ABSTRACT
As advocates of Participatory Action Research (PAR), we want to inspire readers to consider how PAR can enrich scholarship and facilitate political engagement beyond the spaces of its immediate intervention. To do this, in the current climate, means grappling with a series of complex and painful critiques, mainly from development studies, that have thrown some doubt on the utility and legitimacy of participatory and action-oriented approaches (notably Cooke and Kothari 2001b). These critiques engage with poststructuralist theories, most notably the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, and point towards the negative effects of PAR as it has been commonly deployed within the international development context.1
