Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology

J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 23: 405–419 (2013)

Published online 28 November 2012 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/casp.2134

Rethinking Concepts in Participatory Action Research

and Their Potential for Social Transformation:
Post-structuralist Informed Methodological
Reflections from LGBT and Trans-Collective Projects

KATHERINE JOHNSON1* and ANTAR MARTÍNEZ GUZMÁN2

1
University of Brighton, School of Applied Social Sciences, Brighton, United Kingdom
2
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Department de Psicologia Social, Barcelona, Spain

ABSTRACT

Participatory Action Research (PAR) aims to articulate knowledge production and transformative action.
In this paper, we outline the sociopolitical background to our interest in LGBT and trans-collectives as
an important territory where PAR might make some intervention in the social conditions of LGBT lives
by transforming dominant forms of representation that have emerged from a history of psychological and
medical pathology. We present two projects, from UK and Spain that utilize post-structuralist informed
methods (interviews, photo-production, discourse analysis, narrative production) within a PAR
framework. We examine their potential for problematising representations of sexuality and gender by
reflecting on the knowledge produced and the transformative action they provoke. We rethink power
relationships inherent in PAR concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ through a post-structuralist
lens and argue that the achievements of PAR projects can be better understood as ‘co-produced artifacts’.
These (e.g. photo-exhibition) are co-owned by community members and researchers and their
deployment in different settings (e.g. community or university) impacts on the meanings they convey
and the action they provoke. Finally, we argue that through the use of post-structuralist methods PAR
can enable effective transformative action, but caution against the practice of reinstating normative
representations in the invitation to participate under specific identity categories (e.g. LGBT, Trans, mental
health service user). PAR projects can do this by considering naturalized definitions of who is vulnerable
or marginalized as the object and field of social transformation, and the starting point for collective and
political action. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Key words: PAR; LGBT; post-structuralist; qualitative methods; representations

*Correspondence to: Katherine Johnson, University of Brighton, School of Applied Social Sciences Brighton,
United Kingdom.
E-mail: K.E.Johnson@brighton.ac.uk

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 3 September 2012
406 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH: THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

Participatory Action Research (PAR) aims to articulate knowledge production and

transformative action and assumes interdependence between action and research
(knowledge) (Lewin, 1946; Fals Borda, 1993). This perspective also emphasizes the idea
that the knowledge produced should be meaningful and relevant to the people involved
in the research and the contexts in which it is being produced (Fals Borda, 2001; Montero,
2003). The participation of individuals or groups involved is a key principle aligned with
the emancipation and empowerment goals of action research, whereby research is not for
producing knowledge alone but for promoting research praxis that contributes to issues of
social justice, as well as ‘strengthening the capacity of the individual to play the role of actor
in his or her own life’ (Miller & Rose, 2008 p. 106). Yet, concepts of participation and
empowerment are difficult to define despite their long history of association with liberation
social movements (e.g. Martín Baró, 1996; Montero, 2000; Burton & Kagan, 2005),
and their invocation has been criticized for reenacting, rather than neutralizing, power
differentials as it is the researcher who intervenes in order to ‘empower’ those who are
‘disempowered’. As Miller & Rose (2008 p. 107) note ‘Under the sign of empowerment,
one can observe the redeployment of the whole panoply of psychological technologies for
reforming conduct in relation to particular norms’.
Nevertheless, the participatory tenet is crucial to community psychology perspectives as
it represents the intention to reconfigure traditional roles attributed to the subjects of a
research process. Here, participants acquire an active and creative role, participate in defining
problems and generating transformation strategies, and provide local and experiential
knowledge about the issues being addressed. At the same time, the researcher is
required to move from the position of an outsider to an involved participant
(Greenwood & Levin, 2007) such that the research becomes a collaborative process between
researchers and members of the community or social group (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000).
Consequently, within the literature on action research, there is an assumption that
empowerment can be promoted by democratizing the power relationship between
the researcher and the researched (Boog, 2003), and this should be achieved for both the
individual and the collective. To assess the success of a PAR project in meeting its
empowerment goals or making some form of transformative impact necessitates a reflexive
and cyclical standpoint linking action and reflection, theory and practice, so that they
continuously feedback to each other (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). Thus, a central tenet of
the reflexive cycle is to assess the extent to which empowerment has been achieved both
during and after the research process through analysis of the research produced, its impact
on the individuals and groups involved, and its effectiveness for social action. Finally, it
should be remembered that PAR is not a research method in itself, rather an approach to
research, or methodological space, that aspires to certain principles including participation,
collaboration, and transformation. Thus, a variety of methodological devices and methods
can be used in the research process that will impact on the reflexive loop between
participation and action research. Therefore, knowledge of a range of methods and techniques
and a sense of adventure for implementing and evaluating their effect is also an important
quality in developing skills in PAR.
For the reasons discussed above, PAR has been proposed as a useful and valuable
methodological approach for working with groups and communities described as
marginalized or oppressed as a means to explore forms of recognition and representation

