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Community Development Journal Advance Access published online on July 29, 2009
Community Development Journal, doi:10.1093/cdj/bsp039
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© Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2009 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

From community participation to organizational therapy? World Café and Appreciative Inquiry as research methods

Rachel Aldred

Address for correspondence: Rachel Aldred, email: R.E.Aldred{at}uel.ac.uk

World Café (WC) and Appreciative Inquiry (AI) are two increasingly popular approaches to participatory research and policy-making that also frequently define themselves in relation to community development. They both seek to create environments in which participants' shared activity and inter-subjectivity enable positive responses to problems and challenges. WC and AI offer interesting and innovative approaches in research but present a number of problems within the field of community development. Several key issues are raised including the risk of imposing an interpretation of structural problems as ‘misperceptions’, a troubling and potentially stigmatizing interpretation of ‘empowerment’, and questionable assumptions about social change.


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