of the most well-known forms of research within the social constructionist realm is action research. Author Hilary Bradbury has been a leading light in this movement for many years (Reason and Bradbury, 2008). She argues, within this chapter, in favor of describing action research as ART; that is, action research for transformation. The major feature of action research is its dedication to the demands of those with whom one is doing the research. The special talents and training of the researchers from outside the system are engaged in order to facilitate the activities of those who are within it. The preliminary stage of the research involves clarifying the purpose of the project in order to streamline its efficacy and avoid unnecessary pitfalls. Project participants must reflect on what their roles might be and how they might facilitate the project's development. They must be committed to a process that will evolve over time, given various contingencies, including the preferences of the community members with which they work. The talents and viewpoints of all the members must be blended together, to maximize the power of the overall group. Action Research should also be full of good cheer and interpersonal enjoyment. It should be a source of joy and relational robustness for all the contributors.
Research as Performative Inquiry
Mary Gergen, who authored this chapter, has been one of the originators of performative inquiry in the social sciences. Performative inquiry, also called arts-based research, is unique among these research-oriented chapters in that the cardinal characteristic is its emphasis on arts-based forms of expression and implementation. Among the attributes of performative inquiry are its capacities to blend various forms of art together with traditional scholarly discourse, to address social concerns more directly than traditional scientific research, and to be more accessible to various public audiences than professional scientific writing. From a performative point of view, while making declarations about the real and the good, performance work simultaneously removes the gloss ‘is True’. Performative pursuits continuously remind us that everything remains open to questioning and dialogue. Performative studies encourage creativity, novelty, and radical revisions of the ‘real’.
We Are All Researchers
Authors Dan Wulff and Sally St. George use their own lives as templates for understanding the major theme of this chapter, which is that doing research as a professional and making decisions about everyday life are synonymous. What people do is largely based on what they believe is possible and available. This everyday process mirrors a scientific process as well. The authors’ work focuses on what is in practice rather than trying to impact or influence practice from a position outside. The aim is to go forward, not necessarily to fix or to remedy. This is a significant re-imagining for practitioners – the focus shifts from producing change in the client, customer, or community to joining with efforts to take next steps in a preferred direction. It is an endeavor that is not formalized, specified, or described as action research. One might say that ‘action research’ is a formalized and deliberate term for what all people engage in during the course of their everyday lives in making their decisions, big and small.
For the authors, this pragmatic approach is utilized in their teaching, clinical work, and program of research. Importantly, inquiry fits into what the practitioner is already doing, rather than being an extra task over and above the daily work. Six initiatives/activities encompass both what they consider practice and what they consider research: attending to curiosities, speculating, enlisting partners, gathering information, making sense, and reflecting-in-action.
To Know and Not to Know: Dialogic Social Inquiry
This chapter is the result of the collaboration of authors Rocio Chaveste and M. L. Papusa Molina with former students, Christian Lizama, Cynthia Sosa, and Carolina Torres. Its structure is developed around the act of writing a thesis from a Dialogic Social Inquiry approach, developed at the Kanankil Institute in Merida, Mexico. It is a very helpful description of how research is actually done, as an ongoing activity among a group of students. The students enact ‘Design research,’ based on four principles: (1) research as relational and collaborative; (2) research as useful and generative; (3) research as organic and dynamic; and (4) research as engaged in complexity and multiplicity (as defined in Chapter 3).
The approach involves constructing the research question(s); inviting co-researchers; focusing on ethical issues, including maintaining respect and curiosity for the diverse and complex moral orders practices by those with whom one works; enacting forms of inquiry that depend upon dialogue with other people; and, engaging together with the researcher on a particular topic. The manner in which the research takes place is decided through an emerging process, involving ongoing, reiterative processes with others who are not primarily responsible for the project.
Transmaterial Worlding as Inquiry
Transmaterial worlding, the title of this chapter written by Gail Simon and Leah Salter, is an unfamiliar phrase to most English speakers. For these authors, the concept of transmaterial alerts the researcher to the significance of the material world in social life. Worlding is a new word that refers to the creation of the world through symbolic means, often stories. Transmaterial worlding describes researcher activity as storying a diverse material world. It is a way to attend to the human condition and the vitality of matter, to the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, to life beyond species and life beyond what appears as death. Transmaterial worlding is here referred to as a method of inquiry that has an important role to play in showing how language works in and between human and non-human relationships to maintain or disrupt practices of power. We re-position ourselves from in-habiting or co-habiting the world to co-inhabiting the world.
‘Worlding’ describes the constant process of intra-becoming within and between species and matter. As an approach to inquiry, this includes not only observing, but also challenging, perturbing, disrupting, and transforming. There is no stasis, only movement. Deconstructing the relations in dominant discourses enables us to see how and why some voices (human or non-human) succeed in their stories being promoted and popularized in some contexts over others. This has the potential to render visible the context and connection between everyday activities and their local and global contexts. Research then becomes an opportunity to understand and disrupt power relations in order to challenge and reduce injustice.
Researching Socio-Material Practices: Inquiries into the Human/Non-Human Interweave
This chapter, written by Tanya Mudry and Tom Strong, echoes the philosophical viewpoint of the previous chapter. The authors focus on researching socio-material practices – those that conjoin humans with material elements of their situations. Their aim is to show ways to ‘zoom in’ in order to research specific socio-material practices as concurrent doings, sayings, and relatings, while also ‘zooming out’ to research bigger picture influences sustaining socio-material practices.
Socio-material practices exemplify how humans routinely interact with material phenomena to reproduce experiences and relations, and effectively meld with these phenomena. Practices acquire their ‘second nature’ through becoming conjoined in networks and assemblages and then persist because they have a kind of life support system that extends beyond the person caught up in sustaining them. To illustrate, systemic therapy seeking to change unwanted family practices tends to be in competition with other practices engaging the family beyond the consulting room. Thus, a focus on a specific practice in order to create change may seem like bucking the tide when the practice is part of a greater network or assemblage of practices. An important difference relates to the focus of the chapter, which is on integrating the details of a therapy case involving gambling. It is an important narrative in that it allows the significance of the human/non-human interweave to be explored.
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