Introduction

A broad movement of political and intellectual renewal in the second half of the 20th century in Latin America and the Caribbean resulted in critical output intent on addressing the social injustice and political oppression sustained by the dictatorial regimes that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, dominated much of the region. This current can be seen in (a) the organization of unions and political parties focused on defending oppressed populations (workers, the unemployed and underemployed, and the masses excluded from economic and social development); (b) the re-creation of self-managed cooperatives, today referred to as a solidarity economy or social economy; (c) the (re)creation of popular social movements and popular nongovernmental organizations; and (d) academics’ growing attempts to deepen dialogue and draw closer to people’s everyday lives and demands, seeking an endogenous theoretical and methodological rereading of the Latin American and Caribbean experience.

During this period, Latin American intellectuals made important contributions in various fields: Liberation theology, for example, was a seminal innovation in the field of social relations; dependency theory sought to make explicit how central and peripheral countries are, in fact, part of the same world system; in the pedagogical field, the popular education movement valued the knowledge of simple people as a starting point for learning while denouncing the supposed political neutrality of education; in the field epistemology, new questions were raised about Eurocentric modernity and decoloniality (Moretti & Adams, 2011; Streck & Adams, 2012).

Social research was also influenced by this invigorating tide, with new participatory research methodologies coming to the fore, stemming from various insights such as participatory action research (investigación-acción participativa, or IAP), action research, and the systematization of experiences. The research movement based on participative methodologies, in spite of the diversity of experiences, has some common characteristics, as this article will demonstrate.

It should also be noted that this period of scholarly effervescence was closely attuned to developments in other parts of the world, sometimes with different names but strongly imbued with the same aim of social transformation (Streck, 2014). Examples of this are research carried out at the Tavistock Institute in England, which has spread to other European countries, especially Scandinavia; community-based research focused on local development from the resources of the community itself; and in Tanzania, the expression participatory action research—PAR (Swantz, 2015, p. 489) was coined. In the decades since their introduction, these methodologies have made their potential clear as well as their limits and vulnerabilities within a complex interconnected social, political, and cultural context.

Brief Overview of Trends in Latin America and the Caribbean

Participatory methodologies can be sorted into the following categories: sociological (Orlando Fals Borda), pedagogical and educational (Paulo Freire and João Bosco Guedes Pinto), anthropological (Carlos Rodrigues Brandão), organizational and university (Michel Thiollent), and the systematization of experiences (Oscar Jara Holliday and Alfonso Torres Carrillo). We will now situate each of these, highlighting the distinctive characteristics of the authors referenced here.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, who developed investigación-acción participativa (IAP) in the 1960s, began his research with peasants in the municipality of Chocontá, in the Bogota region. He later continued his work in other countries, including Brazil. Fals Borda (1979), based on a decolonized sociology—that is, not copied from foreign examples but recreated—argued that research should focus on understanding sociohistorical conditions impacting the local and national organization of the groups most exposed to the effects of capitalist modernization in Colombia and other countries in a similar situation. He called for independent research, regardless of political affiliation, as long as it contributes to strengthening the social and political struggle of peasant and indigenous workers for better living conditions. Dedicated to social justice and the rights of impoverished peoples, this research dynamic contains practices of dialogue and confrontation or disputes between the organized population and political organisms. Participation was fundamental to this process, even though, from the perspective of classical methodologies, this was seen as “quixotic” (Adams, Moretti, & Streck, 2014).

In 1960, in the city of Angicos (Brazil), Paulo Freire (1979) developed a pioneering experiment in participatory research, a practice that he called thematic research, that is, surveying themes and generating words that were the basis of educational awareness and organization. This research with a pedagogical focus initially analyzed the education of children and adults and provided fertile ground for the creation of what would come to be known as “liberating education,” which was later generalized as popular education. The thematic research involved an interdisciplinary team, including teachers and educators, and the illiterate population that was to be taught how to read and write, whose dialogic practice, at the same time, made it possible “to become aware of the historical, political and cultural circumstances and conditions in which they were inserted” (Streck & Adams, 2014, p. 34). Consequently, an educational process promoted the organization of oppressed populations. Exiled from 1964 to 1978, Freire became known worldwide for his central contribution of linking liberating (popular) education and participatory research, mediated by dialogue and involvement of all in the process, but without abandoning the central role of educators, researchers, and scholars.

