The National Community Development Project was a major ‘anti-poverty programme’ established by the UK government in 1968 to explore the causes of inner city decline: it was one response to growing unrest in inner city areas, including amongst minority populations which felt increasingly marginalised by government policy. Twelve local teams, each including a number of community development workers, and some researchers attached to local universities, spent up to five years in deprived neighbourhoods working with local community groups. Although it became clear that the government took the view that deprivation was essentially the fault of local people themselves, the CDP teams developed an alternative analysis which pointed to the impacts of economic disinvestment, cuts in public services such as housing, health and transport, and the incipient effects of globalisation as largely responsible for the decline in these areas. The major legacy of the CDPs was a series of both national and local reports which spelled out this analysis across the country as a wholeFootnote 1 , whilst demonstrating how these processes impacted on local communities. One of the most significant of these reports was one produced by the Benwell CDP team, in West Newcastle, The Making of the Ruling Class. This painstakingly researched report followed the fortunes (literally and figuratively) of major land- and wealth-owning families in the Tyneside area such as the Ridleys and the Dickinsons showing how they invested in industries whilst they were profitable and jumped ship when they were not, moving from land and agriculture, to coal, to shipbuilding and engineering and finally to finance, being involved in some of the biggest national banks and building societies (including ironically Northern Rock Building Society which went belly up and was bailed out by the government, thus protecting the interests of some of these families). Somehow, the rich and powerful always came out squeaky clean despite the industrial carnage around them. Meanwhile the working class families of Newcastle's West End lost their jobs (some of them more than once), suffered poor services, were unable to get access to decent housing or mortgage finance and then, as the final ironic twist, were blamed for the conditions of their slums and their failure to get work.
I make no apology for the length of this anecdote as it illustrates quite clearly the main thrust of this fascinating book, that research should not be about looking downwards at the poor with open hands pointed toward government and other funders in response to their need to know what makes the working classes tick, but should look upwards, researching the rich and powerful in order to demystify the nature of power and show the working classes why it really is – pace the lies put about by the tabloid papers (most recently that migrants steal their jobs, their houses and even their women!) – they have to endure their poverty.
Research Justice has emerged from a West Coast American non-profit Foundation, Data Centre, which has for thirty years had a long-standing mission of supporting the social justice movement through research, particularly in relation to poor minorities and dispossessed indigenous people. It observed early on that ‘very few communities had the capacity to craft the “right” research question, let alone harness the power of information to take calculated, purposeful action’ and that ‘organizing approaches that integrated research were few and far between’. Those engaged in the CDPs and since, in various attempts at participatory research practice, might say Amen to this observation. To underpin effective community organising with committed research in a sensitive way – which in addition locates local organisers, activists and researchers in an egalitarian partnership – is hugely difficult. When funders demand certain kinds of outputs to satisfy their own agendas, it becomes even more difficult.
The book consists of seventeen chapters, most of them providing illuminating case studies of specific ways in which this task has been attempted by researchers, or accounts of how this approach could empower poor communities: it covers such disparate issues as archival theory, disaster justice, health justice, pregnancy, formerly incarcerated women, resistance narratives, and non-violent action. It would be invidious to pick out one or two particular chapters to review in this book; the point is that taken together they provide a compelling argument as to why researchers should re-examine their praxis, and consider the value base which drives them in their research. Let some of the participants/partners in the research process speak for themselves. Here, for example, is a group of marginalised women:
In a sense we are doing research by and for ourselves. But we're also doing research by and for a wider group and that includes women who aren't able to speak for themselves.
Or a group of Black women who came to research their own pregnancy and childbirth experiences, taking control of the research process to suit the ends of their organisation:
At the very first meeting, which was supposed to be a “research team” meeting, everyone's like – “we don't want to be a research team, we want to be an organisation. We got way more vision than just a research project.”
As the authors argue, Research Justice provides a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research: it is, to my knowledge, a pioneer in print in setting out such a radical approach across a range of ‘research interventions’. Critically it examines and demystifies ‘the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction and political power/legitimacy in society’. As researchers, particularly in higher education, begin to gear up for yet another round of research evaluation (variously known as the Research Excellence Framework or Research Assessment Exercise), a framework increasingly bound by the Holy Trinity of Significance, Rigour and Innovation, this book is a sharp reminder of the absence of political discourse and of the values of social justice – equality, dignity, respect, participation – in most research practice, despite the recent nod in the direction of impact. None of these indicators are fundamentally shaped by the alleged beneficiaries of research which all too often is constrained by the needs of government. As I have found to my cost, when research findings don't chime with government's messages, they tend to be suppressed, manipulated, distorted or simply ignored. There are far too few researchers prepared or able to stay true to the values and politics of social justice: hopefully this elaborate, committed and detailed account will inspire many more to move in that direction.
