Rogers-Brown, Jennifer. (2023). Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South. Contemporary Sociology, 52(3), 257–259. https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231172096u

Please check out my recent book review publication in the May 2023 issue of Contemporary Sociology. I review the book “Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South” by Carmen Martinez-Vargas.

Here’s the opening couple paragraphs from the review:

“Carmen Martinez-Vargas’ Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South demonstrates the potential of a participatory research process, informed by decolonial debate, to bridge diverse areas of knowledge production and empower co-researchers and participants.

Martinez-Vargas proposes a new research process called “Democratic Capabilities Research” (DCR), which reimagines the Capabilities Approach (CA) with a deliberate focus on a participatory process and decolonial debate from a Global South perspective. Participatory research can be a tool for democratizing research through providing access to research exploration and equal involvement in knowledge production to groups historically left out of this process. However, Martinez-Vargas’ project expands Western-dominated applications of participatory research and shows the value of a “flexible ontological approach that is able to accommodate different epistemic systems” (p. 68). She also illustrates what a DCR project may look like through an analysis of a collaborative project at the University of the Free State in South Africa.”