Research, Political Engagement, and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant, and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia

As a social scientist with long-running political commitments, the questionof howmywork contributes to projects of social justice and liberation is important to me. Concerns about the contribution of one’s research to liberatory political projects are especially central for researchers who deal directly with people engaged in political struggle in social locations that are distant from centers of power, especially academic institutions in the globalNorth. For anyonewhowants to examine theways people seek to build relations of solidarity across social locations with differential access to institutional power, this book provides a diverse array of potential strategies, all richly detailed with personal reflection and practical advice. Research, Political Engagement, and Dispossession delivers what it promises, building beyond the Participatory Action Research (PAR) focus of the editors’ 2009 collection to offer additional methodological modelsdirectly fromresearchersputting thesemodels intopractice incollaborationwith socialmovement activists around theworld. Readers are all but guaranteed to learn something thatwill improve their relationship to the people and movements they engage with in projects of emancipatory knowledge production. This book explains how PAR has at times been limited, coopted, and de-politicized, as described by co-editor Steven Jordan in his chapter in the 2009 collection. Co-editor Dip Kapoor offers Anticolonial Participatory Action Research (APAR) in his own chapter of this latest book, grounding its approach in an explicit critique of colonial relations – in contrast to the approach of non-governmental organization (NGO), government, and traditional researcher-led projects that often use a veneer of participation to manufacture consent for development projects that replicate and deepen longstanding power inequities. Kapoor grounds his method not only in the Freirean philosophy