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 23: 405–419 (2013)
DOI: 10.1002/casp
 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 407

while seeking to promote changes in concrete and local conditions. Collectively, LGBT
people are noted as having a shared history of marginalization and oppression that
stretches back for over 150 years (Eribon, 2004). They are also seen as a group that
continues to be at risk of being marginalized or oppressed both within society and psychology
itself (Harper & Schneider, 2003; Orford, 2008). Therefore, the field of gender variance
and sexual diversity is an important territory where PAR might make some intervention in
the social conditions of LGBT lives. In the following sections, we outline the sociopolitical
background to our interest in LGBT and trans-collectives before describing two projects
(UK and Spain) that utilized different methods within a PAR framework. Here, we examine
the methods used in an attempt to address issues of LGBT representation and reflect on the
knowledge produced and the potential for transformative action. In the final section, we will
draw on our theoretical and methodological observations to revisit the assumptions and
principles of PAR outlined above.

GENDER VARIANCE AND SEXUAL DIVERSITY AS SOCIAL

TRANSFORMATION TERRITORY

For LGBT communities and Trans-collectives, the discursive and symbolic devices
associated with our bodies, desires, and identities are not merely forms of representation
and sociability, but central to our daily lives. This is because representational devices
(such as texts or images) constitute the territory on which our sociopolitical positions are
articulated. We find this relationship in the way identity politics are constrained or enabled,
the way material resources are available to us or forbidden, the relationships we can
establish with institutions and other social agents, and, ultimately, at the frontiers of
exclusion or inclusion within a particular context. Thus, names, categories, images, and forms
of gender and sexuality stereotypes with which these collectives understand themselves, and
are understood by different social actors, do not only work as a means of communication, but
play a key role in drawing a specific map of social relations. Consequently, the establishment
and transformation of sex and gender labels and categories is a crucial point for the
sociopolitical agenda of LGBT communities.
As we know, same-sex sexual relationships have been conceived and experienced in
very different ways depending on the meanings, languages, and social codes that organize
same-sex sexuality practices in a particular culture or moment in time. For instance,
homosexuality was depathologized in 1973, but this was soon replaced with concerns over
the psychological adjustment of lesbians and gay men to their own homosexuality in the
form of ‘internalized homophobia’ (Kitzinger, 1987), and contemporary research focuses
on the increased ‘suicidal risk’ for LGB people in statistical analyses of the relationship
between sexuality and mental distress (King et al., 2008). Thus, while homosexuality
has been unleashed from a coupling with mental illness, the focus on the psychological
well-being of LGB people continues to promote a vision of problematic mental health.
The point here is not to negate the materiality of individual experiences of distress but to
suggest that the dominance of psychological discomfort and/or the ‘at risk of suicide’
account in representations of same-sex identities creates particular conditions for subjectivity
in the absence of alternative accounts. Many psychologists show concern about the
psychological health of LGBT people, but the gay affirmative interventionist approaches of
psychotherapy (see Langdridge, 2007 for discussion) inevitably promote transformation of

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 23: 405–419 (2013)
DOI: 10.1002/casp
408 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

