1. Co-Constructing Democratic Knowledge for Social Justice:
Lessons from an International Research Collaboration
John Gaventa and Felix Bivens1
Introduction
Universities have a long history of supporting social change and social justice in the nations and
societies where they are located. In recent decades, however, a changing political and
economic landscape has threatened to isolate universities from societal debates on pressing
issues. As universities find themselves in increasingly precarious financial situations, they are
forced to sell their skills and the knowledge they produce to the highest bidder, rather than work
with those in the greatest need. Nonetheless, the same drivers which can cut off universities
from society can also open parallel opportunities for engagement with communities and civil
society actors. In the past decade, with the advent of knowledge economy, universities have
also reemerged as a vital force for change and development. Global networks have begun to
form which actively promote universities as agents of change. Particularly in the global south,
there is evidence of universities reasserting themselves as a force for social justice, and for
using their research and teaching to deepen democratic change.
Such a move, this paper will suggest, requires universities to think not only about social justice
in the larger world, but as also their own key role in shaping cognitive justice and knowledge
democracy. Without cognitive justice - which focuses on whose knowledge counts – the larger
struggles for social justice will not be realized. And, we shall further argue, struggles for
cognitive justice also include the need to learn and link globally with others in collaborative and
participatory ways. As our problems become increasingly globalised and interconnected across
borders and continents, the response of universities to these problems must likewise be global
in scale and understanding. Addressing complex problems from only one national, cultural and
geographic perspective is no longer sufficient. The struggle for social justice must be a
collaborative and often international endeavor.
1
This paper has been prepared in draft form for the conference on ‗Social Justice and the University‘,
University of Tennessee, April 28 – 30, 2011. Thanks to Joanna Wheeler for her comments and
collaboration. The authors may be contacted at J.Gaventa@ids.ac.uk or F.Bevins@ids.ac.uk.
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2. In this paper, we will focus on the decade-long work of the Development Research Centre on
Citizenship, Participation and Accountability (DRC), a network involving academics, activists
and practitioners from universities and think tanks in seven core countries, with dozens of others
also involved from an additional fifteen countries in the global south. The DRC took shape in
2001, emerging out of questions of how respond to the growing failures of democracy to meet
the challenges of inequality and social justice in countries of the north and south alike. We also
were concerned about the lack of democratic structures and accountability at the international
level, particularly regarding processes of globalization. In order to better understand and
respond to these challenges, the DRC aimed to produce new insights on various conceptions
and practices of citizenship and democracy in divergent national and political contexts from
around the world. As we wrote at the time:
If poverty is to be alleviated, new attention must be paid to the relationships between
poor people and the institutions which affect their lives. To do so requires re-examining
in differing development contexts contemporary understandings of rights and citizenship
and their implications for related issues of participation and accountability.
Ten years on, we have compiled over a hundred case studies which reveal a vast ecology of
democratic practices and ways through which citizens mobilize to claim their rights (www.drc-
citizenship.org.) However, the DRC is significant not only because of the outputs we produced;
we also realized along the way that we needed to build more democratic methods for producing
that knowledge. It is these innovative practices for co-constructing knowledge, across continents
and universities, that will be the focus of this paper. In particular we will hold up five lessons that
can be learned from the DRC‘s work, which relate to the ways in which universities can work
with others in pursuit of social justice. These include: a) the value of collaborative, co-
construction of knowledge; b) the importance of iterative ways of knowing which link different
forms of knowledge over time, and which ground the universal in the contextual; c) the multiple
ways of linking knowledge to action, at all levels; d) the value of linking research on democracy
and citizenship to the pedagogies of democracy and citizenship and e) finally, the implications
for the role of university researchers in this process.
Having highlighted these five aspects of the DRC experience, we want to then circle back to the
overall context in which universities are operating. We believe the lessons pulled from the DRC
experience have important and substantial implications for current debates about the role of
universities in society, offering us a new way to understand how universities can operate in a
knowledge society, in a way that the knowledge we help to create is better suited to not only to
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3. address complex global problems, but also—through the process of constructing the knowledge
itself—to empower the collaborators who have helped to create and develop that knowledge, in
the pursuit of cognitive as well as social justice.
Locating the DRC in Debates on the Role of Universities, Social Justice and Knowledge
From the ancient Indus valley to 19th century America, universities have been strong supporters
of social justice, using knowledge as a force for social change. South Asian scholar Rajesh
Tandon has written about the 8th BC university Taxila (located in what is now Pakistan), which
had as its motto ―service to humanity‖ (Tandon 2008). Likewise, America‘s rapid transition from
an agricultural to a modern economy was largely undergirded by the massification of higher
education enabled by land grant universities like the University of Tennessee. In the United
Kingdom in the early 20th century, institutions like the London School of Economics were
founded on the proposition that universities could aggressively support the development of
knowledge and government policies which could combat urban poverty. Even in this year of
popular uprisings across the Middle East, we see young, university-educated people leading the
way, using their knowledge and ideas to bring justice and change to their homelands.
However, this capacity of universities to support change and to question power in the name of
justice is increasingly curtailed because of changes in the political economy which upon which
universities depend. For decades governments have been reducing public spending on higher
education, and this trend seems to be accelerating in this new age of fiscal austerity. In the UK,
universities have just this year endured a 40% cut in funding for their teaching programs. As
universities lose state funding, they are expected to become more market-oriented, branding
and selling their knowledge or contracting with private sector companies to support them in
research and innovation for their products. These financial forces also have institutional and
social implications. Corporate practices increasingly replace university culture, introducing
flexible labor in the form of non-tenured adjunct faculty, and discourses on efficiency,
effectiveness and quality. In such a market-driven environment, Altbach (2008) argues that
universities are losing their roles as social critics and as a result their relationship with society is
―deteriorating‖ (Olsen 2000).
