theoretical and methododological challaneges in participatory community-based research and feminisms

Multicultural feminist activist scholarship 1

FROM: Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology.(2010) Hope Landrine and Nancy Felipe Russo, Editors. New York, New York SPRINGER, pp. 55-82

Chapter 3

Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Participatory Community-Based Research

M. Brinton Lykes, Erzulie Coquillon & Kelly L. Rabenstein

Boston College

Introduction

Although feminist and community-based psychology share many values and goals these two sub-

disciplines remain practically divided and as a result, leave gaps that, if addressed, would greatly enhance

knowledge and praxis in research psychology that is rooted in a commitment to power-sharing with

marginalized communities and in the promotion of positive social change. In this chapter, we explore

participatory and action research as resources for integrating feminist and community-based psychological

theory and research in a framework that sustainably interweaves an action-reflection dialectic or praxis to

create an activist scholarship for psychology. In so doing, we identify the importance of participatory and

action research’s (1) recognition of and collaboration with communities’ local or indigenous resources and

(2) emphasis on bringing forward the voices of participants in both the research endeavor and in broader

struggles for related social change.

The chapter offers an overview of current literature situated at the confluence of feminist and

community psychology wherein strengths of local communities as actors draw from and contribute to

knowledge generation with a goal of increasing the access to power of marginalized groups. We suggest

participatory and action research1 as an epistemology and methodology to facilitate engaged and

collaborative research for transformational praxis (see Lykes & Mallona, 2008, for a detailed discussion of

participatory and action research, liberation psychology, and transformational praxis). We offer examples

of participatory and action research praxis to illustrate the nexus of academic, political, and (for


participants) personal constructs (e.g. gender roles within a particular environment, voice, subjectivities)

revealed through this work. We begin with a discussion of feminist research in general and in psychology

in particular, as well as a discussion of community psychology. We then move into an overview of

principles and practices at the interface of feminist and community psychology. From there we introduce

participatory and action research as one possible methodological bridge between these two disciplines, and

both toward social activism. Moreover, we discuss the emphasis in participatory and action research on

recognizing participants’ indigenous resources and using action-reflection to motivate participants to social

activism as the “glue” that can bind together these research approaches. In so doing, we offer the first

author’s work with Maya women in rural Guatemala (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000) as a

case example and identify practical challenges often met by researchers and participants who are pursuing

the goals of these research methodologies.

We close by placing these challenges within the framework of the globalizing world, arguing that

the forces of globalization offer conflicting possibilities for the reach of feminist and community-based

research in the new millennium. Whereas on the one hand, global information networks offer

opportunities for broad dissemination and interchange of the stories and lived experiences of communities

throughout the globe, on the other, this exchange of ideas has profound effects on local identities and

understandings of the relationship between self and society. Moreover, global economic relationships and

the realities of global poverty raise challenges to feminist and community-based researchers both in their

approach to the nature of individual suffering and in addressing the importance of linking the research

endeavor to social or political activism, as called for within the participatory and action research

frameworks. Finally, as Susan Berger (2006) has argued in her discussion of the Guatemalan women’s

movement, the opening up on new possibilities for social activism through increased communication, etc.

is obviated by the political reforms necessitated by globalization, “reforms that can weaken and displace


social movements” (p. 4). We argue that these realities further challenge psychologists seeking to infuse

their work with feminist and community-based participatory and action research.

Feminisms and Feminist Psychology: A Brief Introduction

Feminism is often defined as an awareness of gender issues and the analysis of power imbalances

(Angelique & Cully, 2003), but many (Bertram, Hall, Fine, & Weis, 2000) have argued that not enough

“strategic attention” has been focused in feminist scholarship on issues of culture and race (see also

Boisnier, 2003; Collins, 1998; Smith, 1977, among many others). Early feminist scholarship and the

women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s were initially situated among white, middle-class women in

Western societies, and lacked a critical analysis of racism and class oppression (Collins, 2000; Smith &

Stewart, 1983). Coalitions formed across those diversities to redress inequalities of power at the interface

of gender, race, and social class (see, e.g., Collins, 1998; hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1982, 1984, Moraga &

Anzaldua, 1983, among others). Contributions from feminists living in the Southern Hemisphere,

postcolonial theorists of color, and black and Latina feminists in the United States highlight these sources

of inequality and press the field towards a more inclusive critical and transformative stance (hooks, 1984;

Walsh, 1998; Trinh, 1989; Williams & Chrisman, 1994; Mohanty, 2003).

Feminism grew within and from the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s

(see, among others, Evans, 1979/1980). However, despite these roots, a gap exists between activism and

the field of contemporary feminist psychology (Bond & Mulvey, 2000). Participatory and action research,

as a resource for articulating a contextualized perspective on research and an explicit eye to promote

activism, offers the sort of shared conceptual framework that research in feminist psychology and feminist

activism currently lack (Albee, 1992; Grant, Finklestein, & Lyons, 2003).

Within the social sciences, contemporary feminist critiques have given rise to rich literature on

gender-specific research in varied contexts, that is, expanding feminist analysis from a women-centric

view, to examining the impact of gender roles and identities on the lived experiences of all community


members (Grant, Finklestein, & Lyons, 2003; Merry, 2001; Nelson, Dickinson, Beetham, & Batsleer,

2000; Reinharz, 1992). McIlwaine and Datta (2003) as well as Merry (2001), for example, discuss the role

of gender in the context of community development work, and suggest the important use of an

“engendered” approach to development programs, that is, one that explicitly includes men in outreach

activities and critically interrogates traditional maleness and femaleness and how these categories are

deployed in language and behavior. Others such as Leavitt (2003) argue, “that [many] educators and

practitioners still ignore the rich analyses based on the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, age,

sexual preference, disability, and so forth, and use one-dimensional, gender-neutral arguments, [which]

speak[s] to the need for engendering community development” (p. 225). We argue similarly that

oversimplifying human experience, whether on the basis of gender, race, or class, leaves researchers with

an impoverished analysis of the complex and often contradictory social and cultural lived realities of

women and men, many of whom are also engaged collaboratively with them as co-researchers. We urge

instead a continuum of possibilities in which to situate the complex diversities reflected in one individual

and community to the next.

Feminist research methodologies

Early contributions to an emerging field of feminist research methodology in the social sciences

include Barbara DuBois (1983), Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai (1991), Sandra Harding (1986), and the

Personal Narratives Group (1989). Shulamith Reinharz (1992) summarized the diversity of feminist

research practices in Feminist Methods in Social Research, identifying major themes characteristic of

feminist research and emphasizing the importance of the feminist perspective in influencing what is and is

not considered to be “feminist” research. According to Reinharz, feminist research is not rigid, but draws

upon a variety of research methods, all of which are reflected in the major themes she identifies, that is that

feminist research is: guided by feminist theory, involves an ongoing criticism of non-feminist scholarship,

may be interdisciplinary, aims to create social change, and strives to represent human diversity.