self rather than transformation of the social order that is frequently cited as being the source of
the distress (Warner, McKeown, Griffin, Johnson, Ramsay, Cort & King, 2004). Another ex-
ample can be found in the way the psychiatric category Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is ap-
plied to trans people and continues to constructs and construe trans experience within a
medical discourse despite attempts to reclaim subjectivity and control of interventions via
transgender political strategies (Johnson, 2007a). The existence of this category has a marked
influence on the lives of trans people: on how to experience their bodies, build their identities,
relate to institutions, on what health services they have access to, what legal prerogatives and
transitional paths are possible, as well as many other aspects directly related to the existence
and exercise of the diagnosis. Therefore, GID generates powerful boundaries for trans
peoples’ everyday experiences and opens spaces for medical recognition while conditioning
important resources for transitioning (Missé & Coll-Planas, 2010). Thus, while much psycho-
logical research in the area of LGBT lives is well-meaning in terms of trying to document
trends in well-being and campaign for service provision, it does little to transform dominant
forms of representation or the nexus of social relationships by which LGBT people become
defined.
Against this theoretical background, we undertook two projects that sought to promote
forms of social transformation by working with a LGBT group and a Trans-collective,
while also seeking to make some modest intervention in the problem of representation.
The purpose of drawing observations from these two projects together in this paper is first,
to compare the principles of PAR as they have been implemented in the context of a LGBT
community group and Trans-collective and second, to generating a set of theoretical
and methodological reflections to better inform the use of PAR as a social and political
intervention strategy. Prior to this, we describe how these have been activated in the
projects in Brighton, UK, and Barcelona, Spain.

OUR PARTICIPATORY PROJECTS

The first project was carried out with a group who access a LGBT mental health advocacy and
support group, in the city of Brighton, UK. The second project was carried out with a group of
trans people (some of them activists) in the city of Barcelona, Spain. Both researched
experiences with people who have a significant relationship with the medical institution,
who are or have been under some kind of psychiatric treatment or have been diagnosed with
a psychological disorder. In the case of trans people in Barcelona, this link is explicitly related
to the GID diagnosis and the hormonal and surgical medical treatment for sex reassignment.
In the case of the LGBT group in Brighton, this link is primarily to participants’ self-disclosed
suicidal distress and is also associated with a set of psychosocial distress diagnoses
(such as depression), some of which were being treated or regulated with drugs.

Project One: Understanding and transforming LGBT mental health

This project details observations from an ongoing relationship with a LGBT mental health
advocacy and support group in Brighton and outlines two specific exercises that produced
knowledge of experiences of poor mental health and evaluates their transformative impact
through a PAR reflexive loop. The first author has worked with the group since 2005,
and the group has co-produced two outputs, a research report documenting qualitative

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 23: 405–419 (2013)
DOI: 10.1002/casp
 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 409

understandings of suicidal distress and strategies for survival and a photographic

exhibition that was displayed in Brighton during the Pride Festival (2008) and LGBT
History Month (2011).
In the first project, following focus group discussions with members of the support
group, we undertook interviews around the topic of sexual/gender identity, ‘coming out’
and suicidal distress as part of a PAR knowledge-exchange exercise (Johnson, 2007b).
The final product was a detailed qualitative research document (Johnson, Faulkner, Jones,
& Welsh, 2007) that presented themes in relation to sexual identity formation, suicidal
distress, discrimination, and strategies for survival that was widely used locally by LGBT
community organizations to campaign for better mental health provision. One of the key
findings for the group was the acute isolation that many participants felt when experiencing
suicidal distress and the role that shame played in suicide attempts. Here, we reflect primar-
ily on the use of qualitative methods within the PAR framework and the impact on social
transformation and questions of representation.
The methods for producing knowledge were focus group discussions, one-to-one
interviews, and thematic analysis (e.g. Braun & Clarke, 2006). In terms of following the meth-
odological guidelines of PAR, participants took part in focus groups where they formulated
ideas about key areas to be addressed within an interview schedule. The interview questions
were approved by the participants before they took part in an interview with the researcher.
Participants played an important role in dissemination activities where the findings were com-
municated to community members and health and social care policy makers in an attempt to
reshape the local suicide prevention strategy. The primary analysis of the interviews was left
to the researcher with a member-checking role played by one of the service users and a two
project workers prior to the publication of the report. Despite the author’s reflection that the
project did not move far enough away from the researcher-participant dynamics of a conven-
tional qualitative research project, there were some positive reflections from the group including
that the published report played a role in securing further funding for future service provision by
the organization. Some participants also spoke positively about their involvement in dissemina-
tion activities via local and national presentations about the findings, and a strong rapport was
built between the researcher and community group organizers. Nevertheless, in our post-project
reflections, it was felt that the methodological techniques of interviews and thematic analysis
coupled with the expectation that the main action should be to impact on service provision
impeded the facilitation of a more democratic relationship with the participants who narrated
accounts of their experiences. The project was therefore thought to be limited in terms of
‘empowerment’ and development of new ‘self-knowledge’ for the participants, as well as in
terms of the participants’ sense of ownership of the production of the output. Perhaps, this
was because participants already saw themselves as experts in terms of informing the researcher
about their experiences of suicidal distress and the retelling of this story had no material impact
on their psychological well-being. Finally, sticking with more traditional methods the resultant
research output did little to challenge existing representations of LGBT people in terms of their
mental health. Rather, it added to the burgeoning evidence that some LGBT people have poor
mental health as a result of social discrimination. Nor did it effectively promote the transforma-
tion of these representations, something we attributed to the output’s inaccessible mode of
communication via a 20 000 word qualitative report that was targeted at a restricted audience
of policy providers.
In the second exercise, we attempted to address the limitations outlined in our reflexive–
action loop while sticking with the goals of producing knowledge about LGBT people’s

