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This chapter reports on the purpose, methods, and findings of a CDC-funded project in Hartford, Connecticut, entitled the Community Responses to Risks of Emergent Drug Use Project. This project was designed to (1) use ethnographic and epidemiological data collection to identify and track emergent drug use trends; (2) analyze these patterns in terms of the sociodemographic traits of participants; (3) assess the potential impact of identified changes on local public health; and (4) use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) model to implement community-based public health responses to research findings in collaboration with a community advisory group. Three illicit drug use trends examined in the project—the spread of methamphetamine among hard-core drug users, the adoption of PCP among emergent adult users, and the use of sweetened cigars among youth—are assessed while describing applied initiatives designed to address the public health implications of identified drug use trends.

This chapter shows how weekly Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) meetings facilitated the deepening of critical consciousness and the formation of a collective, oppositional political identity among the youth participants. This, in turn, enabled the exercise of political agency. This deepening of critical consciousness was not primarily a result of the formal “research” conducted in the group, but rather of the dialogic process of open-ended critical reflection that occurred in weekly meetings.

This chapter examines how youth Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) members and prospective PARTY members from Jackson High School interacted with the “discourse of these kids.” It shows how youth participants mobilized, reproduced, and contested the discourse of these kids by alternately positioning themselves in opposition to it, in accordance with it, or by contesting certain aspects of it.

This chapter examines the results of the shift of Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) from theory to practice—from envisioning and planning a social justice class to actually teaching one at Jackson High School. It demonstrates that, despite attempts to implement an alternative and liberatory model of education for social change, the practices and discourses of traditional classroom teaching were largely reproduced. It examines how the social context of Jackson High, and the more generalized figured world of schooling, shaped the emerging teacher identities of PARTY members and their ability to exercise agency as individuals and as a collective.

This chapter examines internal debates within Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) about the curricular goals of social justice education, particularly those focused on the meaning of academic standards and preparation for college and careers. Core debates within PARTY concerned the meaning and role of academic skill building and “standards” in the social justice class, and the relative value of academic versus vocational preparation for empowering Jackson students in their transition to adult roles. The chapter contextualizes PARTY's intragroup debates by connecting them to the realities of the postindustrial labor market and the historic struggle to define the purpose of high school at the bottom of the educational hierarchy.

The chapter contributes to discourses of youth participation with respect to understanding what forms of participation might make a difference for marginalised young people living in the context of structural inequality. Drawing on Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), the chapter makes a case for a transformational learning approach to participation that involves learning and change at both an individual level and in professional interventions with marginalised young people. The chapter presents a case study with young people engaged in criminal and violent activities. This case study provides an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of using ‘alternative’, transformative, action-based interpretations of youth participation and empowerment involving social learning rooted in professional encounters with young people’s lifeworlds.

This introductory chapter studies the possibilities and tensions for co-produced research practices that emerge from the collision of long-established, community-oriented research practices, an increased institutional emphasis on community co-production in academia, and the ongoing critique of the key terms of these practices. Among long-established approaches to community-oriented research scholarship, Participatory Action Research (PAR) is squarely oriented to a particular vision of social justice and community defined methods and research questions. The chapter cites various case studies about what co-production looks like and some of the challenges that arise. It opens up the field and begins to illustrate in practice what the tensions and challenges of co-production are.

The introductory chapter to each of the two volumes in Transforming Ethnomusicology offers a critical discussion of a range of socially engaged approaches as well as their deep historical roots that we consider foundational and fundamental to the ethnomusicological endeavor. These approaches affiliate variably with such intellectual traditions as Marxism, feminism and anti-racism, Post-colonialism and Indigenous Studies, Participatory Action Research, analyses of heritage practices and sustainability challenges, studies of intellectual property regimes and ecologies, and other work in ethnomusicology and cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Our aim is to deepen the conversation about how intellectual history has informed our discipline and to probe the premises, activities, and assumptions of scholars past and present who strive to respond to the concerns of the communities with whom they work.

