Saturday 22 June 2013

On session 8 (Participatory learning, data analysis and dissemination)

The PAR strategy we tried implementing was, building on Chatterton et al (2007: 218), a way that can be used as a vehicle for liberation (in a broad sense not implying a romantic majesty), some sort of social transformation (not a radical one) and the promotion of solidarity with those that need to express discomfort (not necessarily resisting or attacking neoliberalism, privatization or the likes), but neither informing a policy or improving a delivery of services.

Yes, I suspected all that was achievable through role play. I still think such results are possible, but not for an hour and a half. Our group intended to make research for a particular class, with a particular set of persons with which we have been interacting with at least since the beginning of term 3, thus setting the need for research or action not stemming from a felt necessity of the community or from us, the researchers. Notwithstanding, we intended to bring the group's troubles afloat inside settings of multiple interactions and dealing with the difficulties of igniting change.

Our idea, I believe, was not to be responsive as much as interested in recording what others had to say about the performative experience, putting whatever good or bad feelings were awaken by the comments. At some point I felt this could be turned into a judgement, especially after Julie's urge to answer some of the comments. That made me think about the need to respond; if it was needed by either the team, the group as a whole, both or none. I welcomed those comments that negatively valued the exercise without further need for action. They would be dealt in the distanced emotions of paused reflexion, not with the heat of reactionary discomfort.

But enough effort has been put in the making of the 'team project' report already. Let me consider the evaluation part, which took so long to start despite my efforts to end the role playing reflection on time. The military sensation of the line formation reminded me that the military have something interesting to offer every now and then. However, my sense of evaluation had become the subjective one of being part or drawing away from the group. Have I been part of the group or has it been a mere coincidence? That is to say, what is the meaning of cohesiveness of a group? If my own evaluation differs so much from the gregarious, have I been then left out? Should I consider looking for other groups? In what things do I feel comfortable differing? In which do I want to be felt included? The dispersion of bodies in space was difficult to assess by, say, Cisca, who had a particular viewpoint. I confess I value more quantitative valuations that my usually pessimistic sensations about group movements.
Here I was waiting for Kees to finish in order to add more to the green light.

Sunday 9 June 2013

On session 7 (Designing participatory research and/or evaluations)

I have been using my mobile phone to take notes, because it appears to be more portable than the notebook. The fact that it incorporates my camera/voice recorder/image editors/note-keeping apps makes all too convenient to leave it aside, not disregarding the fact that I feel the need to take extra care in case something unwanted happens to it. And so let me transcribe some of the notes I took with this odd feeling I was leaving the good old paper notes + pen far behind in pre-smartphone times.


"...ever changing, moving on now, moving fast..."

There is a difference between a random picture and a staged one; multiple ones, in fact. But which? Disparando cámaras was the name of a project in Bogota (the city I have lived in since forever) that 'brought' photo-shooting technologies to people living in poverty (especially targeted for living in problematic housing), from camara obscura to digital zoom in - zoom out framings. Shooting means having a target, a weapon and potential victims... so discursively translating firearms into cameras has enriched the life of some teenagers here. However, power is a different thing. Is the one behind the camera in power? Up to what point? Recently I saw some Ivy League news portraying some Harvard student being praised for his involvement in this project. The people of the community where the project took place were mere context, nothing more. So those behind the technology remain most visible. It is their project (not the communities'). It is a problem of design. That which is being wasted (not necessarily the cameras, but e.g. the camara obscura technology) becomes the means of the underdeveloped. Poor communities can profit from transitioning into development through enlightened means; the saviours keep the press. Reasonablility is important: "it's my school project, it's for my PAR class, it's to make this NGO project accountable..." An external something justifies access to the intervened community, seldom the community itself.  

Marcela and Rosalba, sitting next to each other, seem a like this evening. The awareness of the power of representation highlights links between arts and the humanities and the social sciences. Again performance appears as an important tool for the social scientist, but not an end in itself, as the artful would imagine. This has given way to the mistake of judging one thing in terms of the other or has simply blurred the boundaries that set them appart. However, art (in its Western cannon) has emphasized the individual (even art collectives can be taken for an individual) because it has a hard time keeping track of itself without the figure of the author/authority. This is not only an 'arts' thing. Authors are/have become an important way of acknowledging authority and  those are some of the reasons of why the Harvard article praises the individual over the community of the project he got involved with. So authorship cannot be elude with participatory

