Exploring Ambivalent Emotions of and with Women’s Counselors: Bridging Critical Participatory Action Research and the Hermeneutics of Demystification.

Critical participatory action research (CPAR) is a key methodological approach in psychology for advancing social justice. While CPAR has been fruitfully combined with both qualitative and quantitative methods, tensions remain around its integration with interpretive approaches grounded in a hermeneutics of demystification. This paper addresses these tensions by exploring the potential of methods relying on a hermeneutics of demystification within a feminist CPAR project conducted with women’s counselors. The study focused on the emotional experiences of women’s counselors working in autonomous women’s counseling centers, which have been shaped by decades of NGOization and increasing bureaucratization. In collaboration with three practitioner-researchers, the project employed collective memory-work and the documentary method to interpret group discussions. We examine how these methods, each rooted in a hermeneutics of demystification, enable the uncovering of latent dimensions of counselors’ experiences. Through sample interpretations, we demonstrate how CPAR can benefit from such methods not only to reveal deeper layers of meaning but also to support the development of critical consciousness. We conclude that a hermeneutics of demystification can promote social justice in CPAR by collectively raising critical consciousness. We outline three pathways for integrating hermeneutics of demystification into CPAR: by employing methods that reconstruct latent layers of meaning, by engaging with theory, and by historical contextualization. By bridging these methodological traditions, the paper contributes to debates on the compatibility of reconstructive methods with participatory research and highlights their combined potential for promoting social justice in psychological contexts.