Full Description
Many community health interventions fail, wasting tax dollars and human resources. These interventions are typically designed by subject matter experts who don't have direct experience with the local community. In contrast, successful interventions are built from the ground up, planned and implemented by the people that will benefit from them, using community-based action research. Researching With: A Decolonizing Approach to Community-Based Action Research is a guide for how to do research that is inclusive, engages in community-building, and implements a decolonizing framework. This text advocates for a collaborative approach, researching with communities, rather than conducting research on them. Reviewing both theory and method, Jessica Smartt Gullion and Abigail Tilton offer practical tips for forming community partnerships and building coalitions. Researching With also includes helpful information about incorporating community work into a successful academic career. This book can be used as supplemental or primary reading in courses in sociology, social work, health research, nursing, public health, qualitative inquiry, and research methods, and is also of value to individual researchers and graduate students writing their thesis.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Organization of the Text
Our Backgrounds
Chapter 1. Community Health
Understanding Community-Based Action Research
Issues to Consider
Public Academics
The Slow Professor
The Boyer Model
Chapter 2. Decolonizing Research
Colonization of Knowledge
Indigenous Research
Honoring Culture
Sacred Knowledge
Black Feminist Methodology
The Neoliberal Agenda and the Politics of Knowledge
Other Considerations
Chapter 3. Doing Community-Based Action Research
Epistemic Privilege
Top-Down Solutions Often Fail
Your Role as Researcher
Objectivity
Finding Projects
Gather a Group of Like Minded People
Define the Goals
Mapping the Problem and Collecting Data
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Conflict Management
When People Don't Want to Participate
Chapter 4. Research Ethics
Procedural Ethics
Situational Ethics
Relational Ethics
Chapter 5. Getting the Message Out
The Problem with Academic Journals
Voice
Telling the Story
Writing in Accessible Language
Don't Feed the Trolls
Working with the Media
Putting Action into Action Research
Conclusion
Appendix A
A Pedagogical Approach to Action Research
References
About the Authors