João Bosco Guedes Pinto also stands out for his participatory research in the field of education. Born in Manaus in 1934, Guedes Pinto studied and practiced in several countries and developed action research projects in Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. In Bogotá, he participated in the peasant political movement for agrarian reform, developing ties to liberation theology, the popular education movement, and participant research. He took Paulo Freire’s thematic research as a process for active research, which he also identified as a psychosocial method. Guedes Pinto defended research in action as a social and political practice, as mediation to understand reality and transform it. On the basis of materialist dialectics, he assumed a methodology in constant (re)construction. For him, “the rigidity of a method provokes non-dialogicity, constrains creative outputs of approximation to reality and knowledge of it, as well as proposals for action to transform it” (Duque-Arrazola & Thiollent, 2014, p. 17). In this perspective, action research aims to overcome the simple appearance of phenomena, to see reality as a dynamic process, to perceive the existence of the other, to understand the possibilities of transforming the object, and to “lead to an organization, a historical praxis that allows for concrete action” (Guedes Pinto, 2014, p. 90).

Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1940, is also recognized as a notable anthropologist, popular educator, and environmentalist. His anthropological background rooted participant research in ethnography, with projects in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Goiás. For him, the crisis of European and North American social sciences elicited the (re)construction of theoretical and methodological paths from the Latin American context. For Brandão, the Latin American tradition, born of the experience of Fals Borda and Paulo Freire in the 1970s and 1980s, “took a lot of European and North American traditions, but with particular characteristics, starting with its historical link to popular social movements and their projects of emancipatory social transformation” (Brandão, 2008, p. 21). The Latin American and Caribbean face of participant research presents itself as an alternative form of knowledge creation rooted in solidarity and focused on the processes of organizing for social transformation.

Michel Thiollent, a Frenchman living in Brazil, has served as a professor and researcher of production engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro since 1980.¹ His research focuses on organizations and projects of university extension (Thiollent, 2006), understanding that research in this perspective constitutes “[. . .] a type of empirical-based social research conceived and carried out in close association with an action or with the resolution of a collective problem and in which researchers and participants who are representative of the situation or problem are involved in a cooperative or participatory way” (Thiollent, 2011, p. 20). For the author, research can be identified as action research when there is action on the part of the people or groups involved in the problem under observation, and if the relationship between researcher and research subjects is participatory. As a methodological strategy of social research, action research has also been used in a critical perspective, with the goal of emancipating individuals and groups.

In the mid-20th century, Oscar Jara Holliday, an educator and sociologist at the Centro de Estudos e Publicações Alforja, created in Costa Rica in 1981, set about systematizing experiences as a mode of conducting participatory research and collective knowledge production. Based on Freire’s ideas, which spread from Chile in the second half of the 1960s, the systematization of experiences was born as a means of recording the practices of popular education developed in several countries, with special emphasis on the education of young people and adults. The goal was to register experiences and critically reflect on them in order to allow for their dissemination. This was the basis of this participatory research method, and the investigative practice could occur both after and while the experiment was being carried out. According to Jara (2012), still without a finished concept, the systematization of experiences also arose from the effort to create interpretive references in Latin America capable of responding to the specificities of our socio-historical context.