the gaze from afar

But that was more of an addendum to session 6. Session 7 drew on the politics of sitting, the goods and bads of placing yourself and others in/on space. Athi the chief, however, continued to be the chief, a voice of authority that draws on the voice of the authorities from his particular SA community. When you place equally for the PAR practitioner more invisible hierarchies are still in place. The circle that welcomed me near the elevator door made my notebook inaccessible, because Liz was sitting diametrally opposed to me with  it, as I had send it (and a chocolate) some minutes before with her. I felt I would disrupt the class if I tried to make a place to sit next to her. However, as I sat inside the circle, still finishing my lunch (eating a plum), Gina offered me tea :) There is a nice network of friendship/power opperating in that particular moment.

Yin mentioned a Chinese game where players identified a keyword of what others were saying. That seemed pretty scary. For those of us who cannot make a concise intervention it might be nice to get a one-word summary, but sometimes your point goes beyond one word.




















Wednesday 29 May 2013

on session 6 (Participatory diagramming and the use of visual techniques)

During the past two weeks some people apparently have been reading my diary entries. After some few have approached me, the one unanimous comment is that I overdid it… Which made me think I might be writing more and participating less… maybe. I guess I just have this feeling that everything participatory is somehow meant to disappoint. I’m exaggerating, but I am in a crappy mood tonight. After Rosalba presented us the Rivers of Representation project [which hoped to bring into a LGBT collective a valuable space so that its members saw that fighting together was meaningful making use of metaphor to represent life after HIV+ diagnosis (through drawings and self-narratives including poetry)] I was reminded of a conversation I had had the previous night with Soumita. Her anxieties (and mine) over aesthetics as being pivotal in our lives seemed somehow given an answer with this method. An odd answer, for I believe neither of us really meant to say, read this kind of poetry, stare at this kind of painting.

  

To make the point even clearer, I entered the room happily because I had just opened the Concert Gebouw magazine I had just got from my mailbox as I rushed for class. Our cultivated souls have made our arable tastes elitists. The engagement with the products of such participatory action will be mediated by the aesthetic sensibility of the interpreter (a difficulty also expressed by Larissa in a previous session) in order to make sense out of these materials. But the participatory exercise was yet to begin.
“A diverse, dynamic…” information “means” empowerment… something like that went the story behind one of the interventions presented. It was an idea that privileges [certain] accumulation of knowledge as an improvement. But what if you don’t want to be informed (and I’m not thinking about a masochistic self-tormentor that privileges suffering over more orthodox conceptions of well-being)? What if there’s too much information changing too much too many times? Dufflo made the point (somewhere sometime) that poor people would be better off if they had a bureaucratic apparatus that took the right decisions for them all the time, like accessing vaccination programs or other healthcare decisions. Reinterpreting her, to fight the bureaucracy is easier once you’re in it, the richer you get the more it is part of your life, the poorer, then the further away you are from accessing it. Zizek stresses a similar point [somewhere sometime] when claiming that he is lazy and he prefers to live in a place where there is a state that takes decisions for him, instead of having to be involved permanently in participation and engagement. This is of relevance to me because the double ‘preventive’ mastectomy of Angelina Jolie that she disclosed here, some days after Peggy Orensteins had published a more comprehensive and informative article about breast cancer where she gives the feel that so much is known about the disease without really knowing what to do with it (how to detect it, how to treat it and what to do after it is treated). This comes at a time when a close friend of mine has just been detected breast cancer.

I got torticollis. The round structure of the plenary might not be as adequate for a lecture as… more a place with more comfortable chairs. About the power of those who have the technical ability to produce images of representation, Rosalba commented that if you hold a camera [in Mexico/Peru] you are immediately thought of as someone who can pay for that image. . Additionally, on the commodification of images, my first boyfriend got connected with a project called “Disparando Camaras” or Shooting Cameras for Peace where [poor, marginalized…] children were taught to build camera obscura and how to take pictures with them. Their depictions of their environment were translated into their “identities” that made it to the UN NYC building after the most posh curatorial process…
But now for our participatory exercise! Joyce and Lenny set the mood after our chocolate post-break boost citing Speedy Gonzales: “Ándale, ándale, arriba, arriba”. Talk about the internationally corporate commodification of images, from the US to Colombia to the Philippines, through the family name of some brothers. We rose from our seats to take pictures that represented the ISS for the incoming batch. Although Fungai and Maria had cameras I didn’t understand why or how we ended up using only the pictures from my phone. Maria was crucial for the editing, knowing the collage-making website, filtering the images into “warmer” takes… which brings me again to the aesthetic subjectivities that are lost as they are rendered into academic research standards.