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DOI: 10.1002/casp
410 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

experiences of mental health and making a modest impact by formulating a socially

transformative output. In order to increase the likelihood of this, we introduced a new
objective to facilitate communication and connection between participants and a wider public
audience. The group met to discuss ideas, and there was a broad consensus and enthusiasm
for using the medium of photography. It has been argued that visual research methods
enhance psychological inquiry in three ways: by accessing information that is hard to reach
through other forms, such as interviews; by changing the ‘voice’ of the research by enhancing
the agency of the participant through PAR methods; by enabling research findings to reach a
wider audience by presenting in visual and verbal forms (Frith, Riley, Archer, & Gleeson,
2005). The researcher explained to the group the principles of photo-voice (Wang & Burris,
1997) and photo-elicitation (Radley & Taylor, 2003), and this stimulated the development of
a modified approach that incorporated elements of both methods. It was agreed that we would
aim to complete the project in time to produce a photographic exhibition to be displayed
during the Pride Festival (2008). Methods were modified in order to stress equality in
participation for all group members when some might have more creative or aesthetic flair,
thus it was agreed that all participants would have three images included in the exhibition,
rather than the group picking the best images to represent them as a whole (like we might find
in photo-voice). Next, we discussed the ‘multi-modal’ nature of visual material (Reavey &
Johnson, 2008) and the importance to the group that the images were grounded in some
way to the meanings that they were trying to convey about their experiences. In order to do
this, the researcher created short, textual extracts from the elicitation interviews where
they discussed the images they had taken. These were the participants’ own words, and all
participants confirmed whether the text was appropriate for what they wanted to represent.
Finally, we left a comments box in the art gallery where the exhibition was displayed
and asked viewers to leave comments.
A key difference that emerged in our reflection on this exercise was a shift in the importance
of labelling gender and sexuality identities. The previous research report had large textual
sections focused on discussions of ‘being gay’ in the context of mental health and suicide
attempts. In contrast, in the second project, although named as a LGBT mental health project
in promotion material, participants offered only incidental representations of their ‘gender’ or
‘sexual’ identities within the actual images/texts picked for display. Instead, the exhibition
presented images/texts that reflected emotions, disaffection with psychiatric practices such
as medication, and strategies for coping via their relationships with animals, people, and
the natural environment. The analysis of the feedback left by those who viewed the exhibition
also suggested the project had enabled an ‘affective connection’ between participants
and viewers as they told stories of ‘being moved’ and ‘touched’ by the display. Again
representations of gender and sexual identities were downplayed in favour of viewers’
accounts of their own memories and narratives of psychological distress. This allowed us
to argue that the exhibition offered a modest and contingent social intervention in the field
of LGBT mental health and representations of identities via the affective realm, something
that we might refer to as ‘affective activism’ (Johnson, 2012).

Project Two: Constructing new stories for transgender subjectivity

This project emerged against a backdrop of politicization of trans-communities in Barcelona
against the continued dominance of medical and psychiatric regulation of GIDs and their
ongoing inclusion in the next generation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

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 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 411

