Participatory and action research as a transformative praxis: responding to humanitarian crises from the margins

This article reports on a small set of community-based participatory projects designed collaboratively by and for survivors directly affected by armed conflict in Guatemala and some of their family members in the North (i.e., in New Orleans, Louisiana, and New England). Local protagonists deeply scarred by war and gross violations of human rights drew on indigenous beliefs and practices, creativity, visual performance arts, and participatory and action research strategies to develop and perform collaborative community-based actions. These initiatives constitute a people's psychosocial praxis. Through their individual and collective narratives and actions, Mayan and African American women and Latinas perform a psychology from the "two-thirds world," one that draws on postcolonial theory and methodology to retheorize trauma and resilience. These voices, creative representations, and actions of women from the Global South transform earlier, partial efforts to decenter EuroAmerican epistemologies underlying dominant models of trauma that reduce complex collective phenomena to individual pathology, refer to continuous trauma as past, are ahistorical, and universalize culturally particular realities.