Moreover, the emergence in recent decades of the ―knowledge economy‖ has raised the
commercial value of certain forms of knowledge - but not all - and as a result some forms of
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4. knowledge, and some disciplines, are becoming marginalized because they are not income
earners for their institutions. Likewise, teaching at universities has become more
commercialized (Altbach and Welch 2010). University leaders are forced by financial necessity
think of students as customers and revenue streams. Capitalizing of the idea of knowledge as a
commercialized product, for-profit universities have become the fastest growing segment of the
higher education sector globally (Altbach, Reisberg et al. 2009). The focus in these institutions
is often on human capital development and professional credentialing to suit labor market
needs. In this for-profit environment, often lost is the space for teaching critical thinking and
likewise for critique of the existing system.
Although the context in which universities operate is challenging, if one looks deeper, it is also
possible to locate spaces and opportunities for engagement in social change which exist
alongside of and actually because of these same structural challenges. The idea of a
―knowledge society‖ (UNESCO 2005), not just a knowledge economy, has helped to highlight
the essential roles that universities play in human and social development:
Knowledge societies are about capabilities to identify, produce, process,
transform, disseminate and use information to build and apply knowledge for
human development. They require an empowering social vision that
encompasses inclusion, solidarity and participation (UNESCO 2005, 27).
With this idea in mind, we as members of academic community must ask, ―How can universities
create knowledge which contributes to human development, and do so in ways that are
inclusive and participatory?‖ In locations around the globe, scholars are meeting to debate the
roles and responsibilities of universities in the face of global challenges –as we are this
weekend here at the University of Tennessee. Despite the current state of higher education,
Hall and Dragne argue that ―universities remain the single largest underutilized source for
community development and social change available‖ (Hall and Dragne 2008, 271). Likewise,
de Sousa Santos maintains that universities remain a ―counter-hegemonic force‖ (2008),
particularly if they can play a role beyond the market (Ordorika 2008). Although marketisation
has driven universities into greater collaboration with the private sector, this concept of the ―3rd
stream‖—of working with actors outside of the university—need not be exclusively limited to
businesses. In the UK, the USA and elsewhere, university leaders have pushed to broaden this
concept to include partnerships with non-profit and civil society organizations (Laing and
Maddison 2007; Watson 2007).
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5. Likewise, the internationalization of higher education, which is frequently motivated by seeking
out new sources of revenue, can through the same mechanisms open up the possibility of more
collaboration and engagement with academics and universities from the around the world. This
can allow us as researchers to become more networked with the wider world.
In terms of universities‘ contributions to social justice, such an international perspective is quite
important. Over the past fifteen years of his working with the Institute of Development Studies in
the UK, Gaventa has been able to engage with universities and researchers from many parts of
the globe. In this time he has learned that very often the most innovative work is being done by
universities and researchers in the global south. If we here in the global north are not engaged
with the south, we will miss quite a lot. Particularly in the US, because of the size and richness
of our own culture, it is easy to lose track of events and developments elsewhere and to develop
an insular view of our work and of universities.
In reflecting on the past several decades, we have to admit already the tremendous influence of
southern thinkers on our work for social justice – think, for instance, of Paulo Freire‘ influence on
pedagogy and teaching (Freire 1971) or of Fals Borda‘s seminal work on participatory action
research (1984) (both of whom we had the pleasure of hosting here at the University of
Tennessee in the early 1990s). In both cases, these Southern scholars have forced us to
become more critical about our roles as academics and about the power of knowledge itself.
Who do we create knowledge with? And for whom do we create it? Whose knowledge counts?
The implications of these questions are enormous in terms of social justice, for they raise
important questions of ‗knowledge justice‘ in the pursuit of broader social justice and more
participatory and inclusive political, social and economic democracies. As Boaventura de
Santos Sousa writes, ―Social injustice is based on cognitive injustice‖ (2006, 19).
Anisur Rahman, a Bangladesh economist and researcher, many years ago called our attention
to the relationship between knowledge inequalities and other forms of injustice:
The dominant view of social transformation has been preoccupied with the need to
changing existing oppressive structures of relations in material production. But… by now
in most polarized countries, the gap between those who have social power over the
process of knowledge generation – and those who have not – has reached dimensions
no less formidable than the gap in access to means of physical production… For
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6. improving the possibilities of liberation, therefore, these two gaps should be attacked,
wherever feasible, simultaneously‘ (Rahman 1982).
Other southern intellectuals have articulated the need for ‗cognitive justice‘, as a way of
overcoming domination of certain knowledges over others. Cognitive justice recognizes the right
of other forms of knowledge to exist and co-exist. Visvanathan, an Indian scientist activist
articulates five principles of cognitive justice (quoted in Van der Velden 2004):
 All forms of knowledge are valid and should co-exist in dialogic relationship to each
other.
 Cognitive justice implies the strengthening of the ‗voice‘ of the defeated and
marginalized.
 Traditional knowledge and technologies should not be ‗museumized.‘
 Every citizen is a scientist. Each layperson is an expert.
 Science should help the common man/woman.
 All competing sciences should be brought together into a positive heuristic for dialogue.
Such ideas about cognitive justice and the need to challenge knowledge inequalities have now
become much more accepted that than they were 20 years ago. Programs of participatory
research, university-community partnerships, and community based knowledge movements
exist around the world. Yet many of these are at the local level. The challenges of knowledge
inequality become even greater when we look globally. As we face increasingly complex global
problems, knowledge from one location or one point of view is no longer sufficient to deal with
problems which manifest themselves in thousands of ways across diverse global contexts.
Knowledge must be multi-sited and pluralistic in its underlying assumptions and worldviews.
De Sousa Santos has argued, modernity must remember and recognize that an ―ecology of
knowledges‖ exist and are necessary for understanding the world in its full complexity; such an
ecology is necessary to augment the ―monoculture of scientific knowledge,‖ which has often
been understood as universal, thus invalidating alternative forms of knowing (2006). He does
not suggest the scientific knowledge itself is invalid, simply incomplete, like all forms of
knowledge. However, the recognition of this incompleteness opens up space for epistemic
dialogue between various forms and modes of knowledge which compose the ecology of
knowledge. He writes,
The ecology of knowledge aims to create a new sort of relationship between
scientific knowledge and others kinds of knowledge. It consists in granting
‗equality of opportunities‘ to the different kinds of knowledge… maximizing their
respective contributions to building ‗another possible world,‘ that is to say a more
democratic and just society (2006:21).