Disorders due to be published in 2013. Thus, the project sought to make visible gender variant
subjectivities outside of this frame of pathology. It started in 2007 with a group of people
(most self-identified as trans, but not all) interested in questioning the pathological status of
transsexuality and transgenderism and promoting alternative forms of understanding their
own gender identities. Participants included transgender activists, sex workers, students,
and mental health professionals. A variety of collective activities were implemented
within the project (e.g. gender identity workshops, activist demonstrations, and alternative
information campaigns for sex/gender transitioning). Here, we focus on one of the core
activities of the group: the collective construction of first person narratives about gender
pathologization with the aim of creating alternative stories that may enable new ways of living.
The idea of using narratives emerged when previous methodological attempts to circumvent
discourses of pathologization had shown their limits (see Martínez Guzmán & Montenegro,
2010). These discursive approaches missed elements of experience and strategic maneuvers
of trans people in everyday life, as well as their ambivalent relationships with the medical
institutions. The methods failed to sufficiently account for the capacity to rearrange symbolic
and material resources to construct a particular identity trajectory. For example, the way par-
ticipants related to health services by adopting a passive ‘patient’ position while at the same
time actively promoting community networks to communicate the diagnostic standards re-
quired to achieve access to medical and surgical interventions: a technique that has elsewhere
been referred to as ‘the con’ (Billings & Urban, 1995). In a movement against this erasure of
trans subjectivities (Stryker, 1998), participants wanted to tell their personal stories and
agreed that their experiences had much to contribute to transform representations of transgen-
der people that are dominated by a biomedical discourse. The collective aim was to produce a
map of diversity in experiences, knowledge, strategies, and understandings that would open
up an array of situated and innovative forms for understanding transgenderism. Narratives, as
Riessman (2008) suggest, are privileged means to collect participants’ experience, to
account for their versions of the world: they do not seek to prove anything but to
express the truth as a point of view located in a specific time and place. Moreover,
narratives have been regarded as central to the lives of people with non-normative
genders and sexualities and have been given a useful role in fields such as community
psychology (D’Augelli, 2003; Harrell & Bond, 2006).
The method used for this was Narrative Production as proposed by Balasch and
Montenegro (2003). It is inspired by the notion of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1991)
and attempts to collaboratively articulate narratives that account for participants’ personalized
trajectories and positions. This method consists of the researcher and participant generating a
‘hybrid text’ through conversation sessions on the topic. The researcher then produces a
written text out of these conversations, called a textualization, and the participant checks
and modifies it, gradually making it agree with their point of view. After several additions,
corrections, and clarifications, the end of the loop is reached with the participant’s expressed
consent that the narrative shows their view of the phenomenon. Hence, what is collected is not
the participant’s exact words but the way in which he or she wishes her point of view to be
read by others (Balasch and Montenegro, 2003). Thus, narratives, approached as situated
knowledge, are not only considered as empirical material to be analyzed, but also as a
localized production of a particular view or theory about the issue.
To date, 10 narratives have been produced. Each narrative has resulted from several
conversation meetings (from four to six) and the constant structuring, reformulation, and
refinement of the texts by the participants. Common and significant topics have referred

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412 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

to ways of relating to their bodies outside of the man/woman binary, the reasons to
preserve and/or reject the GID category, and ideas to rethink health services and public
policies towards transgender populations. Participants also articulated stories that gave
prominence to the ways in which they deal with cultural norms and social values in their
daily life as well as via the institutional services aimed at them. They pointed to gaps in
provision, their own methods for coping with stigmatization, and what they sometimes
considered as the narrow and controlling clinical protocols that emanated from the
institutional practices in which they were embedded. Therefore, these narratives integrate
forms of representations available in the social arena but also function as spaces for the
re-appropriation and transformation of discourses on body and gender experience, pushing
further the limits of the existing representations. Rather than being read as simple stories,
these narratives can be understood as social achievements, as a way of acting within a
particular controversy. This situated perspective offers an alternative angle to approach
the problem of pathologization of non-normative identity trajectories found in dominant
academic paradigms (Martínez Guzmán & Montenegro, 2010).
Once the narratives were finished, it was collectively decided to circulate them in the
public sphere so they directly participated in the GID controversy and transgender policy
discussions in the local community. The narratives were published and distributed through
diverse media including blogs, personal web-pages, as well as academic and non-academic
publications. Some of them were recently published in a collective book about the
depathologization of transsexuality (see Miss & Coll-Planas, 2010), and this mobilization
of personalized narratives in the public domain helps us to think of them as actions or
interventions via their participation in and reformulation of community debates.

