PAR has long political and intellectual roots in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Born in the soil of discontent, PAR urges critical inquiry as a tool for social change, in which "difference" and power relations are key lines of analysis (Brydon-Miller, & Tolman, 2001; Lykes and Coquillon, 2006; Martín-Baró, I., 1994; Rahman, 2006, 1985). PAR is, at once, social movement, social science and a radical challenge to the traditions of science. As Anisur Rahman has written, "the distinctive viewpoint of PAR [recognizes that the] domination of masses by elites is rooted not only in the polarization of control over the means of material production but also over the means of knowledge production, including... the social power to determine what is valid or useful knowledge ..." (1985; 119)

Most of our projects have been situated in schools and/or community-based organizations struggling for quality education. Research camps have been designed with youth and educators in some projects, with young people who have been pushed out of schools, with mothers organizing for quality education in communities under siege. On other projects we have created vibrant advisory boards of youth, community elders, educators and/or activists to shape the work and hold us accountable to the needs and desires of local communities. The projects include:

• studying privilege and constructions of "merit" in racially integrated suburban schools (see April Burns, this website);
• investigating the subjectivities and hetero-normative violence of white elite masculinity within exclusive private all-boys schools (see Brett Stoudt, this website);
• documenting the material and psychological consequences of opportunity gaps in wealthy desegregated schools (see Fine, Roberts, Torre, Bloom, Burns, Chajet, Guishard, Payne & Perkins, Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, 2004);
• developing school-based internships in which students in small progressive public schools investigate finance inequity and college access (see Janice Bloom and Lori Chajet)
• collaborating with mothers and youth in varied communities of the Bronx organizing for educational justice (see Madeline Perez, this website);
• mobilizing with youth pushed out of their high schools, researching the politics of the GED, the subjectivities of educational desire and meritocracy (see Eve Tuck, this website)
• facilitating research as queer youth document the sexuality climates and hetero-normativity in schools and beyond (see Darla Linville, this website)
• researching, in a longitudinal design, with urban youth, educators and parents in the midst of school restructuring (see Anne Galletta and Jennifer Ayala, this website)
• developing, with urban youth who are the beneficiaries of the Abbott v. Burke finance equity lawsuit, research projects to document the persistent inequities in their schools and communities and the power and possibilities of state-funded secondary reform (see Jennifer Ayala, Tia Burns, Stan Karp, Yasser Payne)

• The Street Life Project, a systematic historic, quantitative and qualitative analysis of the "streets" as a site of resiliency for young men of African descent (see Yasser Payne, this website)
• The Fed Up Honeys, with young women from the Lower East Side of New York 'fed up' with the stereotypes that spew across their neighborhoods (see Caitlin Cahill, this site);
• The Corporate Disease Promotion project, in which youth from elite and neglected communities document the promotion of disease by corporations selling alcohol, tobacco and low-nutrition foods (see Jessica Ruglis and Nick Freudenberg, this site)
• "Anything can happen with the police around" is a quantitative survey, produced, disseminated and interpreted by youth researchers, completed by over 900 young people on the streets of New York City, documenting their experience of police surveillance, including sexual harassment by police (see Fine, Freudenberg, Payne, Smith and Waltzer)
• The "Weight of the Hyphen" is a study of Muslim-American young women living in post-9/11 and post-"homeland security" New York City and negotiating surveillance by the State, media, community, family and self (see Mayida Zaal, Tahani Salah and Michelle Fine).

• in a women's prison in New York State, documenting the impact of college on women in prison, the prison environment and on the women's post-release outcomes; (see Fine, Boudin, Bowen, Clark, Hylton, Martinez, Missy, Rivera, Roberts, Smart, Torre and Upegui, 2001; www.changingminds.ws)
• with the children of women in prison (see Kathy Boudin; see Sarah Zeller-Berkman, this website)
• with women and men who have served long sentences in prison for violent crimes (see Carla Marquez and the ALUMNI group, this website)

A methodological stance rooted in the belief that valid knowledge is produced only in collaboration and in action, PAR recognizes that those "studied" harbor critical social knowledge and must be repositioned as subjects and architects of research (Fals-Borda, 1979; Fine & Torre, 2004; Martin-Baro, 1994; Torre, 2005). Based largely on the theory and practice of Latin American activist scholars, PAR scholars draw from neo-Marxist, feminist, queer and critical race theorists (Anzaldua, 1987; Apple, 2001; Crenshaw, 1995; Weis & Fine, 2004; Lykes, 2001; Matsuda, 1995; Williams, 1998) to articulate methods and ethics that have local integrity and stretch topographically to sight/cite global patterns of domination and resistance (Katz, 2004).

