A Review of Historieta Doble: A Graphic History of Participatory Action Research

In 1997, I attended the worldwide Action Research Conference in Cartagena, Colombia. One of the sessions opened a space for action research from industrial settings. I presented a project on learning in a network of small businesses in a region of Norway. A Mexican professor raised his hand after the presentation and said: “Excuse me for being direct, but do we live in the same world?”

Historieta Doble. A Graphic History of Participatory Action Research by Joanne Rappaport, Lina Flórez G and Pablo Pérez “Altais” (University of Toronto Press, 2024, 212 pages)

The professor was not the only one who questioned whether action research could even take place in a private production company in a capitalist economy. This Cartagena incident has always been part of my own sensemaking about action research. Obviously, it makes a difference whether your action research takes you to organizations and contexts where those in positions of power are open to some level of democracy and solidarity, and where inequality, poverty and exploitation are not all-encompassing and systemic. Despite this, we have much in common. We live on the same planet, which is currently in an extreme state of crisis, and where the great powers seem completely unable to do anything but worsen the situation. Given such conditions, all the world’s larger and smaller solidarity-promoting projects need to become better at seeing each other, relating to each other and learning from each other. Books like Historieta Doble can help.

In this context, Colombia’s rural areas have been a textbook example of agrarian capitalism and exploitation ever since the colonial era. A blatant dynamic of exploiting land and land workers was established, openly by force and coercion, and more hidden through economic, legal and political mechanisms. With government backing or looking away, big landowners used their resources to block any social reform. In the early 1970s, convoked by sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, researchers and activists came together in northwest Colombia to address some of these issues. Working with peasants, the Fundación developed what came to be known as participatory action research (PAR), emphasizing participation and equality between ordinary people and professionals in research. The task of research, they stressed, is to engage with the challenges of society. They turned research into a tool for political organization and built practical projects for developing literacy, justice, democracy and material conditions.

Many of us have been curious about how these projects progressed in concrete practice. What did they look like? Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said that if you want to understand what a profession or science is, you should not look at its theories or findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say, but instead, you should look at what its practitioners do. The Historieta Doble by Joanne Rappaport, Lina Florez G. and Pablo Pérez “Altais” goes a long way in doing just this.

It can be read on several levels: as a 92-page comic book about how participatory action research was developed and used for knowledge development and political activism, an exciting story in itself, but the book is also rich in its account of the underlying process, presentation of and references to source material, and good tips for further reading, for students, activists, researchers and just about everyone else.

Based on extensive historical work in archives and fieldwork together with many of the original participants, the project helps us learn how the 1970s Participatory Action Research was developed through Rappaport and colleagues’ ability to reconstruct it for us. Through a wonderfully successful interaction between new text and new graphic narrative constructed with accounts from the original practitioners and textual, graphic and photographic archive material, a story that is really an “historieta triple” is created—an interaction between the historical struggles of the early 1900s, the projects that took place in the 1970s, and the authors’ more recent visits to the same people and places, all carefully orchestrated into a well-composed whole, to invite today’s readers into understanding and valuing Participatory Action Research.

The concept of action research developed by the Fundación was based on the incorporation of external researchers into social movements. This included the peasants and the activists as active co-researchers. They played a key role in analyzing the conditions and developing and implementing actions with a view to improving their own situations. Doing this presented challenges. The local participants initially may not have seen the opportunity for their own agency and had limited experience with collective organization. Many could not read or write well and did not always have access to the historical and social facts about their own situation. A key objective of the approach was an awareness-raising process through revitalizing the small farmers’ historical memory of past struggles for better conditions, to advance a contemporary program of mobilization and direct action, including the reoccupation of the landowners’ land. This process involved interviewing elders who had been activists in the 1920s–1950s, inviting them to recount their memories.

This presents a research dilemma: how to maintain the highest standards with rigorous and pertinent investigations that can produce true, important and socially relevant new insights, and to also build this research on grassroot knowledge, which may be tacit, practical, not articulated in language, forgotten in history or inaccessible in other ways. The book’s use of graphic storytelling brings to life many of the techniques developed in the projects: how meetings between people took place, what the surroundings were like, how situations developed, and how different social and creative formats were developed and put into use. For example, they show how the four original comic strips drawn by the artist Ulianov Chalarka were never really “finished,” but were stories that were constantly in progress, as tools for introspection, historical investigation and collective reflection and analysis.

Chalarka’s comics retold inspiring stories, but they were not created by Chalarka alone, but through a cogenerative process that could start with a simple first version of the story coming up, and Chalarka making some first illustrations, and presenting them at meetings, and then the story was detailed and refined together by farmers, activists and researchers. In this way, Chalarka’s sketches were also a form of stimulus for other participants’ introspection or memory work. Such participation and reciprocity between researchers, activists and peasants was, of course, also a seedbed for developing horizontal relationships and erasing distinctions between researchers and “the researched,” encouraging a dialogue between academic and people’s knowledge. Consciousness-raising and political organizing became part of the research.

The researchers who participated changed their formats for reporting and narration, with the help of meetings, pictures, film, and particularly Chalarkas’ comics, to make the collected knowledge understandable and accessible to the people who had produced the data. Through this broad participation, looking back in time and using imaginative, literary and artistic techniques, it was possible to develop a different narrative from the prevailing official history based on other perspectives and interests. Through the projects in Colombia, the researchers and other participants succeeded in creating a new form of practice and research, without distinctions between researchers and other participants, with rich and multi-faceted dialogue between academic and popular knowledge. This created new understandings both of research as always evolving and never final and of its role as a tool for awareness-raising and political organizing.

Sometimes a narrative succeeds in addressing an audience across differences in time, place, experience, training, and expertise. That is the case with this book. There are several achievements fused together. Rappaport’s fieldwork forms the basis. This laid the foundation for her book Cowards Don’t Make History which came out in 2020, an eminent and detailed account of the works of the Fundación’s participatory action research in Colombia’s Caribbean. The book gave us, especially those of us who are not particularly fluent in Spanish, new and deep insight into the work of Fals Borda and others and their contributions to participatory action research. This concrete account and historicization helped make the work more relevant and potentially applicable in different settings, at different times. This foundational work comes to light even more clearly and concretely in this new book. The concretization and historicization inherent in this project do not limit the usefulness ​​but rather increase the possibility of application, for others, in other situations. Its great and innovative contribution lies in its ability to communicate: never have I experienced more strongly that I felt almost present in someone else’s research process, and doing so across great distances in time, space and culture. To borrow from Geertz once again: this is truly a “thick description.”  As a student and later as an action researcher myself, I have read texts by and about Fals Borda and the projects in Colombia’s Caribbean and understood the historical role and impact of these works. Cowards Don’t Make History offered me a rich understanding of how the projects were carried out. Historieta Doble takes me further: It is definitely a “Graphic History of Participatory Action Research” (the book’s subtitle), but I also read it as an unwavering and inspiring call to action and research.

The approaches to research based in solidarity and real participation presented here, “critical recovery” and “systematic devolution,” deserve to be restudied and reused in new ways in new contexts, for the challenges of facilitating real participation across acknowledged and unrecognized diversity are not something that is going away.

Johan Elvemo Ravn is the chief research scientist at SINTEF Digital and a professor at Nord University. https://www.sintef.no/en/all-employees/employee/johan.ravn/.  

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