Critical observations from across the two projects

Although the methodological techniques described in each project are different, here we
wish to draw out some similarities between the use of photo-production and narrative
production in these contexts. Both methods were useful for enabling participants to
reposition or displace some of the medical conceptions and discourses with which these
people are frequently represented. For example, in the Brighton project, we see this in
the photo ‘Bleak’ (Figure 1) and the textual extract that was used to accompany it:
It was a bit of a bleak day when I took this and that was sort of how I was feeling . . . I just wanted
to be alone and not be bothered by anyone and not interact with anyone . . . I just wanted to sort of
close down and shut everyone out. Because, when I get ill, and especially when I go into hospital
. . . they expect you to talk about such personal things and you know, they get you to do it over and
over again and to people you don’t even know and they make judgements on everything you say
and so that’s why I like to go down to the sea and just pretend that I’m not with anyone and
nobody can touch me and I’m all alone. I love that.

The image of the woman sat on a deserted beach, contemplative, hood-up, on a grey
day might be construed in the context of representations of LGBT mental health as sad,
isolating, and depressing. Yet there is something powerfully defiant being constructed
here, anger at the intrusion of psychiatric services into the personal recesses of individual
subjectivity and a refusal to participate in the map of social relations drawout for the
(queer) mental health service user. In this image and the accompanying text, the participant
takes back ownership over her thoughts and feelings, however momentarily, in order to
enjoy the experience of being alone.

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 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 413

Figure 1. Bleak.

Similarly, both projects provided methodological spaces where participants took an active
and creative role, putting into play their ordinary world and everyday life experiences to
resignify the way they wanted to been seen or narrated. For example, this can be observed
in the way Mike, a transgender activist, moves his narrative away from the fixed identity
categories that are usually taken for granted:
I don’t feel myself to be either a man or as a woman. In the outside world there is no possibility to
escape these categories and, in order to communicate with people, I have no option but to choose
one. Given the two options available I usually feel more comfortable presenting myself as a man,
but I do not believe myself to be one in absolute terms. In some spaces I can inhabit a kind of
neutral or in-between position. Nevertheless, depending on the context, sometimes I talk about
myself as a male or a female depending on what is more efficient or adaptive.

This fragment shows an attempt to create new forms of living ‘in-between’ but not
reduced to either of the binary gender positions currently available. Medical discourses
that regulate access to body modification techniques require a committed investment to
transition to other gender. This account shows a more transitive and fluid form of thinking
of oneself and others that escapes the expectations of medical institutions.
Another common feature is that both methodologies produced concrete semiotic and
material devices, which were mobilized within different social and communitarian spaces.
The photographic exhibition has been displayed in a number of sites since 2008 shaping
community action and knowledge production. This product, or ‘artifact’, has informed
the teaching of research methods, mental health, and community psychology. It has been
used by the community organization to promote better mental health and accessibility to
support services, as well as in its recent airing as part of LGBT history month to serve
as a reminder of the history of oppression and pathologization that still marks the everyday
lives of some LGBT people. In the Barcelona project, the narratives produced have been
used in a variety of ways to inform reflexive-learning and activism. For instance, they
were used as didactic material for gender diversity workshops conducted by participants
interested in promoting activism, while others used the material in workshops conducted

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414 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

in schools for educational purposes. Finally, they were also used as critical testimonies in
collective reports arguing for the reformation of current legislation regarding requirements
for gender recognition.
However, our use of PAR has not been unproblematic. We have paid attention to the
theoretical reflections which argue that projects of this nature can be seen as a device for con-
trol or governmentality, brought into play by institutional powers and leading to the re-
production of the dominant social order (Foucault, 1976; Haraway, 1991). These
critiques have helped us to raise reflexive questions around our own transformative prac-
tices. In the area of social intervention, it is important to ask questions such as: in the pursuit
of community wellbeing, what implicit values determine what is beneficial and for whom?
Where do the criteria for defining problems and generating solutions come from? Under what
criteria do we assume that a community or group require an external intervention to enhance
its development and in which direction? (Brown & Jones, 2001). Equally, values and assump-
tions that rule the relationship between researcher and participant (or community) have been a
constant problematic issue when conceiving participation as well as the frequently unequal re-
lationship between scientific and popular knowledge (Ibáñez, 1996). Moreover, some authors
have also pointed out that the participation discourse can be used to legitimize decisions and
policies generated by centers of power (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Quaghebeur, Masschelein
& Huong Nguyen, 2004, Parker, 2007), and we are wary of the current co-opting of the
rhetorical devices that mark out community action by governments seeking to cut public
services and expect these to be replaced by voluntary, community groups.
Aware of the complex political implications in the use of social intervention technologies,
our involvement in these projects has sought to generate a reflexive look at our own
intervention strategies, rethinking some aspects of PAR in the light of the needs and interests
of the collectives we worked with. These reflections on our PAR practices have been trig-
gered and informed by the challenges that LGBT and Trans-collectives raised for us, by their
particular coalescence with and defiance towards a powerful social order, and the forms they
have constructed for dealing with difference and stigma by reclaiming words and images to
re-define themselves.