Enabling youth to interrogate and denaturalize the conditions of their everyday oppression inspires a process of community and knowledge building. As Paulo Freire (1982) eloquently argued, "the silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher but are the masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world. In this context research becomes a means of moving them beyond silence into a quest to proclaim the world." Repositioning youth as researchers rather than the "researched" shifts the practice of researching "on youth" to "with youth"--a position that stands in sharp contrast to the current neo-liberal constructions of youth as dangerous, disengaged, blind consumers who lack any type of connection. Frustrated, alienated and angry survivors of discrimination mature into active policy critics and agents engaged in conversation, confrontation and reform. Legitimating democratic inquiry within institutions as well as outside, PAR excavates knowledge "at the bottom" and "at the margins" (Matsuda, 1995), and signifies youths' fundamental right to ask, investigate and contest policies that enforce injustice (see Torre, this website). With this website we offer up the intimate details of the Participation, the Action and the Research, undertaken in difficult social institutions.

Together, we craft the research questions, challenge each other to assure that varied standpoints are represented in the original framing of the question, work through the specifics of design, data collection, analysis and products 'of use.' With varied methods, including both qualitative and quantitative tools of inquiry, an array of differences at the table, a loose-always-fragile democratic spirit holding us, and an eye on action, we raise up significant challenges to existing structural hierarchies that have been naturalized as if inevitable, and we imagine how to interrupt and re-create conditions toward justice (we draw from and are allied with "sister projects" e.g. Anand, Fine, Surrey and Perkins, 2001; Brydon-Miller, 2001; Cahill, 2004; Cammarota & Ginwright, 2002; Chawla, Clanchet-Cohen, Cosco, Driskell, Kruger, Malone, Moore and Percy-Smith, 2005; Fals-Borda, 1984; Fine, Bloom, Burns, Chajet, Guishard, Payne and Torre, 2005; Freire, 1982; Guhathakurta, 2006; Hart, 1997; NLERAP, see also Pedro Pedraza at El Centro, 2002; Ormond, 2004; Rahman, 1985; Smith, 2005). Our methods include: Participatory surveys, participant observation, intercept interviews, photo-voice, focus groups, identity maps, individual interviews, list stories, street surveys, archival and historic reviews, policy analyses, slam books, problem identification webs, "cold calls" to institutions, web-based research, and more. A sampling of our IRB forms is available on this website (which represent only a small sliver of how we conceptualize and practice ethical deliberations).

Many of our projects have been place-based, dug into the soil of vibrant communities, some historically oppressed and some extremely wealthy. But many of our projects have also been multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) to "examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time-space." (96) We have worked with youth across elite and under-financed schools; women in prison and those now released; with suburban and urban students. Youth have visited and surveyed each others' schools, crossing borders of politics, real estate and emotion, inquiring across place to make visible the spikes of injustice that pierce specific sites and to document the patterned distributions of resources, opportunities and respect that naturalize inequity across public schools in the U.S. (drawn from Fine, Tuck and Zeller-Berkman, Do you believe in Geneva?)

Our work focuses strategically on change--political, epistemological, theoretical and practice based. We deliberate together about the kinds of change we seek, whom we are trying to reach, and what products would most effectively provoke such movements. That is, we theorize audience, products and provocation, hoping that PAR will have "legs" to reframe social issues theoretically, to feed campaigns, nudge those with power, and fill historic, documented memory with yet another instance of collective, informed resistance.

