The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
gets to the heart of the matter in a recent interview: “In participatory research you can help people in seeing their own problems. You do not tell them, ‘This is your problem’, but you work with them in a way that they become active” (Nyemba and Meyer, 2018). This ‘help’ is a form of collaboration and implies an interest in transforming power dynamics toward mutuality.
Reason and Bradbury (2000) presented action research to fellow action researchers as a logical next step beyond a linguistic turn that privileged rational cognition, to one that seeks creative action. In allowing the importance of transforming power relations, if there is to be transformation, we can trace an easy line from the sociology of social constructionism to poststructuralism with the latter emphasis on how social institutions both enable but also dominate people (Foucault, 1994). Action researchers go beyond merely understanding domination to actively transforming toward desired futures. In this we see the value of a constructionist approach. The influential action researcher Bjorn Gustavsen referred to action research as a form of pragmatic constructionism (Gustaven, 2014). This is similar in spirit to Gergen et al.'s (2015) prod to qualitative scholars to move beyond qualitative (deconstructive) descriptions to invest more in supporting creative experiments that co-produce better worlds.
Looking to those rarer efforts that explicitly explicate epistemological groundings for action research (Coleman, 2015), we see social constructionism is at the heart of fostering the explicitly dialogic efforts for collaborative action. These take expression in a variety of forms from balancing inquiry and advocacy (Taylor et al., 2015) and critical appreciative inquiry (Duncan, 2015), to working within the arena of political action. Constructionism when it meets participation implies working transformatively with others, i.e., taking on the exercise of inhabiting another's mind-set, for which empathy is required. For this, action researchers must become better acquainted with the one who is doing the inquiring, namely the self. Thus, the practice of reflexivity becomes a critical anchor for ensuring quality of work with stakeholders in a way that integrates subjective, intersubjective and objective work (Chandler and Torbert, 2003). For example, the practice of relational action inquiry (Bradbury and Torbert, 2016) describes an effort by the author and her mentor to be in inquiry together about the impact of their different gender socialization. In an era of #MeToo, they illustrate and invite others to attempt to transform power dynamics through the active co-creation of mutuality. This highly personal work can transform deeply alienating, inherited patterns of how women and men relate.
As the windows of the Academy open up, and constructionism is understood as the way in which life is co-created through our joint efforts, there is an opportunity for scholars to help with the societal learning required to meet the interwoven social-ecological challenges we face. This chapter proceeds with an introduction to Action-oriented Research for Transformations, or ART (Bradbury et al., 2019), a contemporary update on action research thinking. It is an update that points to ways in which expanded epistemologies that empower participative and reflexive methodologies for collaborative action can help respond to the call of our social-ecological times. ART articulates a timely updating of our notions of learning beyond ill-fitting mental templates in which knowledge has been presumed to emanate from experts in the form of disinterested fact and figures. Instead ART encourages us to reconnect knowing with emotion and action.
A new global consciousness sensitized by awareness of ourselves as participants within the larger ecology of life, along with fellow sentient beings, is now required if we are to make the leap from passive recipients of inert facts to transformative co-creators within an ecology of living beings. Happily, it is not actually a leap, but more of an uncovering, a recognition of the truth available when we turn to our own experience. ‘How long we have been fooled’, poet Walt Whitman enlightened us, ‘we are nature.’ And so our experience, when not drowned out by conditioning to privilege objectifying skepticism, or turn dialogic partners into objects, offers a path forward in scholarship that encourages expression of our full selves within a community of subjects.
Action Research Heritage
The term ‘action research’ is often attributed to Kurt Lewin (1946), but increasingly it is common to hear of two origins of action research, one from Global North and the other from the Global South. These are, however, becoming quite intertwined. The Global North account starts with Kurt Lewin's efforts to understand and prevent human complicity in such horrors as the Nazi Holocaust. Father of social psychology, Lewin escaped Nazi Germany and then stumbled, through collaboration, into bringing observers (e.g., research facilitators) and research subjects (e.g., therapeutic groups) together to share, understand and create new patterns of dialogic interaction. The other account centers on the collaboration of Colombian Orlando Fals Borda (2006) working with Bangladeshi Anis Rahman (2004). Situated in the Global South, action research went hand-in-hand with popular liberation movements, which espoused the importance of popular knowledge creation among non-elite populations (Freire, 1970). The North and South traditions interweave today with, for example, the North's embrace of the arts, e.g., inspired by Augusto Boal's (1985) theatre of the oppressed, At the same time, the Global South embraces a wider set of emancipatory issues – such as gender, sexuality and race – that intersect with the previous emphasis on economic justice.
The heritage of action research is both wider and deeper than just the past few decades. Olav Eikeland (2006) traces the ethical orientation of action research back to Aristotle, whose notions of multiple ways of knowing included what we might call the primacy of the practical (techne) and cultivation of cycles of action and reflection (praxis). Action research also provides interesting points of connection to Indigenous ways of knowing because of a growing openness to the arts (Etmanski and Bishop, 2017). In turn, this allows for connection to the more integrative Eastern paradigm of mindfulness that weaves threads from Buddhist teachings to Greek and to Western Enlightenment philosophers such as Montaigne. Indeed recent scholarship is troubling the simple notions of what is East and what is West.
The contemporary manifestation of action research as ART includes attention to both internal (subjective) and external (objective) worlds, and goes beyond overly rationalistic formats to include the arts. Since the 1970s, explicit concern with social liberation has been a central component of all action research. Without this concern, indeed, action research is devitalized to a set of powerful but uncritical techniques. The concept/practice of mindfulness is more globally appreciated for its help in becoming choiceful with intention and emotion. In short, action research has always been transforming and with its practice emphasis and pragmatic purpose has been open to methodological innovation, which in turn opens the door to new ways of living in the world. Given the growing eco-social crises of our time, action research finds a contemporary expression in Action Research for Transformations (ART) (Bradbury et al., 2019) as a call for creative experiments in how to live better together. Our aspiration is that more of us who practice action-oriented scholarship may revitalize our social institutions as social systems learn to become beneficial presences on our shared Earth.
In Figure 5.1, action-oriented transformations research is presented as an orientation to learning that makes it possible to know ourselves simultaneously as scientists and caring citizens, consciously bringing reflexive agency (‘inner work’) to peer learning experiments with our stakeholders (‘outer work’) in service to a better world. This orientation is a means and an end. By ‘relational space’ we mean finding resonance with the ones we work with, the so-called ‘objects’ of our study, using the myriad insights of group dynamics while also attuning to ourselves. Such artful processes often require respect for generative silence (so as not to be burdened by too much ‘self’), speaking from the heart, use of the arts, listening generously, participating constructively, hanging in when confidence is shaken, and … yes, enjoying ourselves! This in turn enriches our conceptual space, a space for better ideas, richer insights, to meet and align. When these spaces are well mingled, transformative experiments become possible. In other words, action-oriented researchers for transformations – ARTists – require equal emphasis on relational, conceptual and praxis spaces. Therefore, in Figure 5.1 you see these core components, linking relational with the more familiar conceptual space of scholarship and then to pragmatic expression in experiments. Action-oriented transformations research is, therefore, an invitation to inquiry-in-practice on how there can be a more concerted