RETHINKING PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH

In reconsidering ‘participation and the action-research loop’, we make two observations: first,
we acknowledge the inconsistent relationship between participation and empowerment in our
projects yet highlight the importance of participation in the co-production of artifacts that
simultaneously produce meaning and action; second, in co-producing artifacts, we consider
how these continue to mutate creating new forms of meaning and action as they are utilized
for different purposes by communities and researchers. Finally, in revisiting the issue of ‘PAR
and problems of representation’, we critically reflect on our own starting points as we enter
the field of action research by considering naturalized definitions of who is vulnerable or
marginalized as both the object and field of social transformation.

Participation and the action-research loop

In our reflections with participants, we found a mixture of responses in terms of whether
the process of participation in our projects was experienced as ‘empowering’. For instance,
in the photographic project, some talked about an unbearable focus on their feelings,

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 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 415

and one person said they would not want to take part in a similar activity again.
Nevertheless, we also found support for the ongoing use of the exhibition within public
debates about representations of LGBT lives, such as the LGBT History Month in 2011.
In a dialogue with participants, several years after the original production of materials,
some talked about ‘being in a different place’, or not recognizing themselves or the
powerful feelings that inspired their original participation, while others were still deeply
embedded in similar experiences of poor mental health. The shift in subjectivity over time
can occur for multiple reasons so we have no grounds for overstating the empowering
impact of participating in these activities on the well-being of our participants, even if
for some this may have been apparent. Yet, our action-research experiences suggest that
it is possible to think of participation as a co-production of semiotic-material artifacts in
the frame of a methodological relationship. Achievements of a PAR project can be seen
as hybrid products (photos, texts, and narratives) or co-produced artifacts where
participants’ (including the researcher’s) heterogeneous interests, skills, knowledge, and
desires are combined into a collective goal that seeks to contribute to social transformation.
Participation can then be understood as a collective creative process where new (semiotic-
material) objects, such as photographic exhibitions or narrative production workshops are
fashioned and placed in a particular social context to perform certain sociopolitical actions.
In this case, the word ‘artifact’ suggests the combination or integration of art (creativity,
invention, and singularity) and fact (object, form, and reality) and draws attention to the idea
that action research, and its achievements are ‘artificially made’, co-created in local contexts.
These artifacts cannot be entirely understood as outcomes of a methodological program, as
the unveiling of the truth of participants’ underlying primal needs, or as the empowerment
of the oppressed towards self-knowledge, although they may contribute to all of these.
Rather, they are the result of a particular creative relationship, the effect of a more or
less undetermined conjunction developed within the methodological space of PAR. This
relationship combines the expected and unexpected, the explicit design and the contingent
arrangements, affects and technical resources, alliances, and resistances.
In our projects, PAR was the methodological space for the emergence of new stories
and images that generate more livable forms of representations for LGBT participants
and promote connections across identity differences. They were not the stories and images
of the people who took part in our projects, but some stories and images, possible among
many others, generated in response to the specific social conditions where they were
momentarily embedded. As such, we conceive of the PAR process and its achievements
as simultaneously action and meaning, so in considering the action-research reflexive loop,
it is not easy to differentiate knowledge production from social action. In our case, the
required transformative action was to reconfigure how LGBT and Trans-collectives are
represented. Thus, meaning and action coincide, as the new artifacts (meaning) were
simultaneously produced by projects that undertook ‘to say something to the world’ (action).
In this sense, in terms of rethinking our understandings of action research, the main
function of PAR is not to ‘bring something to light’ but to create new representations, new
relationships, and, ultimately, new possible worlds.
Second, co-produced artifacts that are co-owned by community participants and
researchers can be deployed in different settings, for example in university teaching on
research methods, in public policy presentations, or in community events to remember
histories of oppression. Rather than seeing them as fixed representations of individuals
from particular communities, we must consider how these artifacts continue to mutate,

