Participatory Action Research

Professor Brakke has led numerous participatory projects. Many of the projects have been developed with communities in Colombia. Professor Brakke and his students have also engaged communities in Florida and the Midwest. These projects involve participatory mapping, designing, developing, and fabricating. Most projects involve the creative and resourceful use of materials and tool-making (hacking common technologies to find solutions).

One of the active projects is TaDIC (Taller de Diseno E Innovacion Comunitaria / Workshop for Design and Community Innovation). This started as a workshop framed as a way to design for peace in Tumaco, Colombia. ILIAD Lab continues to work with an interdisciplinary group of faculty from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Fabio Fajardo), Mount Royal University (Milena Radzikowska), University of Waterloo (Jennifer Roberts-Smith), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Aaron Brakke and Stan Ruecker) on this project. The first phase of this research was financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.