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7. In order to support the emergence of such an epistemic ecology, which can confront challenges
of global complexity, universities and researchers must work to build global knowledge
networks, based on principles of cognitive justice and knowledge democracy. Already a number
of global networks are developing, trying to bring universities into greater collaboration with
each other across cultures and continents, and into greater collaboration with actors outside of
university. The Global University Network for Innovation, or GUNI, supported by UNESCO, has
built a network of scholars asking about the roles and responsibilities of universities in human
and social development. The Global Alliance for Community Engaged Research, GACER, is
bringing together practitioners of participatory action research and other forms of change-
oriented inquiry to share methods and to deepen their capacities for learning on a global scale.
Likewise the Talloires Network is bringing together university presidents and vice chancellors to
lobby them to position their institutions as forces for community engagement and social change
more broadly. Such far-reaching university networks have the potential for creating knowledge
which can respond to problems of global scope and complexity. As Taylor writes, ―through their
contribution to the social construction of knowledge, higher education institutions have the
potential to explore these complex problems and to help shape new goals within a context of
globalizing economic forces (Taylor 2008, xxix).‖
In this paper we want to touch on one such complex, multidimensional problem—what has been
described as the global ―democracy deficit‖—and how a collaborative network of academics and
activists evolved to better understand and respond to that problem. The democracy deficit has
several interrelated dimensions. In long established democracies, such as the US and the UK,
our democratic cultures are declining, as the governments become less accountable and
responsive to citizens‘ needs. Likewise at the international level, many of the most powerful
organizations which shape the rules and the political economy of globalization, such as the
World Bank and the World Trade Organization, have no electorates and no accountability
mechanisms (Nye 2001). The Citizenship DRC was formed to interrogate this idea of a
democracy deficit. Perhaps more importantly, we wanted to question the very concepts of
democracy and citizenship. Were the traditional views of democracy and citizenship sufficient to
deal with the challenges of participation and representation in a globalised world? Was part of
this perceived deficit a result of other forms and practices of citizenship, which existed outside of
the western model, simply not being recognized? (For further on this theme see Gaventa 2006).
In order to understand this issue in all its nuances and possible variations, it was necessary to
build a research process which would be able to look globally and to identify new practices and
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8. conceptualizations of citizenship which might exist outside of or challenge prevailing notions.
Over the course of working together for ten years in this research collaborative, what became
very evident is that much of the most exciting thinking and practice about citizenship and
deepening democracy is indeed coming from locations in the global south. While the DRC
produced much new knowledge about citizen action and mobilization in this time, along the way
we also learned a great deal about how research could be conducted differently. We found that
our work was deeply enriched by the participatory inclusion of voices and methods from all of
our partners. Researching democracy meant democratizing our research process (Ansley and
Gaventa 1997).
In this way, the theme of the work became its methodology as well. Producing democratic
knowledge required a democratic process, and not only the inclusion of all voices in decision-
making, but also an inclusion of their different epistemic perspectives which were grounded in
specific contexts and experiences. By operating within a framework of knowledge democracy
within the DRC itself, we found that not only were our research outputs transformed, but that our
relationships to each other were likewise deepened and improved, with residual effects which
stretched into our home institutions, effecting the attitudes, pedagogies and positionalities of
many of the collaborators. In these experiences and practices of the DRC we believe there are
many important lessons and implications for the role of universities in furthering social justice
and deeper forms of democracy, here in the US and across the globe.
The Case of the Citizenship DRC
The institutions that gathered together in 2000 for the founding of the Development Research
Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability were highly diverse, and had little
experience in working together. Yet they had lofty goals:
By drawing together the insights and perspectives of a diverse team from various
disciplines in universities, research institutes and NGOs in both the north and south, the
Centre hopes to have substantial influence and impact upon the concepts, policies and
practices that will help to make citizenship rights real for poor people.
Initially convened by the Institute of Development Studies, in response to a call for proposals
from the British Department for International Development, the groups included
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9.  In Bangladesh, initially the think tank Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies
(BIDS), but later BRAC University, a university founded by one of the largest NGOs in
the world;
 In Brazil, the research center Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento
(CEBRAP), which linked academics from a number of nearby universities. (CEBRAP
was originally founded by the Brazilian sociologist Cardoso, who later became President
of the country);
 In India, the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), a large NGO founded
on principles of challenging injustice through knowledge for social change;
 In Mexico, two universities, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma (UNAM), with
partners from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (UAM), both of which had long
histories of engaging with marginalized groups struggling for social justice, especially, in
the case of UAM, in Chiappas.
 In Nigeria, the Ahmadu Bello University, led by led by the Theatre for Development
Centre (TFDC/ABU), an interdisciplinary group of researchers and activists using
popular theatre as a research and community engagement tool;
 In South Africa, an interdisciplinary group from the University of Western Cape (UWC),
convened by the Centre for Southern African Studies, within the School of Government.
The group was coordinated by the Institute of Development Studies, an interdisciplinary institute
based at the University of Sussex, with the mandate of producing knowledge and research for
dealing with global poverty. More recently IDS proclaims in its mission statement its vision of ‗a
world in which poverty does not exist, social justice prevails and sustainable growth promotes
human wellbeing.‘ It also proposed to create that vision through alliances with others, and
through ‗co-constructing knowledge ‗by developing and implementing collaborative ways of
working which engage multiple perspectives in defining problems and questions and in
generating knowledge.‘
From the beginning, then, the Citizenship DRC had a broad mission of producing research and
using that research to bring about change. Its partners were diverse, cutting across many
disciplines. Some came from within Universities, others were practitioners within NGOs. Some
had long histories already of using committed research approaches, such as participatory action
research, in the pursuit of social justice. Others came from more conventional research
backgrounds.
