Understanding the Value of a Digital Equity Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Using Participatory Action Research

Digital equity has been defined as a social justice issue. However, there is currently a lack of scholarship that describes how participatory action research (PAR), as a scholar-activist approach, has been used to advance digital equity and social justice through researcher-practitioner collaborations. In response to this gap in the literature, this study presents on an in-depth reflection on how we used PAR in a research project with findings that were previously published in a white paper in 2023. This current paper seeks to respond to the following research question: What is the value of a researcher-practitioner collaboration using PAR to advance digital equity as a social justice issue? To answer this question, we used our project team’s meeting minutes as a source of evidence. More concretely, this thirty-three-page meeting minutes document provided the evidence that we used to respond to the list of thirty-five questions from Cornish et al.’s (2023) six “prompts for designing a PAR project.” This approach provided us with a structured approach to reflect on and articulate the value of using PAR to guide our work together over an eleven-month period. The purpose of this current study is to address a gap in the existing digital equity literature and to more deeply reflect on our collaboration using PAR as a research/practitioner team. As researchers and practitioners working together to advance digital equity, our study found tremendous value in using PAR to create a theory of change, particularly in the context of the current $65 billion investment in universal broadband infrastructure and digital equity in the United States over the next five years, particularly to ensure that those most impacted by the digital divide are represented in solutions to the problems identified by the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act of 2021.