During the round table discussion on the exercise, Gina whatsapped me. She asked me if I believed her comment about color-difference had been inappropriate. I responded looking at her expressing my awkwardness. “Why would it have been an issue at all?” I thought. “What are you talking about?” I believed that was the only justification of the Attrium’s colorfull bird-like kites. But then this was across the room and Lenny, sitting in the middle of the circle read my face as referring to what her group was saying. It was only after class that I understood (because Gina and Marcela explained to me) that the color phrase had a racial subtext that I had not read. But I overdid it again so I stop.

Some pictures from artsy-farty apps for smartphone pictures:
 

 

 



Friday 10 May 2013

on session 5 (Participatory research on sensitive issues or with vulnerable communities and/or groups)

Today's session was in Aula B, an ampler and cooler environment. More comfortable chairs and three screens for the PowerPoint presentations. Hurra! This set the stage for a picturesque, although somewhat extended, other-knowledges wise talk on trying [the impossibility] to make in-the-middle-of-the-field methodologies horizontal... through drawings.
Athi waves his hand making a point I didn't register in my diary. Carolina doesn't seem to be taking notes here either. I apologize for my inability to straighten the picture. These are very dark photographs. Next time I'll try photoshoping them.













Everyone seemed focused on what he was saying but I cannot longer tell what it was. 

I will center, however, on the second part of the session. Did we really trivialise women-who-have-sex-with-women (WSW) rape victims? Performance therapy (for lack of memory of "the better" name of the intervention) conducted with a group of women prostitutes in Bogota gave positive feedback regarding the possibility to distance themselves from their experience by enacting them/role playing. As Shakespeare or Borges or 1001 Arabian Nights (to recall "the classics") they played a play inside a play. "Family constellations" is another technique from the psycho-suffix experimental adventures into performance as the way to bring the hidden/unnamed visible.

Besides, we, as victims of different types of abuse eventually trivialise our misfortunes. So sings Tori Amos, when she voices herself as rape-victim, motives unclear (but most probably the "slinky red dress" in a patriarchal Midwestern US), "but I haven't seen Barbados, so I must get out of this". Whatever it is you associate the event on a narrative account does not demean the accountant. This is to say, the tragedy remains as such despite the fact that you have to "live with it", even through trivialising exteriorizations. I recently saw a lecture given by Judith Butler (in 2011) discussing what my/hers/our ethical response to suffering at a distance should be or imply. As a very mediocre attendant at a distance (in space, in time, and reason) of that leccture, I believe myself mediated by the scatter thoughts her ideas provoked.

What happens when we, development-concerned people, declare in outrage and from our spatial constraints, be it Den Haag or a non-expat entourage, that something abominable is happening to a set of bodies (e.g. one or many WSW) completely estranged, if only because it is placed in the most remote location of the globe where we have never had accessed or never intend to have access (if only google-wise)? Where does that solidarity arise from? The existence of images that moves us into action might be enough for us to feel their problem ours.

Role playing brings forward problems of representation, the tensions of multiplicity behind apparent identities. The (staged) representative family was not representative at all and came to being through collective imagination. Such creativity should be helpful for a policymaker, be it governmental or not, to imagine policy making, even if the imagined stakeholders are unable to take part (willingly or not) in the Chapatti (or whatever the PAR-tool might be).

There is also the problem of consent. Did we tacitly agree to deal with the "sensitive issue" or was it imposed to us and its structural paranoia? Athi's absence during the participative second half might have been his decision not to deal with the imposition from the outside. Should he be morally obliged to be involved? Or is he, as an empowered subject, making a rightful use of his agency to deny his being there, to refuse response to a suffering he did not cause and/or had no (external) intention of confronting?

I appear very concentrated on appearing concentrated.
My (brief) enactment of a rape-victim did not cover the issues I felt needed to be said, because I was also concerned that the exercise had taken too much time already. As Marcela commented, "I always insist on leaving the classroom by 5 no matter what, but end up with the office clerk attitude: I end up staying there irregardless". I might have extended my story, but then, how valuable (if at all) might it have been to keep everyone from engaging in alternative activities, more productive or of leisure? What was the opportunity cost? Is my concern derived from the (economics) marginalist revolution or is it much more classical (e.g. Bastiat)?

