The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 12: “Not everything can be fully participatory, right?”: On "True" PAR, A Conversation between Aurora Santiago-Ortiz and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández
Citation:
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. “Not everything can be fully participatory, right?”: On "True" PAR, A Conversation between Aurora Santiago-Ortiz and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Naima Raza at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. August 15, 2022. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar
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Rubén: Welcome to The WhyPAR podcast, a project of the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
In the WhyPAR podcast, youth participatory action research practitioners discuss the ethical dimensions of conducting YPAR. In our podcast, we explore issues of co-leading YPAR projects, building relationships, power dynamics, and sharing our work together. The Youth Research Lab is located at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto or Tkaronto, on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently being cared for by the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Aurora: You know, I think being really honest, like not everything, can be fully participatory, right. And if we think about it that way, and we kinda let that go, I think there's a lot less pressure.
Rubén: My name is Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, and I am the Director of the Youth Research Lab, and a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
On today’s episode, we're going to be talking to Dr. Aurora Santiago-Ortiz. Dr. Santiago Ortiz is a social justice education scholar, and currently the Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on anti-racist feminisms, anticolonial perspectives and participatory action research. And she is the co-founder or one of the co-founders and a member of the community organization Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey. And that's the project that we will be talking about today, primarily, and we are very excited and we congratulate her on her appointment at the University of Wisconsin, this coming fall. She will be joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women Studies, and Chicano/Latinx studies. So congratulations, first of all, that's really wonderful news.
Aurora: Thank you so much Rubén, thank you for having me here. I'm very excited to, to talk about some of the work that I've been doing and to just engage and have a dialogue. So thank you for having me.
Rubén: Yeah, no, it's, it's great to have you here and you know, you and I have been having some of these conversations for a long time starting with these discussions about solidarity and how solidarity overlaps with participatory action research. And so I'm very excited to talk about some of the challenges and what, what sort of ethical commitments that direct our work. So why don't you start, I, I, I've known your work and have been following it for a while, but why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the kinds of projects that you've been working on where participatory action research plays a central role.
Aurora: Mm-Hmm. Yeah, so one, the biggest project that I've worked on in recent years was actually my dissertation, which was a qualitative and ethnographic study of participatory action research. And when thinking about and talking about those ethical commitments, why I chose to do a study of PAR rather than do PAR as my dissertation because issues of authorship obviously are present. So I really wanted to understand the collaborative relationship among differently situated actors. So students, undergraduate students, that were taking a PAR class or participatory action research class, myself as the professor coming from a US-based institution to Puerto Rico, which is where I am from and grew up. And also the community co-researchers that participated in the PAR projects that we carried out. So broadly speaking, we worked together for a year in the academic sense, but the project continued on, and we got together with some activists, environmental activists, and community leaders in the urban hub of Cayey to really look at what the concerns and desires were of that community with no real plan, because we really wanted it to be community- driven.
So we had an idea that we wanted to get to know the community that we were working with that was actually adjacent to a college campus, a university of Puerto Rico Cayey campus. It was an opportunity for the students and for myself to really get to know the surrounding community and to find out what sort of things that they wanted to work on particularly. So it was really up to them. And I can talk a bit about that more and when we get into the specifics, but we carried out three broad projects, one of them was an oral history project done with women in the community, which was made into a virtual exhibit. We did a community center, but because of COVID, which we could also talk about, we had to do a virtual community center.
And as a result of that course, we started a community organization, which is called the Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey, because we wanted to continue doing the work, which in a lot of ways was actually, was challenged by COVID during that time. So we couldn't see each other in person, and we had to find other ways to conduct this research project and to continue the collaboration virtually and then later on when we could see each other than continuing on in-person or hybrid that's one of the projects. And the second project that I'm working on within my postdoc is working with Latinx migrant communities in the Lexington area, in designing what is called a sociotechnical infrastructure which is basically using technology to address their needs. And this, I would not call it a strictly PAR project. I would call it a project that draws on the principles of participatory action research, where we co-create a sort of platform that is relevant to the Latinx community.
[We are working with] a very heterogeneous community made up of people from multiple countries in Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, recent migrants, and also long time migrants. But we really wanted to, through community dialogues, get their, their participation into a project that they would be able to use beyond that particular study. So right now it is a website, but we also are trying to develop a community promoter model. So we want to kind of continue this study into training and developing community co-researchers, but also promoters that are able to, to do the outreach in their community in ways that are culturally relevant to where they live. So those are at large those are the two projects that I've been working on lately.
