Engendering Action through Research: Challenges and Lessons Learnt

The research programme, Women’s Empowerment in Muslims Contexts (WEMC) aims to document and amplify women's indigenous strategies for individual and collective empowerment. With this transformative agenda, the research in WEMC is not just to generate knowledge about women’s empowerment but to implement knowledge to empower women. This action research approach presents great potentials to engaging women in research that will bring about transformations in their lived realities. However, there are unique challenges to researchers who are outsiders to the participants in the research locale. In our research in two of the WEMC research sites, namely Guangzhou, China and Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia, we faced challenges of varying degrees in carrying out action research. In both Padang and Guangzhou, in different degrees, we failed to realize the goal of effective engagement of the women in action research. In this paper, we document the challenges in action research we encountered. At the same time, we outline our findings to demonstrate the contribution of our research in term of knowledge production. We conclude with some lessons learnt.