ALARA and Borderlands Cooperative in partnership with oases Graduate School, the Participation, Power and Social Change Team,
Institute of Development Studies, UK and Deakin University, Australia, announces the 8th World Congress 2010, 'Participatory Action Research and Action Learning: Appreciating our Pasts, Comprehending our Presents, Prefiguring our Futures'. 6 - 9 September 2010.
Plus 2 pre-Congress skill sharing days 4 - 5 September 2010.
The World Congress is an opportunity to:
Engage with like-minded (and other-minded) people in conversations about historical and current philosophies underpinning PAR / AR / AL, debate issues of power, deepen your understanding of methodologies and be inspired by accounts of contemporary practices/praxis.
Be stimulated by critical dialogues and reflections within the ‘applied' streams of: Ecology and its several areas of engagement; Community Development; International Development; Health and Wellbeing (including the various ‘welfare' fields of engagement); Systems /Business / Organisational Development; Education and Learning, from pre-school to post-graduate; and Decolonising praxis, including cross-cultural learning with Indigenous and other Peoples and contexts.
Gather materials, shared-knowledge and contacts to take PAR / AR / AL with you into workplaces, associations, organisations and lives. Brush up on the basics of PAR / AR / AL and their current present-day practices, their commonalities and diversity.
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Alan Rayner, a naturalist who uses art, poetry and a new form of mathematics, as well as rigorous science to enquire and communicate about our natural human neighbourhood. He has published over 150 scientific articles, 6 formal scientific books (including Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries) and six e-books. He was President of the British Mycological Society in 1998 and has been a Miller Visiting Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been using a participatory and co-creative approach to introduce and develop his evolutionary understanding of natural inclusion since 2001.
Professor Budd Hall, Director of the Office of Community-Based Research at the University of Victoria in British Columbia Canada, and Secretary of Community-based Research Canada and the Global Alliance for Community Engaged Research. Budd may be considered an Elder in the field of action research having pioneered work in Tanzania in the early 1970s, later founding the International Participatory Research Network. He served as Secretary-General of the International Council for Adult Education for 11 years where he worked with Paulo Freire. Budd participated in the 1976 Cartagena Conference organized by the late Orlando Fals Borda as well as the ALARA event in the same city in 1996. His research and writing are in areas of participatory research, social movement learning, community-university research partnerships and the role of poetry in social change.
Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Māori at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Linda's research interests are wide-ranging and collaborative. She is known internationally for her work on research methodology and Māori and indigenous education. Her popular books are ‘Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies’ and ‘Decolonizing Methodologies’.
Yoland Wadsworth, involved in PAR since the early 1970s. Yoland has written Australia's two best-selling social research and evaluation books based on a PAR approach. The final in the trilogy “Building in Research and Evaluation for Living Human Systems” is to be published in 2010. She is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University and Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne and has worked for 38 years with NGOs, government and community organisations, primarily in health and human services. Yoland is a life member and former president of ALARA, founder in 1986 of the Action Research Issues Association (ARIA) and its current convener.