The metaphors of inclusion/exclusion relate to the seen/unseen, light/dark, free-enlightened/bonded-ignorant dichotomies that perpetuate the Westernized cleresy's thought. Despite the flatbread two-dimensional reference to India I cannot tell if our groups and plenary were creating knowledge or simply reproducing Knowledge-as-usual. I imagined Colombian rape-victims, not of WSW in particular, much less in South Africa or Indonesia. I completely missed the contextualizing video screened by the facilitator-group during the break. These ethical dilemmas of representation and its constraints permeate pretty much all participation but somehow expound when addressing vulnerable communities.


An excercise in role-playing. As WSW that had experienced rape we had a hard time using the subordinated green circles. EVERYTHING was of utter importance.

The Chapati diagrams grouped on the floor (upsidedown in this picture), as we re-enacted and/or improvised our postures.


Tuesday 7 May 2013

on session 3 (Participatory approaches and techniques)



More theory. Tons of people (the circle broke and I had to bring in another chair). More on the Moodle conundrum of diary submission.. . So we have a touch screen… and my diary is being screened to everyone… Kees responds to the comments (Carolina’s, mine ?) on the pertinence of the Honduras’s video… but of course I/we got the point that it was an example of PAR (although I pause before conceding that it wasn’t interventionist). Anyhow…

I feel hideously dressed and everyone is taking pictures! (Ok. So only two persons, but then I like to exaggerate) What’s Soumita telling Alma? I’m not concentrating [evaluation of past session’s lesson, the cascading exercise…]. Make it four persons with cameras. Maria Roda is using a tape-tag: “Maria”. Kees shows some ppt, a tool he outspokenly hates… reiteratively. I believe some credit should be given to PowerPoint as a very useful tool that made paper presentations more entertaining and/or visually appealing as compared with the tools from 20 years ago. Flash is nice but even still it can also be boring and/or disenchanting. Are there no substitutes for PowerPoint-like tools that can be used for this case? Or does this Microsoft Office theme fit the purpose?

Maggie got her tag out. I have mine here but I’m not taking it out.  I don’t want to. I should slept more yesterday. Carolina is looking amazing and she’s right in front of me. Howard conveniently grouped with his girlfriend (lucky him, I guess). Buzz group exercise: “helps flow (?) your ideas… get to reflect a moment with someone else… a question should be out there”. Chambers is one of Kees heroes; he took [from PRA to PLA (?)] out of an NGOish image. It became an easy way to get what “people” wanted [or their undemocratic representatives]. RRA was “quick and dirty”… but “at least it was rapid”, commented Kees, and an “appreciation of local knowledge”.

Methods: triangulation (and others) was a paternalistic, top-down approach, not really very participatory.  Transex diagram… what? Oh! Transect diagram! Just my imagination. A transex diagram sounded so much interesting. Local knowledge can be appreciated, e.g. the locals know where the good soils are. Which reminds me of the pop-art Colombian movement: CARO ES CARO was a statement/engraving that the hippie artist Antonio Caro made contradicting his then recent valuation for his works. His works (a Caro) had become expensive (in Spanish caro). Art valuation tends to be a topic of heated debate among economist… probably more than the valuation of these techniques in the heavily funded development supply side interventions inside their own speech communities. But back to the toolbox: Chapatti Diagrams... would Ven ever imagine his image compared to a usually round wheat yeast-free bread (mainly Indian)? How can comparisons be validated, especially when the proponents of the original ideas are absent? How do these tools account?


India is in the air. Body language, as an alternative to a written or spoken one, might not be as universal as we usually expect. Take for example tapping! Kees sustained that tapping someone in India was different than tapping a person in The Netherlands. Howard nodded but Kees sought only Indian responses… so Soumita had to answer… however contradicting this anti-universality. Tap a person downward = CALM DOWN! Tap her upwards = SPEAK UP!

Lenny is unwrapping candy and Umbreem is chewing gum. I feel tired all of a sudden and want to eat something. I’m writing a lot today. Inequality and wealth rankings… social map of the village [I forgot the name of this… oh yeah! Social cartography]. Kehinde seems to have gone to the toilette. Everyone looks bored. Yeah, Chambers promotes FUN as an important distinctive factor of PRA. Disadvantages to PRA: technique used in development business with hidden agendas. Santiago (in Paris) blames the weather: imagine then summer productivity.

