community as part of inquiry in practice.
Different Associate Board members brought their own individuality, reflexivity and egocentricity to the effort. One board member chose to resign around this time.
As a follow up, I continued to lead ongoing trio meetings among board members, recording notes to ‘play forward’ to the next group. The heart of our work was to refresh the set of criteria by which we assess quality – called the 7 quality choice points – and which also help us discern how to develop papers toward publication.
We shared the new emphasis on transformation with our stakeholders, namely all readers, authors, reviewers. Six scholars volunteered to join as associate editors. We're really just getting started. Transformation is emergent. In turn there are practical issues, such as building our capacity for using social media, and joining, where welcome, the efforts of others and inviting them to ours. For this we use the Action Research Plus Foundation and the global community developing around it. It was founded with seed capital from the royalties associated with the Handbooks and Journal of Action Research. It is a foundation that also funds work that makes journal articles available in accessible blog posts and videos, as well as books (called Cookbooks) that share stories and resources for self and community transformation. At the ‘Transformations 2019’ conference in Santiago, Chile, two years after the Dundee conference with which this case opens, Action Research Plus (AR+) launched its new bilingual, Spanish/English Cookbook, helping to overcome a language barrier that prevents action researchers from the Global North and South learning together. This launch happened during huge street protests that called on the government to rewrite its constitution. It was also in the midst of a severe drought and a burden of pollution brought about by unregulated capitalism. A timely moment indeed.
We Pave the Road by Walking
Does ART sound perhaps ‘a bit much’, requiring so much emphasis on transformation? Or are we perhaps too used to the controlling narrative of Cartesian scholarship, whose stance is distant from life, controlling, simplifying and universalizing? Stability and control undoubtedly have a place in producing the powerful impact of double-blind results. Still it is partial (and indeed a surprising number of scientific studies are never reproduced). Action-oriented transformations research calls us to inquiry/practice as whole persons enriched by reflexivity, which allows for interpersonal resonance, and through that capacity for objectivity. Still one may expect that action research – and transdisciplinarity more generally – remains interpreted by a feudal elite of professors and grant foundations as foreign ideas too risky to take on. The resources of mainstream academia emerge to replicate rather than transform the status quo. Patience and understanding is useful. Yet asymmetrical power makes life difficult for more action-oriented junior scholars who would be the future of the field.
The Implications?
All of us scholars grapple with a deep addiction to the unsustainable systems within which we live and work – and a deep addiction also to the approbation, the scholarly rewards that recognize a narrow slice of inquiry. To varying degrees, we belong to communities that practice various levels of denial of just how much we exact a toll of suffering on weaker ones to maintain the status quo. If all of us are morally culpable, we also have the possibility to co-create the next system together, because we understand that we construct our social institutions. Knowledge systems for knowledge creation are not just academic. Transformation of academia is possible too!
Action research shows up in many contexts. The special issue on climate transformations mentioned above offers examples, e.g., by Daniel Morchain and his colleagues (2019). They share how transforming Oxfam's Vulnerability and Risk Assessment methodologies contributed to personal and institutional transformations. Drawing on projects in Malawi, Botswana and Namibia, they conclude that inclusive and representative participatory approaches can help shift narratives that people hold about their lives and work. By establishing platforms and processes for speaking ‘truth to power,’ participatory processes also allow marginal voices to be heard, which can uncover issues that have been previously unaddressed. Their ART research focused on building relationships and on narrowing power dynamics and differentials to enable the co-creation of solutions that are rooted in social justice. Their work is a powerful example of how to move beyond incremental toward transformational thinking and action, especially in relation to climate change adaptation.
This – and the many hundreds more action research cases – share principles of not remaining distant from the object of study, working within a conscious relational space, broadening perspectives and producing results together. Future and past are treated as part of the present moment. To ask ‘how do I do action research’ is similar to asking ‘how do I cook'? There is no simple answer, nor is a conceptual description all that helpful, especially not one without pictures of the dishes. By this I imply that action research is a process and takes various cultural forms across fields of endeavor and scholarly disciplines. And as with cooking there is a range, from simple potatoes to fiesta, and so action research too can involve a few or many thousands. As Gustavsen (2014) points out, there cannot be universality but there is potential for proliferating social learning if the findings are brought to a next group of stakeholders.
The wary newcomer may see this as off-putting and amorphous in comparison to the controlled process of conventional science. Still there are key ingredients or principles (Bradbury and AR+ Associates, see ActionResearchPlus.com); as long as you make sure you are not alone nor follow an expert's recipe to the letter. Along with stakeholders, may the ART force be with you!
Conclusion
I have offered a case as an illustration of the practice of ART. Journals – which channel the work of scholars – help to give voice to, and therefore fashion, the mindset of the educated class that produces – either as reproduction or transformation – the world we have. ART is a process for self-transforming as a scholar, with stakeholders, in the creative work of co-producing a more sustainable world.
To be transformative – that is to bring social constructionism to pragmatism with a larger ecological intention, ART comprises:
Clarifying purpose
Reflexivity and agency
Commitment to developmental process
Inquiry in practice with others
Integrating first, second and third
And don't forget, enjoying ourselves too!
How then might we muddle forward, learning together?
For our transformative inherent potential as a learning species to be realized, a new intention for knowledge creation is key. Like Othello who bemoaned mere ‘prattle without practice’, we can intend for ourselves, new systems of learning – beyond prattle – which can practice as part of a solutions orientation to future forming.
To paraphrase the relational sentiment of Margaret Mead: never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, constructionist action-oriented transformations researchers can help change the world. Isn't it time that more scholars learned to engage fellow citizens in inquiry/practice around desired futures?
It helps to remember the wisdom of philosopher/poet David Whyte who reminds us that our ‘great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone’. We are not alone. We construct the world in relationship. This is the promise of the constructivist spirit of action research for transformations.
References
Berger,
