Flavia Perea 
Tuesdays, 12:45-2:45 (can be changed to better meet the needs of all students in the course) 

Course Description: This course will examine the principles and methods of community based, participatory, action, and decolonizing approaches to inquiry. In addition to developing this knowledge and skill-set among students in the course, the purpose of this lab is to design a curriculum to teach this content to undergraduates in tandem with creating a strategy to increase public knowledge and usage of equitable approaches for knowledge generation, meaning making, and social transformation through inquiry. Together we will engage with various frameworks and systems of knowing and meaning making; how they are centered on, or the extent they intersect with the pursuit of equity and justice; and pragmatic approaches for moving from theory to practice. We will discuss power and privilege, identity and location in the context of research; the promise and limitations of engaged inquiry to help advance social change; and the ethics of inquiry with historically and systemically oppressed people and communities. We will discuss epistemology, research paradigms, and explore a variety of approaches, including Participatory Action Research/PAR, Community Based Participatory Research/CBPR, citizen science, and indigenous approaches to research. We will examine how different approaches for asking questions, methods for gathering and analyzing information, and sharing knowledge, as well as the principles, truths, and worldviews that undergird different approaches, can be applied in diverse contexts. Learning from and critical engagement with voices and perspectives from beyond the academy, in particular those excluded from academic scholarship, will be central to our work. Ultimately, we will critically examine how inquiry that emphasizes equity, collaboration, and reciprocity in the uncovering, integration, application and dissemination of knowledge can be a tool of liberation and certain methods a strategy for responding to oppression, colonization, and systems of domination.