Praxis Intervention - Systematic Participant Objectivation in Praxis Intervention

Systematic Participant Objectivation in Praxis Intervention

Praxis intervention is not just a method in which one interferes with the habitus of the persons with whom the action research is carried out but also it is intervention on the praxis intervention practitioner's habitus. In this respect the practice of praxis intervention is also a systematic participant objectivation. Participatory objectivation is ‘objectifying the act of objectification.’ By ‘objectifying the objectification’ it is meant the researcher, while observing and objectifying, taking a similar critical distance towards the objectification itself. It is being sensitive to the immensely possible biases from the researcher’s social coordinates, field and intellectual orientation and self-critically problematising them to reduce the impact of the biases (Bourdieu 2003)(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:39–42). According to Bourdieu, within the sociological analysis, the participant objectivation is the essential but difficult exercise of all because it requires the break with the deepest and most conscious adherence and adhesions, those quite often give the object its very interest for those who study it- i.e., everything about their relation to the object they try to know that they least want to know (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:253). It is through the participant objectivation the practical relation to practice is substituted with the observer’s relation to practice (Bourdieu 1990:34). Through the practice of participant objectivation, Bourdieu aims to make the critical and political activity of social research the ‘solvent of doxa. Though the practice of reflexive participant objectivation, the practitioner re-looks the taken for granted assumptions in order to wake up from her epistemic sleep and helps her clients too to help them to wake up from theirs.