Ethel Tungohan and I wrote an article on PAR and building migrant worker power and it is out now in the link below and downloads are free until the end of April! Our article “Mula Sa Masa, Tungo Sa Masa, From the People, To the People: Building Migrant Worker Power through Participatory Action Research” would be great to assign to an Intro to Methods class or a grad seminar on Participatory Action Research!

https://journals.tplondon.com/index.php/ml/issue/view/81

With my Filipina-Canadian collaborator, kasama-mama, sister in the struggle, Ethel Tungohan at York University, we wrote across borders, across the Filipina diaspora, to reflect on how PAR has operated in our organizing work with migrant workers in Alberta and San Francisco/Bay Area. As Ethel gestated and took home her second newborn, we wrote and edited and Zoom’ed and talked about how important this work is and how crucial that we were getting to reflect on it!

PAR is an acronym for Participatory Action Research–many scholars have explained it in great detail and in far more eloquent terms, but for me, PAR is a method of conducting social investigation that prioritizes the participation and action for change that matters for people normally “studied” as objects in sociological research.

PAR has been one of the research methodologies that I’ve been able to wield so I can craft projects that align with people’s organizations for social justice, towards the general rights and welfare of Filipino migrants and that contributes to the types of movement-building strategies that is needed in this world right now.