TREES Challenge: researching with communities transforms the way we understand inequalities
The TREES Challenge: Revealing Classism (2024-2025) brought together 120 undergraduate and master's students from different disciplines and from eight departments of the country in an immersive and collaborative experience aimed at designing strategies to strengthen social cohesion. Through participatory research methodologies, the teams explored attitudes, perceptions and practices related to classism in everyday contexts.
More than an academic exercise, the challenge opened a space to connect research, critical and ethical thinking and collective work. Rather than viewing communities as objects of study, the participatory research methodology promoted processes of dialogue and co-creation in which the people involved were able to reflect on classist attitudes and how they reproduce inequalities.
For Irma Flores, associate professor at the Faculty of Education of the Universidad de los Andes, one of the main contributions of this approach is that it allows “not only to bring a topic such as classism to a community, but also to talk to that community to see what they understand by classism”. From this perspective, participatory research not only produces knowledge: it also strengthens the social fabric and creates more horizontal relationships between researchers and communities.
Watch the reel and find out why participatory research was key to #RetoTREES
The challenge was aimed especially at students in training, precisely because this academic moment can open spaces for critical exploration and interdisciplinary creativity. As Paula Jaramillo, TREES teaching leader, points out, it is “a moment in life in which they can perceive the classisms around them and try not to reproduce them and also do something about them”.
The challenge was developed in six phases that guided the teams in the design and implementation of participatory action research in their own environments. Throughout the process, students identified and critically analyzed attitudes, relationships, perceptions and practices that reproduce - or challenge - dynamics of classism in everyday life. For the two editions of the Challenge, 2024 and 2025, the last phase culminated in a face-to-face meeting at the Universidad de los Andes, where the teams shared their findings, discussed their methodologies and reflected collectively.
Beyond presenting results, the final meeting allowed students to connect practical experience with theoretical, methodological and ethical discussions on how to do research with communities. As stated by Blas Zubiría Mutis, mentor of the Universidad del Atántico, during the 2024 meeting, the process allowed participants to “live a concrete research experience, using parameters established by TREES and linking them to the theoretical, methodological and epistemological reflection of participatory research”. In the first edition of the Challenge, teams from Universidad del Norte, Universidad del Atlántico, El Colegio de México and Universidad de los Andes developed research questions, designed methodologies and evaluated together with the communities whether this type of research was meaningful and useful for those who participated in it.
The projects developed during the challenge also showed how classism manifests itself in everyday scenarios. One of the teams from the Universidad del Atlántico investigated dynamics of classism and microclassism in Alameda del Río, an urban housing project that brings together people from different socioeconomic contexts. Through observation, interviews and surveys, the team identified how everyday practices - such as drying clothes in windows or the presence of street vendors - generate tensions related to social status and perceptions of exclusivity.
The research showed how certain prejudices, towards informal activities and ways of inhabiting the space, reflect stereotypes and class barriers that generate tensions in coexistence. Beyond identifying these dynamics, the process allowed us to open conversations with the community about the ways in which these practices affect relations between neighbors and the perception of the “other” within the same territory. “Through surveys and interviews, we collected perceptions of exclusivity and prejudice towards informal activities such as street vending. These results will allow us to propose mitigation measures and foster understanding of classist attitudes,” explained Andrés Eduardo Miranda Pacheco, challenge participant and member of the #SOMOSUA team.
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The Alameda del Río project showed how the challenge not only sought to produce data on classism, but also to generate processes of listening and collective reflection. This same logic ran through other projects of the TREES 2024 Challenge, such as the one developed by the SINPREJUICIOS team, which investigated the dynamics of classism in a beauty salon in Bogota. Through interviews and observation, the team identified how class differences between employees and clients produce derogatory attitudes towards workers.
“We discovered that personal attention, talking to the client, is considered an ‘implicit service’ that affects less talkative employees. We also found xenophobia and gender preferences among the stylists,” explained María Fernanda Blanco, a participant in the SINPREJUICIOS team. For the members of the project, one of the main lessons learned from the challenge was to understand the importance of humanizing people in the research and not seeing them only as data.
In addition, the Challenge served as a space for building networks among students from multiple regions and socioeconomic contexts, strengthening ties and collective learning. Valentina Gutiérrez, a student at Universidad de la Sabana, talks about what it meant to her to participate in the TREES 2025 Challenge.
“In this experience I understood the importance of each discipline, because each one brings a different look that enriches and transforms the way we understand reality. The most important teaching is that we must constantly challenge ourselves and question what attitudes or behaviors may be replicating classism, even when we are not fully aware of it.”
This reflection was also echoed in the experience of Verónica Rumaña Moreno, a student at the Universidad de los Andes and member of the team. Sentipensante Fabric. For her, one of the main lessons learned was to understand that classism does not always manifest itself in an obvious way. “Discriminatory behaviors are not necessarily expressed explicitly; many times they appear in subtle actions that have a profound impact on people,” she said.
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The teams' findings also revealed a major challenge: classism is often deeply normalized in everyday interactions, which makes it difficult to identify, investigate and even name. This is why the participatory research methodology takes on greater importance in the TREES Challenge, as it allows for the opening of spaces for listening and dialogue, and for the communities themselves to name and identify classism in their environments.
For more than five months, students not only develop research on different expressions of classism in their immediate environments, but also explore concrete ways to recognize and mitigate these attitudes that create inequality gaps in everyday life.