A Personal Position Paper on Participatory Research: Personal Quest for Living Knowledge

This article is a personal position paper in which the author presents thoughts about participatory research as they evolved during years of search for "living knowledge." The author weaves together experiences gathered from her work in two regions of Tanzania and a personal history to make conclusions about and derive implications for participatory research. I am writing these thoughts as a personal position paper about participa-tory research as it has evolved in my work during the years of search for what I have come to call &dquo;living knowledge.&dquo; I am at present working in a rural area in southern Tanzania, where I can put into practice my long experience in participatory action research (PAR) in two regions comprising 900 villages. I am employed as a senior sociologist, but no one anticipates social surveys or structured or unstructured interviews from me. I continue the process of mutual learning that I started in coastal Tanzania 30 years ago. I reflect here in a rather personal way on what led me to my quest for living knowledge. When I began my research in a Tanzanian village in 1965, I took it fo