Wellington Sousa 

Program Staff

José Wellington Sousa is an emerging adult education and community development scholar and practitioner. Wellington brings 10 years of experience advancing Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development approaches through training and projects in countries like Brazil, Uganda, Colombia, United States, Canada, and more recently Indonesia (remotely). Wellington is committed to seeing more communities leading their own development and moving toward the fullness of their potential. This vision led him to the Action Research for Citizen-Led Change Certificate at Coady Institute in 2016 and later, to his PhD in Adult Education and Community Engagement, soon to be completed at the University of Regina. In Wellington’s doctoral research, he draws from a post-structural notion of power and self to explore how community practitioners become community-based research (CBR) facilitators. His study re-visits the idea of organic intellectuals as an essential concept to reclaim CBR as a people’s approach to change. Wellington holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economic Sciences and a research-based Master’s Degree in Administration (Organizational Management) from the University of Amazonia (Universidade da Amazônia), Brazil. 

Selected Publications

Sousa, J. W. (2022). Liberating community-based research: Rescuing Gramsci’s legacy of organic intellectuals. Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 8(3), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.15402/esj.v8i3.70755 

Sousa, J. W. (2022). Relationship as resistance: Partnership and vivencia in participatory action research. In R. Stoecker, & A. Falcón (Eds.), Handbook on participatory action research and community development (pp. 396–416) Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839100970.00032  

Sousa, J. W. (2021). Community members as facilitators: Reclaiming community-based research as inherently of the people. Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, 14(2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.5130/ijcre.v14i2.7767 

Sousa, J. W. (2021). Community development in Canadian adult education: Looking back and moving forward. Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 33(2), 27-43.