In encountering IAP, Jara Holliday cites Fals Borda’s book, Ciência Propia y Colonialismo Intelectual, as a foundational framework. He affirms that the systematization of experience has found convergences insofar as both contemplate an educational, research-based social activity that aims to “promote social transformation in favor of the oppressed, discriminated, marginalized, and exploited populations” (Jara Holliday, 2012, p. 53). In keeping with the theoretical and methodological characteristics of the different expressions of participatory research, systematization defines the “experiences” as “complex and dynamic social and historical processes, personal and collective. . .,” in permanent motion, and that vary according to the conditions of the context in which they are inserted (Jara Holliday, 2012, p. 72). In this sense, the systematization of experiences consists in the reconstruction of the event, its critical interpretation and concomitant theoretical deepening, with a view to bringing propositional contributions with transformational intent.²

These experiences come together in a diverse set of practices in various fields that we can only exemplify in this space. Popular social movements have been one of these spaces where participatory methodologies have been used by socio-environmental and environmental movements in promoting community health, in social processes to strengthen democracy in community life, and in public management, in the struggle for land against latifundia and access to water as a public good. In the context of unemployment and precarious labor relations, organizations of a solidarity economy are now a place where participatory methodologies play an important role of self-knowledge, organization, and training (Muslera, 2015; Damonte & García, 2016; Toledo & Jacobi, 2012).

Although met with a degree of skepticism in academic circles for their supposed lack of scientific rigor, participatory methodologies help universities transform extensions into sites of effective knowledge production by identifying relevant research themes from action in and with communities (Thiollent, 2006). Extensions cease to be a mechanism for transmitting knowledge or simple “devolution” to become a nucleus for action research that identifies the limits of classical academic research. One such limit is the compartmentalization of research into disciplines that rarely communicate with one another. Participatory methodologies challenge researchers to embrace inter- or transdisciplinary approaches. At the same time, one of the difficulties of participatory methodologies is that, while betting on the coproduction of knowledge, they are often constrained by the incompatibility of the different agendas of organizations, communities, and the researchers themselves, as well as the demands to produce “practical” academic products and those required by the academy based on rankings far removed from the concerns of the research participants.

Schools have also been common sites for research using participatory methodologies (Santoro & Pimenta, 2018). Several levels of collaborative research practices are identified in schools. One of them is restricted to the teacher who, in his or her classroom or in his or her discipline, seeks to identify difficulties and the means of overcoming them. Sometimes it is the school as a whole that deals with some problem, with or without the help of external professional advice. There are also systems of education at the municipal or regional level that conduct sociological-anthropological research to identify what Paulo Freire called generative themes to guide curricular development.

Finally, social practices developed by nongovernmental organizations and governmental institutions are privileged spaces for developing participatory research (Streck & Adams, 2017). There are countless experiences in Latin America through the systematization of experiences, participatory research, or action research that allow for evaluation processes through research. These are characterized by their strong educational potential, their ability to collectively produce knowledge, and to mobilize those involved to strengthen organizations that produce benefits for participants and foster collaboration with local and regional development efforts.

Shared Aspects of Various Participatory Research Modalities

Bearing in mind this brief characterization of the variations of participatory research in Latin America and the Caribbean—participatory action research, participant research, action research, and systematization of experience, among other denominations—we can identify common aspects based on the referenced authors themselves, but also in the studies of Marcela Gajardo, Luiz Gabarrón and Libertad Landa, and Alfonso Torres, among other intellectual researchers.

First, it is assumed that social reality is constituted as a historical movement, a dialectic between the specific and the universal, between parts and the whole. Both the researcher and the research subject are part of this continuous rendering process as are all those involved in the research process. Investigative, educational, and political action merge as methods and techniques seek to acquire knowledge through the act of transformation (Gabarrón & Landa, 2006). Second, this view of research separate from positivism breaks with the monopoly of knowledge and information on the part of intellectuals and researchers and establishes a participatory practice of collective knowledge production and the appropriation of these by the “marginalized groups” in their organizations and struggles.

Researchers must insert themselves more robustly in the empirical field for this to occur. The Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch—recognized as a forerunner of decolonial theories (Viveros Espinosa, 2016), along with Orlando Fals Borda and Paulo Freire—explains his method of investigation to find a basis for considering an American way of being. He affirms that it is part of the immersion in the empirical field to eat with its people, to participate in their feasts, and to probe events in this context, observing and collecting the natural ways of thinking in the streets and neighborhoods. But what he proposes goes beyond a mere participatory record; on the contrary, it means interpreting phenomena from empirical experience (Kusch, 1962). In methodological terms, the philosopher conceives that the method supposes the explication of the path traveled, even if there is nothing rigidly defined other than a bet on the relation with the objectivity of the field under study. Thus, according to Viveiros Espinosa (2016),

