John Gaventa

John Gaventa OBE (born 1949) is currently the Director of Research at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, where he has been a Fellow since 1996. From 2011-2014, he served as the director of the Coady International Institute and Vice-President of International Development at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Gaventa received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University in 1971, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville from 1987 until 1996.

He began to help lead a grassroots adult educational program at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, in 1976, and was director from 1993 until 1996. He received a MacArthur Award in 1981 for his work with the Highlander Center. His first publication, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, broke new theoretical and empirical ground in the study of social power, winning the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award of the American Political Science Association, the V.O Key Book Award of the Southern Political Science Association, the Lillian Smith Book Award of the Southern Regiona Council, and the W.D Weatherford Book Award, and earned co-runnerup in the first annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award competition.

While studying at Oxford with Steven Lukes, author of Power: a Radical View (1974), Gaventa developed a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of community power that has radically transformed community power studies in political sociology and opened a path for the legitimization of participatory research in mainstream sociology and political science. He used this skills to become an activist in and document series of national mining strikes across the United Kingdom, including the 1974 Wales miners' strike.

...
Wikipedia