Additionally, themes in feminist research include giving voice to women’s experience, contextualized

thinking, self-reflection linked to activism, collaborative approaches, and research as a tool for seeking

social justice (see Cosgrove and McHugh, 2000).

Feminist researchers employ a variety of methods and a broad range of epistemological stances in

their work. Thus, fluidity remains within the discipline in regards to drawing upon varied resources in

engaging feminist scholarship at the community level. Researchers who position themselves within

traditional positivist or post positivist epistemologies may utilize methods that are more typically

associated with a constructivist or interpretivist epistemology, such as oral history narratives or

ethnographic observation. Constructivist or critical theorist feminists, on the other hand, may distribute

surveys or engage other, more positivist, research methods, to gain understanding of or develop a critique

of existing power relations, for the purposes of transforming them rather than for the purposes of

explanation, prediction, or control (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Feminist researchers have an opportunity to create conditions in which a group of individuals who,

to date, have had very little inclusion in the writing of history can encounter and record their voices, telling

their stories and situating their lives in context from new perspectives. Thus, the work of many feminist

researchers emphasizes processes of raising awareness or generating consciousness (primarily that of those

with whom they work) about gendered oppression and how it constrains women’s lives. Doing so dictates

the centering of memory, voice, and re-presentation using a variety of research methods (see, for example,

Bond, Belenky, & Weinstock’s, 2000, work with poor, rural women in the United States).

Community Psychology: Historical Roots and Current Possibilities

In one of the first textbooks on community psychology, Julian Rappaport (1977) struggled to define

this emerging sub-discipline within psychology. More recently, Nelson and Prilleltensky (2005) have

suggested that community psychology began in the community long before psychology as a field was even

solidified, in the social turmoil at the start of the twentieth century. At that time, individuals who sought to


make positive social changes began to utilize scientific methods to examine, report on, and suggest

improvements to a variety of pressing social issues, particularly the inability of the U.S. government to

respond to the influx of immigrants to the United States and the resulting sub-par treatment of these

individuals on a grand scale (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005). Duffy and Wong (1996) summarized decades

of theory development and applications, describing community psychology as focusing on “social issues,

social institutions, and other settings that influence groups and organizations (and therefore the individuals

in them). The goal is to optimize the well-being of communities and individuals with innovative and

alternate interventions designed in collaboration with affected community members and with other related

disciplines inside and outside psychology” (p. 11). The shift from roots in social activism to a field of

research or sub-discipline within psychology parallels feminist psychology’s growth from activism to

scholarly discipline. Community psychology assumed its current research and applied priorities in the

1970s, when the growth of clinical psychology as a sub-field within psychology and of the community

mental health movement (Cowen, Gardner, & Zax, 1967), in the context of the social movements of that

era (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005) as well as the policies of deinstitutionalizing the severely mentally ill

and treating them with psychotropic drugs, began to shape its goals and scope (Hersch, 1969; Rappaport &

Seidman, 2000). More specifically, the growth yet severe underfunding of community mental health care

revealed a gap between the need for and availability of these services. Research revealing correlations

between low socioeconomic status and increased risk of mental illness (see Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend,

1969, among others), as well as a lack of access to services increased awareness of the role of social

context and structural inequalities in mental health diagnosis and delivery of programs and highlighted the

need for a field that would take into account the contextual factors facing the “mentally ill,” including,

among others, increasing disparities between rich and poor, white and black. Thus, community

psychology developed as a set of strategies for “creat[ing] knowledge and chang[ing] social conditions”

(Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005, p. 6).


Community psychology research methodologies

Research in community psychology is diverse and spans studies that utilize positivist and post-

positivist methods to explore hypothesized causal relations through activist scholarship. Some, including

many who write from a feminist perspective within community psychology (see e.g., Mulvey, 1988), have

suggested that despite its roots in community activism, community engagement and applied scholarship are

currently undervalued relative to a more traditional form of research wherein the principal investigator

remains distant from research subjects, that is, “objects” of investigation. Recognizing and drawing on this

critique, this chapter focuses more directly on a community psychology whose underlying concepts and

values are consistent with those discussed by Nelson and Prilleltensky (2005). These include an emphasis

on person-environment fit (ecological perspective), support and respect for human diversity and

empowerment (individuals do and act for themselves), prevention over treatment, and a focus on strengths

and competencies. Additional key markers of this community psychology are inter-disciplinary

collaborations, community-researcher partnerships, and respect for established community practices

including indigenous or local knowledge. As importantly, many of the goals or purposes of community

psychology described herein (e.g. community collaboration) are actualized through the inclusion of action

research, and a “focus on social change….[through] human resource development, political activity and

scientific inquiry…” (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005, p. 4).

Community psychology research that embraces these values seeks methods and actions to

understand and change social processes, including, for example, how to combat negative experiences of

oppression and promote well-being for community collaborators. These methods include the

documentation of the social ecology of everyday life as it is experienced by people living and engaging in

home, work, school, and neighborhood settings. In line with the goals of community psychology,

researchers who work within this framework aspire to including methods that are genuinely empowering,

rather than distancing. This requires a focus by the researcher on the process, rather than exclusively on


outcomes. This aspect of community psychology in particular benefits directly from, is informed by, and

informs participatory and action research.

Community psychologists utilize many tools in cultivating the goals discussed above. These tools

vary among researchers, but may include participant observation, ethnographic recording of the rituals and

performances of everyday life, detailed open-ended interviews, textual discourse analysis, and interpretive

methods that privilege the perspective of the participant, rather than the scholar-as-expert vantage point.

Moreover, although those who work within this sub-discipline frequently engage with communities as

researcher and observer, there are many additional roles that are expected of these community-based

researchers. Fulfilling these roles may include acting as reporters of participant observations, or as

collaborators, accompaniers, educators, advocates, activists, and creators of opportunities for others to

speak.

Community psychologists sometimes lend their technical skills and human resources to local

communities for their use. These researchers are frequently outsiders, but may also be insiders. In so

doing, community psychology researchers actively resist treating the community(ies) as objects, as

“others”, that is, working as technicians who enter from the outside to solve a problem; or researching for

the sake of constructing knowledge for its own sake. They seek rather to collaborate as co-researchers

towards the betterment of the community and its diverse members.

Community Psychology through a Feminist Lens

Principles of work at the interface

Research in community psychology infused by feminist understandings of power dynamics and

difference reflects a number of overlapping themes, which some have argued signify a “pro-feminist

stance” in the field of community psychology (Mulvey, 1988; Angelique & Cully, 2003). Meg Bond and

Anne Mulvey, psychologists working at the interface of feminist and community-based psychology,

identify a number of commonalities between the two sub-fields: (1) a common history as part of


movements of the 1960s aimed at social change in the United States; (2) a critique of victim-blaming; (3)

questioning of restrictive standards on health and/or behavior; (3) calls for a move from dichotomous

thinking and planning, and, most fundamentally; (4) a basis in respect for difference, distributive justice,

and equality (Bond & Mulvey, 2000; Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000).