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10. But it was also clear from the beginning that to pursue its mission of producing research and
capacities for using knowledge to address issues of democratic justice– inclusive citizenship,
rights, accountability and participation – the network would also have to deal with issues of how
such knowledge was produced, and whose voices and agendas were to be important within the
network. The programme was to be up to 10 years long, with substantial sums of money
involved. Funded by the Department of International Development (DFID), this programme is
an example of a much larger field of development research, much of it funded from the north,
but with the stated goals of promoting development processes for overcoming poverty in the
global south. Yet, historically, such research had been carried out with little active engagement
from those from the global south: research questions, methods and issues were set from the
north; southern researchers were often treated as subcontractors to gather data, but with little
voice in how it was analysed or used. In such a system of research, often linked to an
extractive set of relationships deeply colonial in their nature and roots, there is little scope for
‗cognitive justice‘.
The Citizenship DRC set out to be different. It sought to develop a way of working in which all
partners could help to construct the research agenda and work with one another - as well as
with the communities which they were researching - to gather, analyse and use knowledge to
engage with the issues of rights and democracy which it sought to explore. At the same time, it
did so within the constraints of funding from a powerful single donor, and few pre-existing
relationships of working together in a different way.
We have written elsewhere of how the Citizenship DRC sought in the first few years to shift this
top-down, northern driven way of producing knowledge to a more collaborative and participatory
way of working (Brown and Gaventa 2008). In particular, we have explored how such a diverse
set of partners could build a collaborative transnational network across such diversity. Based on
a review of the work of the Citizenship DRC after its first 5 years, this earlier work focused on
the process of building shared values and purposes, developing relationships and trust, creating
a more decentralised and participatory architecture, which could distribute formal and informal
power across the network. This earlier article concluded:
In a world of expanding problems of transnational governance and escalating needs for
knowledge and practice innovations, transnational action research and learning
networks can play increasingly vital roles. As national and global societies become
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11. increasingly knowledge based, such networks offer opportunities for constructing
knowledge, practices and policies that respond to a global constellation of
stakeholders.... And, as citizenship is increasingly taking on global dimensions,
constructing learning networks which learn from and help to strengthen transnational
citizen alliances will be critical if these new forms of citizen action are to deal effectively
with the challenges of a rapidly changing and globalizing world (Brown and Gaventa
2009, 25).
By the end of its second five year period, in 2010 it was clear that the work of the Citizenship
DRC had contributed in a number of ways towards its goals. The accomplishments of the
network were considerable in a number of respects (for an overview of this work see
http://www.drc-citizenship.org/system/assets/1052734700/original/1052734700-cdrc.2011-
blurring.pdf.)
 First, the Center produced a huge amount of research on strategies of citizen action and
civic engagement, especially in the global south. Representing over 400 research
outputs, and over 150 original case studies, the work included an 8 volume book series
on the theme of Claiming Citizenship: Rights, Participation and Accountability
(http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/citizenship.) Much of this work was written by southern
researchers and activists, who had not previously published in the international arena
and covered a range of topics on inclusive citizenship, mobilising for democracy and
national policy reform, social movements, global citizenship, science and citizenship,
accountability and natural resources, and participatory governance.
 Second, the group developed a series of innovative methodologies for action research
on rights and citizenship, ranging from participatory surveys, to participatory video,
public fora, theatre and more.
 Third, the group was able to link its research to public debates and action on relevant
issues in each of the countries involved and at the national level. These ranged for
instance to using research to address health policies for indigenous people in Brazil, to
issues of violence in Mexico, Jamaica, and Brazil, to debates on constitutional reform in
Nigeria, to mobilising approaches on local NGOs in Bangladesh, to strengthening of
social justice committees in India. At the international level, the group contributed to
broadening the discourse on the role of citizens in development and democracy, and on
the nature of state-society relations.
 Fourth, according to the group members, the process also helped to strengthen the
capacities of those involved. In some cases these were about research capacities, such
as learning new approaches to research or becoming aware of new concepts, but in
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12. other cases they were about institutional strengthening, building south-south
relationships, or shifting the mindsets of what research for social justice could be.
By almost any count, then, the programme met its original goals of producing high quality
research, using that for policy and practice influence and strengthening the capacities of the
researchers involved. Much more could be written about each of these, and much has been
already – in the reports to the donors and others involved.
However, to tell the story of what the Citizenship DRC produced would be to tell only part of the
story. Looking back over the history of the group‘s work together, network participants
constantly said that it was how the group had worked, which also had had a huge impact.
Not only had it used knowledge to deepen understanding of citizen action, but it had done so in
a way that was transformational to many of the researchers, and to the understanding of
themselves and their institutions for how to do research in pursuit of social and democratic
justice. During the course of 2010, two retreats were held which allowed us to reflect on what
had been unique about the process of working together – one which had helped the network
move from a disparate set of individuals and institutions, to a highly collaborative network that
could help to produce knowledge for change. It is these lessons on the ways of working,
rather than the content of the work, which we shall explore further here, as we believe that they
give us insights into how to create inclusive knowledge networks, across universities and
activists, based on principles of cognitive justice, linked in turn to larger issues of social and
democratic justice. 2 These lessons focus on a) the value of collaborative, co-construction of
knowledge; b) the importance of iterative ways of knowing which link different forms of
knowledge over time, and which ground the universal in the contextual; c) the multiple ways of
linking knowledge to action, at all levels; d) the value of linking research on democracy and
citizenship to the pedagogies of democracy and citizenship and e) finally, the implications for
the role of university researchers in this process.
1. Research as collaboration and co-construction.
In many settings, research and knowledge production are highly hierarchical affairs, full of
unequal power relationships as well as conflicts and fractiousness. There are often senior more
powerful researchers who frame the questions, analyze the results, receive the credit, and junior
2
This section draws in part from work on a parallel paper with Joanna Wheeler, ‗Using Collaborative
Research for Social Change: Tensions, challenges and lessons‘, forthcoming IDS Working Paper.