The method is operability established as a journey, as a road being traversed. A journey like a “gambit”; a gambit as an opening to the unknown. Then the unknown goes round in the symbolic, becoming understood to the extent that it is changing according to what Kusch referred to as its “own operation.” (p. 228)

Such openness in methodological processes should not be seen as lack of rigor. In practice, the researcher(s) assumes the role of organizer of social interaction or promoter of dialogues and synergies among the participants. From the inside of the research process, the contribution of the researcher(s), based on a critical (and not distancing) approach, can bring contributions to the collective critical analysis of the information and experiences processed in the research. As part of the results, which are always provisional and the basis for the advancement of participatory research, it is understood that the process is carried out with the various mediations that enable the construction of new power relations between all participants and other interlocutors. In such nonlinear dynamics, when searching for the causes of problems and alternative solutions, the relation between individual and collective and functional and structural problems comes into focus (Brandão 2008); in short, it articulates the collective production of knowledge and the sociopolitical movements of society.

Alfonso Torres Carrillo (2006) emphasizes the role of collective memory as one of the central methodological aspects of participatory research. The use of “memory activation devices” more suitable for each reality contributes to the reconstitution of solidarity bonds and feeds collective identities. In this way, the Colombian researcher recognizes the complexity of social phenomena and values the diversity of languages to name and interpret reality.

Specifically, in our practice, from the demand of the subjects—when there is already a certain level of interaction with the potential empirical field—or by our proposition, the researcher(s) meet with the community or social organization for a dialogue regarding approach and research possibilities. From the general survey, questions are identified, generating themes to be developed during the research process. In dialogue with the participants, a work plan is established where, according to the quantity and complexity of the subjects under investigation, the number of conversation circles is defined, in many cases also called discussion groups, usually involving six to twelve participants.³ With some “guiding questions” around the generative themes, but without a rigidly established road map, the participants’ speeches are stimulated and recorded. As these conversation circles unfold, one can observe the different opinions, the consensuses, and the dissensions that, in the continuity of the dialogue, are problematized by the researcher.

Special attention to conflicts or contradictions reveals the importance of theoretical contributions in mediating the interpretative process. Researchers are attentive to propositional possibilities and referrals of action projects. When the participants understand the sociohistorical context, they explain an ethical-political path, a collective commitment to the transformation of the issues at hand. Moreover, the relation between theory and practice follows as part of the dialectical dynamics, with a permanent critical evaluation of the practice: action—reflection—action, which constitutes praxis, where reflection and action occur concomitantly (Freire, 1976, 1978).

For Freire (1979), “change in the perception of reality, previously regarded as something immutable, means for individuals to see it as it really is: a historical-cultural, human reality created by men that can be transformed by them” (p. 50). This shift in perception is the result of the educational process favored by participatory research dynamics because there is an inseparable relationship between education and research (Torres, 2010), where researchers and participants learn and teach together.

In short, the meaning of participatory research is neatly expressed by Gómez Sollano and Corenstein Zaslav (2017):

when knowledge is shared and valued collectively they tend to consolidate in an active dialectic that oscillates between the person in whom it is instituted and the person who instituted it, an operation that demands articulations between the knowledge produced and recreated, when criticism exposes the mechanisms, forces and policies of sedimented meanings and, therefore, a different way of locating actors and their knowledge. (p. 50)

The hermeneutic and dialectical-critical epistemological and methodological perspectives in which the participatory research approaches discussed here are inserted, allow, “among other things, for the subject and its subjectivity to be centered in social research, both of the subjects of knowledge, generally minimized or rendered invisible by positivism, [. . .] as the density of subjects and social subjectivities [. . .]” (Torres, 2006, p. 67). It is a hermeneutic-dialectical interpretive process that implies a historical understanding, a search for meaning where the subjects are involved with their beliefs and ways of acting and thinking according to the conditions generated by the context. Again, it is worth mentioning that Kusch proposed the participatory relationship so that the subject—object relationship becomes a subject—subject relationship:

From the point of view of fieldwork, obviously the latter makes it so that the observed ceases to be mere object and becomes subject by virtue of the type of anthropological work, since it refers to something existing. At the same time, as long as it exists, it has a project or possibility of being. [. . .] But insofar as this occurs, the relationship between the investigator and the investigated, that is, between the observer and the observed, which was from subject to object, becomes a subject—subject relationship.