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416 K. Johnson and A. Martínez Guzmán

creating new forms of meaning and action, as community groups and researchers use them for
different purposes. For instance, both projects have been used in events such as university
teaching or academic conferences to make methodological and practical points about the
representation of LGBT lives. In contrast, community groups have utilized the artifacts for
the purpose of goals such as securing funding for support services, and in these contexts,
different interpretations will be at the forefront of discussion. Another example about the
mutability of meaning and action can be found in the ongoing use of the photographic project.
A request was made for it to be redisplayed as part of LGBT history month (2012). The
participants were consulted, and one informed us that they would like their images displayed
again, but since they had come out at trans and were transitioning from female-to-male, they
wanted their new (male) name assigned to all future displays. This had the immediate effect of
transforming the only previous representation of sexuality in the exhibition (where a named
female participant referred to her girlfriend in a text extract) into a representation of a
heterosexual relationship. To some viewers, given the context of a LGBT history month
event, this might appear ‘queer’, while for others, it may increase the possibility of this
person being read as heterosexual and therefore transgendered. These were contingent
transformations that impact on the future presentation and reception of the exhibition,
demonstrating how ongoing participation increases the possibility of mutation in meaning
and action and how we should never read representations as fixed accounts of individuals
from particular communities.

Participatory Action Research and problems of representation

Another way in which these research experiences have helped us to rethink our PAR practice
has to do with the assumed concepts used to trigger social transformation projects,
particularly the conception of who we work with and how this organizes action. While
promoting ‘participation’ where participants are invited to identify their needs and define
problems, the identity positions from where the PAR relationship is weaved (e.g. LGBT,
Trans, mental health service user) are frequently not called into question, despite in this case
being a key part of the problem. Very often, for an intervention project to be interested in a
community or a collective, it is necessary that they are conceived beforehand in a particular
manner, attributed with specific identities or traits (of vulnerability, precariousness,
dependence, or disadvantage) that make the intervention project relevant and justifiable.
However, this approach risks leaving out of the picture the important issue of addressing
the very definition of the subjects involved. As in the projects we have presented, this problem
is central if we wish to propose a radical and effective social transformation of dominant
forms of representation by which LGBT people become defined. In other words, PAR often
embarks on social transformation projects assuming preconceived definitions regarding the
people it works with and by re-invoking them contributes to the calcification of these identity
positions. For instance, an observation made about the original photographic exhibition was
that participants did not actively chose to display text/image combinations about their identity
as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or trans. The only representation was through a textual reference
to ‘my girlfriend’ by a female participant in an image/text combination that focused on feel-
ings of trust in relationships. Even in the wider set of images, any symbolism of being LGB
and/or T was captured incidentally. Although the starting point had been to provide represen-
tations of LGBT people with mental health problems in order to tackle stigma about non-
normative gender and sexuality identities and the resultant impact on mental health, the

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DOI: 10.1002/casp
 Rethinking PAR in LGBT and Trans-Collective projects 417

artifacts that were co-produced were about mental health and not minority gender or sexuality
identities. Similarly, the examples discussed earlier in this paper demonstrate how both pro-
jects inadvertently managed to subvert the calcification of existing identity representations by
co-producing occasions that ‘escaped’ or defied medical constructions and intrusions into ex-
perience (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008). However, this reflection on what
emerged suggests we need to be cautious about the starting points in action-research projects
and consider naturalized social definitions of who is vulnerable or marginalized as both the
object and field of social transformation.

CONCLUSION

The research experiences we have been involved in have invited us to think about the
potential of PAR to expropriate authority discourses (medical, academic, and social) within
which LGBT people are so often objectified. The projects discussed demonstrate that
the methodological devices deployed within action-research projects impact on the way
participants, and researchers are able to reformulate representations, offering momentary
escapes from the dominant representations that constitute the territory on which our
sociopolitical positions are articulated. Therefore, as others have stated, methods matter
(Foster-Fisherman, Nowell, Deacon, Nievar, & McCann, 2005), and methodological
reflection is crucial for those working to transform gender and sexuality representations
and the place of marginalized groups in the social order. By turning the spotlight on our
PAR practice, we also note our own disposition to be transformed as professional subjects,
as social psychologists. Reflexive gestures need to be directed towards our languages,
technical programs, and epistemological authority, all of which are usually too ready to
unilaterally name the other as well as our selves. This reminds us of the necessity for entering
the field of social definitions and representations of LGBT lives as the starting point for
collective and political action.

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