When stakeholders in participatory action research [PAR] projects live in poverty, practices sometimes fail to recognize and draw on their capacity for critical reflection. This constitutes epistemic (knowledge-based) injustice. It is problematic for approaches rooted in covenantal ethics and beliefs that PAR should empower participants as ‘actors of knowledge.’ This paper reflects on a research project carried out by All Together in Dignity Fourth World [ATD]. To ensure co-production of knowledge, ATD made unconventional decisions about methodology, allocating resources, and interacting with academics. In many ways, these choices created conditions for epistemic justice. However ATD faced important challenges around North-South power dynamics, engagement with academia, and the comprehensibility of deeply personal conclusions reached by project participants. More positively, a dogged effort to invent conditions for epistemic justice transformed ATD’s governance, the ways some institutions address poverty, and the way participants addressed inter-generational traumas.

During the pandemic, members of ATD Fourth World living in poverty communicated across the world to build a picture of their experiences. This chapter will first explore that international work. It will then give examples of how ATD translates ideas into activism to effect change. One example comes from an indigenous American community where people in poverty are at the forefront of strengthening and broadening the existing web of solidarity. Another example tells the story of participatory research about the impact of COVID-​19 on UK family courts, where hearings are being carried out via telephone and videoconference. Finally, this chapter will identify ways that ATD’s approach creates conditions for people in poverty to develop their knowledge and challenges the interpretive barriers that create epistemic injustice. Working in 34 countries on five continents, ATD is neither a top-​down hierarchy nor a bottom-​up federation. Our horizontal governance is tethered to the realities of people in the worst poverty. Through a collective learning process, our members regularly engage together through broad and focused dialogues that mix experiences at local and international levels. This process begins with activists struggling to overcome poverty in their own lives and to support their neighbours. Next, we build respectful connections among activists, academics, policy makers and professionals working in low-​income communities. This intense collaborative work develops constructive conversations (Skelton et al, 2016a, 2016b).