power dissymmetries in

action research, the authors maintain that power can be re-distributed in ways that suggest a

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sovereign understanding of the malleability of power. Travers and colleagues (2013) reflect

on the limits of their engagement with power and conclude that it might be better ad-

dressed: “were this to become a problem” (p.412), through specific processes and spaces to

negotiate power differences, which suggests that these inequalities are neither inevitable or

inherently problematic. Hilsen (2006) expands on the discourse of distributive power by

attending to both its enabling and constraining effects. However, within Hilsen’s proposal

that “we act out mutual and interdependent power relations” (p. 301) and her discussion of

reciprocity is the suggestion of an evenness. Although these latter scholars embrace post-

structural, particularly Foucauldian notions of power as relationally constituted, they tend

to hold out the possibility of a flattening that does not account for the structural forces that

shape the historical, political and social conditions where knowledge work unfolds.

Postcolonialism makes clear that there is no space or subject position outside of

power and offers a theoretical framework with which to re-constitute power relations in

CBPAR as deeply contextual, inevitable and uneven, not easily manipulated yet still dy-

namic. Memmi (1969) and later postcolonial theorists (Chowdhury, 2006; Loomba, 1998)

reject the possibility that privilege can be revoked or reduced regardless of one’s position or

feelings about oppressive hierarchies. While the term postcolonial is a contested term that is

troubled by theorist’s who document colonial continuities that cannot be consigned to histo-

ry (MacClintock, 1992; Smith, 1999), the “post” is understood in this paper, not as a tempo-

ral marker, but as a theoretical positioning of its alignment with other epistemologies (i.e.,

postmodernism and poststructuralism) that attend to the knowledge to power loop.

Mignolo (2000) stresses that the epistemological break that postcolonial theorizing

proposes is to re-politicize and re-locate knowledge production in the particular contexts of

escalating social inequalities. Mignolo (2000), and Castro-Gomez and Martin (2002), note

that what is erased in the epistemic encounter is a privileged knower who is male, western,

White, heterosexual, middle/upper class and abled. What is also erased is the embodiment

of the community knower who is assigned a number of ambiguous, subordinate subject po-

sitions. Postcolonialism goes beyond a critique of the oppressive features of these subjec-

tivities and spaces to inquire into the specific participatory techniques that re/produce epis-

temic privilege.

Participatory techniques of epistemic governance

For postcolonial theorists, epistemic governance is not only a discursive site of con-

testation, but a form of symbolic and material violence. Catro-Gomez and Martin (2002)

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suggest that the link between knowledge and discipline is evident in institutional arrange-

ments that determine whose knowledge counts. These arrangements, Castro-Gomez and

Martin argue, are a ‘technology of power that persists today, founded on the “knowledge of

the other”’ (p. 276). The centrality of knowledge to relations of power provokes Mignolo

(2009) to argue that epistemic governance is the crucial site to struggle against modern/

colonial dominance. He warns that to neglect epistemic governance is to enact reformations

at best, reproductions at worse, of the parameters of privilege.

Knowledge production is, thus, framed by postcolonialists as anything but neutral and

instead, as essential to projects of rule and a site of rule itself in the form of epistemic gov-

ernance. Although CBPAR proposes an emancipatory epistemology, knowledge hierarchies

persist and are in fact, produced through the binary subjectivities, spaces and social rela-

tions of the campus/community collaboration. This paper traces some of the ways in which

epistemic privilege is sustained through participatory practices including: the production,

subordination and assimilation of difference; claims to authenticity and “giving voice”; and

spatial dislocations and disembodied subjectivities that obscure power.

!!

Epistemic governance I: The production, subordination and assimilation of difference Epistemic governance often takes the form of two interlocking practices: the produc-

tion of difference and its other “face”: the inculcation of difference into the “same.” Ahmed

(2000) argues that the production of difference is the work of research, where: ‘Knowing

strangers...transform[ing] those who are recognized as strangers into knowledge’ (p.73).

Therefore, in the role of “professional strangers” academics desire, require and produce dif-

ference. However, the production of difference depends on welcoming strangers into the

research project and CBPAR takes this welcome very seriously. CBPAR proposes a radical

solidarity with communities that hides the assimilation of their knowledge. Despite the cen-

trality of constituting difference to CBPAR, indeed all research, few authors attend to its

production. Notably, Kapoor (2005) along with PD critics: Cooke and Kothari (2001) argue

that participatory techniques re-inscribe epistemic authority to the academic/development

actor through the assignment of difference to the community knower. Interestingly, these

critiques of participatory development are rarely acknowledged in the Anglo-American

CBPAR literature - signalling a severance of local and global praxis that warrants attention

in a future paper.