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13. researchers who play data gathering roles and more service oriented roles. There are issues of
powers across disciplines – with battles over which way of knowing is thought to be most
important played out competitively against others in numerous often subtle ways. Power
relationships embedded in the research process may translate into highly hierarchical research
institutes, often reflecting rather than challenging, dominant power relationships in the broader
society. And ultimately, there is the fundamental power relationship between those who
research, and those whose lives are the objects of that research – a relationship long
challenged by advocates of participatory research and those who argue for democratic and
inclusive ways knowledge production.
For researchers who came from research settings laden with such hierarchical and often
combative power relationships, we found that the Citizenship DRC offered a different kind of
space – one that attempted to be collaborative across many differences, be they between
researchers and practitioners, north and south, disciplinary and methodological divides. Rather
than a competitive environment in which one approach or researcher produced the ‗best‘
knowledge on behalf of others, we sought to co-construct knowledge, both across the network
itself, and between the researchers and the community stakeholders involved.
Within the network, collaboration took many forms. From the beginning, the research project
was somewhat open ended. While we had a set of themes we wanted to pursue – issues of how
citizens claimed rights in different contexts – we did not start with specific hypothesis or
research questions pre-defined by the lead researchers. Rather, in a process that some
colleagues initially found unsettling, these were generated together, drawing upon the deep
knowledge and perspectives from researcher and practitioners across many different contexts
and disciplines. Researchers then pursued themes in working groups, which themselves
became mini-epistemic communities, where ideas, draft papers, methods were shared and
discussed either face to face or through e-dialogues and other electronic forms of interaction.
Where possible, meetings were held in different field settings, not always in the UK, from where
the project was coordinated, giving researchers an understanding of each other‘s institutions
and society‘s. Drafts of papers were discussed in writeshops and workshops, and rigorous yet
supportive peer review became a valued feature of the network. Collaboration even extended to
the governance of the program, with a steering committee made up of representatives of all the
key partners, and key decisions, including over budgeting of resources, made together.
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14. For many researchers, especially for those coming out of deep conflicts and social divisions
(e.g. apartheid in South Africa, caste divisions in India), or other hierarchies of class,
knowledge, and gender which pervade all of our societies, the DRC encounters offered a
different kind of space, On the basis of this experience, researchers could then also imagine
how things could be different in their own settings. One researcher said she began to
understand collaboration itself ‗as a political project‘, as it challenged lines of power in the
research and knowledge production process. Others pointed out that in an international
knowledge system, where southern researchers often are mere spokes feeding into a northern
knowledge hub, collaboration and co-production together – across south-south lines – was a
way of challenging global hegemonic relationships.
Others began to apply such approaches in their own settings, and we began to see ripples
occurring as they sought to adapt or replicate these ways of working elsewhere. These
attempts at replication were not easy, as sometimes, they felt, it was easier to establish ‗global;
moments of collaboration, then to do so embedded in their own settings and institutions.
As a South African researcher said,
If you look at the DRC‘s collaboration, its political act was to develop a new
global agenda. Locally, we tried to implement DRC type processes where there‘s very
little collaboration, where the political environment is very fractious. So, there‘s the
opportunity to shift political agendas, to get people together. The DRC‘s ways of working
– it‘s not simply facilitation. This became clearer to me in our discussions…
Another researcher attempted to model the ways of working she had experienced in the DRC in
working with communities she was researching. She reflects
I think I value the fact that I‘m now able to engage in collaborative work. We‘ve struggled
with it, but we‘ve managed to achieve some things too. The very act of being
collaborative is an important end. I also value that I am now able to be more of a
facilitator, building communication between different groups. I don‘t know if I‘ve become
more political, but certainly, I‘ve become more sensitive. This whole culture of DRC –
you have to be accountable. That‘s changed what I do with my research, what I want to
do with my research.
Others pointed out that the collaborative and co-productive way of working was deeply related
to the kinds of knowledge being produced. Knowledge produced for its sake, without concerns
for how that knowledge is used or of cognitive justice in the research process, can perhaps be
gained through less collaborative and extractive relationships. However, critical knowledge,
14

15. which can be used to challenge and change underlying power relationships, often must also
involve changing the relationships of the researchers to their subjects as well. In this way of
working, the research process, and research workshops become ‗spaces of encounter‘. As one
researcher working with lower caste dalit groups in India commented,
Our reflexive workshops embodied spaces of empowerment – where the researchers
and the practitioners all come together, and through participation and dialogue, and each
responding [and participating] we arrived at solutions [and agreements] on social
justices issues…[these were] lively spaces [full of] exchanges of ideas.
2. From the contextual to the conceptual: Research as a process of iteration
Building collaborative, democratic relationships in the research process takes time. The
Citizenship DRC was fortunate to have some ten years in which researchers could work
together in the development and pursuit of a common agenda. This time not only allowed the
opportunity for forging relationships of trust and collaboration, but it also allowed for a process of
‗iteration‘ to occur in the generation of knowledge. Often times in the global knowledge
enterprise, theories, concepts or discourses on topics like democracy and citizenship may arise
deeply de-linked from local realities, yet in turn often have the power to shape norms and
expectations within them. For us, iteration was important in that it became a way in which
research concepts and theories could both arise from local contexts and in turn be grounded
and deepened within them. In a global system characterized by highly unequal forms of
knowledge power, research which is global in nature but linked to the local, and which grows
from the local but speaks to the global, is itself an important part of building cognitive justice.
Much global research on citizenship and citizen action constructs citizens (and their agencies
and identities) as byproducts or residuals of other institutions. Thus a market oriented approach
to development argues for getting the market right, and constructs citizens as consumers who
then will have market choice. A statist approach argues for getting the state institutions right,
and then citizens can exercise voice as users of its services. Even an NGO civil society
approach often pays more attention to the organizational forms of civil society, and relegates the
citizenry to their ‗beneficiaries.‘ Our research approach sought to reverse the telescope. Rather
than see citizens as residual of other institutions we sought to take a ‗seeing like a citizen‘
approach in which took a grassroots, locally grounded perspective and looked upwards and
outwards at the institutions which affected their lives. Such an approach often gave a very
15

16. different perspective than that found in the more top down ways of knowing (for more on this
see Gaventa, 2010).
