to fruition, which is available without a paywall (https://actionresearchplus.com/climate-transformations/) alongside a set of papers, each emphasizing engaging aspects of a new generation of ART.
An Epistemological Interlude: Reflexivity and Dissonance
The case recounted is one example of how I respond to the question of what can I do in my sphere of influence, in my day-to-day personal and professional life. The self involved with action research is a transformative self and this self – and activities with others – are the experiments that help us learn how to enact needed transformations. In the space of the conference we recognized together that part of what inhibits our efforts as scholars is the unquestioned norms of an academia that has yet to truly reckon with the limits to objectivity, much less the need to support active engagement with (rather than distancing description of) our fraying social and ecological ecosystems.
When individuals – and more powerfully as a group – find the opportunity to look under the surface of what inhibits our well-being (a key step in transformation is asking how structures prevent well-being), we may feel our sense of dissonance increase and sense of agency decrease. How to proceed? At first blush the brain, especially when unpracticed in reflective skills, can leap to black and white choices: either I must make a difference or fall back to sleepwalking. Taking things personally and feeling (unconsciously) overwhelmed is, however, paralyzing. What might a middle path, a kind of muddling forward, look like? It helps to recall that this ‘I’ is not alone, but is inside a system co-created with others, because of, and for, others. The question may morph to ‘how can I take responsibility without feeling burdened?’.
By definition, there is no objectivity for a self who investigates their own experience. Bias is always a danger, hence the need for reflexivity and consensus seeking. Reflexivity in inquiry is a central practice of the self-development necessary in action research for transformations. By investigating more of what I am subject to, through making it an object of investigation, the perspective of ‘I’ transforms. To use an analogy, learning improves the capacity to see, much like updating the software that runs the microscopes in a biology lab. This ‘subject object’ investigation provides the basic dialectical mechanism behind adult constructionist development. With it comes the capacity to grow ourselves in complexity to meet what we experience. Such reflexivity is therefore key in our practice as action-oriented researchers for transformation. In the process, we hardly need to be reminded that the dominant, and in many cases powerfully useful, discourse on objectivity, domiant since Descartes, is but a few hundred years old. Moreover, it is waning.
When knowing starts with experience here and now, as when we engage with reflexive practice, the separation between self and other cannot be found. After all the oxygen I breathe or the thoughts I think are not controlled by me. There is – in experience – only one boundless field, that includes me and my personal agency. Contemporary Buddhist philosophy, exemplified in part by the Kyoto school that has arisen around the work of Kitaro Nishida (1979), is grounded on Buddhist experiential concepts – of say a boundless field in which all happens – that are radically systemic. Nishida claims that the self is emergent (there is no separate, fixed self), coming to being and passing away in response to action, interaction with others and universal context. He articulates a relational self (also referred to as no-self). Experiential reality is naturally already interconnected. When persons tap into this collective field, collaborative knowing can open up new avenues for inquiry and reflective conceptual knowledge that emerge from the relationships involved.
Social Means Building on Legacy
Action research can begin anywhere – in any context in which we find ourselves as facilitators, and or as leaders, and/or as participants in the systems that require change. We can't do action research if there are no stakeholders to the inquiry. Engaging others is the most important, and often most difficult, work. To return to the case above, I wondered about next steps, and next key stakeholders, after the Dundee conference. An immediate group to engage was the other associate editors of the journal in which the special issue on climate transformations was published. What if the special issue was not just a once off?
I know from my own experience that no one embraces transformation easily (including me). I started the conversations with my fellow associate editors by stressing how a potential change process – whereby the journal would support more action research for transformations – is also in continuity with what we have accomplished before.
As a journal we were well positioned to embrace a refreshment of our mission. Our journal experiences an over-supply of good articles. I knew that each associate editor had individual career and personal goals, and so I inquired with them how a shift in emphasis to embrace sustainability in our mission, and with it a vision for regenerative society, could be of value to them and to us as a whole board.
Not everyone is equally familiar with the notion of sustainability. To bring clarity we agreed that the SDG's (The UN Sustainable Development Goals) supply a concrete, if imperfect vision of a regenerative world. We agreed that the SDGs supply a concrete, if imperfect, vision of a regenerative world.
The emphasis on refreshing our mission at the journal felt like a step toward joining the many poly-centric, poly-vocal efforts within our larger societal shift to embrace better knowledge-creation processes in search of a life sustaining society. These are fed in particular today by the Global South and non-Western perspectives on diverse forms of knowledge beyond Cartesian colonialism. The action research tradition brings decades of experience, and a commitment to learning with others – a recipe for naturally transforming with the times.
While it is unlikely that conventionally trained scientists will leap to practice action research, we agreed as a board that we can and ought to partner more to mutual benefit with those conventionally trained scientists who are interested in impact. In turn, our gift to our stakeholders, i.e., the scholar-practitioners who want to do things differently, who want to be part of the solution, and who see ethics as part of scholarship, is to offer an oasis, a community of inquiry/practice, in an otherwise arid world of objectivist-objectivizing research.
Overcoming Micro-Institutional Inertia
The journal of Action Research has been around for over 15 years. Our own process of transformation emphasized relational space. Before and during our associate editor meetings, we met in progressive trio groups so all participants could discuss the implications of a new emphasis. Coming back into plenary dialogue (we number a dozen people from eight countries; we meet by video which allows for breakout groups), there was more willingness than opposition to adopting a transformative agenda. There were also good questions, some too difficult to answer. For example, who would we attract and/or repel with this new emphasis? Would we be forced to reject papers that just a few weeks previously would have been considered good? To answer too soon would merely substitute speculation for inquiry. Perhaps such questions can only be answered through our practice. To take inquiry to practice required aligning in intention.
One board member called for more attention to our learning approach, asking us specifically to use our meetings for inquiring systematically into our own practice. We'd see in the intervening time which papers we saw as having potential and which not. We'd learn together to make these decisions more explicit together. We ended up agreeing that we'd look more carefully and reflexively at what constitutes truly ‘transformative’ action research. In other words, while we might not be able to tell in advance what the rejection process would be, we could simultaneously engage the new emphasis as a learning process for ourselves too. Moreover, we also agreed to bring more of the relational spirit to the review process itself. We agreed that the first round of review would remain completely blind, but that later rounds of review could begin to include
