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The global call to ‘leave-no-one behind’ cannot be achieved without tacking the intractable social issues faced by the most excluded people. There is increasing interest in using visual methodologies for participatory research in contexts of marginalisation, because they offer the potential to generate knowledge from people’s lived experience, which can reveal subjective, emotional, and contextual aspects missed by other methods; alongside the means for action through showing outputs to external audiences. The challenge is that the perspectives of those in highly inequitable and unaccountable contexts are – by definition – rarely articulated and often neglected. The author thus begins by assuming that there are unavoidable tensions in using visual methods; between perpetuating marginalisation by inaction, which is ethically questionable; and the necessary risks in bringing unheard views to public attention. Many experienced practitioners have called for a situated approach to visual methods ethics (Clark, Prosser, & Wiles, 2010; Gubrium, Hill, & Flicker 2014; Shaw, 2016). What is less clear is what this means for those wanting to apply this practically. In this chapter, the author addresses this gap through the exemplar of participatory video with marginalised groups. Drawing on cases from Kenya, India, Egypt, and South Africa, the author contributes a range of tried-and-tested strategies for navigating the biggest concerns such as informing consent; and the tensions between respecting autonomy and building inclusion, and between anonymity and supporting participant’s expressive agency. Through this, the author provides a resource for researchers, including prompts for critical reflection about how to generate solutions to visual ethical dilemmas in context.

One common feature of different variants of participatory and action research is rejection of technocratic, undemocratic elements in science and inquiry, aiming to break the dominance of traditional academic views of science. These variants open up broader participation of people, and emancipate knowledge creation for the production of actionable knowledge with transformative potentials. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and clarify a striving for knowledge democracy in these explicit or implicit democratizing ambitions and tendencies in the sense of broadening the participation of concerned parties in research and development work on open and equal terms. This recent concept, still in the process of formulation, has been proposed as a global mobilizing and unifying thinking for distributed networks and movements for participatory oriented research. The concept and movement had an initial embedding in the First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in June 2017, Cartagena, Columbia. The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate on the meaning of knowledge democracy as a vision for the participatory and action research community. Particularly I will distinguish between different orientation to knowledge democracy, and the character of the logic of a more, open, democratic and coproductive science that can be a carrier of it.

Photography is used in research because of its appeal for communicating, expressing feelings, sharing experiences, raising new awareness of participants and potential audiences, clarifying social issues, and framing plans for action. Taking and sharing photos has become easier particularly because of ready access to devices with cameras. Yet, using photographs in research can undermine anonymity and confidentiality (Noland, 2006), and unanticipated unauthorised dissemination of digital images raises ethical concerns for researchers using photography in their research methods (Brigham, Baillie Abidi, & Calatayud, 2018). In this chapter, the authors discuss the participatory photography method and provide practical suggestions for carrying out ethical research using participatory photography. The authors highlight the cultural, social, and contextual situatedness of ethics by drawing on our own research project with youth with refugee experience.

In this chapter, we explore the use of participatory and community-based research (CBR) strategies within institutional ethnography. Reflecting on our current, past, and future projects, we discuss the utility of community-based and participatory methods for grounding one’s research in the actualities of participants’ lives. At the same time, we note ontological and practical differences between most community-based participatory action research (PAR) methodologies and institutional ethnography. While participants’ lives and experiences ground both approaches, people’s perspectives are not considered as research findings for institutional ethnographers. In an institutional ethnography, the objects of analysis are the institutional relations, which background and give shape to people’s actualities. The idea is to discover something through the research process that is useful to participants. As such, the use of community-based and participatory methods during analysis suggests the greatest utility of this sociological approach for people.

We argue that by conducting systematic research with communities rather than on communities, community-based research (CBR) methods can both advance the study of human interaction and strengthen public understanding and appreciation of social sciences. CBR, among other methods, can also address social scientists’ ethical and social commitments. We recap the history of calls by leading sociologists for rigorous, empirical, community-engaged research. We introduce CBR methods as empirically grounded methods for conducting social research with social actors. We define terms and describe the range of methods that we include in the umbrella term, “community-based research.” After providing exemplars of community-based research, we review CBR’s advantages and challenges. We, next, summarize an intervention that we undertook as members of the Publication Committee of the URBAN Research Network’s Sociology section in which the committee developed and disseminated guidelines for peer review of community-based research. We also share initial responses from journal editors. In the conclusion, we revisit the potential of community-based research and note the consequences of neglecting community-based research traditions.

This chapter examines the role of actors operating within the context of participatory democratic institutions. The literature on radical democracy suggests that reforming democratic institutions to promote secondary associations, participation, and deliberative decision-making can radically transform states. Through an analysis of alternative local government (ALG) practices in Saquisilí, Ecuador, the chapter demonstrates that a variety of actors, with diverse motivations, constitute and operate within participatory institutions. Despite the radical discursive structure of the institutions, however, actors are able to creatively use those institutional spaces for other goals. The implication for radical democratic theory is that not all outcomes that have been read as unintended consequences are unintended.

This chapter brings to the forefront various challenges of engaging in both critical and participatory forms of knowledge building, in particular with queer and trans migrants with precarious status. Two scholars trace their previous experiences of engaging in participatory and critical research as well as their shift toward reflexive ways of knowing. This shift elicits the ways in which Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) may be used to build reflexive knowledge with and about queer and trans migrant communities, and in particular, LGBTQ refugees and MSM Latino migrants.

In Western liberal democracies over the last decade or so, community development, housing policy and neighbourhood renewal have been increasingly underscored by a philosophy of participatory decision-making (see Imre & Raco, 2003; Lo Piccolo & Thomas, 2003; Maginn, 2004). At one level, it appears that central and local governments have experienced a policy and democratic epiphany. This is reflected in a ‘new’ acknowledgment that ‘when citizens themselves are the key to the quality of neighbourhoods, a new avenue of policy intervention is opened up’ (Lelieveldt, 2004, p. 534; see also Crenson, 1983). In this context, participatory models of decision-making are seen as having the potential to ‘empower’ local residents who were previously the subject of ‘top-down’ or command and control forms of planning (Healey, 1999; Meredyth, Ewing, & Thomas, 2004; Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996; Rose, 1996; Dean, 2002). On another level, however, there is caution, suspicion even, about this paradigm shift. A perception exists that governments are essentially displacing, redistributing and/or retreating from their historical welfare responsibilities (Chaskin, 2003, 2001; Fraser, Lepofsky, Lick, & Williams, 2003; Pierre, 1999).