Abstract Summary
Today in China publicly minded social scientists are enthusiastically employing the methods of participatory action research, a form of engaged scholarship most famously associated with Brazilian philosopher of education Paolo Freire. Chinese social scientists typically treat participatory action research as a refreshing foreign paradigm that became accessible to China with the increasing academic exchanges made possible during the post-Mao Reform Era. However, anyone familiar with the discourse and practices of Mao-era science will recognize the profound similarities between the “mass science” of socialist China and participatory action research. And, indeed, participatory action research emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, when radical intellectuals around the world were studying the epistemological writings of Mao Zedong. This paper will explore the movement of ideas about participatory knowledge-making between China and other parts of the world during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As such it represents one step in the process of mapping—across temporal, geographical, ideological, and geopolitical boundaries—the larger global-historical context within which “citizen science” and other understandings of popular knowledge production have gained significance.