(Kusch, 2007, p. 210)

It is in participatory practice that the sharing of emotions and sensibilities is made possible by the language mediating the interpretative dialogue. In this sense, hermeneutic circularity allows for the approximation of an interpretation closest to the phenomenon in its context, and the dialectic contributes to situate and relate the phenomenon in its totality, ethical perspective, and historicity.

Among the common aspects, from the point of view of the theoretical-methodological and epistemological consequences of the option for participatory research, we can highlight the following:

Flexibility and Methodological Rigor: Challenges and Perspectives

The emergence and development of social research have been embedded for many years into a conception of society governed by the laws of the functioning of society, driven by predictable and verifiable regularities from theoretical frameworks of interpretation. In other words, “uncovering” the real was based on hypotheses and theoretical frameworks elaborated a priori: logical-deductive methodologies (Guerra, 2014). Accompanying the dynamics of history, epistemologies in another direction sought to sustain a research committed to the processes of transformation in an ever-changing society. Instead of searching for linear regularities, qualitative research of a comprehensive nature pursues the understanding of the meanings of social phenomena, where people work and participate

[. . .] with the universe of meanings that correspond to a deeper space of relationships that cannot be reduced to equations. This understands and explains the dynamics of social relations, which, in turn, are custodians of beliefs, values, attitudes and habits. It works with the experience and also with the understanding of structures as a result of human action.

(Minayo, 1993, p. 24)

We find here a tension, not an opposition, between the models of research anchored in theoretical frameworks and the comprehensive perspective that assumes a dialectical logic between theory—practice—theory. This is because any investigative approach does not start from the lack of a theoretical vision, as if it were possible to start from a position of neutrality in relation to the field searched. The model that departs from the theoretical framework has its limit when pretending to fit the reality of the field searched. In the same way, it would not make sense if the theorizing model wanted theorizing to be a linear result of what it came to grasp in the observations empiria of the social field. Participatory research, as we understand it, assumes the dynamic relationship of intersubjective dialogue between theory, social practice, and worldviews embodied by researchers and participants.

Apart from this vision that integrates objectivity and subjectivity, we run the risk of moving from a research paradigm that interprets in a linear and deterministic way all the phenomena of daily life as if it were only the reflection of macrostructures, to an interpretive relativism in which everyday life is governed by a logic of its own.

In our experience—and we observe the same in other Latin American countries—education and participatory research, in its various expressions, have always been closely related. Our option for participatory research, unlike the traditional one that focuses heavily on the product, values the process that attributes value to participation, to the intentional and transformative purpose as justification for its achievement. It is an idea of quality linked to an ethical-political option which is associated with the struggle to transform the conditions that produce injustice, which seeks to respond to interests and meanings for the great part of the population not contemplated in the projects of the dominant elites, and which contributes to producing another way of living in society.

Hence, we have deduced the criteria that any qualitative research should possess: “social relevance, quality of description and interpretation, reflexivity, quality of the relationship between subjects and the practicability of knowledge” (Streck, 2016, p. 538). In addition to these criteria, participatory research focuses on the quality of participation that is closely related to the quality of the relationship between the subjects. This quality is built with the establishment of relationships of trust, knowledge of life and culture of the community in question, involvement of all, and all valuing the knowledge and values present in the daily activities of their lives. It is important also as a stimulus for the participants to share and dialogue about their knowledge. Finally, the quality of the relationship in participatory research is built with a transparent commitment of the researcher to the collective of research subjects. This quality of participation is not only a strategy but an epistemological principle distinct from the traditional epistemology that restricts the place and subjects of knowledge production.

