Governance Through Participation: An Inquiry into the Social Relations of Community-Based Research

Community-based research (CBR) is consistently held up as a benchmark for socially just knowledge production. Calls for the intensification of and further institutionalization of CBR indicate the discursive value of community-engaged research, but its material effects are unclear. CBRs claims to egalitarian, emancipatory research relations and outcomes remain largely uninterrogated and the participative practices and collaborative relations under documented and theorized. This study of the social relations of CBR theorizes participatory research as a site of governance. Specifically, I inquire into how the social relations of CBR are governed through affect, participatory practices, colonial processes of subjectification, institutional arrangements, as well as resisted as counter governmental practices. I draw on poststructural, postcolonial and affect theories in dialogue with the critical reflections of twenty-nine academic, community-based professionals, and peer CBR collaborators to bring forth the complexity of governmental practices. I develop a methodology of Dialogic Theoretical Pluralism to produce five distinct strands of theoretical analyses, which trouble the discursive and material practices of collaborative research, while not foreclosing on its possibilities. I argue that conversants desires to do socially transformative research are unmet and reconfigure CBR as a site of scaffolding community collaborators toward social mobility. These desires activate participative practices of access to and appropriation of community knowledges and labour to produce a tertiary, low cost and precarious knowledge work force. Colonial subject-making practices of CBR, which are raced, gendered and classed, secure the benevolence and expertise of academe against community subjects Othered as lacking beneficiaries in need of capacity building. Institutional arrangements coordinate time, authorize who is a legitimate knower, and consign community collaborators and community benefit to the margins. These governmental practices are not total and institutionalized norms of CBR are resisted through unsettling affect, strategic subjectivities, dissent and distance, and revitalized commitments to social and epistemic transformation. Despite these transgressive practices, the reconfiguration of CBR as an individual intervention in a context of eroding support to social programming and social change warrants sustained attention to the ways in which participation colludes with the very neoliberal/colonial projects it aims to contest.