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Ahmed (2000) suggests that the production of difference is obscured by an ontology

of difference, which is naturalized to the community Other. Attending to how difference is

produced makes transparent how the community knower/knowledge “comes into being”

and is authorized and subordinated by the academic subject. The CBPAR literature is large-

ly silent on the epistemic operations that assign particularity to the community knower and

universality to the academic. This division became apparent in the Homeless2home project,

when I struggled with both wanting to invert the status hierarchy between experiential and

academic knowers and to reject the hierarchy altogether by subverting the processes by

which these different sites of knowledge are assigned value. Although attempts were made

to remove any "status markers” during the H2h knowledge exchange forum, our failures

signalled that the ability to mark and unmark oneself as different, what Spivak (2005) refers

to as “self-synecdochising,” is a privilege not available to most community knowers.

A variant on this privilege is that of marking others as different, then assimilating

them into the "same." This assimilation is evident in CBPAR’s inculcation of community

knowers into discourses and practices of academe. Healy (2001) contends that the CBPAR

often takes the form of ‘finding the most appropriate participatory ways to convince the

“uneducated” of the merits of [our] own educated convictions’ (p. 98). There are many

ways in which this inculcation takes place: some explicit such as the scripting of nonacad-

emic knowledge workers that occurred in our early media encounters, and other more sub-

tle activities such as the discursive and material practices of capacity building.

Capacity building appears in the CBPAR literature as a key activity and objective.

Although positioned as a important step toward community self-determination, it is crucial

to ask who benefits and in what ways from the aim of building community capacity to con-

duct research? While acquiring research skills can be one tool toward social change, we

may be overly focused on its currency and cursory in our training efforts. During the two

CBPAR projects referenced in this paper, as well as other projects I collaborate on, I have

led training sessions where research methods are taught in the span of a few hours to a few

days. Academics train for years, so why would I anticipate that others can glean something

useful in such a short time? Also, even if some research skills are learned, how can these be

leveraged for future employment or community mobilization? Addressing these questions

may lead us to reassess our claims to building capacity in communities and revise our prac-

tices of engaging community researchers.

Even more troubling is that capacity building discourses suggest that the community

“lacks capacity” or that it “lacks the right capacity,” which according to CBPAR practices

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are academic knowledge and skills that subordinate community knowledge by situating it

within the “sameness” of academe. The colonialism of discourses of capacity building is

thoroughly critiqued by First Nations authors who argue that claims of “Aboriginal non ca-

pacity” are levied to maintain academe’s epistemic privilege (Schnarch, 2004). Although a

few authors have suggested the need for capacity building for academic partners (Minkler,

2004; Travers et al., 2013), most of the training is targeted to nonacademic knowledge

workers or students. Furthermore, as Roche (2005) suggests, the focus on fostering acade-

mic discourses and practices subverts the complementary, yet distinct, knowledges nonaca-

demics bring to CBPAR.

! !

Epistemic governance II: Claims to authenticity and “giving voice”!! The subordination of community knowledges frequently operates in CBPAR dis-

courses that valourize community knowledges as more “authentic.” This quest for unmedi-

ated representation not only obscures the labour of community knowers, but the labour of

their elite partners. Kindon, Pain and Kesby (2007) critique the reification of community

knowledge as more “authentic” for the ways in which it situates CBPAR outside of power

relations. This valorizing of the local also obscures that dominant discourses are reproduced

by community, as well as elite, knowers. A postcolonial approach recognizes that the multi-

ple (though not mutual) constitution of binaries such as local/elite, community/academic,

and dominant/subordinate are socially produced and relational rather than fixed to particu-

lar spaces or bodies. The CBPAR literature’s tendency toward naturalizing these binaries is

revealed in Smith, Bratini, Chambers, Jensen and Romero’s (2010) surprise at the degree to

which dominant ideologies are reproduced by their community partners. Assuming that

community knowledge is somehow inherently resistant, more “real” and less hierarchical

does not account for how power relations operate within, as well as across, research loca-

tions.

Postcolonial understandings of oppositional constructions, whether in the form of

valorization (e.g., authentic, unmediated and “truer”) or devaluation (e.g., primitive, raw

and experiential) of community knowledges, raise important questions regarding CBPAR’s

(dis)engagement with the complexities of multiple knowledges. These complexities were

apparent during the planning of dissemination forums for H2h and BAWA, when I asked

community colleagues to speak in “their own words” despite their desire to articulate more

“persuasive” academic discourse. Although I initially resisted this desire, I have since revis-

ited how insisting on “community voice” was yet another way to re-inscribe knowledge

hierarchies.

