Social science from below: Grassroots knowledge for science and emancipation. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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Social science from below: Grassroots knowledge for science and emancipation. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9431371
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identifier
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9431371
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Creator
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Stern, Susan Parkison.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Frank Bonilla
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology, Theory and Methods
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Abstract
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This dissertation builds on a peer-directed emancipatory participatory research process (EPR) developed by a group of male Latino prisoners that relies on critical friendship-based dialogue as a methodology for doing research as a part of life and of an emancipatory praxis that also includes education, therapy, and action. It adds to the prisoners' model of critical social science, in which grassroots groups theorize critically as popular intellectuals and create many kinds of emancipatory knowledge, a place for academic intellectuals and academic critical theory. The author, whose initial perspective on social research was framed by her work with the prisoners, implemented, tested, and elaborated the prisoners' model in a peer-based EPR process with her African-American neighbors and fellow parents, working together to understand and interrupt the reproduction of race and class relations in their local schools. Ethnographies of the prisoners' and parents' groups draw on extensive fieldwork relationships with both.;The author uses several academic literatures including critical social science, feminist methodology, feminist epistemology, critical anthropological fieldwork, Freire's "conscientization" method, participatory research, critical ethnography, and research-as-praxis to provide concepts for (1) codifying the prisoners' process as a small-group-based EPR model, (2) elaborating various aspects of the prisoners' process in more depth, (3) showing how the various literatures and the generalized EPR model complement each other's self-defined projects, and (4) demonstrating how these self-defined projects are related to each other within a framework of EPR. The integration of these literatures with the parents' process results in a generalized small group EPR model that is at once a methodology for democratizing knowledge production and for creating progressive social change that joins grassroots groups and academy-based intellectuals in a critical community, with benefits for both.;A broader theoretical EPR model is also developed, which proposes a dialogue of epistemic and other communities of emancipatory praxis to create a non-"totalizing" theory of domination; non-dominating forms of emancipatory praxis; and new standards for objectivity and validity.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
