Praxis intervention

Praxis intervention is a form of participatory action research that emphasizes working on the praxis potential, or phronesis, of its participants. This contrasts with other forms of participatory action research, which emphasize the collective modification of the external world (Madhu 2005). Praxis potential means the members' potential to reflexively work on their respective mentalities; participant here refers not just to the clientele beneficiaries of the praxis intervention project, but also the organisers and experts participating in such a project. Praxis intervention is intended to lead its members through a 'participant objectivation'. The method prioritizes unsettling the settled mentalities, especially where the settled mindsets prevalent in the social world or individuals is suspected to have sustained or contributed to their suffering or marginality (McLaren 2001). Praxis intervention is a form of participatory action research that emphasizes working on the praxis potential, or phronesis, of its participants. This contrasts with other forms of participatory action research, which emphasize the collective modification of the external world (Madhu 2005). Praxis potential means the members' potential to reflexively work on their respective mentalities; participant here refers not just to the clientele beneficiaries of the praxis intervention project, but also the organisers and experts participating in such a project. Praxis intervention is intended to lead its members through a 'participant objectivation'. The method prioritizes unsettling the settled mentalities, especially where the settled mindsets prevalent in the social world or individuals is suspected to have sustained or contributed to their suffering or marginality (McLaren 2001). Praxis was conceptualized in its reflexive and non-reflexive varieties by Karl Marx (Gouldner 1980:32-33). The reflexive praxis is the moment in the dialectic change, and the non-reflexive one as the routinising mechanism operating within the ideologies as a reproductive or status quo maintaining. In Marx, it is the non-reflexive habituating praxis, that leads to false consciousness and alienation. Mihailo Marković (1974:64) explains that moments of praxis include creativity instead of sameness, autonomy instead of subordination, sociality instead of massification, rationality instead of blind reaction and intentionality rather than compliance. Praxis intervention makes research, creative expression or technology development into a bottom-up process. It democratizes making of art, science, technology and critical conscience. The praxis intervention method aims at provoking members to unsettle their settled mindsets and to have a fresh look at the world around and intervene. For instance, members may take a fresh critical look on the gender relations existing, if the praxis intervention method is applied to study gender relations. They would be unsettling their biographically and structurally ingrained perceptions of gender relations and freshly look at it. A gradual process by which members are helped to reflexively recognize the arbitrary and discriminating mindsets within themselves and the world around and working towards correcting it is praxis intervention. The praxis intervention method helps members to struggle against structurally ingrained discrimination. Praxis intervention helps respondents to come out with answers which they would not have otherwise expressed. Questionnaire based surveys, formal interviews, and even focus group discussions are not useful to help respondents to come out with genuine answers to the questions posed at them. Praxis intervention as it helps groups of people probing their own conditions phase by phase through prolonged discussions, experiments and conscious explorations is capable of coming out with better quality data that could be useful for the group to challenge existing epistemic structures and work out their own well being. Praxis intervention is useful wherever reflexivity is a major component in a research project. Praxis intervention interferes not only with the habitus of the people with whom the action research is carried out, but also the praxis intervention practitioner's own habitus. In this respect, the practice of praxis intervention is also a systematic participant objectivation. Participatory objectivation is 'objectifying the act of objectification'. By objectifying the objectification it is meant the researcher, while observing and objectifying, takes a similar critical distance towards the objectification itself. It is being sensitive to the immensely possible biases from the researcher’s social coordinates, field and intellectual orientation and self-critically problematising them to reduce the impact of the biases (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, pp. 39–42; Bourdieu 2003). According to Bourdieu, within the sociological analysis, the participant objectivation is the essential but difficult exercise of all because it requires the break with the deepest and most conscious adherence and adhesions, those quite often give the object its very interest for those who study it, that is, everything about their relation to the object they try to know that they least want to know (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:253). It is through the participant objectivation that the practical relation to practice is substituted with the observer’s relation to practice (Bourdieu 1990:34). Through the practice of participant objectivation, Bourdieu aims to make the critical and political activity of social research the 'solvent of doxa'. Though the practice of reflexive participant objectivation, the practitioner re-looks the taken-for-granted assumptions in order to wake up from their epistemic sleep and helps their clients too to help them to wake up from their own. Praxis intervention as a practice involves working on the bias of the professionals and their clientele. It is a practical method of 'objectifying objectification' on a collective basis (Maton 2003:57). The praxis intervention method problematises the bias of the researcher and her clientele emerging from their social origins, class, gender coordinates; their position in the intellectual field and in their respective social space; and also their 'intellectual bias,' the results of viewing the world as a spectacle.