Beyond Doing No Harm: A Call for Participatory Action Research with Marginalized Populations in Criminological Research

Abstract

While most social scientists agree that the outcome of research should be useful in the real world, the idea that research can, and should, be empowering and directly useful to research participants has largely been limited to the margins of a few social science disciplines. While community psychologists and critical sociologists have long embraced participatory research and co-operative inquiry approaches-where the empowerment of research participants is as important as the contribution to knowledge and policy development-criminologists have been slow to adopt more emancipatory research models except for a few notable exceptions. This essay calls for the use of participatory action research by criminologists and for us to have a dialogue about the social value of our research and our obligations to research participants beyond ''simply doing no harm.''To what uses are experiences of suffering put? (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996) I am struggling to finish a paper that I have been working on for some time. It details the life histories of 25 low-income African-American battered women taken from a larger sample of 43 ethnically diverse battered women. I am conflicted about it because I am afraid of further marginalizing or reinforcing negative stereotypes about poor black women. 1 No matter how much I try to humanize the women by focusing on their strengths, detailing their acts of resistance and emphasizing their hopes for the future, as well as placing their stories in a wider structural context, what stands out most about these women's narratives is how downtrodden they are. I have begun to question the utility of exposing sensationalistic stories of abuse, oppression and criminalization of poor black

Embracing Emotionality: Clothing My “Naked Truths”

“…By placing humanity at the forefront of criminal justice research, academics are moving past the traditional divide between rationality/feeling and objectivity/subjectivity (Dupoint 2008). Rather than categorize and simplify, the humanistic approach contributes to understanding the complexity of crime.…”

“…In recent years, some criminologists have been arguing for a more humanistic approach to criminology (Crank and King 2007;Dupoint 2008;Wozniak 2008). Such an approach may be understood in contrast to the continued dominance of the traditional scientific approach F. Yuen (&) Department of Applied Human Sciences, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke St. West VE 331.04, Montreal, QC H4B 1R6, Canada e-mail: fyuen@alcor.concordia.ca in criminology, which has led to an absence of the ''human face of crime, including the daily unremitting suffering that conditions such as poverty imposes'' (Wozniak,p.…”

“…In response to the limitations of mainstream criminology, alternative methodologies, such as peacemaking criminology (Wozniak 2008) and participatory action research (Dupoint 2008) are (re)-surfacing. These methodologies focus on human suffering and the inequalities of marginalized populations.…”

“…Denzin and Lincoln's (2000) analysis of the evolution of qualitative research provides an understanding of were we have been (i.e., crisis of representation) and offers insight as to where we might go in criminology (i.e., orientation of praxis). While criminologists have been slow to adopt more emancipatory methodologies (Dupoint 2008), there is movement. Indeed, as Denzin (2000) contends, there is a new generation of researchers who are committed to not just describing the world, but changing it.…”

Citizenship, Belonging and Attachment in the ‘War on Terror’

“…In depth interviews allowed participants to reveal their narratives in their own words and thus share their meaning and understanding of their identities (Dupont 2008;Hollway and Jefferson 2000). The interviews tool place at the University, local community centres and in some cases participants' homes 1 .…”