CAN PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH EMPOWER PARTICIPANTS IN ADULT EDUCATION STUDIES?

Participatory action research (PAR), as a research methodology, challenges conventional, positivist, and scientific approaches. Recent adult education studies on PAR have explored how to develop PAR to enhance research practice and further the "democratizing aims of adult education" (Joyappa & Martin, 1996). Historically, as a part of adult education movements, PAR has been developed for social justice and social change (Glassman, Erdem, & Bartholomew, 2013). Yet while conducting PAR in adult education with the commitment of empowering the oppressed, researchers sometimes overlook unequal social and power relations behind PAR, restrictions from institutional power, and tensions between local practice and currents of global neo-liberalization. This reflective paper adopts a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework to review the historical development of PAR in adult education, and analyzes the limitations of PAR in empowering adult participants. I argue that PAR should be understood as a praxis that could be used to mobilize social transformations. Researchers should be aware of separations between the commitment of empowerment and actual practices that reproduce unequal social relations.