Our Purpose
The Boston-Based PAR Network was founded in 2022 by community activists, students, educators, and researchers coming together in direct response to the worsening realities of structural violence and social marginalization in many Boston-area communities. Particularly, the Network members acknowledge the interlinked effects of a lack of affordable housing and inequitable access to quality public education that have created long-standing crises in the lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, single-income, LGBTQIA youth, and immigrant communities. Housing and education inequities remain two salient sites of chronic precarity in Boston. The PAR Network thus gathers community educators, activists, artists, and researchers from public, private, non-profit, and academic spaces to exchange knowledge, offer support and training for PAR projects in ways that privilege lived expertise through innovative community-centered research approaches. This network prioritizes community-led participatory research, positioning it to help communities bring action-based solutions to life in response to ongoing crises. Specifically, our work aims to mitigate the harmful effects of structural violence by providing training and ongoing collaboration in participatory and action-oriented research initiatives that promote community-informed policy change.
Our Vision
The PAR network seeks to continue growing and evolving a community of neighborhood housing and education activists, community members, college faculty, K-12 educators, education advocates, students attending public institutions, researchers, and leaders of community-based organizations. The network is committed to creating and implementing research as a non-extractive relationship and healing-oriented practice. While we generally dedicate our critical PAR projects to confronting interlocking systems of violence and oppression, the Boston PAR Network was founded specifically from members’ long-standing commitments to education and housing injustices. This PAR Network aims to support communities in transforming traditional top-down research into inquiry processes that are rooted in community expertise, collectivized decision-making, and reciprocity to insist that community voices be included in policy change.
The Boston Participatory Action Research Network for Educators and Housing Activists 