The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов

      Figure 5.1 Action-oriented Research for Transformations (ART)

      A case follows. It's intended to provide detail enough to clarify what has just been sketched and, one hopes, to connect lofty sounding abstractions to practice. In the following case, the elements of purpose, listening/inquiry in practice, making a positive difference with the stakeholders to an issue, resonance within the subject/object distinction, specific methodologies, dynamically reconnecting reflection to sense-making and active experiments in learning, use of the arts, working transformatively, overcoming institutional inertia – and, not to forget, enjoying ourselves too – will become evident.

      A Case of Transforming Self and Community: The Journal of Action Research

      When baking an apple pie from scratch, quipped physicist Carl Sagan, you must start with the big bang. In other words, as everything is connected to everything else, the location of a pragmatic starting point is always a choice; Similarly, when recounting a case. Let's take August 29 as a start then. I remember it because I was celebrating my birthday. This was a day punctuated by getting to give a keynote address at an international conference titled, ‘Transformations 2017’, hosted by the University of Dundee, Scotland. This date provides a good starting point from which to look back and see specific notable results which have emerged through the practice of action-oriented research for transformations, namely: i) a new articulation of Action-oriented Research for Transformations (ART); ii), refreshed emphasis by the Action Research journal to develop and publish papers that exemplify ART; iii) stewarding a new global community (Action Research Plus) which gathers online and in person to provide content, curriculum and gatherings for those interested in this ARTful practice of knowledge creation. What follows is therefore a case that integrates personal, interpersonal and impersonal findings. It is not presented, as is conventional scholarship, as a case of work being done ‘somewhere by someones’, though its methodologies and principles are similar to the many such disembodied cases. Instead it is a case offered by the author in the first person.

      The ‘Transformations 2017’ conference was itself a pearl in a strand among events and efforts championed by scholars concerned by climate change. Professor Karen O'Brien, a geographer, was figural in such events. Karen was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for work with the International Panel on Climate Change. Since then, she has come to feel stymied by the reluctance among IPCC team scientists to even mention ‘transformation’ in connection to climate change. The term was deemed too political, too contentious. There is wisdom in this reluctance given that outright science denial often hinges on the claim that science is biased. Additionally, there is the ongoing sensitivity of scholars to the negative colonizing impact of zealous experts. Still, if talk of transformation is said by scholars to be taboo, then talk of pragmatic efforts, much less engagement of scholars with non-elites, becomes impossible to discuss. Imagine if even 20% of IPCC funding could be spent on local experiments in combatting climate change in ways that those involved might learn from and build upon, harvesting the collective power of abundant, small-scale, nature-based efforts. To get close to such an outcome requires acknowledgment of the need for transformation and a scholarly practice that can support that. It was in this context that I was invited to talk about action research as an orientation to transformative knowledge creation.

      Despite the often-unquestioned norms of the scientific approach and the heretofore marginalization of action researching as a challenge to the dominant regime, interest in action research has been climbing exponentially since the 1970s. As such, it is a sibling to many efforts today that call for a transformation of the very practice of science, many of which may be found in the chapters of this Handbook. Action researchers can understand the sensitivities around the term transformation without shying away from it. We can seek to be nuanced. Also because of the centrality of stakeholders in decision making, we can strengthen ethical guardrails and have our inclusionary efforts be more evident.

      A key part of the relational work of action research is to locate allies in other fields and see what we might co-create together. I therefore approached the Transformations conference as an opportunity to meet thinking partners in the field of climate change. As the editor in chief of a journal, I was also in a position to convene a guest editor team for a special issue that allowed us to blend ideas of action research with those of new allies who do not identify with the legacy or label of action research. With like-spirited guest editors Karen O'Brien, Steve Waddell, Marina Apgar, Ben Teehankee and Ioan Fazey, our collaboration eventuated in an editorial essay which became an important articulation of ART (Bradbury et al., 2019). We also succeeded in bringing a special issue on Climate Transformations 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,