Abstract
As a range of social, economic and political issues of the twenty-first century challenge us, academics need to rethink not only what we teach and research but how we learn, teach and conduct research. Neoliberal competitive ideals have continued to promote the idea that “elitist knowledge” is better, and provide little self-critique about how mainstream research approaches and pedagogy continue to reproduce social inequality. In this chapter, we argue for participatory knowledge co-creation as a transformative approach. This method emancipates people, allows power shifting and promotes a greater sense of belonging in the community and environment. The case study, the Maribyrnong Maker Map (M3), showcases a collaborative form of action inquiry where a digital mapping application was used to create a maker map. A maker map is a map of the local productive resources in a community. This emerging knowledge space, located both physically and online, offers new potentials for situated problem-solving and engaged participatory research. The chapter also explores the implications of participatory knowledge co-creation for scholars, researchers, practitioners and activists across the disciplines. Building on Reason’s (1998) four participation imperatives—political, ecological, epistemological and spiritual—we propose that participatory knowledge co-creation offers peace psychologists a much needed bridge between academic knowledge, and grounded and relevant relationships with the reality constructed by people in their communities.
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Notes
- 1.
We acknowledge the problem of using the term “western epistemology” as it could create a binary proposition because not all work that arises from the West is hegemonic. Foucault, for example, is from the West but his work is not hegemonic. Hence, we use the term “hegemonic epistemology” to illustrate our points in this chapter.
- 2.
- 3.
www.chuffed.org: an online fundraising platform for non-profit initiatives and social enterprises.
- 4.
www.meetup.com: an online platform to bring local interest groups together to meet, interact and engage.
- 5.
www.facebook.com: a global social media platform which connects people through sharing updates, news and events.
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Law, S.F., Ramos, J. (2017). Participatory Knowledge Co-creation: Using Digital Mapping as an Emancipatory Method. In: Seedat, M., Suffla, S., Christie, D. (eds) Emancipatory and Participatory Methodologies in Peace, Critical, and Community Psychology. Peace Psychology Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63489-0_6
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