Bond, Hill, Mulvey, and Terenzio (2000), offer the following “foundational threads” for integrating

feminism and community psychology: a call for redistribution of power; participant empowerment; honor

and strengthening of “natural helping systems;” and more specific calls-to-action “…integrating

contextualized understandings, paying attention to issues of diversity, speaking from the standpoints of

oppressed groups, adopting collaborative approaches, utilizing multilevel, multi-method analyses,

adopting reflexive practices, and taking activist orientations” (p. 588-9). In light of these potential

intersections in the theoretical frameworks underlying the two psychologies – feminist and community –

we explore below the everyday processes of conducting research at their interface.

Methodologies at the interface

Despite this consensus about a set of parameters and underlying values for working at the interface

of feminist and community-based psychology, there are varied articulations of the dialectic between

reflection and action as well as of the recommended research strategies that embrace these goals. In her

discussion of alternative models for social change, Anne Mulvey (1988) was one of the first to note

challenges for those seeking to work at this interface. She identified similarities between feminist and

community psychology such as the emphasis on diversity and a critique of social structures as well as a

shared lack of multi-cultural awareness and divergent research methods within each sub-field. For those

working at the interface seeking to prioritize memory, voice, and re-presentation, for example, data

collection techniques such as reflective dialogue, use of tape recorders for transcriptions, use of newsprint

for group brainstorming, and folders to retain written or drawn information have been prioritized (Bond,

Belenky, & Weinstock, 2000). Psychotherapeutic principles are also used in both feminist and


community-based psychological research as a resource through which participants can assert their power

and to encourage “storytelling,” by, for example, creating safe spaces for conversation and using

restatements among group members in dialogue with one another. Additionally, more grassroots group-

based methods embraced by some included relationship-building and community change strategies

whereby experts were demystified and peer support models were developed that fostered consensus

decision-making, community organizing, local interventions, and political advocacy. Although there has

been a mutual embrace of strategies for applied research and action, Mulvey (1988) suggests that one

reason that the two sub-disciplines, regardless of their many similarities, are not better integrated is a lack

of awareness among scholars in these sub-fields concerning the overlap of mission and values.

Despite this lack of integration, as feminist research increasingly emphasizes the importance of a

general openness to non-traditional approaches to the research process, such as engaging with participants

in community settings like nail and hair salons, child care centers, churches, and bookstores (Campbell,

Self, Wasco, & Ahrens, 2004), the work relies more explicitly on insights from community psychology.

Campbell, et al. (2004), for example, argue for the importance of creating a safe space for co-researchers,

over the interests of the research itself, and contend that engaging with participants (in this case, rape

survivors) in their own self-determined “safe spaces” will yield the comfort necessary for them to share

their stories and thus to meet their own needs as well as those of the researcher in gathering data.

Significantly, this press to engage in and with participants in their “safe places” reflects a growing

recognition within community psychology that community is no longer only or exclusively a geographic

locality. Specifically, contemporary life is characterized by a range of communities of association and

affiliation through which one defines multiple communities of belonging and action (Duffy & Wong,

1996). This recognition, coupled with the insights of participatory and action research to be discussed,

contribute new understandings of place that are reflected in this work.

Benefits to participants and communities


Feminist and community psychology intersect best in concrete attempts to improve the

circumstances of research participants and the communities in which they live and work. This can and has

been achieved in multiple research experiences, including, for example, the work of Campbell, et al.

(2004) with survivors of rape in the U.S. They offer an excerpt of a letter written by a participant that

illustrates the positive outcomes that may result for participants when feminist and community-based

researchers in psychology commit themselves to the principles at the interface of the two sub-disciplines:

Participating in this study was the most helpful thing I experienced in working through

the rape. It wasn’t counseling or therapy, I was always clear it was research, but it was

research that was caring and healing. I was listened to. This study gave me a chance to

talk about what happened to me in a supportive, caring environment….Your interview

helped me talk about the assault and gave me the courage to find the help I

needed…Participating in this study made me feel valued as a person, and that helped me

value myself again and start taking care of myself again. I am so grateful for all that your

work has given me (p. 259).

Lykes, TerreBlanche, & Hamber (2003) cite other benefits that participants have gained through

community-based research endeavors in women’s organizations, such as skills acquisition and changes in

understandings of gender dynamics. Moreover, through the participatory and action research endeavors in

which they participated, efforts that will be described in more detail below, participants gained awareness

of and engaged collectively in broader political processes to redress injustices they faced (Lykes, 1999;

2001). Lykes, et al. (2003), note that “[through this work] rural [Guatemalan and South African] women’s

voices have entered the scientific and human rights discourse about state-sponsored violence and its

effects, transforming the ‘talk’ as well as the lives of those who speak their truths,” (p. 84-5).

Another example of work at this interface is the ongoing collaboration of psychologist Anne

Brodsky with The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, RAWA (Brodsky, 2003).


Drawing on the traditions of community psychology and qualitative feminist research, including but not

limited to focus groups, ethnographic observations, and interviewing, Brodsky deploys both traditions to,

in her words, “draw our attention to the importance of examining not only the results of research but the

research process itself” (2003, p. 8). The women of RAWA embraced the collaboration with Brodsky as

they determined that she, as an outsider, “might be seen as a more credible source than they themselves

and who, also, unlike them, had the time and resources to do so,” that is, to document their story as an

organization and movement (Brodsky & Faryal, 2006). Brodsky’s work offers another variation on some

of the examples described as she entered her collaboration with RAWA as an activist and then became a

researcher and, in the words of the women of RAWA, a resource for them. Each of these examples

illustrates the dynamic possibilities as well as some of the concrete outcomes attendant to the engagement

of community and feminist psychologies through an action-reflection process. Below we explore the

possibilities of participatory and action research as another resource to accomplish work at this interface.

Participatory and Action Research as a Bridge from

Feminist and Community-Based Research in Psychology to Transformational Praxis

As discussed, feminist and community-based research in psychology have distinctive

epistemological assumptions yet share overlapping methodologies as well as similar assumptions and

goals. Thus, the researcher interested in enacting positive change through the research process from one or

both of these perspectives need not “start from scratch.” However, in bridging the sub-disciplines in ways

that (1) emphasize the position of participants as experts in their own lives, (2) work with participants to

tell their stories of oppression and survival, and (3) leverage those stories as resources for social and

political activism, participatory action research offers additional dimensions to these processes that hold

this work together (the “glue”) and extend it in a number of critical ways.

Clarifying potential contributions of participatory and action research


As suggested above, participatory and action research refers to a set of research approaches that

expose ideological, political, and social processes underlying systems of inequality through collective

knowledge generation and action-reflection processes. Some trace the beginnings of participatory and

action research to the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1940s and the experiential learning and inquiry

communities of the 1960s (see Adelman, 1993; Greenwood and Levin, 1998; Gustavsen, 2001). Zeichner

(2001) identified five major traditions in the English-speaking world and argued that some of these draw

on the emancipatory practices developed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, extending the focus of action

research beyond institutions to local communities (see also Brydon-Miller & Greenwood, 2003, for a brief

historical overview). The emancipatory perspective articulated in the global South moved beyond Lewin’s

work which did not include a critique of the wider society nor did he consider “power bases that define

social roles and strongly influence the process of any change …” (Adelman, 1993, p. 10).

