Integrating Participatory Action Research in the Anthropology Classroom Through Black Oral History: Process, Outcomes, and the Future

Abstract

We discuss a multi-year partnership between Centre College and the Danville-Boyle County African American Historical Society (DBCAAHS) that focused on training students to execute and archive semi-structured oral history interviews with members of the local Black community who experienced Danville's urban renewal and school integration period. The project culminated with a large-scale public history exhibition and an archival website. Pedagogically, the project successfully made visible local manifestations of structural racism, both to Centre students and the community. We argue that this project demonstrates a successful fusion of Participatory Action Research (PAR) with ethnographic methods from cultural anthropology. In carrying out this project within several college courses, we further show that tying principles of PAR to ethnographic methods reconciles some of the historical tensions that applied anthropology has had with the community-engaged learning model in higher education. We continue implementing PAR in this article by analyzing debrief interviews with both research participants and students, whose inferences and feedback demonstrate the current outcomes and inform the future shape of the project.