Yet at the same time, we wanted to produce something more synthetic than over 150 separate
case studies. By looking across these cases, in each working group and in our synthesis
process, we wanted also to be able to draw broader lessons and themes, and speak to a set of
more international normative, conceptual and policy debates about rights, citizenship,
democracy and accountability. The challenge was to remain both rooted in local empirical
understanding, while also being able to address larger cross-cutting national and global issues.
In dealing with this dilemma, a key approach was found in the ways of working in the several
working groups which pursued critical themes across our research. Each of these groups
ended up going through a process of moving from research question, to broader concepts, and
back again.
 Generation of questions: In most cases the questions and themes for working group
were generated through some sort of participatory process involving researchers close
to the contexts and countries involved - a very different process from a research
approach which specifies research questions or hypotheses in advance.
 Sharpening the questions and the frame: we used various methods including various
forms of literature review, field testing, e-dialogues, follow up workshops and concept
notes to sharpen the approach;
 Choosing cases; working with them: In many instances, the cases for study were
chosen because researchers had other ongoing links to them, and they were seen as
places for action and change, not just places for study. As a result, we often had very
diverse cases and diverse methods for looking at them. The synthesis process had to
deal with that diversity.
 Sharing, critiquing and re-framing: Most groups had mid-point workshops in which
researchers shared early drafts of their material. This often also led to a re-framing and
re-conceptualising of the project itself, based on feedback from other researchers
working in other contexts.
 Re-writing case studies; deepening analysis: Following the global workshops,
researchers often went to the cases, with new questions and with deeper probing, based
in part on the need to be able to compare this case with other trends that were
16

17. emerging. In this process there were of course tensions and trade-offs between telling a
local story vs conforming to an overall frame emerging from the group.
 Synthesising findings: In most cases, each of the working groups worked together to
generate synthesis across the findings in a participatory way. Again, this process differs
a great deal from one in which researchers from different countries feed their findings
into a central hub for synthesis in which they have no role.
 Final writing and publishing: moving to the final published product often was a
challenge for editors and contributors alike. The goal was to include as many of the
products emerging from the local research as possible. In many cases, however,
national and local researchers had not written for international audiences, also posing
some challenges of balancing inclusive voice with traditional understanding of ‗quality‘ in
global research projects.
 Generating new questions: Over the life of the DRC, the work of one working group
often contributed both to the questions and ways of working of subsequent working
groups. In this sense knowledge was both generative and accumulative.
 Sharing ‘downwards’ as well as ‘upwards’. For most of the researchers, as we shall see
in the next section, generating research for an international audience was only one
purpose. Equally, if not more important, was the way that the knowledge was used by
and with those whose lives were being researched.
The above stages of the research process are not necessarily unique – they follow a cycle that
will often be found in research handbooks. However, what made this unique for many was the
opportunity of bringing collaboration- across south-south, research-practice, methods and
disciplines, into this process of local – international –local generation and use of knowledge.
In this research process, the role of the researcher often took on a new dimension, as the
mediator between the local and the global communities. In related work in the project on the
challenge of inclusive citizenship in a globalised world, we wrote and theorised both about the
critical roles that inclusive knowledge framing and democratic, accountable mediation played in
building global social justice (See Gaventa and Tandon 2010). In reflections on the research
process, we began to see our own roles as knowledge mediators in a local-global knowledge
system, in which we were helping to shape whose knowledge could be seen and heard, and
with what perspective, as also an important act of cognitive justice.
17

18. The open-ended iterative process also implied another different way of working, as it implied the
need to think of the research process as a journey, whose outcomes and destination could not
clearly be predicted. Taking a ‗seeing like a citizen approach‘, and then working upwards and
outwards in collaboration with others, means that the researcher must lose some control on the
process, to be willing to respond to and be led by others. The research process as one of
engaging with the world requires a humility, researchers said, to listen, and in that humility
comes the research encounter which allows one to learn and act with others. As one Mexican
researcher said in our reflection workshop on this link between humility, collaboration and
iteration between context and concept:
I think that humility tends to be a condition for opening this space for collaboration. It
seems to me that the iteration between the conceptual and contextual is important – this
hierarchy in European academia of concepts being more important than contexts. The
hegemony of a conceptual, detached knowledge is brought into question. Though the
practice of iteration can be seen as a dialogue between forms of knowledge, wherein
overarching conceptual frameworks are open to transformation, the iterative process is a
way of humbling the conceptual frameworks and opening them up for different ways of
working. We also know that one of the important components of the working methods is
the breaking down of hierarchies. I think you‘ve achieved an important inroad for the
humbling of the academic community and for the humbling of academic practices.
3. Communicating knowledge for social action and policy reform
A third principle which emerged in the Citizenship DRC way of working, but is not unique to it,
involves the question of how research may be linked to change – through the stimulation of
action, advocacy, policy or attitudes and beliefs. In more mainstream ways of thinking about the
transmission of research to policy or public action, ‗research utilization‘ is a linear process –an
often one which does not question the relationship of the researcher to those whose lives are
being researched, or whose policies are being influenced. The normal flow is that a researcher
produces high quality research, which then is communicated in professional journals and to
professional audiences, but which then may also be shared with various publics to bring about
change. In more recent versions of this, the researcher may play the role of public intellectual,
who brings knowledge and expertise to various publics (reference Burawoy 2004).
In the Citizenship DRC, while there were certainly elements of this approach in our work, over
time, this linear approach began to be challenged. Rather, more in line with thinking in more
participatory research, we began to see that research process itself as one which could not only
18

19. produce knowledge but which could also, and simultaneously, contribute to processes of
change.
