The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
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 meeting/dialoguing with reviewers and with authors, thus emphasizing 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