Action research with immigrants: working with vulnerable immigrant communities

Public, private, non-profit, and public organizations are increasingly using Action Research (AR) to engage individuals and communities to address problems that affect their well-being (Dick 2006, 2009).The proliferating use of AR raises questions about whether there is alignment between the interests of organizations sponsoring AR projects and the communities involved in these projects. Over a decade ago, Hagey (1997, p. 2) called attention to the abuses of AR, especially by principal investigators serving as agents for powers interested in managing the community, infantilizing community leaders and belittling their problem-solving skills, and turning local leaders and young people into research assistants while wresting away their control over the research project. In addition to manipulation, organizations can use AR projects to reinforce political ideologies that marginalize immigrant communities. My research with Mexican immigrants involved in AR projects sponsored by state-organized, private-public partnerships revealed that immigrantswere being trained to support, rather than to challenge, broader neo-liberal and neo-conservative political projects that marginalize them (Rodriguez 2007). A critical examination of AR with immigrants is in order because of the vulnerability of

immigrants in a profoundly and persistently antagonistic political environment. As much as immigrants are now a permanent feature of today’s highly industrialized societies, so is the nativist and vitriolic discourse that continuously legitimizes the use punitive public policies against working class, vulnerable immigrant populations (Castles and Miller 1998; Castles and Davidson 2000). This anti-immigrant discourse pejoratively casts immigrants as “illegal aliens,” that is, as undeserving noncitizens without the right to demand better social conditions (Rosaldo 1997; Chavez 2001, 2008). This article calls for a normative stance on the use of AR methods when working with vul-

nerable immigrant communities to ensure that social justice guides the design and implementation of AR projects. AR practitioners should use AR methods that help immigrants build greater legitimacy as social actors in an anti-immigrant context and help them to demand better conditions by challenging practices, politics, and people that weaken their political, civil, and

social rights. AR methods that do not advance the legitimacy and interests of immigrants as social actors should not be used, or at the very least should be supplemented by AR strategies that bolster the position of immigrants in society. There are three issues with the AR scholarship and among AR practitioners, however, that

make it challenging to adopt a more normative stance in the use of AR methods with immigrants. First, AR scholars have justifiably resisted making strong demarcations between different AR methods, but taking this position creates a situation where any AR method might be viewed as “good enough” when working with immigrants. Second, the AR literature focused on immigrants generally fails to link the everyday problems faced by immigrants to the broader anti-immigrant ideologies and public policies that actively marginalize them. Finally, at the level of practice, organizations sponsoring AR with immigrant communities are often unaware of the differences between and among AR methods, and can place constraints on the use of AR methods that strengthen immigrant communities. The first part of this article provides a brief overview of the AR scholarship, showing that the

field has avoided drawing hard distinctions between different AR approaches. I propose distinguishing AR methods based on what they conceive as the root cause of the problems that immigrants experience: individual behavior; system fragmentation; or social inequality. The second section shows how the AR immigrant-focused literature tends to define immigrants’ needs with little reference to the broader anti-immigrant cultural politics and public policies that create many of everyday problems faced by immigrants. Using a theory of citizenship that shows the connection between anti-immigrant cultural politics and public policies and how these turn Mexican immigrants into a vulnerable group in the United States, I argue that Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods should be used with vulnerable immigrant groups, unless otherwise justified. In the third section, I present a case study to illustrate how organizations sponsoring AR

projects with immigrants can often drive the choice over the AR method, placing many constraints on AR practitioners and immigrant communities in terms of using the PAR approach. This case study also shows how PAR methods were infused into a planning process in order to bolster the legitimacy and power of immigrants as social actors, or “citizens,” in a way that the original AR method could not do. The conclusion presents three general lines of inquiry pertaining to the use of PAR with vulnerable immigrant communities.