Rubén: Right. Great. Thank you so much. And I really would love to revisit these, the conversations about the ways in which you have been using digital dissemination strategies. I think that's one of the most interesting and innovative aspects of your work, that, you know, the mapping work that you've been doing in Cayey. And it sounds like this work in Kentucky also, and I saw about COVID, but it, I think it would be really helpful for our listeners who might not be familiar with Puerto Rico in particular. Maybe if you could say a little bit about Cayey, the community that you work with, and what drew you to that community. And to do that work perhaps just as a way to situate that, that project.
Aurora: Yeah, so Cayey is located in the central Eastern mountainous region of Puerto Rico, which is an archipelago. So it's made up of various islands that are inhabited. There are three, and I'll call the bigger island, the main island is where Cayey is located. And the [Cayey] campus emerged in the mid 20th century, around the fifties in a time of expansion of Puerto Rico's only public university, which has 11 campuses. So originally it was a teaching college, but it was actually fought for and asked for by the Cayey community who wanted that campus to open. So there was a deep community connection already, and that campus in particular has also been very active. The student movement there has been very active in fighting against budget cuts and neoliberal austerity measures that have been imposed by a fiscal control board that was imposed by the US Congress in 2016.
So there is a tradition and a history of very active participation in community matters, a very active student movement that has gone on strike various times to fight these austerity measures and also very involved in community life. So they have done a number of initiatives like community kitchens, where folks that are experiencing precarity can get food or trade canned goods for a hot meal, or as well as a community garden that emerged during the strikes. So people were starting to grow their own vegetables, in response to the fact that Puerto Rico imports upwards of about 85, some people say 90% of food. So it's in direct response to food insecurity in Puerto Rico. So that also called my attention, but also that the Cayey campus of the university has a program where people from the diaspora come, or they don't have to be from Puerto Rico, but that want to participate in a sort of program at their interdisciplinary research institute and can teach a research course for a semester or for a year, and students can be co-researchers or research assistants. And the approach that I took was that I wanted students to be co-researchers with me on these projects. So kind of all of those factors conspired and came together and really made Cayey a place where I wanted to do this kind of community-based work. And because I knew that there were students that were very committed to doing that work as well. I ended up doing my field work there, which was teaching this interdisciplinary research course.
Rubén: So interesting. And, and it sounds like a, a, a very different context from where your current work in Kentucky. And I'm just curious, like, what are some of the similarities and differences in terms of the communities that you're working on between Cayey and the work you're doing in Kentucky now?
Aurora: So in Cayey for my dissertation, I designed a sort of intervention where I really wanted to bring together a critical dialogic methodology called intergroup dialogue with participatory action research, because both of these methodologies kind of pursue the same goals. They want and look for coalition building for social change. They promote solidarity and they take a collaborative approach to issues of social justice or to liberation. So those approaches particularly were attractive to me and intergroup dialogue had been mostly done in campus settings, but I wanted to bring together folks from outside of the university and within the university to engage in this methodology, because it promotes kind of meaning making across differences and really enhances communication skills. So this was also born out of my own preoccupation with a lot of social movements when there's conflict or when there's differences.
People tend to kind of leave the space and, and not engage in hard conversations. And that's in my own experience in the past and activist spaces. So I wanted to design this intervention to see what happens when folks engage in these methodologies. And I continue doing that work in the Lexington project by engaging in community dialogues and bringing together these elements of PAR to see how folks can build trust and engage in these reciprocal and mutual practices that go beyond the temporary moment, the temporality of meeting, and how can folks continue to use dialogic strategies in their everyday lives, in their relationships, and also how folks build solidarity by doing this collaborative work and engaging in dialogic communication. So those are sort of the intersections of the work. I want to continue building these sorts of interventions in ways that show what can happen when they're combined. And, when you bring folks that are different in terms of socioeconomic status, race, immigration status, gender, sexuality, et cetera which I found that it does, it does really shift ways in, in how we relate to one another. Yeah, I think that's the most important thing for [these projects].