This chapter outlines a model for engaged ethnomusicology fostering human development, locally and globally, through sustainable music-centered community collaborations. Human development is a process of upholding human value in the world—rights, freedoms, social justice. Human development is impeded by dehumanization—the human treated as a nonhuman through an impersonal world system (and ironically shaping much “development” work today). The model builds on Habermas’s duality of system and lifeworld, but argues that the maintenance of the lifeworld—locus of human value—depends not only on rational “communicative action” (as per Habermas), but equally on affective social connectivity, constructed primarily through a profoundly social “soundworld,” where sonic feedback loops of thought-feeling produce “resonance.” The chapter describes projects that use participatory action research to forge collaborative, community-engaged networks, blurring differences between “researcher” and “researched,” drawing participants into a shared, resonant soundworld, across boundaries of ethnicity, religion, nation, and class. Projects based in Liberia, Ghana, and Egypt address post-conflict trauma, public health issues, maternal and neonatal health, cultural continuity and civil society. The chapter suggests that resonant networks of participatory action research in ethnomusicology have the potential not only to transform local communities—whether rich or poor—but also to transform the networks themselves, toward global human development.

This chapter questions the politico-epistemological potentials of and challenges notions of dialogue and collaboration in current scholarship on sound praxis. It addresses variable meanings of both dialogue and collaboration as general signifiers central both to social processes and the ethnographic experience. What motivates dialogue and collaboration, and how do variable motivations play (or not) in contexts of struggle for political recognition and valuing of forms of knowledge and practices under pressure from exploitation, inequality, and criminalization of the oppressed? The argument proceeds through three basic steps: (a) a synthetic examination of recent reviews of collaborative/dialogic/advocacy/applied/engaged work in both soundscape and music scholarship vis-à-vis the increasing and generalized self-awareness of local-global political struggles and tensions; (b) highlighting the role often ascribed to the so-called arts in mediating the negotiation of human coexistence in conflictive and post-conflict contexts; and (c) opening a debate on political-epistemological alternatives to research on sound praxis drawing on the theorists Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe.

The introductory chapter to each of the two volumes in Transforming Ethnomusicology offers a critical discussion of a range of socially engaged approaches as well as their deep historical roots that we consider foundational and fundamental to the ethnomusicological endeavor. These approaches affiliate variably with such intellectual traditions as Marxism, feminism and anti-racism, Post-colonialism and Indigenous Studies, Participatory Action Research, analyses of heritage practices and sustainability challenges, studies of intellectual property regimes and ecologies, and other work in ethnomusicology and cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Our aim is to deepen the conversation about how intellectual history has informed our discipline and to probe the premises, activities, and assumptions of scholars past and present who strive to respond to the concerns of the communities with whom they work.

One of the core challenges of grounded normative theory is to deploy a methodology for theorizing that guides us to seek insight from lived experience even though our knowledge of that experience can be only partial, incomplete, even flawed. Grounded normative theory is a broad methodological approach that requires specific methods for developing the empirical basis appropriate to each normative inquiry. Chapter 5 describes the specific methods I used to develop the theory of just responsibility. It provides an argument for drawing on the strategic initiatives of human rights activists and describes the research–activist partnership from which the normative theory presented here derives.

Mainstream academia assumes a dichotomy between active political research for problem solving and theoretically driven research on the problem. In many music academies, the researcher is trained to be a detached neutral observer in the field who is expected to be objective in the analysis of the data collected. However, socio-cultural problems such as poverty, conflict, ethnic and class inequalities, or rights to cultural representation, which affect musical cultures, do not exist in a political void. If our goal is for the research to have a practical and social impact, we need to question the conventional neutral methods of research in music studies. Drawing on the praxis of arts activists in Asia, Freire’s ideas about education and social change, and Appadurai’s concept of “research from below,” this chapter argues for a type of activist research that is both politically engaged and scholarly. In a case study on a theater tradition that was on the brink of disappearance, it emphasizes collaboration at all levels of research with members of the community whose problems are being studied, and extension of the right to research to nonacademics. Collaborative research engaging the communities themselves can be seen as an intervention whereby communities are empowered to question and voice their opinions about their socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural development and transformation. This study is located within the wider agenda of bridging the gaps between academia and practitioner, and decolonizing collaborative research where paradigms of knowledge flow across regions rather than from North to South.

Chapter 8 provides a rational for using the feminist participatory action research method of Photovoice as a means of creating a more complete picture of “non-action in the face of injustice.” Through recruiting 54 women living in five coal-mining communities for an eight-month Photovoice project, a micromobilization context was created to study the factors that facilitate and hinder the process of “becoming an activist.” Forty-seven of the recruited participants had no prior involvement in environmental justice activism, while seven of the participants (one or two in each of the groups) were associated in some way with one of the local organizations fighting irresponsible coal industry practices in the region. The chapter presents how this project was organized, how the five communities were selected, how the 54 women were recruited, how the meetings were run, and what data were collected throughout the 8-month project and beyond. Descriptions of each of the five communities and the demographics of the participants are also included in this chapter.