by Jean Sumner

Created on: December 20, 2006   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Book Review: Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research

Traveling Companions explores the traditions by which diverse groups of feminist and participatory action researchers (PAR) experience, create meaning, and adapt to the unique challenges of engaging in collaborative processes of reflection, action, and change. Although the editors have published other books relating feminism to participatory research, the method in which this book was written is novel. In the true spirit of the social justice aims of action research, the book explores the roles of feminism and PAR in with the international perspective from which it arose. It is literally a collaborative effort among several authors, respecting and identifying the different perspectives, power roles, and privileges from a worldview perspective. The authors acknowledge that although feminists are collectively moving in the same direction, feminist cohorts and issues change; feminism can also be radically different in other parts of the world, where some women purposely resist Westernized feminism.

Traveling Companions has two divergent yet interrelated and intertwining objectives. First, it creates a space for a diverse group of educators, researchers, practitioners, and scholars to wrestle with the diverse and complex issues that are threaded throughout feminist and action research. Second, it seeks to examine how action research and feminist research can complement each other in developing strategies for engaging in collaborative research that is rooted in activism and social change. In three powerful sections, participatory action research is continually redefined through the eyes and objectives of its international participants, much like the iterative process of action research itself.
Although PAR and feminist PAR have commonly been divided into separate journeys traveled by separate voices, rarely acknowledging one another as collaborators, this collection purposely focuses on, and attempts to tackle, their shared issues:

* How does a researcher negotiate the power imbalance between the researcher and researched?

* How can researchers bridge the schism between the "inside"/academy and "outside"/community?

* How do issues of insider/outsider or us/them affect collaborations and outcomes in PAR, and how can we successfully constructing me/you/we collaborations?

By describing the merits of action research, the contributing authors repeatedly argue that PAR is the perfect research methodology

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