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Closely linked to claims of authenticity are the discursive and material practices of

“giving voice,” which are quite commonly referenced in the CBPAR literature (see reviews

by Dick, 2010 and other years). In my early collaborations with members of the homeless

community, I adopted a “speakers bureau” model to convey first person narratives that at-

tempted to complicate homelessness, housing and home. These narratives invoked risky

disclosures by the speakers that were often re-traumatizing in the telling. Later on, in an

attempt to mitigate the effects and consumption of painful testimonials, hybrid vignettes

were crafted that integrated personal and community experiences to highlight policy and

program failure, rather than individual failure. Postcolonial critiques of “giving voice” re-

veal the subordinating logic that orients the telling of “authentic” experiences. As Razack

(1993) suggests, storytelling obscures the power relations at play between tellers and listen-

ers. Srivastava and Francis (2006) explored this dynamic in their inquiry into anti-racist/

homophobia workshops, where people of colour and marginalized sexualities are called

upon to be experts in their own domination. This not only reproduces relations of privilege,

but invokes a performance that Hartman (1997) describes as a “staging” of suffering, which

displaces these narratives from their social, political and historical contexts.

!

Epistemic governance III: Dislocating and disembodying knowledge work!

Postcolonial theorists, such as Escobar (2001), argue that locating epistemic commu-

nities is critical to rethinking Eurocentric knowledges. Locating is not exclusively about

place, but about postcolonial understandings of space as a social construct that is both a

means of producing identity and community, as well as a means to exercise power (Bhabha,

1994). This conceptualization of communities articulates to issues, interests and belong-

ings that transcend geographical location. Postcolonialism’s attention to the production of

space offers a critical lens to inquire into the making of CBPAR’s spatial imaginaries. For

example, Korf (2010) uses the term “provided spaces” to describe how participatory devel-

opment is disconnected from postcolonial regimes in a carefully regulated space outside of

political and historical fault lines.

The impermeability of these spatial imaginaries was evident in my negotiations of

compensation for community colleagues working on the BAWA project who lived on limit-

ed income assistance. The funder was reluctant to provide honoraria for certain activities

that they framed as training rather than research activities (even though it was the commu-

nity researchers who facilitated the workshops). The irony of a funding envelope that seeks

to foster the socio-economic inclusion of women, but resists compensating women living in

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conditions of poverty was disturbing. However, institutional regulation of CBPAR space

precluded consideration of the socio-economic conditions of community knowledge work-

ers and the asymmetrical compensation of academic versus community researchers.

These highly regulated spaces are also theorized by postcolonial authors as sites of

surveillance. For example, Kapoor (2005) notes that PD functions as a means of monitor-

ing community activities, and re producing existing patriarchal and racialized power rela-

tions. This panoptic space is sustained through the proximity required by participative

knowledge work and is alleged to be consensual. Kapoor maintains that these regulated

spaces silence opposition, naturalize consensus as an unquestioned good, and smooth out

the racialized, gendered, classed dimensions of participation. These consensual spaces not

only obscure power between research constituencies but within them. While the CBPAR

literature emphasizes consensus building (Israel et al., 1998; Wallerstein and Duran, 2006),

the everyday realities of working along side of community colleagues who have histories

and presents of trauma requires a more complex alchemy of contestation and collectivizing

toward a common goal. For example, during a H2h focus group that I co-facilitated with

community colleagues, a composite scenario was presented to community members and

policy makers from the municipal public housing corporation. The barriers to adequate

housing outlined in these vignettes were vigorously debated by community participants,

some of who were tenant representatives. This latter group subverted proposals that con-

flicted with housing policies supported by the housing staff present. This articulation of

both official and resistance discourses by community members stands in contrast to imagi-

nary of the consensual community. However, while thinking through and engaging conflict

within community, it is crucial to acknowledge that conflict exists among academics, as

well, and to consider the how concepts such as “horizontal hostility” (Travers et al., 2013)

pathologize community dissensus.

