This is a small book with a big heart. Determined to avoid writing an overly academic book, Kaz Stuart and Lucy Maynard have created a practical book for people working in community-based settings who want to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their practices and take steps to improve. The big heart in the book is how clearly and strongly Stuart and Maynard embrace the potential of participatory research to empower both practitioners in local community settings and the community members that practitioners serve. This embrace is not easy to maintain, and the determination to see it through can be enhanced through the use of this book.

Readers, practitioners of participatory action research and advocates of engaged and responsible civic life will find this book a worthy companion. The book has a clear aim: ‘to help organisations and practitioners across a wide range of fields to do research with the people they work with’. Stuart and Maynard firmly believe more research in practice is needed to better understand and develop practice from within organisations and within communities. They recognise that the way research is done should be guided by the people the research matters to, ‘rather than being externally “done to” them’. Their approach to participatory research, with its emphasis on working with both practitioners and community members to engage them as much as possible in the research, reflects a larger social movement to democratise knowledge production and dissemination.

The authors make their case in the book’s introduction for grounding their work in knowledge democracy. Knowledge democracy is a phrase that refers to long-standing conflicts over what constitutes knowledge, how it is created and whose knowledge counts. The phrase has been advanced as a kind of platform for resistance to the domination of long-standing and privileged academic platforms that have too often tended to colonise the production of knowledge. Knowledge democracy seeks to break the grip of this colonisation and its faulty assumptions about people and their lives.

Participatory research as presented in this book serves knowledge democratisation both through the recognition evident throughout its pages that participatory research is conducted ‘closer to the ground’ with the intention of solving practical problems and enhancing practices to benefit local populations.