In this sense, this quality criterion is linked to the interpretive dynamics that characterize the participatory research whose centrality is the problematization, considering the conditioning of knowledge, in our place within the social context in which we live. In this sense, it can be said that social practice will always allow for the verification and credibility of research, provided that it can help research participants problematize conceptions and ideas already systematized theoretically. What Freire treated as conditioning can be summarized as follows:

[. . .] the world is not made up of “free individuals,” since the weight of our socialization inclines us to “pre-chosen choices”; that our rationality is, to a large extent, a myth and that there are no “subjective values,” since society creates all the cognitive and moral background in which we move.

(Souza, 2015, p. 169)

In this understanding, when participants and researchers think and dialogue in order to interpret the real (lived experience), they articulate this ethos embedded in their history, which is soaked by the realities lived with the conceptions and visions of the things that the institutions of society reproduce. It is through institutionalization that ideologies and “moral ideas acquire real practical and social effectiveness” (Souza, 2015, p. 179), a process subordinated to the social hierarchy in each society, but also in what is hegemonic today in globalized relations. In short, we start with the assumption that there are no isolated individuals, but as beings of relation we are subjects that assume modes of (re)production. Thinking, acting, and expressing culture are representative aspects of groups, communities, and networks of influence according to the objective conditions of a society in movement in which we are all inserted.

Finally, the methodological proposal of participatory research, in the variations already indicated, seeks to deal with the tensions pointed out without departing from the perspective of understanding the local realities in each sociohistorical context. This means that micro-phenomena situate themselves in social interaction with broad realities in an environment in which information and ways of thinking and common sense are propagated by institutions such as communication networks, churches, and schools. In this direction, we believe that a clear explanation of our pre-understandings of the visions and ways of understanding social reality and science and research, their purpose, and their incidence in the local and wider social historical context, is necessary. It is through the clear explication of the method, that is, of the path taken by the research, of the conceptions that support it, and of the intentions that guide it, that will ensure methodical rigor. But it is also essential to broaden the dialogue with new research communities that must be evaluated not only for their academic logic, but also for their effective contribution in the civilizing humanization. We are referring to the ethical dimension of research whose universal reference is life in its materiality (Dussel, 2000). To what extent would we justify research that remains exempt or does not involve the problems of two thirds of the planet’s underclass who do not enjoy the benefits of nature or of the goods historically produced by human labor?

Social Research and the Democratization of Power

Participatory research methodologies are closely related to the democratization of power through the collective creation of knowledge. Its origin in Latin America is related to the emergence of a political consciousness that sought to break the historical silence of the masses, not only allowing it to conquer the voice, but recognizing the legitimacy of its knowledge and its ways of knowing and interpreting your world. It is therefore a brief reflection on the construction of power through research.

As a starting point, participatory methodologies share a structural view of power. The assumption is that unequal access to the assets and resources of society also corresponds to an unequal distribution of power, and research may represent a form of counter-hegemonic power. In Fals Borda’s understanding, a “social science of and for the working people” (Fals Borda, 2009, p. 271) was to be gestated in which history, geography, and other social and human sciences would unite with sociology. It is a reasoning analogous to that found in Paulo Freire when he announced a pedagogy of the oppressed, opposed to the pedagogies formulated for the oppressed.

This vision of building an anti-hegemonic power through the generation of knowledge does not dispense with classical science or the specific knowledge to conduct the research. Analyzing quantitative data, for example, requires the expert knowledge of someone who has training in statistics; the interpretation of the social conjuncture requires historical knowledge for the proper contextualization. On the one hand, it is an interdisciplinary task in the sense of what Fals Borda called a “meeting of disciplines,” each one contributing with its specific knowledge. On the other hand, these methodologies can be classified as transdisciplinary insofar as they go beyond the disciplines of the academic canon and include knowledge of local communities and their respective experts, for example, local religious expressions, artistic manifestations, and knowledge of activities, among others.

In order to account for the diversity of knowledge found in the understanding of reality and its transformation, several concepts were used: The widely used knowledge exchange concept gave way to the idea of cultural negotiation in which the notion of knowledge negotiation was integrated to emphasize the power dimension present in investigative and educational processes; the expression “knowledge dialogue” currently seeks to account for the complex web of knowledge involved in the research.

