PAR is a way of life: Participatory action research as core re-training for fugitive research praxis

In this article, we present participatory action research (PAR) as a radical act of humanity: a direct response to real dehumanization of vulnerable communities. We argue, as an enactment of critical social theories, that PAR privileges relationships and shared knowledge creations as strategies for transforming everyday worlds. We draw on interviews conducted with nine participants of a 2013 PAR Institute, which aimed to explore and document the ways in which PAR is taken up in the lives, bodies, and thinking of PAR activists and students. Interviews reveal PAR is not an act of imagination, but rather an act of reclaiming and disrupting realities. As a result, PAR fractures an ongoing dystopia/utopia dialectic, and positions horror and hope side-by-side in the material world. It is through and with participant interview narratives that we frame PAR as a site for re-training one’s epistemic core away from Western, Eurocentric standardized and normalized human conduct rooted in historical and ongoing violence towards a fugitive praxis. We conclude that PAR is a radical commitment to guiding social science researchers towards epistemological fugitivity: a moving with and through current, though historically rooted, devastating social realities, as a possibility for a way to be with each other–indeed with the other–in this world. We find that PAR is a way of resisting and rejecting the nastiness of the world, while not waiting for utopia: It is a way of being in this world, a way of life.