Those who live and work in Latin America, Africa, and Asia and engage in participatory and action

research are thus more likely to trace the origin of their praxis to the work of Paulo Freire (1970) or the

early participatory action research of Orlando Fals-Borda (1985) and Mohammad Ansiur Rhaman (with

Fals-Borda, 1991). In the late 1960s and 1970s in India and Latin America liberation educators and social

change advocates were influenced by Paolo Freire’s understanding of critical consciousness, that is,

conscientização [conscientization]. These educators and community activists sought to create participatory

processes that tap into and engage local knowledge systems towards emancipatory practices. Despite

many differences in context, origin, and specific strategies, the theoretical assumptions underlying most

participatory and action research – and those to which we refer in this chapter - include systems theory,

humanistic values and the development of human potential, democratic participation and decision-making,

and social action for institutional and/or structural change.

Group processes generated by researchers and participants in participatory and action research seek

both to find solutions to the problems confronted by participants in their daily lives as well as to transform


the social inequities implicit therein. Often these action research projects involve collaboration between

those directly affected by an issue (usually called participants or co-researchers) and those who bring

external resources and technical expertise (usually called researchers, catalysts, and co-researchers). All

collaborators understand the issue(s) identified and its impact on lived experiences, the systematic

exploration of which is beneficial to all parties involved. Increasingly co-participants press not only for

solutions to local problems but for larger community actions that engage the often deeply entrenched

causes of the identified problem, that is, for an activist scholarship (see Hale, 2008, for examples).

Through the development of “mutually dependent and cooperative relationships” (Martin, 1996, p.

88) in participatory and action research, researchers and participants typically experience both personal

transformation and politicization (Khanna, 1996). As in feminist and community-based psychological

research, the identification or generation of shared spaces wherein the various knowledge systems and skill

levels of all research participants can be valued, shared, and exchanged is critical to the work. These spaces

facilitate the development of shared procedures for generating, appraising, and reflecting on the data

gathered during the research process, as well as the broader systems of power and privilege that influence

them. Harrison (2001) summarizes these central tenants of participatory and action research as

“community-based sources of accountability, community-based sources of knowledge, action as a criterion

of success, [and the] equal weighing of process and results” (p. 235).

Feminist participatory and action research

Participatory and action research’s goals are similar to many of the feminist principles discussed

here because participatory and collaborative community based research (a) “has an inclusive method of

choosing who will carry out the research; (b) […] has an inclusive method of deciding what is valid

knowledge; [and] (c) because the social relations among its researchers are, as much as possible, non-

hierarchical; (d) [and] because during the process of carrying out the research, some of the personal needs

of the team members are attended to and met” (Harrison, 2001, p. 243-4). An even more distinctly


feminist approach to participatory and action research focuses on understanding the status of the women

involved in the study (see, e.g., Earth, 1998 and Guruge & Khanlou, 2004) and engages gender as an

analytic tool to press for structural change and transformations towards more egalitarian outcomes (see

Lykes & Coquillon, 2007, for more details). The work of, for example, Cynthia Cockburn (1998, 2004),

Dorothy Smith (1987, 1991), Patricia Maguire (2001), and Brinton Lykes (1999, 2001) draws on critical

feminist epistemologies and problematizes women’s work, demonstrating how women’s agency is

developed towards activism and social change. These researchers, among many others, use a diverse range

of research methods to facilitate processes of knowledge construction, engagement with women and

women’s concerns, political activity, and social change. We offer Lykes’s collaboration with women of

Chajul, in rural Guatemala, as an exemplar of a culturally sensitive approach to community-based, anti-

racist, feminist research in psychology within an action-oriented framework of participatory and action

research (Lykes et. al., 1999; Women of ADMI & Lykes, 2000).

Photovoice in Chajul, Guatemala: Work at the interface

Oppression against the indigenous population of Guatemala by colonial forces centuries ago

instituted a system of racism, economic exploitation, and political violence that has manifested itself in

cycles of human rights abuses in the country. The most recent iteration of these cycles of violent structural

oppression was a 36-year period of civil war during which more than 600 massacres were perpetrated by

the Guatemalan military against the predominantly Mayan communities of the Altiplano (Carmack, 1988;

CEH, 1999), contributing to massive displacements as survivors sought refuge inside the country and in

México (CEH, 1999; Manz, 1988) and places further North. The Commission for Historical Clarification

(CEH) concluded after extensive research and documentation that the Guatemalan government and

military were responsible for acts of genocide against the Maya (CEH, 1999). Between 1992 and 2006 the

Guatemalan Foundation of Forensic Anthropology [FAFG-Fundación de Antropología Forense de

Guatemala], one of five teams of forensic anthropologists who have been conducting exhumations in


Guatemala in recent years, carried out more than 530 investigations of these massacres, including

exhumations of over 200 clandestine cemeteries in Guatemala (FAFG, 2007). Importantly, a National

Program of Reparation [Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento], established by the government in response

to the horrors documented by the CEH, has initiated a process of identifying victims and establishing

processes for psychosocial and material reparation.

Although a fuller discussion of the root causes of this conflict are beyond the scope of this chapter,

key factors that gave rise to armed resistance to the oppressive conditions described briefly above and

subsequent state counter-terrorism included the grossly unequal distribution of wealth as well as the U.S.

backed overthrow of the democratically elected government that held power in Guatemala between 1944

and 1954 and had begun to redistribute land in an effort to redress some of these structural inequalities

(see, e.g., Schlesinger & Kizner, 1999). Despite the protracted armed conflict and the 1996 Peace

Accords, these social inequalities have persisted into the 21st century, made more complex by the U.S.-

Central America Free Trade Agreement, commonly known as CAFTA, which was ratified by Guatemala

on March 10, 2005 despite widespread protests which shut down many areas of the country for days.

CAFTA promised greater economic opportunity for all but to date has privileged a small number of export

farmers while reducing the majority to further marginalization and more extreme poverty and contributing

to the growing numbers of young men and women from rural communities who migrate to the capital and

then to México and/or the United States in a second major wave of displacement and migration in

Guatemala in less than 50 years.

In response to these nearly four decades of atrocities and persistent poverty and marginalization,

one local group of women in Chajul, the Association of Maya Ixil Women—New Dawn, sought, among

other goals, local strategies for telling stories of war, economic oppression, survival, and resistance and to

do so within a context that not only offered some healing of the multiple wounds from the war, but also

created an organizational base from which to establish new programs or projects that would improve their


lives and the lives of their children (Lykes, 1999). The women realized that the divisions of war and the

grief, loss, and rage, among other emotions that they were experiencing in the wake of massacres, military

control, refugee experiences and more, required a new kind of response.

