While carrying out a study aimed at understanding the contribution of participatory action research (PAR) to the political realm in contemporary higher education, a problematic situation was found when doing a literature review in the field of action research. This problem concerns the intermittent appearance of the "participatory" component (P) in the acronyms used by PAR practitioners. To flag this problem, a decision was made to use the parentheses around the "P" in PAR; that is, (P)AR. This intermittent appearance of (P) in the literature of action research is linked to one of the main findings in the study; namely, the existence of contested views of "action" and "politics" in action research. In order to address the concept of "participatory" in PAR, and drawing from Hannah Arendt's notion of "natality", it is suggested that the participatory aspect of PAR (i.e. the "P") be re-signified on the basis of six imbricated "P" notions: people, plurality, publicity, participation, power and politics. The objective of this article is to present how this theoretical resource was utilised to re-signify the "participatory" component of PAR. It is discussed that this re-signification of participation (the P), together with the re-signification of the action ("A") and the research ("R") components of PAR, constitutes one of the implications to contribute to the re-humanisation of contemporary higher education.