Just as community is constituted in ways that erase its heterogeneity, so is the cam-

pus. Postcolonial analysis reveals how the campus/community binary extracts the universi-

ty, as not only separate from the surrounding community, but separated from the possibility

of constituting itself as a community. This spatial rationale also conceals the complexities

of insider/outsider research. While Loomba (1998) and Ma-Rhea (2002) acknowledge the

problematics of the Western white spaces of academe, they argue that scholars are generat-

ing decolonizing knowledges, while at the same time reproducing Western disciplines. This

double bind of working against and within spaces that reproduce relations of dominance is

well documented in the postcolonial literature (Spivak, 1988; 2005) and complicates CB-

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PAR spaces by avoiding essentializing either the community or campus. The complexity of

negotiating this spatial divide is evident in my ambivalence over disclosing my “insider”

status in the context of H2h, after community colleagues argued that any “gains” associated

with this disclosure were offset by the loss of the power associated with outsider status.

Reflecting on this impasse from a postcolonial perspective, it becomes clear that it is as im-

portant to strategically leverage power for social change, as it is to struggle against its in-

equitable effects by claiming greater proximity.

! A parallel technique to the dislocated spaces of CBPAR is the production of disem-

bodied subjects. Community knowledge workers are assigned multiple, ambiguous subject

positions including: “participant” (Blair and Minkler, 2009), “partner-stakeholder” and

“peer” (Flicker, 2008), “co-researcher” (Smith et al., 2010), “community

researcher” (Minkler, 2004) and “volunteer” (Doyle and Timonen, 2010). These subjectivi-

ties, Godway and Finn (1994) suggest, articulate to dominant discourses that position the

nonacademic as a disembodied “other.” Postcolonial theorists (Mignolo, 2000; Spivak,

2005) would suggest that the goal is not only to contest these subjectivities, but to under-

stand the processes by which they come into being and their material effects. This attention

to the production of subject positions is useful to inquiring into the ways in which the CB-

PAR academic remains largely unmarked, while the non-academic is overdetermined with

so many varied, subordinate subjectivities.

The overdetermination of the non-academic is evident in the productive slippage of

of “participant,” which may be understood as respondent, advisory group member, or co-

researcher. The multiplicity of positions constituted as “participant” is one mechanism by

which CBPAR can make diverse claims regarding participation without revealing the par-

ticularity of material practices. Related to the slipperiness of this subject position is the

widespread use of service providers as community researchers. In my work with communi-

ties experiencing homelessness and insecure housing, community members often had con-

tested relationships with service professionals. From this perspective, the representation of

those that prefer to think of themselves as “inappropriately served” rather than “hard to

serve,” by those who “serve” has significant ethical dimensions that go unnoted in the CB-

PAR literature.

Inquiries into the academic subject are rare in the CBPAR literature, who remains

monolithic and monochromatic, except perhaps in her femininity. However, certain discur-

sive themes mark the CBPAR researcher: she is a “good” alternative to the “parachute in

and parachute out” researcher who mines community knowledges for professional gain

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(Healy, 2001; Stoecker, 2009). Her “goodness” is articulated through claims to being “use-

ful” and “empowering” (Dick, 2010; Israel et al., 1998). Postcolonial readings reveal how

these characterizations obscure the constitution of the “good” academic against the com-

munity knowledge worker in need of improvement. A postcolonial framework also resists

homogenizing the elite knowledge worker, by recognizing the anti-colonial knowledge

work of scholars of colour and complicating a simplified White reading of CBPAR’s sub-

ject positions.

The production of the “good” academic requires a discourse that can account for the

divide between discursive claims and material practices. A divide that is frequently mediat-

ed through discourses of guilt and apology. For example, Doyle and Timonen’s (2010)

“confess” their failure to realize more substantive participation of older adults and in Sud-

bury and Okazawa-Rey’s (2009) collection on activist scholarship, the apology for being

“not participatory enough” is pervasive and the liberatory potential of CBPAR is described

as a “pretty fiction” (p. 31). These apologist discourses, according to Kapoor (2005), recu-

perate the goodness of speaker without the need for substantive action.

During the two CBPAR projects referenced in this paper, the multiple demands ex-

perienced by community knowledge workers living precarious lives led to my ongoing

guilt - for not forestalling the eviction of a community colleague or sustaining legal coun-

sel for another, to name a few. However, my most common source of guilt paralleled the

literature: that of “not being participatory enough.” For example, while writing the Home-

less2home community action guide, I struggled with collectively writing up the findings

from the knowledge exchange. This led to various strategies, all of which authorized me to

write more. I have since considered how my guilt over “writing too much” failed to recog-

nize that professionals (including academics) hire ghost writers/editors and that contribu-

tions can take many forms beyond the technical exercise of writing. Furthermore, the guilt

over this instance, and others, of not being “participatory enough” articulates to blunt mea-

surements of the quantity, rather than the quality, of participation. As my theoretical work

on CBPAR evolves, I recognize that the “full model” of participation is not only oppressive

but conflicts with a central tenet of the work: engaging the complementarity of different

knowledges, skills, interests rather than the tyranny of everyone participating in everything.

