This article examines how participatory action research (PAR) can contribute to citizen self- and group-formation in contexts of marginalisation and political polarisation. Conceptualising citizenship as an emergent and relational process, the article draws on feminist theories of affect, Foucauldian accounts of subjectivation, and Freirean critical pedagogy to explore how agency and solidarity are formed through participatory praxis. Empirically, it draws on a four-year PAR process in Gateshead, north-east England, involving peer researchers with lived experience of marginalisation. Participatory storytelling, collective analysis and action research groups connected individual experiences of exclusion to wider structures of power, generating reflexivity, mutual recognition and affective solidarities across difference. The findings suggest that PAR can function as a democratic practice of re-subjectification, disrupting polarising ‘us/other’ rationalities and enabling more inclusive relational forms of citizenship. The article contributes to debates on citizenship formation by theorising how facilitated participatory spaces that work explicitly with affect, dialogue and vulnerability can support democratic agency in fractured social contexts.
Jo Howard (Wed,) studied this question.