Rubén: Yeah. And I, and we're really interested in, in those, those differences, I think in particular, because so many of the conversations that we've been having through the podcast are really about how each project or different context, how the ethics that we bring to the work get expressed differently in each of those contexts. And, and we've had many of the participants in the podcast have described, you know, what is, what, what do those ethics look differently when you're doing work in schools versus community centers versus art projects? And you've you've, you mentioned at the earlier, you know, you, you made reference to sort of the difference between doing participatory action research versus doing ethnographic research about participatory action research. And then you also talked about the difference between, you know, some notion of like pure participatory action research versus participatory inspired action research.
And I, I think that's also something that a lot of, a lot of folks who are interested in participatory action research is often this question of like, okay, what's pure PAR, right? Is, is there such a thing as pure PAR? And when, when, when, and how do we sort of draw on the practices of participatory research in order to shape different kinds of projects? And I, I wonder if maybe you can speak to that a bit by sort of talking to us about what are the ethical commitments that you bring to the work and, and how do these ethical commitments get, get expressed differently depending, you know, based on the different places where you've worked and the different approaches that you've taken. I know that's a big question, but maybe you can give us some examples of what that looks like.
Aurora: So I think first and foremost, [about] the ways that folks participate. So if we're doing something that's, I, I don't wanna say pure, but closer to, to the strand of participatory action research that I practice, which is very much based in South American understandings. Drawing from Orlando Fals Borda and the work that he did in Colombia during the sixties and seventies, it's very much a tool for activism and organizing. So I view PAR in ways that further certain interests of communities that don't look towards the university for that kind of model of change, but look towards what these folks in these spaces are already doing, and how can we, as people in an academic space become resources or leverage our resources in academic spaces, for the benefit of these communities. And to me, the participation component is very important because there needs to be an opportunity and a space for the folks that are not from the academic space to participate on an equal level, but that doesn't mean that we're doing the same kind of work .
And I also think that comes in with that ethical commitment, of who has time, who has the resources and who has the ability many times, because if you're doing this within a course, the students already have time carved out, so they have the ability to take on more of the tasks. But the participation aspect is equalized. It is equitable. When I talk about using elements or drawing from them in spaces where there are certain challenges and barriers to equal participation, particularly around how the work is, how the end product is produced. If you don't have participation in every step of the process, from the folks that are outside of the academic space, then I would not call that participatory action research. I could call it action research or having elements of PAR in it, but I would not call it that. And also to me, it also shows up in the publishing, right? So I'm very interested in whatever we produced, whatever knowledge was co-produced be published in a collaborative way.
Aurora: Which is what we've done recently with a piece that we are working on for Curriculum Inquiry. So it is very important that folks do participate in every step of that process. And to me, that is really what I consider being more of aligned with the values of participatory action research that I at least practice in my own [work].
Rubén: Yeah. Yeah. And this, this question of dissemination is, is one definitely that, that we, that we often like to think about and that I think is quite complicated. And, and of course, I'm, you know, familiar with the piece that you have coming out very soon, hopefully, in Curriculum Inquiry which, which I was at a special project, and I'm, I'm interested in how you approach these questions about dissemination. So in addition to writing articles like the one coming out in Curriculum Inquiry, I know that you've done, and you've, you've mentioned already these digital strategies you've been using you know, the mapping, the, the, the virtual map and the, the digital project that you have going on in Kentucky. And I'm wondering how, how you approach these different strategies differently. So why does, how, what kinds of conversations unfold? How do you approach integrating the participants into the decision making and how does that vary, for example, like, what's the difference between the decision making project for something like an academic article versus a decision making project for something like a website or, or, or like a digital yeah, like a digital tool. Cause I know you've, you've developed a couple of those.
Aurora: So, yeah, it really does vary from project to project. For example, I didn't mention the mapping project and thank you for reminding me. So one of the first things that we did when we started out our study of the community of the urban hub was a process of familiarization. So the students and I started to get to know the community we were working with. And one of the first things that the students did was walk the urban hub by foot and take a map and did a structural census of all of the buildings. So that way we knew how many of them were residences, businesses, offices, government agencies, et cetera, and that to them, to the students, they found very useful because they were getting to know the space where they were at. So they weren't coming in like very alien or foreign to the space that they were working with.
And so that project, they ended up writing a report on it. And that is available online with the map that they used and the report, showing visually with graphs the distribution and the layout, and that is open to any person that, you know, wants to see it. And it's on the website. And so that was done by the students. And when we were, when COVID happened and we were talking, we wanted to open up a physical community center. It was actually what the, the suggestion of it being a website was done by one of the community co-researchers. The students took on the weight of creating the website and with myself and, and putting the content in. But those decisions were always done through consensus based processes, where we went around and we talked and we discussed, like, what can we do now?
