Money & Power: Financial Politics of Queer & Trans CPAR In Shifting Political Climates

Critical participatory action research (CPAR) centers co-creation, collaboration, accountability, and transformative change with attention to power. Though often deeply negotiated in practice, the financial conditions that make CPAR possible are less often foregrounded in broader methodological conversations. In queer and trans CPAR, funding, compensation, and financial decision-making are inseparable from relational and political commitments in the work. In a moment marked by escalating attacks on trans and queer communities, increasing institutional constraint, and shrinking or increasingly conditional funding opportunities, this roundtable offers an explicit collective conversation about CPAR’s financial dimensions.

Panelists will draw on both current and former queer and trans projects to examine three interconnected dimensions of CPAR practice: funding, budgeting and financial governance, and compensation. The session will consider how queer and trans CPAR studies are resourced across contexts, including grants, foundation support, community-based crowdsourcing, and other strategic models offering alternatives to conventional research streams. In doing so, the session will explore what it means to fund not only data collection, but also action-oriented dimensions of CPAR, including community dissemination, organizing, dialogue, performance, and other innovative collective actions. The discussion will also address questions of financial governance: how budgets are built before funding is secured, who holds project funds, who determines how resources are allocated, and how financial decisions are made across research teams, advisory structures, and community partnerships. Compensation will be considered as both an ethical and methodological concern, with attention to how participants/co-researchers and advisory boards are paid, what compensation communicates about whose labor is valued, and how financial recognition can either reinforce or interrupt hierarchies. Across these areas, panelists will discuss how race, socioeconomic and educational background, disability, age, and other dimensions of positionality shape whose leadership and labor are compensated, whose participation is materially supported (transportation, childcare, access needs, etc.), and whose communities and knowledge are positioned as legitimate, fundable, or deprioritized within research and nonprofit systems.

Across these areas, panelists will situate this work within the current sociopolitical context, considering how anti-trans and queer conditions and anti-DEI efforts inform what kinds of CPAR are funded and sustained. The discussion will explore how power operates through money, how financial structures shape relationships between academic institutions and community partners, and the gains, tradeoffs, and complexities that emerge when universities are positioned as stable financial partners in community-engaged work, particularly as these dynamics vary across different academic institutions, organizational settings, and communities. An intersectional racial justice analysis will ground the roundtable throughout, attending to how racism, classism, ableism, and other entangled oppressive structures shape funding priorities, institutional intelligibility and legitimacy, and the barrier-removing conditions under which CPAR becomes possible.

This roundtable invites social work scholars to bring financial practices often negotiated within individual projects into a collective conversation. By drawing on lessons from former and current CPAR studies, panelists will offer attendees strategies, tensions, and questions for designing CPAR with marginalized communities in ways that better align funding, compensation, and financial governance with the values and priorities of communities this work seeks to support.