Entering Chajul

The first author responded to an invitation to join this group after nearly seven years of

collaboration with a rural Guatemalan health organization developing community-based, creative resources

for responding to war and its psychosocial effects on children and their families (see Lykes, 1994), and

many more years of Central American solidarity work. Contact with the group had come through an Ixil

friend and colleague whom I 2 had known in México when working with refugee women in the

compilation of oral histories (see Lykes, 1989/1994).

I was thus introduced to this small group of women through “one of their own” but one who had

been out of the country and the community for many years. We traveled to this remote village together and

I facilitated a workshop designed to explore the local women’s needs and desires and to share in a process

of mutual introductions. For several years, I returned to Chajul to facilitate similar workshops with a

growing group of women and to collaborate in the formation of a woman’s organization that provided

psychosocial and educational activities for women and children as well as to engage with them in an

economic development project (see Lykes et. al., 1999, for details). As we worked together on concrete

goals articulated by the Ixil and K’che’ women, I became more familiar with their cultural realities, their

challenges as rural women with minimal formal education, and the breadth and depth of the horrors many

of them and their children had survived over several generations of terror and state-violence. Field notes

and journaling provided me with an opportunity to reflect on these developing relationships and tensions

that arose in negotiating my role as advisor and advocate, as well as the challenges of developing “just

enough trust” (see Maguire, 2001) for collaborative work.


During these years, the women developed a corn mill, a revolving loan fund, explored gender

relations within their community, and began to develop psycho-educational projects for the children of

Chajul (Lykes et. al., 1999). After several years of working together and impressive growth in women’s

participation as well as the successful incorporation of their women’s group as a non-governmental

organization, the women of ADMI and I agreed to collaborate in a participatory action research project

using photography, life stories, and interviews to document the effects of the war on their community as

well as the resources – traditional as well as contemporary – that they were deploying to survive and, in

some cases, to transform their lives. Informing those outside of the Ixil triangle about the violence of the

civil war in Guatemala, its impact on the community, and the ongoing survival and resistance of the people

became an important goal for many of the women, as important as sharing their stories within their

community, reflecting their deep desire to prevent the recurrence of the violence they had experienced. In

part because most of the women in the group could not read or write, and because the camera enables us to

capture experiences and then critically reflect on their multiple meanings, we decided to use photography

and storytelling to document images of the community, awakening long silenced voices through the stories

that framed the photographs, thus reconfiguring the history of the war through the women’s own

memories. This approach provided the opportunity for the re-telling that the women sought, while offering

the necessary documentation for disseminating the women’s understanding of their experiences, remaining

true to their memories. In this way the women of Chajul engaged in processes of self-reflection and

collective knowledge generation within the context of a critical analysis of the political, social, and

economic forces that influenced their past and current lives.

Collaborating across diversities

Twenty Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul joined the research team, taking one roll of 24

pictures once a month for approximately 10 months, generating between 3,500 and 4,000 usable

photographs. The group identified a different theme each month and each photographer was encouraged to


take pictures that reflected the chosen topic as well as of events as they emerged in the community or its

neighboring villages. Bimonthly small group meetings provided opportunities for individual storytelling in

pairs or small groups whereas group analyses took place in monthly workshops. Pictures were described

and their stories re-told in each of these contexts. Once those analyses were completed and tape recordings

transcribed, the processes of data reduction and re-organization began. Below I trace the creation of one of

the 56 phototexts that are presented in the book, Voces e imágenes: Las mujeres Maya Ixiles de

Chajul/Voices and Images: Mayan Ixil women of Chajul (Women of ADMI & Lykes, 2000).

Discovering global realities in a local post-war context. In a bi-weekly workshop during

September 1998, this story was told by Ana while showing her photograph (see Photograph 3.1) to the

group:

I took a picture of a girl who wanted a chocobanana. She lives with her mother in the village of

Agro, one hour from Chajul. There they don’t sell chocobananas. So, she asked her mother if

when they were in Chajul she could buy a chocobanana. Her mother did not have any money. She

told her that if she wanted a chocobanana she would have to go and sell wood to have enough

money. So she gathered the amount of wood that was necessary in order to make her purchase and

she carried it to Chajul to sell it. She was offering to sell the wood to me [Ana]. She was 7 or 8

years old. She had to wait to get a chocobanana here [in Chajul]. (Memoria/Group Field Notes,

Williams, 1998, Translation from Spanish to English, Lykes)

[INSERT EXHIBIT 3.1 HERE]

When I and the ADMI co-researchers gathered as a larger group in November of that year for the

first of what would be a series of analysis workshops this picture was chosen from among a large cluster of

over 40 photographs about children and work. The photographer’s initial story about this young

barefooted girl was shared with a group of 6 women photographer-co-researchers representing three

generations. The initial story, summarized above, focused on a young girl who desires a chocolate covered


banana and describes her need to sell the wood on her back in order to secure money to buy herself a treat.

After hearing this story and discussing the picture, the group generated the analysis summarized in Table

3.1.

[INSERT TABLE 3.1 HERE]

The categories for analysis included above were developed through a series of earlier workshops.

They reflect issues that had emerged over several years of collaborative work which sought to critically

understand war and extreme poverty, as well as women’s responses to them, through dramatizations,

drawing, and storytelling. Based on this work, the six categories (see Table 3.1) as well as others were

developed to analyze multiple pictures and to re-thread experiences towards storying the photographs that

women were taking and re-storying them as the community’s “her-story” (see Lykes, 2001; McIntyre &

Lykes, 2004, for more details about this process).

In contrast to Ana’s story about the picture which centered on the individual child’s desire for a

chocolate covered banana, the group-based analysis presents a differentiated understanding of children’s

participation in the labor market. The group suggested that this school-age child was forced to sell wood

to bring home cash, representing children who “should be in school” but who have rather entered a cash or

market economy. In addition, in the taped conversations of this group discussion that were later transcribed

and analyzed, the older photographers in the group described their experiences as child-workers that

included gathering wood to heat their homes or to cook the family’s food, but not being forced to sell

things to generate cash for economic survival. Their commentaries reflected generational changes in child

labor and the deepening impoverishment of their local community due to the war, shifting local economies,

and pressures to export to global markets.

Comments about the child’s torn skirt, lack of shoes, and dirty face were described and analyzed as

both indices of parental neglect and of family poverty. Some members of the group were critical of the

child’s parents, arguing that they should be taking better care of her – interpreting her lack of shoes, torn


skirt, and lack of cleanliness, as a “lack of proper parental care-taking.” Others rejected these personal

attributions, suggesting that structural poverty was the primary causal factor. Women who interpreted the

photograph in terms of structural poverty calculated the cost of the child’s treat and the money she would

get for selling the wood. They concluded that the bulk of the funds she secured would be used to enable the

family to buy necessary goods for basic survival. In contrast to Ana, who had assumed that the amount of

wood was equal to the value of a chocobanana, other members of the group recognized that the child had

gathered wood valued at more than the cost of a chocobanana and interpreted this difference in ways that

re-situated the child and her labor. Finally, some suggested that the load of wood was “overly burdensome

for a small child” and that the child’s labor “deprived her of access to education.”