!Conclusions, limitations and proposals toward more democratic praxis!! This paper has put forth a postcolonial analysis of the ways in which the discursive

and material practices of CBPAR preserve epistemic privilege by producing and assimilat-

ing the difference of the community knower and then subordinating her knowledges

�26

through claims of authenticity and re/presentations of her “voice.” CBPAR’s participatory

techniques of capacity and consensus building were deconstructed to reveal how they situ-

ate the work outside of the political, social and historical conditions in which it unfolds. A

postcolonial analysis of the production of overdetermined, subordinate community subjects

and “good” then “guilty” academic subjects was presented to trace how their mutual, yet

asymmetrical constitution preserves relations of power. As CBPAR is increasingly instru-

mentalized as a means of accessing “over researched” communities and appropriating

community knowledge and labour, this paper has proposed a theoretical reading, woven

with critical case reflections, that alerts to the limits of this potentially liberatory research

praxis.

This paper is not without its own limits including: the centring of the academic

voice and the focus on academic CBPAR literature, which reproduces the devaluing of

knowledge work outside of academe; and the privileging of the discursive, which despite

reflections on two CBPAR projects, still aligns with the literature’s inattention to the every-

day practices of knowledge work. Further, although the feminization of CBPAR is noted, it

was not explored and warrants future inquiry. Finally, the problematic of critiquing a

promising praxis that may be appropriated to rationalize less democratic knowledge work

creates an imperative to conclude this paper with modest proposals toward a more democ-

ratic encounter.

Future CBPAR praxis might subvert its claims to proximity by theorizing distance

and a more humble knowledge project. CBPAR typically articulates desires to “get closer”

to communities of interest, but what if the distances between differently located knowledge

workers were made more transparent? Perhaps, if the in-between spaces were made visible,

so too would the circuits of power that sustain them and therefore, be open to scrutiny. Re-

claiming distance might take two paths: the academic knower who elects to turn away or

does a double turn, first toward herself and then to her community colleagues. Turning

away, although tempting in its resistance of colonial relations, ultimately re-inscribes the

privilege of an academic knower who can elect to turn, while the community knower may

not. Whereas, Ahmed’s (2000) proposal to turn toward the authorized “I” and then toward

the Other to engage in the “painstaking labour” of speaking to, not for or even with, each

other about the difference and distances in-between research and social locations suggests a

transgressive move for the social relations of CBPAR praxis. This dialogue could follow

Spivak’s direction to neither “celebrate or deny difference, but find out what specific case

�28

of inequality brings about the use of difference and who can deny it on occasion” (2005, p.

484).

Furthermore, this turning toward the community knower requires a less totalizing

gaze: what Smith (1999) refers to as “research through imperial eyes,” to disrupt the endur-

ing vanguardism of CBPAR praxis. A similar humility is proposed by Jazeel and McFarlane

(2010) who advocate for knowledge production that is both uncertain and emplaced in

ways that challenge the notion that knowledge travels seamlessly across borders and bod-

ies. Jazeel and McFarlene suggest that knowledge is “always caught in translation.” These

translations ensure that epistemic privilege is never total and re instate agency for commu-

nity knowledge workers and allied academics to re constitute the subject positions and spa-

ces of CBPAR. In this humbler proposal, the social relations of CBPAR are not bound by a

theorizing of power emanating from dominant to subordinate knowers, but by a more com-

plex sociality that explores how power might flow in both directions.

!Acknowledgements I would like to thank Anne O’Connell for her comments and advice on early drafts. I would

also like to thank Robert Fitzgerald and Opal Sparks for pushing me to think through CBPR

carefully. Finally, I would like to thank Davydd Greenwood for leading the review process

for this article.

Funding This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral

Fellowship (# CAS-SRQ-183161).

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Author biography Julia Janes is a PhD Candidate at the School of Social Work, York University. Before enter-

ing the doctoral program, she conducted arts-informed participatory action research in the

areas of homelessness, housing insecurity, aging in place, and older woman abuse. Drawing

on Foucauldian governmentality and postcolonial theories, her current program of research

explores the social relations of participatory approaches to knowledge production, its limits,

as well as how it challenges epistemic privilege.

Notes

This project was funded by Homelessness Partnering Strategy Human Resources, Social Development Canada.i

Information about this unique resource and others, as well as project reports for Homeless2home and the Bridging ii

projects are available @ www.nicenet.ca

This project was funded by Status of Women Canada.iii