Participatory action research in Social Work
Challenges and Opportunities

Med professor Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London.

Many of the values underpinning participatory action research (PAR) align with the social justice values of the social work profession. However, just like social work practice, the somewhat abstract notions that align with these values – i.e. participation, co-production, social change and power relationships – can easily become tokenised and distanced from their criticality and ethical premises. In this lecture I discuss the ethical foundations of PAR and explore ways in which ethical issues come into play in different phases of the research process. Based on experiences in several PAR projects with parents involved in the child protection system and families living in poverty, I then present the complexity and practical challenges of conducting PAR from a critical, justice-based perspective.

Anna Gupta is Professor of Social Work in the School of Law and Social Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London. Her research interests are in the area of child and family welfare, including poverty and child protection, work with racially minoritised parent advocacy and family inclusion policies. She is a co-author on the book – Protecting Children: A Social Model and was coinvestigator in a large UKRI/ESRC study exploring Black, Asian and minority ethnic families and communities experiences during the pandemic.

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