As a result [of the criticism?] the third strand came: PLA

Tree diagram: gina comments from her experience what it consists on. The intelligent board is very dusty. Reflection is learning? What? Reflection as learning? I guess I missed it. Nice example of Disempowerment: a YouTube video. But first Kees´s synthesis. Should I include quantitative data into my RP? Just to tell a different story or less ambitiously, controvert a dominant view. Maggie says, “this looks like a role play” Yeah! It does! I was thinking the exact same thing. Kehinde: “You need a skillful person to direct/facilitate a participatory actor”. So e.g. I shouldn’t do it. I like Marlon’s explanation “this looks like the end of a day where everyone just wants to get it over with”.

I complain too much in these diary entries. What is simply a metabolic disorder that I must address with yoga and a change in diet can be taken for a whimsical attitude which I do not have. I somehow miss the cheerfulnes that a good rest + good health provide. Dear reader, please be patient and forgiving.

This word has given me a very hard time! I feel so glad that I have the opportunity to pronounce it and to identify with it! I valued this greeting symbolism greatly.

Another (less amazing) use of local resources. People cannot complain they have not seen a map of the Hague.

Umbreem asked me to take pictures with her panoramic app. Picture taking and participating in the exercise overall made me put my note-taking aside :) (I was very happy that happened).

Alma and I thinking on cool things to do for further integration.

This is me engaging in participatory action!

Kyla guiding us as another group at the back debated heavily on their listing. Madurodam discounts were the new voting token.

 Our votes, dispersed.
 Some tape was introduced to uniform the votes along the red tulip like lines.
 Lenny and Carolina very proud of our group work... despite the fact that we didn't come up with a tenth activity.
 Gina and Marlon continue to tape their listing, just to make sure it would not fall (which it didn't).
 Associating ourselves with emotions. Like Kees, I thought the surprised expression (lower right) was possitive and lay my red square on it.



Monday 6 May 2013

on session 4 (Knowledge, Power, and Transformation)




Imagine yourself remembering something. Now imagine yourself imagining memories. It has been less than a month since i visited a Mitsuo Miura public intervention in a globally posh setting, Madrid's Cristal Palace as curated by the Reina Sofia Museum. A mostly empty space with soft-colored circumferences suggested to  me as either podiums or umbrellas, situating me for say, a picture, or as a shade-seeking someone in at a summer-hot spring. Where and under what I stand were important loci of how I related to the space I was in and especially to how the work of art was transforming such space. However, this wasn’t a solipsist universe, I would soon be reminded: my mother who insisted a picture should be taken in such and such pose, the guard that impeded me or any other from sitting on the circumferences (stand-only postures, please), the woman I almost hit while I walked in reverse staring at the glass ceiling… The production of space was beyond my controls and desires. Yes, I was in Spain, in Madrid, where some great great male ancestor had once walked through the courts before me and my mother had traveled through other means and purposes all the way back to reinvigorate our bonds. The space I was at was a collective construction.



I bring this to mind because I have carried a leaflet of the exhibition inside my diary since the first day of class, hinting its association with this class, but without being able to relate it in a concrete fashion. Despite being a white male I always felt dispossessed of something important, transcendental, essential. I was brought up in a “white” all-male school and built an outsider identity for 12 years. “white” in quotation marks because that was what all the boys were trying to be in the Colorado-Benedictines-founded institution, not strictly correspondent to hitlerian tone-of-skin standards. Although probably the cheapest bilingual (English-Spanish) "international" schools, the poorest families were middleclass, but most came from the higher income elite. Outside that space I would later learn I could fit in, but it was through exclusion that I learned to relate to others. I learned to distrust the self-centered and self-secure displays of identity and to sympathize or even commune with monsters and almost anything abject. That is still, broadly speaking, how I know the world and how I develop interests about it. 



In a way ports have become important for the reasons mentioned, they’re a way of scape. Centraal, Holland Spoor, Laan van NOI were my first referents of the city. Of course, they were my port of entry but they have become also the way to exit it. Those came up first on my list of spots outside-the-ISS-bubble, to be followed by parks, the cinema, and places of worship. All places I frequent mostly by myself but that I am happy to share every now and then with those who are willing. Not that I don’t worship Haneke or von Trier or even cinema itself, nor do I go to the mosque to worship Allah or to an Evangelic or Catholic Christ.
These subjectivities were not accounted for. I did not mention them to my mapping group, nor were they collectively discussed into a particular category. The taxonomy into which consensus was allocated excluded, probably due to time constraints, a more pluralistic classificatory logic. I will never know if someone else understood ports similarly or if it is through sentiment that another order of reality might be achieved. 

