Participatory Research

Course description 

This course equips students with the knowledge and skills to design and conduct participatory and action-oriented research in urban management and development. It provides a critical understanding of how research can move beyond extractive practices to become a tool for co-creation, reciprocity, and locally grounded impact. Students will learn to design research that is ethically responsible, contextually relevant, and collaborative, laying the foundation for their thesis fieldwork in the PBS. The course is also relevant beyond the thesis, as it equips students with skills they need as urban managers, that is to link research to urban management.

The module addresses the ethical and political challenges of conducting research in the Global South and elsewhere. It explicitly engages with questions of power, positionality, and neocolonial legacies in urban research, preparing students to approach communities not as objects of study but as partners in knowledge production. Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own role as researchers and to design research processes that create value for the communities involved.

A central feature of the course is the involvement of our local partners (e.g. in Nairobi, Chennai), who will act as mentors throughout the module. These partners not only provide contextual expertise and access to locally relevant data but also ensure that student proposals are grounded in actual community needs and challenges. This collaborative approach allows students to avoid abstract or top-down designs, while learning how to establish relationships of trust, reciprocity, and accountability.

The course is structured in three modules (one week per module):

1. Foundations of Participatory Research: This module introduces the principles and practices of Participatory Action Research (PAR) and its application in urban contexts. It explores how participatory approaches have evolved as alternatives to extractivist models of research, emphasizing co-production, reciprocity, and relevance. The module begins by tracing the history of participatory research — from Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) methods developed in the 1970s and 1980s, to the emergence of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and its subsequent evolution into Action Research and Participatory Action Research (PAR). It then critically examines contemporary academic debates and extensions of these traditions, including Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), design-based research, impact-driven research, and the integration of digital and technological tools in participatory methodologies. This module also includes Ethics, Reflexivity, and Stakeholder Engagement: which addresses the ethical and reflexive dimensions of participatory research, focusing on how researchers can engage with communities in equitable and responsible ways. It examines power dynamics, positionality, and strategies to avoid neocolonial and extractivist research practices.

2. Participatory Research Methods and Application: this module will introduce the main research methods that students can apply in the participatory research, including participant observations, participatory mapping, Focus Group Discussions, storytelling-based approaches and visual methods. Sessions will combine theoretical grounding with practical application and critically explore how participatory and narrative data can be generated, documented, and integrated into a (thesis) research.

3. Designing Impactful and Locally Grounded Research: This module follows the participatory research cycle, indicating for each stage how to engage in participatory research. This may entail using problem trees for joint problem analysis, etc. Issues include building feasible research design aligned with community needs; incorporating local data and mentorship from local partners; translating participatory research into actionable recommendations.

Through lectures, case discussions, and practical exercises, students will gain methodological skills in stakeholder engagement, participatory design, and ethical collaboration across cultural and institutional contexts. The final output is a participatory research design proposal, developed with feedback from peers, staff, and local partners. This proposal may serve as the starting point for thesis work, ensuring that students enter the PBS with designs that are both academically rigorous and locally meaningful.

Learning objectives

1. Understand the theoretical foundations of participatory and action-oriented research in urban studies.
2. Analyse ethical, power, and positionality issues that shape collaborative research.
3. Apply participatory methods to the design of stakeholder engagement strategies throughout the participatory research cycle.
4. Evaluate the limitations of extractive approaches and the relevance of reciprocal research practices.
5. Create a participatory research design that demonstrates methodological rigour and ethical responsibility.