What is FPAR?

Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) is a conceptual and methodological framework that enables a critical understanding of complex oppressive structures and relationships that undermine social justice.

The term "action research" is usually traced to Kurt Lewin's work in the aftermath of WWII, when he developed social research methodologies for empowering minority groups to take action for change. But the traditions FPAR draws on are older and wider than any single origin point, rooted in the knowledge practices of colonised and oppressed peoples long before they were named as methodology. Participatory Action Research was developed as critical pedagogy by thinkers of the Global South from the 1970s, among them Paulo Freire in Brazil, Orlando Fals-Borda in Colombia, Marja-Liisa Swantz in Tanzania, and Anisur Rahman in Bangladesh. PAR critiques positivist approaches for being elite and exclusive to academic researchers, and aims to enable oppressed people to participate in social investigation and take collective action for social change.

PAR is a powerful tool for challenging entrenched, oppressive structures and power relations, and so has an affinity with the feminist mission of dismantling patriarchal domination. However, feminist scholar Patricia Maguire, in her seminal doctoral work in 1987, critiqued the praxis of PAR for being androcentric (or male-centred) and ignoring the patriarchal structures that limit women's participation in social processes. Over the last four decades feminist researchers and activists have integrated feminism and PAR and developed the methodological paradigm of FPAR.

FPAR integrates key feminist notions into the process through the following key dimensions as articulated by Reid and Frisby (2008):

  1. Centring gender and women's experiences while challenging patriarchy;
  2. Accounting for intersectionality;
  3. Honouring voice and difference through participatory research processes;
  4. Exploring new forms of representation;
  5. Reflexivity; and
  6. Honouring many forms of action.

Why We Chose FPAR

From our experience, FPAR has been an effective methodology for partnering with grassroots, marginalised women's movements to address gender injustices. Through our work in the last decade, we have worked with hundreds of grassroots activists and used FPAR to address climate justice, issues related to labour and migration, women's political participation, and trade justice. In FPAR, community participants are considered 'co-researchers' and take on an active role in generating knowledge and action plans.

FPAR utilises participatory and arts-based methods (such as drawing, storytelling, photovoice, social mapping, power mapping, timelines, journaling, roleplay, theatre, poetry, song, dance and more) to enable inclusion, access, collaboration, and diverse participation. Women and girls use these methods to generate evidence rooted in their lived experiences, and then collectively analyse the data for knowledge production. The cyclical FPAR process of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting encourages co-researchers to continuously reflect on the effectiveness of their activism, and refine their strategies for greatest impact. Social change happens through actions driven by the powerful evidence base generated through the FPAR process. For example, through APWLD's Climate Justice FPAR in 2017-2019, grassroots women formed women's groups, networks and alliances, and undertook a range of actions for climate justice, including participating in decision-making meetings, monitoring, lobbying, campaigning for consciousness-raising, and petitions.

We are also clear-eyed about what FPAR asks of people. It is slow. It makes real demands on communities who are already carrying a great deal, and those demands are not always repaid on the timeline anyone would want. Questions of who owns the data, who is exposed by it, and who carries the risk when findings are made public are genuinely difficult, and they do not have generic answers. FPAR is not the right approach for every question. Part of what we teach is the judgement to know when it is.

We have found FPAR to be the most useful framework we know for doing critical and effective feminist activism.

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