Dialogue characterizes this intersubjective process of gaining knowledge through transformation and transformation through gaining knowledge. The dialogue of knowledge, as pointed out by Alfonso Torres Carrillo, is more about recognition than just knowledge:

Therefore, the dialogic practice allows the subjects to redefine their contexts, relationships, experiences, motivations, convictions, representations, imaginaries and visions of the future. This collective reconstruction of the senses that have the subjects of their practices, their social relations and of themselves, is understood as a collective hermeneutic.

(Torres, 2016, p. 134)

It is not about annulling the power that academic knowledge confers on the researcher so as to favor the supposedly lower power of popular knowledge, since both of them play a role in the construction of new knowledge by recognizing the incompleteness of one and the other. Power thus acquires a creative and productive dimension, since it is an inherent dimension of research as a process involving social relations. The challenge posed by participatory methodologies is to transform one’s power along with knowledge and the transformation of reality.

If the aim of democratizing power through the democratization of knowledge is one of the salient points of participatory methodologies, as we have seen in the analysis of the various tendencies, it is also one of the points that reveals important weaknesses. To the extent that research is concentrated in academic centers that respond to the demands of competitiveness within the knowledge market, participatory methodologies tend to occupy a marginal place, since they do not always meet the criterion of “scientific productivity” established by this market. The coproduction of knowledge, in addition to the ethical-political disposition of the researcher and other stakeholders involved in the process, requires other conditions not always favorable within the academic context, such as the time of the academic research projects and the time of the generation of knowledge in the process of social transformation.

Conclusion

In this article, we try to identify some of the main trends in the field of participatory methodologies in Latin America as well as to explore characteristics common to the various practices. The exercise revealed the importance of continuing to build an inventory of the trends, their origins, and the activities in which these methodologies continue to be developed and recreated. It is a dynamic methodological proposal that accompanies changes in society, integrating new subjects and new social practices. We note, by way of conclusion, some of the guidelines that should form part of this inventory.

In the first place, a broader survey of the origins and their various links would have to be made. For example, how does Paulo Freire construct his proposal for dialogue, integrating the perspective of dialogue in Buber, the personalism of Mounier, and the notion of alienation of Marx, among other influences? How are these references redefined in the context of the oppression of the popular classes in Latin America? Or how does Fals Borda re-elaborate classical understandings of historical materialism when he proposes a “root socialism” that integrates the resistance of the native peoples, the struggle for the freedom of enslaved Blacks, and the work of the settler on their land?

Second, it would be necessary to identify the theories that underlie the new practices and at the same time show how these practices contribute to the theoretical construction in Latin America. Both Freire and Fals Borda can be recognized as precursors of decolonial thinking that in the second decade of the 21st century have exponents such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and Catherine Walsh (Mota Neto, 2016). This decolonial thinking questions the academy itself, the place where much of the research is carried out, and the intellectual and political leaderships that identify themselves as progressive, as explained by Raúl Zibechi: “Implicit conviction, rarely said in a clear and frontal way, that the people cannot emancipate themselves, hidden in the bowels of the academy and also the revolutionary left” (Zibechi, 2007, p. 128). Particularly notable is the work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, a Bolivian historian and one of the founders of the Andean Oral History Workshop (Taller de Historia Oral Andina, or THOA).⁵

It would then be necessary to identify social practices in which participatory methodologies are now in conditions for development. Based on the assumption that participation can have a wide range of possibilities for application and interpretation, there will also be a diversity of ways of using and understanding participation in research, from the traditional return of results to an effective codetermination, from the conception of the project until disclosure of the results. The quality of participation will be a result of both the conviction of the researcher and the objective conditions found in the context of the research. For this, we understand that it is important to keep in mind that participation is as much an investigative-educational principle as it can be a strategy or a set of strategies. Both dimensions are important: Care must be taken to develop creative participatory strategies to achieve results; however, participation as a principle guarantees the formative consistency of the research.