In this book Carmen Martinez-Vargas explores how academic participatory research and the way it is carried out can contribute to more, or less, social justice. Adopting theoretical and empirical approaches, and addressing multiple complex, intersectional issues, this book offers inspiration for scholars and practitioners to open up alternative pathways to social justice, viewed through a Global South lens. Martinez-Vargas examines the colonial roots of research and emphasises the importance of problematising current practices and limitations in order to establish more just and democratic participatory research practices. Although practitioners have been challenging the Western roots of research and participatory research for decades, their goals can be compromised by pluralities and contradictions in the field. This book aims not to replicate past participatory research approaches, but to offer an innovative theoretical foundation—the Capabilities Approach—and an innovative participatory practice called ‘Democratic Capabilities Research’. Democratising Participatory Research is not only timely and relevant in South Africa, but also in the Global North owing to the current crisis of values jeopardising the peaceful existence of diverse societies. The book gives essential recommendations for capabilities and human development scholars to reframe their perspectives and uses of the Capabilities Approach, as well as for participatory practitioners to critically reflect on their practices and their often limited conceptualisation of participation.

In this book Carmen Martinez-Vargas explores how academic participatory research and the way it is carried out can contribute to more, or less, social justice. Adopting theoretical and empirical approaches, and addressing multiple complex, intersectional issues, this book offers inspiration for scholars and practitioners to open up alternative pathways to social justice, viewed through a Global South lens. Martinez-Vargas examines the colonial roots of research and emphasises the importance of problematising current practices and limitations in order to establish more just and democratic participatory research practices. Although practitioners have been challenging the Western roots of research and participatory research for decades, their goals can be compromised by pluralities and contradictions in the field. This book aims not to replicate past participatory research approaches, but to offer an innovative theoretical foundation--the Capabilities Approach--and an innovative participatory practice called 'Democratic Capabilities Research'. Democratising Participatory Research is not only timely and relevant in South Africa, but also in the Global North owing to the current crisis of values jeopardising the peaceful existence of diverse societies. The book gives essential recommendations for capabilities and human development scholars to reframe their perspectives and uses of the Capabilities Approach, as well as for participatory practitioners to critically reflect on their practices and their often limited conceptualisation of participation.

This collection of reflective essays is a treasure trove of advice, reflection and hard-won experience from experts in the field of open and distance education. Each chapter offers tried-and-tested advice for nascent academic writers, delivered with personal, rich, and wonderful stories of the authors’ careers, their process, their research and their writing, and the struggles and triumphs they have encountered in the course of their careers. The contributors explore the philosophies that guide their work, the conflicts and barriers they have overcome and the mentors and opportunities that sustain and stimulate them, always focused on making their experiences relevant and useful for scholars who are in the early stages of their writing lives. These rich and informative essays will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about the crafts of research and writing, and the unseen struggles involved in publishing and “being heard.”

This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.

This book provides a rich synthesis of empirical research and theoretical engagements with questions of disability across different practices of colonialism as historically defined – post/de/anti/settler colonialism. It synthesises, critiques, and expands the boundaries of existing disability research which has been undertaken within different colonial contexts through the rich examination of recent empirical work mapping across disability and its intersectional colonialities. Filling an existing gap within the international literature through embedding the importance of grounding these within scholarly debates of colonialism, it empirically demonstrates the significance of disability for the broader scholarly fields of postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional theories. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, critical studies, sociology of race and ethic relations, intersectionality, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and human geography.

All education and educational scholarship occurs on Indigenous Lands. Despite this reality, U.S. social studies education and scholarship has reinforced settler colonialism through curricula, teacher education, professional development, policy research, and more. To confront settler colonial social studies and transform the field, educators and scholars must engage relational approaches, prioritize community and student expertise, and commit to action that recognizes Indigenous Ways of Knowing. This book brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, practitioners, and community partners from across the U.S. to share experiences of, stories about, and hopes for anti-colonial social studies. By sharing these examples, the book also provides methodological guidance for researchers, teacher educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers looking to learn about scholarly processes and partnerships with Indigenous communities. In addition to individual chapters, contributors engaged in conversations and collaboration between chapters and about the book as a whole. Chapter co-authors and thought partners dialogued about the following questions: • What is relational research, and how can it help confront settler colonial content, processes, and praxis within social studies education? • How has social studies education and research (mis)represented and (mis)applied Indigenous Ways of Knowing? • How can a re-envisioning of social studies educational research be more intentionally participatory and relational to improve social studies teaching and learning, especially for and with Indigenous communities and youth? ENDORSEMENT: "Through relational scholarship, the co-editors and contributing scholars bring forward an essential call to action that centers Indigenous identities, histories, relations to land, and sovereignty. Embodied in Indigenous research and anti-colonial research methods, the collective work uniquely privileges Indigenous Peoples at the core of transforming the field of social studies for Indigenous futurities. Threaded throughout this book, are critical questions we should all be asking ourselves as we engage in advocacy, agency, and resurgence with and for Indigenous Peoples." — Jeremy Garcia (Hopi/Tewa), University of Arizona

This edited book draws on an international cohort of authors, all working towards sustainable, decolonizing human development for more just futures in a variety of learning spaces. Integrating sustainable human development with ‘reparative futures’, the chapters present diverse examples of how transformative learning spaces can be created through different participatory methodologies and with different stakeholders. The book will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, practitioners and policymakers in the areas of higher education, development studies and transformative innovation.

This edited collection proposes a common good approach to development theory and practice. Rather than focusing on the outcomes or conditions of development, the contributors concentrate on the quality of development processes, suggesting that a common good dynamic is key in order to trigger development. Resulting from more than three years of research by an international group of over fifty scholars, the volume advocates for a modern understanding of the common good—rather than a theological or metaphysical good—in societies by emphasising the social practice of ‘commoning’ at its core. It suggests that the dynamic equilibrium of common goods in a society should be at the centre of development efforts. For this purpose, it develops a matrix of common good dynamics, accounting for how institutions, social norms and common practices interconnect by identifying five key drivers not only of development, but human development (agency, governance, justice, stability, humanity). Based on this matrix, the contributors suggest a possible metric for measuring the quality of these dynamics. The last section of the book highlights the possibilities enabled by this approach through a series of case studies. The concept of the common good has recently enjoyed a revival and inspired practitioners keen to look beyond the shortcomings of political and economic liberalism. This book builds on those efforts to think beyond the agenda of twentieth-century development policies, and will be of interest to those working in the fields of development, economics, sociology, philosophy and political science.