Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: I worked and did research with young people in El Salvador.I coordinated a local youth participation project in the capital, where, at the same time, I conducted fieldwork for my PhD research.The youth project aimed at empowering young people through participatory action research (PAR) and, together with the young participants, I critically reflected on the empowering impact of this participatory process.While participatory researchers and practitioners traditionally stress the importance of critical consciousness and critical discourse as the principal motors for individual and social transformation, my research with the young people particularly confronted me with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges.This research focuses in particular on the politics of emotions; their role in confirming exclusion and oppression and in facilitating empowerment and resistance.In this thesis, I bring together different bodies of theory.I start from the critical literature on PAR and from a poststructuralist account of power and empowerment.I build on an understanding of emotions as socio-culturally constructed and, at the same time, as deeply embodied phenomena.I look into emotional geographies considering emotions as relational and as always functioning within power relations and I use non-representational theory to challenge the privilege of cognition by focussing on practical and embodied knowledges and explicitly recognising their political and empowering potential.I conclude that although participatory researchers have increasingly extended and refined their understanding of power and empowerment, they still focus too much on critical reflection, discourse and conscious/linguistic representation as key to personal and social change.This focus has distracted their attention from the way power works through emotions and embodied knowledges.I believe that participatory researchers should become more sensitive still to the subtleties of power by paying more explicit attention to how emotions and embodied knowledges function within power relations to reproduce or challenge the existing status quo.Such a focus also opens new doors to new ways of empowerment (and politics) by considering alternative methods and media directly engaging with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges to shape the social world.('H.F.'), dearest friend, thanks for our long conversations, your critical honesty and deep sensitivity.I'll never forget that you don't function between one and three o'clock in the afternoon, kept a notebook with my mistakes in Spanish, and threw old tea and coffee over my head.Thanks also to all my colleagues and friends from CFO for your enormous courage, faith and continuous social struggle and for allowing me to be part of that for a while.Candita, it was great to share that horribly small office with such a cheerful and fiery person as you.Angelita, Rita and Niña Vicky, you are such incredibly strong, warm, wise, and beautiful women.I am so grateful to have known you and to have you as an example in life.To all my friends, thank you so much for your support!Sandrine, thank you for your common sense, good humour and reflexive honesty.Thanks for our daily phone calls and messages (or should I say the several calls and messages every day!) in which we chatted on and on about daily matters as much as about current political issues and 'important' world events.Working at home sitting behind my computer for hours on end, our calls kept me in touch with the human world and saved me from total isolation.Thank you for always being there when I need you and for coming to live close to us.Aline, thank you for your sparkling, caring and funny personality.Thanks for the endless hours of laughing, crying, philosophizing, and devouring huge quantities of chocolate cake, waffles with chocolate sauce, m&m's, chips, feta cheese, olives, and salami (generally in combination with each other).Thanks for putting up with my emotional ups and downs, for understanding and encouraging me, for making me laugh and for regularly cleaning my kitchen.Karen, thank you for being such a wise and loving friend.Thanks for our weekly running and long tea-drinking sessions, for sharing joy and sadness with me, for always carefully listening and posing thoughtful questions.Thank you for your warm presence and for your great creative talent.Karlita, thank you for being such a strong, intelligent and free women and for the intense moments we passed together.I hope one day we'll be able to make our trip, visiting the capitals of Europe together.To my 'anthropological' / 'liminal' / 'hybrid' friends, Joris, Heidi and Birgit, thanks for all the coffees and lunches and for patiently listening to me, going on and on about what to do next.To all of you, sorry for my absences, silences and unfulfilled promises over the last few months!But, now I am back, ready to bake you a thousand chocolate cakes, cook for you, phone you regularly, come over to your place and join all the (family) parties, in short: to be a normal and present friend again.To my dearest mother and father, what can I say … I owe everything to you! Thank you for always believing in me, encouraging
Author: Barbara Van Wijnendaele
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2150787391