I served as sort of a facilitator in those conversations, but not as a decision maker, as someone that had the ultimate say. it was, how do we find a way for what y'all want us to do to make it happen? So the students already knew how to make a website. So they did that. And with the oral history project that was the only project that was sort of pre known that was going be done at the beginning of the semester. Because we were working with another partner originally and they asked us to do something similar. But when that [partnership] fell through, we continued with the project, but the research questions were designed by the participants, by the interviewees and the students. We had folks come in and talk about oral histories, they read about oral histories.
So they prepared for it that way. And the map that was used in that project was the same map that the students used. And we worked with a curator that helped us do that and, and set it up as a website. So that one, you know, was directly done with the interviewees and there was collaboration within that. And yeah, so those were sort of the different strategies also done with the Lexington project. The website was designed by having done focus groups beforehand with civil society folks, but also with these community dialogues in mind, talking to folks about how they get their information, what they need, or what are the gaps of information, do they know these services exist or not? So it was kind of a scaffolded approach on having different people come in at different points of the project. So it really does vary depending on what's being done.
Rubén: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think you know, I remember when we were working with the youth couple years ago on, on our final project at the beginning of the pandemic on how you know, how, how the youth in our project were experiencing COVID, you know, we ended up putting two, two products out. One was a digital story. One was an article. And even though they were based on the same data and they were sort of in a sense telling the same story, how, how we all participated differently in terms of what that actually looked like. Right. So the adults played a more kind of heavier hand on the written one, whereas the youth played a heavier hand on the digital one, and that seemed to sort of allow for the products in the end to be different because they were being shaped by different hands.
And you you've talked a little bit about the differences in terms of the, the, the, the availability. So, so the fact that the students had time to be able to do certain things that perhaps community members couldn't do that. I'm wondering about other kinds of power related differences. So, for example, in what ways in these two projects that you've been working, how do power issues related to gender and, or, or race, or even, you know, I know even within the Latinx community, you know, race is always kind of latent there, even though oftentimes people like to ignore it, but I'm wondering, in addition to the sort of material and, and sort of class context, you know, how, how have some of these challenges, how have you addressed them how have they manifested themselves? And in what ways have they sort of shaped the, the outcome of the work?
Aurora: I think that in regards to let's say, social identity differences, that's one set of issues that arose, and that also are in conjunction with personal circumstances, right? So, for example, when we were working, as I mentioned earlier, when we were working on the website, the students took on more of the weight of the work, but during the first semester, when we were going through the process of getting to know the folks that we were working with, the nonacademic folks, they took a lot more weight of having to tell us, explain to us the story, the context what's happening in the community. And because, you know, some of these folks, and I also wanna say that the students were also in very similar precarious situations where some were contributing financially to their homes, had three jobs and had a lot of obstacles after, after the pandemic started, where some of them connected via phone, on Zoom.
So it's not so cut and dry. I felt like if anything, I was the one [sic] there were a lot of power differentials because I was the professor and there was a power there inherent that I had to constantly name and, and, you know, talk about. And also the fact that I came from a US-based institution where there are more resources in a lot of ways, compared to Puerto Rico's university. So you know, we openly talked about those experiences as well and how they differed. What they mentioned throughout the process was that none of them felt like their contributions were diminished. They were equally as important. The knowledge that came from outside of the university space was just as equal, just, you know, as, as any sort of academic work. So that was also very important to always sort of name and have very present.
In, in the context of the other study with the folks, the community dialogues that we held with the folks in Kentucky, it got a little complicated because, you know, and when you add the dimension of citizenship as well, when you're talking about how do you get health insurance, for example, a lot of the folks were talking about, well, how do you even get an identification number to begin with, and this is something that had never crossed my mind as a colonial subject, but as a US citizen. So you have to redirect your thinking because you're like, okay, so I cannot ask these questions in the same way. So those power, you know, thinking about those differentials and how they also affect us differently. Yes. Also mentioning there were issues of race that were mentioned. There were issues where we had to deal with in very careful ways to not alienate the participants in being honest and vulnerable in what they're talking, but at the same time, listening to some very problematic conversations around race relations. So just trying to build a space, a container where folks feel comfortable, but also creating community guidelines was very important. And also even things like having dinner, eating together, having non formal work space and time to kind of, you know, build that, that relationship outside of, of the research.