There are many examples:
- In Nigeria, researchers from Amehdu Bello University used participatory theatre in
dozens of villages across the country to understand local perceptions of citizenship,
rights and government accountability. The ‗performances‘ also became ways in which
space was created for villagers to articulate key issues, some of which would be risky to
do in other ways. Researchers also followed the process with development of
community action plans, based on issues that had emerged from the research. At the
same time, the local research fed into national dialogues and debates, including linking
to processes of Constitutional reform in which the very meaning of the concept of
citizenship was at stake (Abah et al 2009).
- In Brazil, researchers used participatory video with youth in the favelas to understand
the ways in which violence affected perceptions of citizenship and citizen action. The
youth were then able to produce films based on their own perceptions, and to create fora
through which these were shared and debated with public authorities. The local research
also fed into broader national and international debates on violence, security and
democracy, and was part of a larger working group doing similar work in other contexts
(Wheeler 2009).
- In India, researchers worked with local Social Justice Committees to understand further
the role that these committees could play. Originally established as fora for the lowest
caste or dalit members of the community to become engaged in affairs of local
governance, these bodies had largely been dormant or non-existent. Through a series of
dialogues in conjunction with local NGOs, the researchers helped to stimulate
awareness of the potential of these committees, contributing in turn to the emergence of
a strong social justice movement (Mohanty 2010).
Not all of the projects within the broader program used such participatory methods. But many
did. And over the course of the research program, researchers became much more aware and
intentional in understanding the ways in which research could contribute to change from the
very beginning of the research process. New skills were learned, such as how to do a political
analysis of constituency publics before setting out on the research process, how and when to
19

20. involve them along the way to ensure stronger ownership and use of the results, and what kinds
of research products were best used to communicate with which kinds of audiences. It became
clear that various knowledge strategies could be used to produce a spectrum of kinds of
knowledge, ranging from the instrumental, to the interactive to the critical. In all of these
processes, the researcher could play multiple roles – ranging from that of facilitator, critical
friend, translator, interlocutor, or intellectual (Benequista and Wheeler forthcoming). Such an
approach often extends the role of the researcher as a public intellectual, to that of participatory
intellectual, who works with multiple publics to gather knowledge that informs policy and
practice, rather than only sharing his or her knowledge to ‗enlighten‘ others.
4. Constructing democratic citizenship in the classroom
As researchers from around the world were working on research projects on citizenship and
citizen action, they began to reflect on how they could build the DRC work into their teaching. At
the outset these were questions of curriculum and content, how to use DRC case studies in the
most effective ways. In some universities, curricula on democracy and citizenship had not been
updated for many years, and still reflected northern literature, drawing from very different
conceptual and normative underpinnings. There was an increasing concern that the alternative
understandings of these concepts, more deeply rooted in local contexts, was absent from the
classroom.
Over time these discussions on content evolved into wider reflections on process. Increasingly a
question began to be raised about the disconnection between the research theme, the research
process and the researchers‘ own teaching. There was a sense of disconnection of the DRC‘s
ways of working in the community, where researchers were engaging in more participatory and
collaborative forms of research, and their ways of working in the classroom, where pedagogies
of teaching democracy often in themselves were not very participatory. As a result of these
concerns, a working group on teaching and learning (T&L) democracy and citizenship was
formed, which piloted new approaches and curricula of teaching for three broad kinds of
teaching: university courses at old and new universities in Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, South
Africa, and the UK; donor-sponsored events where public officials came together as ‗champions
of participation‘ to share learning and build networks in Angola, Brazil and southern Africa; and
an NGO-led distance learning course in India.
In keeping with a fundamental premise of the DRC, the members of the T&L working group
operated from a perspective that knowledge creation was a collective process. While they were
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21. enthusiastic about using papers and case studies drawn from the body of research, they also
felt they needed to be more cognizant and intentional about engaging students‘ own knowledge
and experience of democratic agency. Spaces were created for thinking about democracy within
the classroom and in the wider contexts in which they students lived. Many of the working group
members experimented with participatory classroom pedagogies, allowing students to construct
reading lists and facilitate class discussions. Even the spatial arrangements of the classroom
itself were questioned as to their tendency to entrench hierarchical power relations and interrupt
the dialogical flow of knowledge and experience. As well students were asked to create their
own local case studies to compare with those being produced by the DRC. Informed by the
concept of cognitive justice, these educators attempted to contextualize democratic theory
within the cultural heritage and identities of their students. A South African researcher recalled
encouraging his students to contrast the idea of the social contract—rooted in the writings of
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau—with their own understandings of social relationships rooted in
indigenous ubuntu sociology, with the result that ―their enthusiasm for my course became
boundless.‖ The effect of these experiments with more democratic pedagogical methods was
transformative not only for students, but also for the researchers themselves. As one working
group participant reflected,
The T&L collaboration has changed my sense of myself as a teacher… I am now
more sensitive to the fact that students bring all kinds of knowledge that I do not
have, and if you bring these into the classroom something enabling really
happens.
In a longer paper about this process, Kahane and von Lieres (2011) outline the learning from
this collaborative approach to developing teaching and learning on democracy and citizenship.
The paper points clearly to the importance and potential of the classroom as a place for
teaching and learning that can foster the deepening of democracy and citizenship. Yet, what is
taught, and what is relevant will vary a great deal according to the context of the particular
setting. And, the possibilities of teaching and learning about democracy in more democratic and
collaborative ways can themselves be constrained by the hierarchies of the universities in which
such teaching takes place. Moreover, the paper reflects on the value that global collaboration
can play in challenging approaches to pedagogy in differing contexts, while also providing
support for innovation and change. As one of the South African colleagues in the project
summarized:
It is not when we are together in T&L that matters, but when we are alone in the
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22. classroom situation, facing eager students that seemingly want to learn: how does one
tell students, so used to and immersed in the traditional banking concept of knowledge,
that the knowledge that they bring into the classroom situation has as much validity as
the texts that are filling the libraries of the world (not that the latter have all of sudden lost
their import!) But, through the presence of a Mexican exemplar, the innovative training
methodology of an Angolan colleague and the impetuous interruptions and clarifications
of an Indian scholar, I have come to realise that in the web of life, we are all learners and
teachers - and this singular, most important truth constitutes ‗democracy-in-action‘ in the
classroom.
