Knowledge and the Postwar Liberal State: Science and Participatory Action Research at Highlander Research and Education Center

In 1961 Highlander Folk School, a training center for southern labor and civil rights activists, charted a new direction under a new name: Highlander Research and Education Center.  This change recognized the critical role that research had come to play for activists confronting a liberal welfare state with a narrow view of expertise and policy-formation.   In the southern Appalachian region around Highlander, such a political culture of expertise was embodied in the Great Society poverty warriors and bureaucrats, community developers, and social science experts who arrived in growing numbers to study the region’s social problems and to prescribe solutions.  Highlander, however, had a long-established method of working with communities that stood at odds with a notion of expertise that positioned citizens outside arenas of policy-making. Staff posited expertise in deep local knowledge and collective experience of communities and encouraged individuals and groups to develop their knowledge into activist agendas of their own making.  Attentive to the changing landscape of community organizing and knowledge production in the1960s, 70s, and 80s, staff coordinated outreach programs and developed materials that extended scientific and technocratic knowledge and know-how into communities of activists.  Their work supported citizens who fought toxic dumps and strip mining in their communities and teams of residents across southern mountain communities researching how a long history of unequal taxation that had left Appalachian infrastructure and residents sorely underserved.  This paper explores the shift to participatory action research at Highlander, placing it within a longer history of political projects that sought participatory democratic alternatives to a twentieth century culture of expertise and the growing power of the liberal state.