Bio: Carmen Martinez Vargas completed her undergraduate studies as a Social Worker at the UNED (Murcia, Spain), and a master's in Development Studies at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Valencia, Spain). Her PhD project focuses on the use of participatory methodologies to advance socially just higher education.

TITLE: Democratic Capabilities Research: An undergraduate experience to advance socially just higher education in South Africa

Abstract

During the last sixty years, an extended family of participatory approaches has grown within qualitative research, creating a wide range of conceptualisations and typologies under the same umbrella, mostly know as Action Research (AR) or Participatory Action Research (PAR). Within the Capabilities Approach’ community, much Action Research has been used as a methodology to research the different aspects of human development, without proposing a particular typology. Therefore, this study lays the foundation of a new pedagogical tool, which re-signifies the terms ‘Participation’ ‘Action’ and ‘Research’ into a Democratic Capabilities Research (DCR), which is aligned with a human development perspective.
DCR is a co-inquiry driven process designed for undergraduate students or individuals with constrained or developing access to academic discourses, where the participants own the freedom to conduct the research according to their team aspirations and are being enabled and guided in this process by a facilitator. Due to the complexities of blending a collective research into an individual thesis, the study has been divided into two projects, allowing the integrity of the team agency and the elaboration of a case study based on the data collection from the collective process. Moreover, there are three analytical levels for the instrument selection. These include: A group process in which data is collected by participant observation during the co-inquiry workshops, an interpersonal process through in-depth interviews, with a total of fifteen interviews before, during, and after the collective research, and at an individual level through personal contributions in creative diaries.
Therefore, the aims of this individual process are to implement and re-think the Democratic Capabilities Research process and to understand how this original training might contribute to advance socially just higher education at a particular South African university.