Democratic encounters? Epistemic privilege, power, and community-based participatory action research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The literature suggests that community-based participatory research holds the potential to democratize and decolonize knowledge production by engaging communities and citizens in the research enterprise. Yet this approach, and its associated claims, remain under theorized, particularly as to how power circulates between and among academic and community knowledge work/ers. This paper puts forth a postcolonial analysis of participatory techniques that sustain academe’s epistemic privilege through producing, subordinating and assimilating difference; claiming authenticity and voice; and dislocating collaborative knowledge work from the historical, political, social and embodied conditions in which it unfolds. Postcolonial readings of community-based participatory action research offer a powerful theoretical framework for interrogating the divide between the discursive claims and material practices that undermine this democratic project. Drawing on critical reflections on two community-based participatory action research projects, this paper offers modest proposals toward (re)placing community-based knowledge work/ers in space, time and bodies. Although this paper presents a critique of community-based participatory action research, it is not in pursuit of revealing “bad” participatory praxis or recuperating a better practice, but rather seeks to open up dialogue on the circulation of power in the campus/community encounter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it