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FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGIST DIANE WOLF (1996: 37) ONCE CHARACTERIZED participatory research (PAR) as "ideal for feminist researchers" because it effectively addressed multiple dilemmas of power in the research process, and particularly power inequalities between the researcher and the researched. In this article, I reflect on my experience of attempting to implement this "ideal" research approach across three PAR projects, each involving a distinct population: students at an alternative high school for "at-risk" youth; undocumented university students; and low-income immigrant parents in a school reform effort. My purpose is to explore the challenges, contradictions, and possibilities of PAR as a means of disrupting unequal power relations in and through the research process. I borrow from Wolf's (1996) notion of "feminist dilemmas in fieldwork" to identify three "critical dilemmas in PAR" that emerged in my work: power, authorship, and scale. Each dilemma reflects a critical tension between the values of PAR and the practice of PAR that emerged in my experience. I believe these dilemmas are particularly relevant to projects like my own: led by a university-based scholar for whom PAR is the basis of an academic research program, and in which the university-based scholar occupies multiple positions of privilege (including white privilege) in relation to other project participants.1
My first exposure to PAR was in reading Wolf's (1996) chapter as a doctoral student. I was immediately drawn to it as a model of engaged critical research for social change. I had begun to develop a critical consciousness of the oppressive and reproductive tendencies of traditional social science research, including the reproduction of a colonial-like relationship in the research process, the "other-ing" and objectification of research subjects in a text, and the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of "science" or publications (or dissertations), rather than collective empowerment or anti-oppressive social change.2 Hoping to avoid these dilemmas in my work, I sought a way to do scholarship that squared with my political and ethical values. In "discovering" PAR, I believed I had found a way to move forward as a scholar while avoiding these thorny dilemmas. I saw in PAR both a justification for and a model of doing research differently- doing it with rather than on other people. Inspired by its promise, I committed myself to using...