This particular photo-text was re-iterated in March, 1999, by Ana on a U.S. tour in which she and I

described our collaborative PhotoVoice project. Among the pictures presented was the “village girl.” Ana

told the following story while in Boston:

The town where we live is an extremely poor place. As you see here we see a small girl. She is

carrying a load of wood, of 16 logs and this size [about 10-12 inches each]. And the little girl has,

that is, has walked 2 hours to come to the town, as she lives in a village. She said that there were

many needs in her family. She asked her mother for 25 centavos [approximately $.05 US] to buy a

chocobanana. But 25 centavos is a lot for a family in Chajul and they told the little girl to gather a

load of wood and sell it in the town and she could buy a chocobanana. But she [her mother] told

her that she could only spend 25 centavos and she needed to bring the rest of the money to her. So

that’s the story of the girl. (Lykes, Caba Mateo & Laynez Caba, 1999. Translation from Spanish to

English, Lykes)

Of note is the combined story that Ana now tells about her picture. She sustains her earlier focus on the

child’s desire but has added details about the cost of this treat and the surplus funds generated by the sale

of the wood. This information clearly came from the group discussion and analysis to which Ana was


privy. The story she now tells, re-presenting her community to a U.S. audience, is a combined tale. The

emphasis Ana has selected, for the U.S. audience, is to minimize the child’s desire for a chocobanana,

emphasizing rather the poverty in which children of Chajul live and the challenges they face. As we will

see below, the knowledge she constructs about audience and voice through this experience is threaded into

the final narrative.

The narrative or collective story that appears in the book is a combination of Ana’s two stories and

the group analysis:

A girl went to gather firewood in the bush. We think that she is worried and also sad since

she doesn’t have any shoes. She’s tired from walking so much and her head hurts because she is

carrying her load without a mecapal; she uses only a rag. Her parents don’t have enough money

and this is the reason why she brought her wood from the village to the town to sell.

We hope that the girl can have sandals one day, that she can be neat and clean and that she

not have to work like this because it’s too great a burden for her. There should be work appropriate

for children her age and the opportunity for this girl to go to school. (Women of ADMI & Lykes,

2000, p. 61).

The economic conditions in which children labor, both in terms of support for their families and in terms

of what is considered an appropriate or inappropriate burden, is emphasized here. Although this story

attributes individual emotional concerns to the child, it is notable that the original desire for a chocobanana

is no longer included. The photo-text stories this girl-child laborer as burdened by work and as living in a

desperately poor family in a rural community. Hope is expressed as well as the group’s collective

demands, that is, the authors’ protest of overly burdensome and age-inappropriate child labor in their

community and their moral claim that there be a better future for children, one that includes schooling and

improved material well-being. These claims evidence how these women further situate themselves within


a global community, this time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or, more specifically, the

Convention on the Rights of the Child. As significantly, they include reference to the mecapal thus

reasserting one of the multiple traditions within their Mayan community.

Through these multiple iterations we, the authors of this chapter, can trace a developing storyline.

The singularity of the photographed child’s desire for a chocobanana, the initial focus in Ana’s individual

story, was appropriated by the group who gave voice to the particularities of rural Mayan childhood and

poverty and universal claims for children’s rights. The singular desire of a young child was thus

transformed into a collective hope for a better future for all children of this community and beyond.

Personal desire and singularity have been deconstructed and resituated in the particular challenges of rural

Mayan life and a universal discourse of childhood characterized by poverty, human pain, and children’s

rights.

The shared theme of shared space: Voces e imágenes

: The project in Chajul demonstrates how a participatory action research project enacted over a

number of years and in the context of ongoing relationships between co-researchers (outsiders) and

community members (insiders): (1) enhanced community participants’ capabilities to adapt to existing

settings and to seek to alter problematic and create alternative settings; (2) reflected the priorities of the

community and some of its multiple diversities; (3) prioritized prevention over treatment for the traumas of

war and gender-based violence and oppression; (4) incorporated local values, beliefs, and cultural strengths

into program design, implementation, and evaluation; (5) was integrated into existing community settings

and activities; and (6) emphasized capacity-building over direct service provision. By speaking from the

standpoints of oppressed groups the women of the group were able to join together to design a

collaborative process by which memories were collected, analyzed, and discussed, and action for future

prevention was embraced. The decision of what was or was not “valid” knowledge in the research project

developed through workshops and small group analysis sessions in which all co-researchers deliberated –


often heatedly – over the photos and corresponding information and came to agreement on whether or not

to include the images, and what the text accompanying the photos should be. Perhaps most importantly, the

women of Chajul collaborated actively with outside scholars in the development of strategies for this

process of conciliatory memory production. The experience of sorting out and deliberating through their

own methods provided the women an opportunity to gain skills in communication and social and political

analysis. As importantly, the capacity of the research team to sustain the multiple diversities reflected in

the group and create a classed and ethnically diverse community PhotoVoice reflects the remembering

process that Jelin (2003), among others, has argued is critical towards enhancing the survivors’ ability to

define justice in a post-war context such as Guatemala.

Participatory action research methodologies emphasize reflexivity, a cyclical process of action and

reflection that encourages one to develop a critical and reflexive sense of self both within the group and as

a protagonist as well as “product” of society. Through group sharing processes the women began to

discuss ways to prevent the atrocities of war from recurring and to share a vision for change at both the

individual and collective levels. Moreover, through reflexivity the researchers and the women attained a

form of personal and political transformation (Williams & Lykes, 2003). Indeed, in an interview with the

first and second authors of this chapter five years after the close of the project, one of the women of Chajul

noted that the experience of participation in the PhotoVoice project meant many things to her and to the

other women, because, she said, “what we learned is to create and sustain a space [for ourselves].”

Creating spaces for local women to share their experiences and to respect that knowledge,

including their “natural” helping systems, while drawing upon the communities’ Mayan traditions as well

as new technologies represented by photography, is a particularly important aspect of the nexus of

feminism and community psychology as experienced through this participatory and action research project

This example illustrates how participatory and action research can bridge feminist and community

psychology methodologies and epistemologies, transforming local actions of photography and storytelling


into opportunities for deepening understanding of the causes of rural poverty and the violence of war. As

importantly, it provided spaces in which survivors could reclaim their protagonism through demanding a

better future for themselves and their children as they transformed themselves as well as some small but

significant dimensions of their local realities through collective actions.

