Participatory action research

So for those who might be unfamiliar with the healthy neighborhood study, give us a introduction to what that is and how you guys are connected to it.

So yeah, so the Healthy Neighborhoods Study is a, it's a participatory action research project based in, neighborhoods and place and health as the name you know suggests um it has it actually just wrapped up 10 years of of its studying but throughout that because it is participatory action research it's very much based on learning and doing and actually learning from doing so We have been working throughout nine communities in Massachusetts for the past 10 years.

Basically, each community has about three resident researchers, folks who live and or work in their community, who are basically community organizers, community researchers, community organizers, working with their community.

neighbors, their friends, their families to kind of almost do like an assessment.

Suffer no illusions that that would be a statement about me.

But in the work that I do around place-based social change, I'm around a lot of data and measurement people who are doing a lot of work.

And I think when you hear that neighborhoods are being studied – You don't often picture the kinds of activities that participatory action research are doing, right? You probably picture computers and spreadsheets and some sort of government office somewhere or some sort of very advanced technology where there's lots of numbers and percentages and graphs and pictures or whatever.

And all of that can be very valid, right? Like there's lots of ways to study things and there's lots of way to study neighborhoods.

But it also offered such interesting ways that we could reroute it, that in the critical response, we had people coming in from Palestine to talk about how it translated into the work with Hannah Massoud was on that episode talking about working with farmers in Palestine.

And we had an interesting part of that where Michelle Fine was on an episode and started talking about how in works that she was doing with one of her previously graduated Maori students, talking about participatory action research with ancestors.

The way that we've kind of colonially constructed PAR is with people who are currently alive rather than in knowledges with ancestors.

And we were able to all learn so much from those episodes that that kind of model, I think, proved itself to us that it was helping us go deeper into a particular concept and then broaden where we could take it with us.

So we're going to try for something pretty similar in season two, but it will have a slightly different focus.

But I'll see what else we want to talk about with season one first before we make that leap.

I was going to ask about the goals, but I'm actually curious about one of the episode topics you just mentioned with participatory action research and ancestors.

Could you talk a little bit more about that?