History is Written by the Researcher: a Reflection on Mullett’s “Issues of Equity and Empowerment in Knowledge Democracy: Three Community Based Research Examples”
Winston Churchill once famously said, “History is written by the victors.” While action research is certainly no war, this quote highlights that those in power control the narrative. In Action Research, the stories that are told are those of the subjects, but the voice, and therefore the perspective, is usually that of the researcher. Therefore, the power to decide what part of the action-knowledge process is worth telling is held by the researcher.
I read the article “Issues of equity and empowerment…” because the idea of knowledge democracy and empowering marginalized people fascinates me. My observations in various communities in the United States, but especially in Afghanistan, have led me to believe that those who hold and control the knowledge are the ones truly in power. In order to build a better, more equitable society, we have to democratize knowledge and share power with those who traditionally have lacked control over even the knowledge they help to create.
Participative researchers often talk of becoming co-researchers and co-participants in our studies, but do we ever really cede much power and control of our researcher with the participants? We, as PhD students, often think of our work in terms of “our” research, “our” projects, but if we are truly to be the instrument through which knowledge is engaged, gained, interpreted, and distributed, we must recognize that the knowledge we access and represent in our studies is never completely ours, and to pretend otherwise is arrogance.
In order to access the knowledge necessary to conduct action research, participants must have a certain level of trust in the researcher. Yet in a struggle for academic rigor, action researchers may inadvertently keep the knowledge generated from the organizations they seek to empower by keeping the locus of control—over the findings, the project, and the outcomes—with themselves. Release of control of the knowledge in question can help to build trust and increase the rigor of the study, even though it might seem counterintuitive. This paper explores a new perspective to examine where we unconsciously hold power, and by which we might democratize that power and share the knowledge and the narrative with the subjects, making them truly co-researchers (Mullett, 2015).
James Green is a 3rd year PhD student, studying Organizational Leadership. He is also a Network Security Manager at Rackspace, and an Intelligence Professional and First Sergeant in the National Guard. He is passionate about solving problems at any scale using a people-centered, research-driven, systems approach. He is a husband to an amazing, brilliant Nurse Practitioner, a father to a champion freestyle wrestler, and pet-parent to 2 dogs, 3 cats, a rabbit, and 3 chickens (and counting…)
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