Rubén: Yeah, yeah. That element, I think and, and this is a good, a good way to get back to the conversation about COVID. Because we, we found that that element of the work that is the informal interactions that happen, say around a dinner table sharing food, in this spaces before and after, right. The interactions were were so important. And, and we've heard from folks who have contributed to the podcast so much how important those interactions are. And in the context of COVID, those spaces largely disappeared, right? There was no longer when we, when things were happening on Zoom, we were no longer sharing food. There's the, the Zoom space really curtails the, or at least we, we found really curtailed the sort of interaction that happens in the, in between spaces, right? The before and after the kind of socializing the saying, hello, the hugs, the, the how’s your family, right? The, the cause is Zoom, right. That, that, because Zoom for, for whatever reason really sort of doesn't allow for that sort of informal space. And so I'm wondering what your experience was shifting to COVID, how COVID sort of impacted and, and what were the decisions, what were some of the key decisions that you had to make when COVID hit and suddenly you found yourself having to do this work differently and using virtual tools. That's just, it's something that we're interested in, in talking and thinking about. You mentioned it a few times.
Aurora: Yeah. The spring or the second semester of the 2019-20 academic year got off to a very rough start in Puerto Rico. In January, we had a series of earthquakes that were very intense and, you know, I'm talking about 6.4 [on the Richter scale]. So already there was like a level of anxiety among everyone that was palpable, you know, because it's pretty horrific to go through that being there and once COVID began, no one really had any idea. We thought it was gonna be two weeks of online [classes] and then we would go back. But I think that the thing that really allowed us to continue, and that's something that everyone talked about constantly was the fact that we already had built an in-person relationship since September. So we had been working together for six months.
We had new students come in, in January, but they had, you know, two months where we would meet once a week for three hours. So we had a lot of time together. And then we started having weekend meetings. Additionally. So we spent a significant amount of time together, and we mostly met at one of the co-researcher’s house. So she would make us food, for Christmas, she would make us like this incredible meal of like five or six things like, you know, rice and pigeon peas and pork on a spit. So it was amazing. So that interaction allowed us that when this transition came, it was a lot less felt. And we still felt the closeness of that moment so much. So that class ended in May. And once we knew that we could wear masks and be outside in July, we started doing our pop up pantries. So we came back together. I think the semester probably ended a little later, like in June, but in July we started doing this again. We did it in August. And once I left for the US, everyone kept doing it in September and October until we had the permanent pantry set up. So we had that time before, which helped us continue the work when the pandemic came.
Rubén: Right, right. Another one of the, of the themes you and I have been talking about for a long time and that I know is a, it's a big interest for you and that it's also the focus of your article in Curriculum Inquiry is this concept of solidarity, which, you know, nowadays over the last two years, particularly over the pandemic has become this sort of word that everybody uses for all kinds of. I mean, it's always been that, but I think the pandemic has sort of exacerbated. And I'm wondering for you having done this work and I, I know that solidarity is also sort of an important concept in terms of your orientation to this work. What have you learned? So, what have been in, in the few years, in the years that you've been doing participatory research around this to explore this concept, I'm, I'm curious, what have you learned about solidarity and, and, and I particularly curious, do you think solidarity is still a salient and, and, and useful idea for thinking about not just in general for thinking about social relations, but specifically to, for thinking about participatory research?
Aurora: Well, to start with the end. Yes. I still very much think that solidarity is, is probably for me the main ingredient that is necessary in participatory action research, especially because you're working with folks that can come from very different places, spaces, backgrounds, context, et cetera. So I think it's necessary when you're working across difference in a way that's very kind of grounded in understanding that conflict can happen, that, you know, it's not gonna be easy. It will probably be very hard. But I do think that the approach in what I've learned in my time sort of grappling with the concept, but also trying to like concretely learn about how to do it, how to apply it and how it's developed, I think that a lot of the times when we're doing certain kinds of work, we become sort of task-oriented and we forget about the relationship building.
And I think it happens in political organizing context and community organ- in grassroots , we're so caught up in trying to do the things that we forget how to be together. And I think that that's why for me, it will continue being a salient concept as long as we also live in the world that we live in, where individualism is kind of the modus operandi of, you know, the context that we live in. I think that solidarity will always be an important counter to the ways that people, you know, a lot of people relate to today and sort of those transactional neoliberal ways. So I do think it is very important. I think that it's also very much needed in my context of Puerto Rico, as a way to, to enact a decolonial practice, like how do we become, how do we act differently towards one another?
