Ways of Knowing

As Beloved Community announced the next phase of our work, “Investing in People, Place, and Power” we began exploring the inextricable relationship between the content of our capacity-building work, the learnings that surface from our community-engaged research, and how we engage our broader community in different ways of knowing.   

When we start training each new Participatory Action Research cohort, we ask community members to explore their current ways of knowing.  How and where do they locate knowledge in their communities, families, places of worship, work sites or even formal education?  It’s vital to their training and sense of self as a community-engaged researcher that participants can locate the sources of their own knowledge in multiple settings.  We are troubling the notion that knowledge is only created by the academy and only translated with academic tools in exclusively academic settings.  Before any research agenda, or methodologies, or questions, this is where our community-engaged research must begin.

As our YPAR and PAResearchers develop their wonderings, collect and analyse their data, we invite them to trouble another component of traditional research - dissemination.  While there are gold standards of research dissemination within the academy, we encourage community-engaged researchers to revist the sources of their own knowledge and ask themselves which media, which methods, would be most accessible to share their findings with their community.  In their different ways of knowing, they may choose to communicate their findings via in-person showcases, meetings, social media, community gatherings, and town halls.  They may choose to communicate their findings via artistic expression - poetry, song, dance, visual arts, theatre arts, and documentaries.  

Walking this path with our community has led us to explore our own ways of knowing.  We will continue to publish findings in peer-review journals and briefs and book chapters.   And we’re excited to develop The Art of Labour, our first series on artistic ways of knowing.  Based on a series of New Orleans-based community listening sessions, focus groups, town halls, and public polls, The Art of Labour will explore how visual artists depict the value of human labour, the precarity of our contemporary existence, and the good life  - what becomes possible when workers are treated with dignity and possibility.  

We invite you in to learn more about our first curatorial theme: The Art of Labour: Abundance, Despite, and our first Open Call for artists to present their work exploring themes of labour, work, value, sustainability, and contemporary life.