Community Research | Freire Institute

Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education has had a profound impact on people throughout the world working for social change. His work has been applied not only to formal educational settings but to many diverse social movements.

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Price: GBP 250.00

Community Research

Understanding your social environment

Participatory research for   collective empowerment

Community research is often presented as a process of gathering information about people: designing surveys, conducting interviews, collecting data, identifying needs, and reporting findings. These methods can produce valuable knowledge, but they can also reproduce unequal relationships in which researchers, institutions, or professionals determine the questions, control the interpretation, and retain ownership of the knowledge produced. Rooted in Paulo Freire’s philosophy and pedagogy, this participatory workshop invites participants to approach community research differently. Rather than treating people as objects of investigation or sources of data, participants explore ways of...

What would research become if communities were not simply sources of data, but participants in asking the questions, producing knowledge, interpreting what it means, and deciding what should happen next?

Participants will explore approaches including participatory action research (PAR), ethnographic methods, narrative inquiry, peer and community research, participatory mapping, and creative forms of inquiry. Particular attention will be given to the relationships between experience, dialogue, knowledge, power, interpretation, and action . The workshop also examines the ethical and political dimensions of community research. Questions of consent, representation, ownership, confidentiality, reciprocity, cultural context, researcher positionality, and unequal institutional power are treated not as procedural matters to be resolved at the beginning of a project, but as issues requiring...

What you learn

Analyse conventional and participatory approaches to community research in terms of knowledge, power, participation and purpose, including how research questions, categories and institutional priorities shape what can be known.
Compare and apply participatory and community-based research approaches, selecting methods appropriate to the purpose, context, participants and forms of knowledge involved.
Analyse and critically examine processes of interpretation, ethics and representation in community research, including questions of consent, positionality, ownership, co-interpretation and whose account is authorized.
Develop and justify a contextually grounded participatory research design that involves communities meaningfully in inquiry and interpretation and connects knowledge production with reflection, action and community benefit.

Availability

For organizations: This workshop is available in virtual, in-person, or hybrid formats to meet diverse organizational needs and preferences. We can tailor the focus to your specific institutional context.
For individuals: We will run occasional virtual workshops, and you are encouraged to join the notification list to be informed of upcoming dates.

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Duration

You will continue to be registered in the course area for 3 months following the workshop.

Course Certificate

You will receive a certificate upon successful completion of the course.

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