And what are the possibilities of that in resisting colonial domination and structures? So to me, it's a very concrete thing. And to me it's still very much important. Even though at sometimes it's temporary or there's a temporality to solidarity, but every time in Puerto Rico, particularly when we see that there's a government disaster, you know, in conjunction with a natural disaster folks do tend to step up for their neighbors, for people they don't know for their family, for their friends. So I, I still think it's very much a practice that is needed and that, and that we do see it in, in, in different places.
Rubén: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, this context of emergency for me, what they, what they bring into relief is the contrast between solidarity that is, that is premised on, on a hierarchical order, right. Where those with privilege attempt to be in solidarity with those without, and then solidarity as a kind of practice of reciprocity that is expressed through things like mutual aid. You know, I think that one of the things that I found really interesting through the pandemic is just noticing the contrast between those two, right. And the way that the, the different top sort of dynamics that, that expressed through that. So thank you for that. And so as you look ahead to your new, new position, congratulations again, on your new position. I'm wondering if you, what, if you have sort of future projects in mind what's the future of the Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey , if that, if that is continuing and if you're gonna be in, you know, what, what do you see it as that, and whether you have some new projects brewing that you'd like to share or that you're sort of thinking about.
Aurora: Yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you for your congratulations. In terms of the Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey, once, as I mentioned, the class was over, [and after] we started two main initiatives for the project. When I say we, I include myself because we actually still meet twice a month virtually. And when I'm in Puerto Rico, we end up meeting in person or they meet in person and I meet virtually. So that's very much still going on. And as you said about mutual aid projects and thinking about solidarity, the projects that we are working on are mutual aid projects. So, as I said, first is a community pantry. So we ended up occupying an abandoned building, putting up two pieces of furniture where folks can drop off things such as non-perishable food and clothing and other folks can pick up. So it's sort of a take what you need and leave what you can.
And that very much drives our work too. It's like, we can give what we can, right. We work on our strengths and that's how we contribute. So that's still very much active and we have new members. We have members that have left. We have members that have joined. We are working with farmers who are helping us with a garden that we started to, we have an urban garden, which is really cool. So we're trying to see different ways of, you know, providing vegetables and food and, and herbs for, for the folks in the space. And in terms of my own projects, I am working on a book manuscript that sort of looks at different projects that are anchored in mutual aid and solidarity in Puerto Rico. And I'm looking at a street library project, feminist pantries that also emerged in Puerto Rico after COVID 19, the work of the Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey , and also the work of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, which is a black feminist organization that has been raising awareness of systemic racism, Anti-Black racism, colonial violence in Puerto Rico. So I'm looking at these sorts of projects as interrelated because they are in a lot of ways, they stem from the afterlives of the student movement, but also as forms of self-determination in Puerto Rico.
Rubén: Mm-Hmm. And yeah. That's okay. I hear you. I hear your dog back there. That's okay. Don. No, don't, that's just life. Don't worry about it. But I'm also wondering, so maybe this, this can start, we can start sort of being in a different position.
So one of the things that I often struggle with as a faculty member working with doctoral students is how to help doctoral students who want, who come in into the program wanting to do participatory action research, but oftentimes not having relationships with communities. And, and I, I always appreciate the spirit and the ethic that the students bring, but I I'm often hesitant because of the practical aspects of implementing that spirit. And, and I wonder as, as a, as someone who did participatory action research, or, or at least did work about participatory action research through your dissertation, what sort of advice would you give future practitioners and specifically, I'm thinking about future doctoral students or graduate students who might be interested in, in doing participatory action research.
Aurora: So I think what I was really wanting to look at in my own work was the process itself, the collaborative process, what happens because a lot of the time we look at sort of what, what is the end product of participatory action research. So in thinking about what are ways that you can come at it that are not necessarily, you know, crossing an ethical boundary of, you know, authorship, right? Because the work produced is collective, as I mentioned earlier. So looking at processes, what works, what doesn't work, how, what does that look like? I think there should be more work and theorizing that, or even thinking about that in practical ways, like practical ways to apply that, not necessarily this is my dissertation and its participatory action research. Also, you know, I think being really honest, like not everything, it can be fully participatory, right.