Challenges in the practice of participatory and action research

There is a vast literature that discusses the importance of culturally embedded community-based

programs (Campbell, Self, Wasco, & Ahrens, 2004; Gurage & Khanlou, 2004; Moane, 2003), specifically,

the concepts of consciousness, communal healing, and collective change. However, as McIlwaine and

Data (2003) have noted “[w]hile theorizing difference is now an integral cornerstone of contemporary

feminism, the challenge remains as to how to reconcile the diverse demands and priorities of different

constituencies within feminism in the North and South” (p. 372). Moreover, “[t]hese debates on

representation have also re-ignited discussions on the ethics of fieldwork among Western feminists

working with Southern women, especially in relation to positionality and reflexivity” (McIlwaine and

Data, 2003, p. 372). Despite these cautions, activist researchers working with existing community groups

offer feminist-infused psychology a possibility to tap into the systems that local people have put into place

and thus into the issues pertinent to them, as well as the resources and skills that they have to offer

(Schuler, 1999). Seeking out these groups may be the first step towards greater collaboration between the

researcher and participants on the path to becoming co-researchers.

Ethical challenges that may arise in feminist, community-based research within a participatory and

action research framework include protecting the identity of co-researchers, honoring participants’ needs,

maintaining mutuality of the research relationship, and building strategies for making concrete change in

the lives of participants (Paradis, 2000), to name a few. Memory, voice, and re-presentation, constructs

discussed above and emergent as descriptors of the photovoice processes in Chajul, are constant challenges

during a participatory action research process. There is a careful dance between presenting the experiences


of the participants as distorted through the interpretations of the researcher, and developing a truly

collaborative presentation of information, that is, a “third voice” that represents the combined efforts of

researcher and participant (Lykes, Terre Blanche, & Hamber, 2003).

Challenges may arise specifically from the complicated relationship among co-researchers (the

university-based outsider and community insiders) due to the intense collaboration inherent in the

participatory and action research processes. Anne Brodsky describes some of these she experienced in the

embrace of community psychology and feminist qualitative methods as a resource in bridging diversity

between herself as an outsider and the insiders of RAWA (Brodsky & Faryal, 2006). She writes about the

similarity-difference dynamic in her work and in the personal relationships she developed, highlighting, for

example, her Western, social scientific, academic tendency to “discuss everything” which contrasted to the

Afghan women’s comfort with silence and ambiguity. She and one of the RAWA women with whom she

co-authored a piece about their work, describe these “road bumps” and the processes through which they

came to a shared understanding – or not.

Minkler (2004) addresses many of these points of cultural confusion or friction within the context

of participatory research specifying that it is the vast differences in resources, cultural knowledge, and life

experiences between the researcher and community members that may lead to miscommunications or

worse. She (2004) also stresses the need to remain vigilant during the action stages of the research process

to the consequences, unforeseen by the “outsiders,” which may arise as changes are made within the

community. In Chajul, there were multiple occasions where women’s engagement in new experiences

through PhotoVoice, for example, when rural women hiked to a village and remained overnight to

photograph and interview women and families there, created tensions in their families or, more

specifically, with their husbands.

For outsider or university-based researchers, the personal aspects of entering into a project as co-

researchers entails a practice of self-disclosure and relationship-building not often expected of the


academic researcher (see Acker, Barry, & Esseveld, 1996). For example, during a research process with

middle-class mothers in the U.S., Acker, Barry, and Esseveld (1996) discovered that expectation by

community members of friendship was an unexpected and unrealizable challenge for the authors.

Additionally, one of the unforeseen impacts on the actual data collection was self-editing among the

interviewees, resulting from the self-comparison of female interviewees to the researcher, who was a

professor of the same age as themselves. Acker et al. (1996), in a retrospective criticism to the original

essay on the project, noted that “empathy is not always possible, nor is it a defining quality of feminist

research” (p 82). They continued, “However, a feminist researcher…still need[s] to recognize the

researched as an active subject and to comprehend the effects of the social locations of both the researchers

and the researched on the process and the content of the interview” (1996, p. 82). Thus, challenges facing

participatory and action researchers can directly stem from the goals of working collaboratively.

Moreover, institutional issues can affect participatory and action researchers who are working from

within the academy. Indeed, Wahab (2003) notes, “if there is one story, one song, to be told in this

inquiry, it is that which rests at the intersections of the participants’ lives, my life, and the academic

institution” (p. 636). For example, the topics studied by participatory and action researchers are often not

“mainstream” enough for funders. Barriers may also include co-researchers who lack the skills, time, or

resources necessary for involvement in research which involves the time consuming process of training

collaborators. On the flip-side, if the community does become involved, the researcher loses control of the

project as in the traditional positivist research model. The process of writing and disseminating information

with an eye towards memory, voice, and re-presentation is arduous and difficult and, “…might place

[university-based] researchers in a difficult ethical position, forcing us to choose between our professional

self-interest and doing research that is truly beneficial and meaningful” (Paradis, 2000, p. 856).

Other challenges such as language barriers and conflicts of interest also have an impact on project

outcomes. Co-researchers in Chajul encountered many of these in their work together. Most notably,


language differences among the “outsiders” as well as the women from other parts of Guatemala

sometimes caused consternation and aggravation. Funders who visited the project to evaluate it were, for

example, particularly self-conscious when, prior to responding to one of their questions, the Ixil and

K’che’ women spoke at great length among themselves and did not offer a translation. Moreover,

translation involves complex understandings of how words are situated within and among social relations

in a particular material context, and thus a power differential emerged between those who spoke Spanish,

Ixil, and K’iche’ or those limited to communicating in only one of the four languages spoken by project

participants.. In addition, basic differences of time and space associated with the differing cultural

backgrounds of the co-researchers posed challenges throughout the project. These differences sometimes

led to contrasting rhythms of time and work, contributing to miscommunications and misunderstandings.

Looking Forward: The complex and sometimes contradictory

influence of globalization on and in local participatory and action research

Throughout this chapter we emphasize the importance of analyzing gendered, class-based, and

racist constructs and social structures and find that processes of re-presentation can be deployed for both

personal survival of individual participants as well as to generate structural changes within wider social

systems (Lykes, Blanche, & Hamber, 2003). However, this local work is not isolated from wider socio-

political contexts that introduce constraints and limitations, including, most notably, the forces of

globalization. In their discussion of the gendering of globalization, McIlwaine and Datta (2003) draw on an

earlier formulation wherein Walby (2000, p.27) argued that globalization is “‘restructuring social relations

on a global scale” creating both deleterious effects [the feminization of poverty, the spread of HIV/AIDS

and human trafficking] and opportunities [transnational organizing] for women and men,’`” (McIlwaine &

Data, 2003, p. 376). These realities of global poverty impact upon workers at the grassroots, and the

growing economic gap between rich and poor countries calls for new forms of organizing for structural

change (Lykes & Mallona, 2007). Moreover, the increasing interconnectedness of many aspects of daily


life has led to the rise of the notion of the global civil society (Smith & Johnson, 2002). Within that

context, as Berger (2006) has suggested, Guatemalan women, not unlike many other women of the

Southern hemisphere, have been “boxed into development labels and set institutional spaces … within

institutional cultures” (p. 104) which impede rather than foster wider efforts for collective change. These

larger institutional and systemic realities thus shape discourses and actions of individual women and of

their efforts to build movements.

