In this episode, our guest is activist teacher educator Alice McIntyre, known for her use of Photovoice in PAR.  She discusses the challenges of her first PAR project with white classroom teachers to make meaning of their white racial identity in a racist educational system. She talks about the power of photovoice in two long-term PAR projects, one with urban adolescents of colour to identify and act on problems they identified in their community; another with working class women in Belfast in the North of Ireland to make sense of their experience of three decades of sectarian violence. Alice explores the impact of her working-class identity on her social justice stance in higher education, and critiques how she fought battles, saying she “did go to every fight [she] was invited to.” She wraps up with advice for what potential participatory researchers should look for in a graduate program and briefly discusses how her feminism played out in projects.

Alice McIntyre teaches in the Boston College Lynch School of Education, as well as teaches and chairs dissertations at Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies doctoral program. She began her career as a classroom substitute teacher in 1980 and by 2020 was Professor Emeritus at Hellenic College in Massachusetts. She authored major PAR books, including, Making meaning of whiteness: Exploring racial identity with white teachers; Inner-City Kids: Adolescents confront life and violence in an urban community; and Women in Belfast: How violence shapes identity. With host Patricia Maguire and Mary Brydon-Miller, Alice edited the anthology Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching, and Action Research, in which feminist scholar-practitioners examine their work to bridge the gap between feminist and participatory action research.

See more about the Alice McIntyre and her work at our companion site www.parfemtrailblazers.net  This episode is brought to you by host Patricia Maguire and is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by ZakharValaha from Pixabay.