Today we face what Pierre Bourdieu calls "a crisis of politics...[in which we encounter] despair at the failure of the state as guardian of the public interest." (1998, 2). Bourdieu argues, further, that the neo-liberal view of the state and the market have been represented as self-evident through "symbolic inculcation in which journalists and ordinary citizens participate passively and, above all, a certain number of intellectuals participate actively. This kind of symbolic drip feed to which the press and television news contribute very strongly produces very profound effects. And as a result neo-liberalism comes to be seen as an inevitability." (p 30)

Bourdieu insists, as do we, that social researchers--PAR researchers in particular--have a public responsibility to disrupt the sense of inevitability and to engage with communities on questions of justice and the inequitable distribution of freedom, goods and opportunities. Whether launched in schools, communities, prisons, around kitchen tables or in social movements, PAR provides a vital way of maintaining and resuscitating democracy; unleashing a diaspora of radical hope and possibility across generations. Participatory Action Research is a strategic tool by which we can interrupt the drip feed of dominant ideologies, expand our audiences, create alliances with social activists, generate products of provocation and ask, in the language of the poet Marge Piercy, how we can "be of use?" (Fine and Barreras, 2001)

So we offer here a smorgasbord of the kinds of "products" or actions taken by our works, and note that actions don't simply "come at the end." The ongoing social movements fed by these PAR projects--carried in individuals and collectives, in-site and across--are, indeed, the prime focus. But more materially, for instance, in the Changing Minds project, documenting the impact of college on women in prison, the prison environment and on the women's post-release outcomes, we authored a policy report sent to every governor in the nation and to New York State legislators, as well as to activists and academics working on the issue. We have also co-published academic articles, designed a website (see "Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum-Security Prison) from which the full report can be downloaded, and distributed 1,000 organizing brochures about the prison-industrial complex in Spanish and English for the women's prison project.

From the Opportunity Gap Project and Echoes of Brown, we produced a series of articles, spoken word pieces, a public performance of the research, with dance and youth poetry, and a DVD/Book that blends research by youth, voices of elders, choreography, history and youth performance (see Rosemarie A. Roberts, director of Echoes; and Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Fine et. al, 2004 for youth research on the politics of racial/class injustice in public education).

Monique Guishard and the MOMS youth project coordinated a project with mothers and youth in under-resourced communities of the Bronx organizing for educational justice, and produced collectively a compelling website on the history of educational organizing in the South Bronx.

Jennifer Ayala (St. Peter's College) and Anne Galletta (Cleveland State University) have been working with youth, educators and community members on a school restructuring project, and have created a museum of data. Janice Bloom (Lang College) and Lori Chajet collaborated with young New York City high school students on a student of finance inequity, and together published an article, "Urban Students Tackle Research on Inequality,"in Rethinking Schools. Subsequently, a number of the youth researchers traveled to Albany to present their findings at a State rally for finance equity.

Caitlin Cahill (University of Utah) worked with young women from the Lower East Side of New York, aka the "Fed-Up Honeys," to develop the research project "Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of young urban womyn of color"; followed by a website (www.fed-up-honeys.org); a report (Rios-Moore et al. 2004) which was distributed to youth organizations, schools and community centers around the neighborhood and policy makers; and a massive sticker campaign in which the stereotypes were exposed and challenged.

Yasser Payne (University of Delaware) and the Street Life Collective researched men who lead a street life and created a series of street conferences, and presentations in public schools.

Maria Elena Torre (Lang College) has completed a participatory project with students at an elite university, ostensibly working on 'diversity' issues and racism, during which they sponsored a massive speak-out on students' experiences with racial, sexual, class and disability-based injustice.

Sarah Zeller-Berkman is completing a PAR project with youth whose mothers have been incarcerated, and they are now consulting on New York State policy for youth affected by mass incarceration.

To conclude...

Because our work is often nested within institutions, and because it is typically launched from the perspective of those with the least power, our research collectives deliberate on "for whom?", and "toward what ends?" In the "ghostly haunts" (Gordon, 1997) of our work, we know that even with permissions, approvals and collaborations at the top, participatory action research is often quite inflammatory. As one school director admitted, "we as administrators are trying to encourage a revolution, which is an odd thing to do."

Before, during and after the PAR project, whether in prison, in schools or in communities, the ashes of vulnerability--no matter how hard we try to anticipate--fall unevenly. Because of these delicacies, throughout these projects, epistemological and ethical deliberations must be deep, continuous--bold and cautious at once--about who pays for speaking truth to power. And so we theorize audiences and change within, and audiences and change beyond local contexts.