5. Researchers for social justice: reflecting on positionality
As the above pages have shared, when universities and researchers engage in these new ways
– through collaboration and co-construction, through iterative ways of knowing with others,
through using research as a process for social action, and through teaching differently in the
classroom – our own roles, beliefs and positionalities as researchers also must change. For
many researchers in the DRC, the process was deeply transformational. Researchers began to
see research as itself a political act, and themselves as political actors, who are deeply
embedded and part of struggles for social justice, even if these focus mainly in the epistemic
and cognitive domains. The measurement of ‗success‘ and ‗impact‘ from the program will have
to be not only in what it produced, but also in how its ways of working transformed researchers
themselves, creating new understandings, commitments, networks and momentum for change.
But as researchers come to see themselves in this way, they also see begun to understand the
multiple identities and roles which they play – be they as facilitators, translators, mediators,
educators, communicators. With multiple roles come multiple accountabilities, to the
communities with they are researching and engaging, to the institutions of which they are a part,
to their peers in a global research network. Navigating such roles and accountabilities can
produce new tensions – whose voices are agendas are most important? When are we
‗researchers‘ and when are we social actors? What happens when the multiple roles and
accountabilities come into conflict?
From these tensions also emerge new ethical dilemmas: Who benefits from the research?
What happens to standard rules of confidentiality and ‗protecting‘ those being researched, when
the research process is itself a form of giving voice, of challenging power relationships, and of
breaking down the dichotomies of the researcher and the researched in the first place? When
one thinks of the university and the researcher as apart from the struggles for social justice,
whose role is to study and teach about them, but not with or for them, one gets one set of
answers. But when one understands that the struggle for social justice is also a struggle for
22

23. cognitive justice, new roles and ethics of the researcher will also emerge. As Mehta wrote
about the process:
There is a universal research ethic that stresses informed consent, protecting the
interests of subjects, maintaining confidentiality, and preventing the disclosure of
identities where this could harm research participants. These principles are often in
university codes and some of them are hopelessly inadequate for developing country
settings. Moreover, in participatory research other ethics also emerge, such as those of
reciprocity, using the research for change, and being clear about the involvement of
those being researched in the process. Thus formal ethical codes are often inappropriate
in the context of participatory or action research (Mehta 2008:247).
Throughout the process, the position and role of the researcher may constantly change. As one
of the researchers reflected in a final workshop, ―I think that the role of the researcher is to
engage in critical encounters. What does this mean? The researcher must listen, must negotiate
critical relationships, but also hold onto their political and social positioning…and in these
encounters, they act in lots of different ways – with policymakers, with practitioners, with others.‖
And another said, ―Because we have discussed that research is a political act, you have a
political position that defines the various roles you will play within it. This includes the
collaboration that occurs during the course of your research. So in that sense, listening is not
just listening. Listening is an encounter, but the moments of encounter are in different spaces in
different places…and you choose, in many cases, who you encounter.‘
Conclusion
The previous pages have focused then on one global collaborative research program that
sought to bring a new way of producing knowledge to research on citizenship, democracy and
citizen action. We have focused on five themes emerging from this research collaboration: a)
the importance of co-production in knowledge processes; b) the importance of iteration from the
contextual to the conceptual; c) the importance of embedding research in processes of social
and policy action; d) the role of pedagogy in teaching and learning on practices of democratic
citizenship and e) finally, understanding the impact of each of these on the identities,
accountabilities and ethics of the researcher.
We feel that these themes have important implications for universities as they seek to contribute
to social justice in the wider world. As universities become more marketized and market-driven,
it is increasingly common to think of knowledge purely as a product or commodity. The DRC's
work makes a strong counterclaim to this by demonstrating that knowledge is also a process,
and that the process of how knowledge is constructed is fundamental to the counter-hegemonic
23

24. value of that knowledge. Knowledge production which is driven by motivations of efficiency or
market value is unlikely to be transformative or contribute to social justice. Space and time have
to left for iteration, relationships and imagination. Knowledge itself has been and should remain
a fundamental tool in constructing a more just world. However universities must go beyond their
old ways of constructing knowledge as they strive to address the complex, global problems of
our age. These challenges require knowledge which is adaptable and epistemologically
pluralistic, knowledge which draws on the experiences and diversity of the world in its fullness.
Over a decade ago, based on experiences at the University of Tennessee, Gaventa, then a
sociology professor at UT, and Fran Ansley, a law professor reached similar conclusions in
relationship debates about researching democracy. We argued then that ―researching for
democracy also implies democratizing research, a shift that poses a fundamental challenge to
many university-based researchers. At the heart of the problem of linking research and
democracy is not only the question, ‗whose voices are strengthened by university research?‘ but
also, ‗Who participates in research in the first place?‘‖ (Ansley and Gaventa 1997, 46).
In many ways, the experiences of earlier work and thinking at the University of Tennessee
based on efforts of the Community Partnership Center, and the participatory research at places
like the Highlander Center, were carried into the more international experiences of the
Citizenship DRC. Over a decade later, a similar argument remains that that is relevant to the
contemporary debates on universities and social justice. The role of universities is not simply to
produce critical and knowledge about social justice, though this is important. Rather, it is also to
understand that issues of knowledge and knowledge production are themselves related to
issues of cognitive justice, which is about whose knowledge counts and how this is
produced. Without cognitive justice –which respects and includes multiple forms of knowledge
and ways of knowing - then there is little likelihood that universities can contribute effectively to
broader social justice goals. As researchers and teachers, it is not only what we do, but our
ways of working which are critical to the larger question of how universities themselves are
actors in producing social justice, not just studying it. In a global world, where issues of power
and justice are increasingly complex, multi-tiered and multi-sited, then engaging in struggles for
cognitive justice also means engaging with others in collaborative global knowledge networks.
In such collaborations, universities of the north have much to offer, but also much to learn, by
listening to and being part of broader knowledge and social justice movements.
24

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