And if we think about it that way, and we kinda let that go, in ways that maybe we can look towards action research or elements of participatory action research in the work, I think there's a lot less pressure because I think we come in it with like, we wanna do it purely, and we wanna do it like 100%. And there's so many challenges, with time and you know, I feel bad a lot of times asking for folks that are not in the academic space to, to, to even be able to come to a lot of these meetings. So also if you end up doing that, I would say to a student, these things are gonna happen outside of work hours outside, you know, they're gonna take weekends, they're gonna take nights. They're going to take you rearranging yourself to other folks' schedules because that's what it is. And, you know, that's sort of what comes with that territory. So I don't know, I would say like, keep doing work about PAR, ethnographies of PAR, qualitative research of PAR or action research, because I think the ethical piece is so important in that. And I think that should never be sort of dropped to the side when, when doing this kind of work.
Rubén: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I'm, I'm always struggling too with like, what are the non-negotiables right? Like whether you're doing participatory action research or PAR inspired research or research about par, like, what are the non-negotiables, what are the sort of like, okay, this is non-negotiable, if this is not there, then, then you can't even use the term. Like what, what would you say? Like what's, non-negotiable for you as a practitioner?
Aurora: Ooh, I, I don't know if folks are gonna agree with it, but to me having a project that is thought up of with the folks that are outside the academic space, not bringing in a prepackaged project or even being able to develop, even if that's the case, like some aspect that is sort of outside of that, that is fully done with folks outside the academic space from its inception to its end. To me, that would be a non-negotiable in doing that work. So the oral histories, I wouldn't necessarily call it full on PAR. Cause we already had that in mind. I think that authorship is important so whatever the way that this is disseminated and we, we talked a little about ways. Yeah. Reports, articles, websites, exhibits, like any sort of way, needs to be credited to the folks that are not in the academic side. Yeah. That needs to happen. I think that I cannot take someone else's work and say it's mine because it is not. Yeah. so I think that's also a way to do that.
Rubén: Yeah. And I appreciate that piece. I think it's important also to remember that publishing articles is not the only way to disseminate knowledge. Right. And, and I think that sometimes the conversation gets stuck on this issue of authorship of academic articles, as if that were the sort of preeminent way to share knowledge, right. Like there, and especially now with you've, you've given us so many really beautiful examples from your own work, in terms of other ways of disseminating knowledge that allow for the participants to be credited and to be, to give them the in a sense that kind of the, the authorial relationship to the knowledge. So anyways those are all the questions I have. I don't know if there's anything that we, that you'd like to share with our audiences of the YPAR podcast, anything we haven't talked about or.
Aurora: Well, we're on Facebook at Instagram, Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey . So for folks that wanna find out about the sort of work that we do and have that visual of the work, everyone's more than welcome to visit if they can. And yeah, I appreciate the time and having me here.
Rubén: Yeah, no, it's been great. Going to share this with my Puerto Rican sister and I look forward to hopefully at some point having a project where we can collaborate whether it's in Puerto Rico or wherever it is that that define us. So thank you so much.
So thanks again for taking the time to chat more very exciting work and and yeah, and good luck with your new position and your move. You're moving to the Midwest, from the
Aurora: Yes. A big change. Thank you so much.
Rubén: Thank you so much for joining us in today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Aurora Santiago-Ortiz. I found it fascinating, the conversation about how COVID has affected oru work as practitioners, which is something we have been looking at here at the Youth Research Lab and that we hope to continue exploring as the work shifts under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also found it really interesting to have conversations about the continuing relevance of solidarity, as well as thinking about different ways of disseminating knowledg.e I hope you enjoyed this episode, stay tuned for the next episode, and we’ll see you next time.
REFERENCES:
Aurora’s website - https://www.aurorasantiago-ortiz.com/
Aurora’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/santiaaurora?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Aurora’s dissertation - Collaboration, Collective Agency, and Solidarity Through Participatory Action Research in Puerto Rico - https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2218/
Research in Progress: “La solidaridad no perece”: Community organizing, political agency, and mutual aid in Puerto Rico. Peer-reviewed journal article for Curriculum Inquiry.
Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ccucayey/
Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey webite
fbclid=IwAR0D4rxArwyF3iGkNbea9ScHZDpANRBeTxZJdZ3vLfC4Lu0Zqr9f0shj13U
Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/ccucayey2020/?hl=en
La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción https://www.facebook.com/Colectiva.Feminista.PR/