In this episode, we speak with Dr. Wendy Frisby and Dr. Colleen Reid about their feminist participatory action research projects with community partners and people from marginalized groups who are often excluded from health and community recreation programs.

Dr. Wendy Frisby is Professor Emeritus in the School of Kinesiology, Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she was also Chair of Women's and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts. She has worked with and learned from women living in poverty, immigrant women, community partners, and graduate students. Dr. Frisby and her co-researchers have been awarded 25 research grants, and while they have published in traditional academic outlets, they have disseminated findings outside of academic outlets in ways that promote knowledge transfer and policy change. She was awarded the Earl Ziegler Lecture Award, the highest honor for research, teaching and leadership from the North American Society of Sports Management.

Dr. Colleen Reid is a faculty member in Applied Community Studies at Douglas College in British Columbia, Canada. She is also an adjunct professor in both the Rehabilitation Sciences program at The University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Faculty of Health Professions at Dalhousie University. For 25 years, Colleen has been involved in many varieties of Community-Based Participatory Research: action research, participatory action research, and feminist research. She works in promoting health equity with stigmatized and marginalized groups. Her work focuses on health inequalities such as access to leisure, recreation, and health programs. She's researched with women who are on low income, women struggling with employability, practitioners striving for workplace and health care system recognition, individuals with lived experience of mental illness, and individuals living with dementia.

The conversation starts with exploring our guests’ journeys into Participatory Action Research (5:27), diving into some of their early projects such as Women Organizing Activities for Women (10:58) and getting to know some of the 'aha's' and key takeaways from that experience about participatory research (18:34). The topics covered in this episode include challenges, barriers, support and resistance encountered in Community-Based PAR projects and the critical importance of community partners (23:22); contributions to changing the near-environment (such as the university and partnerships with community groups) (26:39); what has sustained them in this work (56:50); concluding with words of encouragement for people starting out in community-based feminist participatory action research (59:50)

Learn more about our guests, their work, and references mentioned in the episode at our companion site https://www.parfemtrailblazers.net/ This episode is hosted by Patricia Maguire and produced by Vanessa Gold, Shikha Diwakar, and Kavya Harshitha Jidugu. Music is by ZakharValaha from Pixabay.