Tuesday 23 April 2013

on session 2 (Why participatory approaches?)

I did not expect to see the Honduras PRSP video as I entered class 5 to 10 minutes late. What seemed an overarching optimism on participation was made par by Kees statement that [poor] Catrachos made "their own PRSPs". I was confused because I was unsure on how to read this pre-2009/pre-coup video presentation. Was it an invitation to embrace the marvels of participation? Kees involvement with Nicaraguan PRSP related work was disclosed, but that was just a pinch of ISS involvement in such evaluation. Van Staveren's less optimistic takes on IMF/WB pro-poor interventions remain hidden in the annals of ISS, as well as Jose Cuesta's involvement in PRSP evaluation that now make him part of the WB establishment. Whatever the link might have been it was not subject to discussion and I dismissed the chance to inquire about it (but then again, I'm far from being knowledgeable about that country). Rosalba mentioned the coup as a not so happy event but the link is still to be made with how empowered did the poor communities engaged in participatory PRSP-promoted workshops were affected by that event, or how they were relevant actors in it.

My head was still thinking on the links between PAR and anthropology (Scoones' very short piece that I had just read) but also somewhat baffled by Honduras, so when the flash card reflection took place the only word that came to mind was 'reflexivity'... instead of say 'change' [of social practice]. After shortly reflecting on this first exercise (and with no input on my part may I note), the group noticed that the terms brought up by the members left almost empty the middle steps of the Kanji and Greenwood (2001, p5) in: Figure 4.1 in-page-105-of-a-copy-of-a-source-Kees-mentioned-but-I-failed-to-understand ladder. So adding to the first session's tools, we were now learning this collective picture reflection technique and imagining how visual strategies stimulate the brain out of the passiveness of blackboard/ppt presentations. We were having something to be active about... but what voice were we creating?

Fals Borda and Leal and Scoones and the other author whose articles we were supposed to read warned about tons of problems in PAR/P(A)R/etc. The interesting part of their discussion was its ascendance from 'southernly global' initiatives (as Kees highlighted, at pre-internet/slow diffusion times) that brought 'different cosmologies to dialogue with western takes on these converging approaches' [Rosalba's terms]. Derived from engagement in struggle, how does PAR manage (if it can) to passer a l'act, how does it move into action? This might not be a relevant issue to the practitioner [should it be?], but this might be key to understanding that dialogue [or maybe my head is messed up with Saint Catherine's hagiography and related sources]. Can people move into action through sentiment or coldly/unmoved, in a mystical fashion or with the most un-extraordinary pretence? Is PAR decision making [economically] rational (and do the PRSP mandate-makers intend it to be) or does it contend the enlightened and mainstreamed homo oeconomicus? I had reached a conclusion (visualized reasoning or reason-attached-to-a-visual is easier to remember) but did I engage knowingly in the process (some might think 'freely' is a relevant adverb)? How did it become mine (or did it)? How violent can action be or how is action being summoned onto a common goal and how is that goal read as the elimination of something, perhaps even something characteristic of the action-group members? If this is a process of overcoming (e.g. poverty), will there always/most of the time be a romantic twist of self annihilation (eliminating the poor) instead of say, changing poverty-generating structures?

The roof of the subversive attic. I was not surprised by the decision to make this the class's environment... but Rosalba's comment reminded me of a similar discussion regarding conventional and unconventional schooling settings among 13-14 year olds  (all male). They/we distinguished between 1) serious and non-serious classes (e.g. sports or arts vs Spanish or Math) and 2) ordinary vs extraordinary classes (exams vs field-trips). Would these kids consider PAR techniques to be non-serious and if so what effects would that have on the objectives of these types of interventions? Should focus groups be scanned for those that will engage wholeheartedly in PAR techniques or should they be addressed with a pretentious view to prove them different?

 The Europeans standing before the excess population of everywhere-else migrated to their chairs.

 Why was Africa said (as in the past session) to be located in the wrong place? Were we meant to replicate it all?


An anthropocentric setting and discussion... I wonder how small voices are lost in huge participatory platforms such as the Codex Alimentarius.