The relationship between participatory and action research and the redress of social inequities is

historically embedded (Freire, 1970; Rahman 1985/1983; Fals Borda, 2001; Reason & Bradbury, 2001).

Moreover, the manner in which this is articulated has changed over time (see Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001).

Thus, the assumption made by participatory and action research that processes of critical reflection on

material conditions, local knowledge production, and social change efforts will link to broader social

movement-building, may not always be realistic within today’s global realities (Lykes & Mallona, 2007).

Yet, globalization offers some positive potentials for participatory and action research that aspires to

activism and mass-based organizing. For example, shifting populations, power structures, and

relationships between nations and their citizens, create new spaces for advocacy, and rapid

communications technologies can link organizers across the globe (Stahler-Sholk, 2001). At the same time

these global communication strategies can have varied influences on local dynamics and identities

(Marsella, 1998; Jensen, 2002; Smith & Johnson, 2002).

A focus on social systems (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000) may lead to the exploration of issues such

as the local adoption of non-local concepts (e.g. global feminism or cultural rejuvenation of indigenous

people) which may be at direct odds with one another, and deeply influence the ways that communities see

themselves, complicating the research process (Merry, 2001). For instance, Mayan women’s participation

in a research process in Chajul was cause for consideration of gender and race power relations, such as

how gendered power relations are produced and enacted through discourses and ideologies about these


processes (see also, Lennie, 1999; Cornwall, 2003). Race and power relations are also causes for

circumspection, and co-researchers must attend to issues of personal privilege and one group’s dominance

over another that may infiltrate the research process (Green & Sonn, 2005).

In Chajul, for example, the co-researchers faced challenges in the sustainability of the work begun

in the PhotoVoice project due to divisions along religious lines that intensified during and after the life of

the project. Gaps grew among women around both issues of leadership and affiliation with, on the one

hand, the growing evangelical Christian presence in the town, and, on the other, the sustenance of

traditional Catholic and Mayan beliefs and practices. Evangelism is not a new feature of globalization, yet

the faith traditions of heightened influence today are changing, and global technologies allow for increased

contact among faith traditions from the industrialized North and the global South (Drogus, 1995).

Additionally, assumptions that “outsider” or feminist researchers sometimes make about women’s shared

identifications or affiliations with one another being based upon gender may not be true to local forms of

social organization. Neither the category “woman” nor “community” is singular. Women and

communities are characterized by “both solidarity and conflict, shifting alliances, power and social

structures” (Cleaver, 2001, p. 45). Thus in some societies, women’s primary alliances may be with family,

and thus with male relatives, rather than with other women of the community, as may be assumed by some

feminist researchers (Cornwall, 2003). As significantly, as argued by Butchart & Seedat (1990), in the

South African context the discourse of community is now deployed to mask or gloss over underlying

structural inequalities, assuming similarity or unity in the post-apartheid (sic) era where class and race

based inequalities persist.

Global poverty raises a significant and very particular challenge for community-based researchers

in psychology who are concerned with social change and power differentials. They must evaluate the

usefulness of traditional psychological methods such as individual or small group interventions and

therapies that fail to address the clients’ or participants’ lack of adequate housing, education, shelter, etc.


(Mulvey, 1988) as well as how local poverty is linked to global power relationships that call for redress of

social structural inequalities. These needs must be explicitly articulated and problematized in ways that

incorporate them as planned outcomes of a project and lead to enhanced community involvement and,

eventually, to systematic social and political change (Bond, Belenky, & Weinstock, 2000).

Conclusions

Shifting from a set of ideas presumed to be universal to a more local yet globally-infused approach

to research that allows the space for commonalities to surface between and among co-researchers and

communities in order to effect change is a central tenet of a feminist, anti-racist, participatory and action

research process (McIlwaine & Datta, 2003, p. 373). We suggest that participatory and action research

processes bind community-based and feminist psychology research through recognizing the strengths of

communities and deploying gender as a critical analytic tool while actively collaborating through activist

scholarship processes to challenge the oppressive structures of power in these communities and beyond.

We recognize the challenges facing feminist and community-based researchers in psychology who employ

participatory and action research methodologies. The case example from Chajul suggests how, in one

participatory and action research process, outsider researchers and local insiders were able to creatively re-

thread a collective story of war and extreme poverty through combining feminist and community

psychology principles and values and developing “just enough trust” to generate knowledge and actions.

Some of the limits and possibilities of combining these resources and strategies have been critically

discussed above.

We urge a continued explanation and debate of these modalities in an effort to provide participants

with an ever-widening forum within which to re-present memory and voice. Participatory and action

research are not, we have argued, the only approaches with transformational possibilities (see, e.g.,

liberation psychologies in the Special Issues, American Journal of Community Psychology, 2003, 31 (1/2)).

It is the embrace of each of these critical action-reflection processes that shifts our gaze as researchers


trained in the academy to the reality of participants, the resources they bring, and the social and political

constraints that bear upon their lived experiences, garnering for psychology a depth and vastness of human

experience without which we will fail professionally and personally to contest injustice and inequality

wherever it occurs.


Endnotes

1. Note that we use the terms “participatory and action research” to refer to a spectrum of research

methodologies, including that which identifies itself as action research and as participatory action research,

all of which draw upon systems theory, humanistic values, democratic participation, and action or change.

For more on this, and the relationship between these forms of research and psychology and feminism, see

Lykes & Coquillon, 2007).

2. In the description of this work the chapter co-authors have employed the first person singular to

reference the first author’s collaborative work in Chajul as this is grammatically more clear as well as more

consistent with the values and assumptions of the research process and of my positionality within the

research process and as co-author of this chapter.

3. A head strap of leather or woven twine wrapped across the forehead and extending toward the back,

used by Mayan peasants to distribute and balance weight of heavy loads carried on the shoulders and back.


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Table 3.1: A village girl.

Context Actors/ People

Actions Feelings Thoughts Reasons/ causes/ Explanations

In our area there is corn & coffee & this girl child is in the path & along the edge of the path there are cloths hanging on the fence surrounding a corral

a child smiling, without shoes, bright eyes; she does not have a mecapal3 for carrying wood, she is using a small, old piece of headband/cloth on her head to carry the wood; it is not well situated

she went to gather wood in the woods

she seems happy but also tired. We think she might be worried, and sad to not have any shoes

I feel badly seeing a child carrying so much wood

She is working because her family does not have sufficient income to support the family. Many children work to help gather firewood for the family but this child has to sell her wood, her labor, and so has entered into the paid labor force and a market economy. Her father uses a mecapal but perhaps he disciplined the daughter so she is using an old headband instead of a mecapal.

[Italics added to indicate text developed by the group that was not in the initial story told by the photographer. Memoria/Group Field Notes, Lykes, 1998)]

theoretical and methododological challaneges in participatory community-based research and feminisms

Documents