Into the periphery: Acting into fleeting, unfinished, just perceptible movements of experience in scenes of joint action

Much of what goes on in organisational life happens at the edge of language, in the form of vague stirrings, fleeting feelings or small gestures. In the midst of relating to others, we may sense a potential new opening or an ill-defined disquiet. Usually, it is only later that we can make reference to a some-thing that has since emerged. I offer two reflective narratives of moments of action occurring with colleagues and students. I propose that as organisational and action research practitioners we need to learn a particular kind of artistry, one that pays attention to minor shifts and variations as they are occurring, often at the periphery of our awareness. I draw on Manning’s work on ‘minor gestures’ and Shotter’s notions of ‘joint action’ and ‘withness thinking’. I turn to novelist Clarice Lispector to explore how we might approach crafting after-the-fact, reflexive accounts that remain in touch with the precarious potentiality of where things might go next.

Doing feminist participatory action research for disrupting traditional gender discourses with Indonesian Muslim kindergarten teachers

The purpose of this article is to explore the authors’ and the co-authors’ reflexivity in feminist participatory action research, conducted in three kindergartens in Indonesia, aiming to disrupt traditional gender discourses in early childhood education settings. Kindergarten is one of the most gendered spaces that perpetuate the binary between femininities and masculinities. This research takes place in Indonesia, one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world. The first part of the study deals with our own reflexivity as university lecturers, middle class and Muslim women, and we use these as a departure point to understand multiple positioning taken by our nine co-researchers as kindergarten teachers, women as well as Muslims and how these influence their gender understanding. The second part of the study discusses the journey of our co-researchers from having gender blind to more gender flexible attitude. As the co-researchers began to acknowledge their personal values, they were better able to apply gender flexible pedagogies to their kindergarten context. The co-researchers also demonstrate different forms of action in implementing gender flexible pedagogy. Our study suggests continuous reflexivity and the possibility of translating gender flexible pedagogy into the co-researchers’ local context were essential factors in this action research.

Artfulness as a dimension of professional practice in organizations and action research: Acknowledging sensory-aware and embodied attunement in professional organizations

This article addresses the importance of action research to provide approaches to emphasizing and acknowledging artful aspects of professional practice in public sector organizations. The article introduces the philosophical works of Knud Ejler Løgstrup and Kari Martinsen as perspectives on artful aspects of professional practices and knowing. In order to concentrate on artful aspects of the research process, empirical material from two arts-involving workshops with teachers are presented as the concrete methodological expression of the participatory ideas of action research. The article addresses embodied dimensions of practice, the role of sensory awareness in professional knowing in organizations, which are some of the main preconditions for contributing to creative, social change, and scholarly weight. Thus, the article contributes with ways to regard action research as artful, participatory processes and practices that enable creation of organizational and public knowledge on the artful aspects of professional practice.

Four practices for conducting feminist participatory action research with young women

While there has been an increase in action research explicitly defined as feminist in orientation, there has not been sufficient discussion on the actual translation of feminist theory into research practices. The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing body of knowledge labelled Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) by articulating specific research practices for conducting research with young women who are negotiating social injustice and marginalization. We define and describe four research practices: 1. coalescing into a group; 2. encouraging the shared ownership of the research process and its outcomes; 3. developing multiple centres of power; and 4. promoting interdependency. We illustrate these principles with specific examples from an FPAR study that explored how social workers in Israel can best support girls and young women in situations of distress. We explored this question with a group of young women who were active partners in the research process. We conclude the article by underscoring the linkage between these four practices and feminist theory.

Zining as artful method: Facilitating zines as participatory action research within art museums

‘DIY’ publications called zines have long been a way for marginalized communities to record their stories, spread information and organize. However, this article presents zines as a potential research tool for action researchers who are working within organisational contexts. The authors, both museum professionals, action researchers and zinesters, use examples from their research within art museums to examine the value of zines as a methodology. Though the research projects take place within art organisations, using the four themes of aesthetics, communities of practice, counter-narratives and plurality it considers how zines could be used more broadly as a research tool in other knowledge-based settings. The authors provide a recommendation for practitioners to explore zining to engender dialogic cultures in their organisations as well as their potential in shaping ‘major’ and ‘minor’ organisational change.

Launching support groups for informal caregivers of people living with dementia within participatory action research

Support groups are one possibility to empower informal carers and accordingly have spread across many countries because of their informal, inexpensive nature and because of their effectiveness. This paper aims to reflect on the viewpoints and experiences of the lessons learned from the participatory action research (PAR) conducted from 2016 to 2019. During PAR, several support groups in different regions of Estonia were launched to empower the informal caregivers. In the study, the stakeholders and researchers participated as partners and developed new knowledge and 17 support groups were launched in different regions of Estonia. In conclusion, our experiences highlighted the stakeholders’ collaboration which resulted in creating the knowledge needed to launch support groups. Based on our experience, we recommend launching support groups in countries where they do not exist yet, and to apply participatory action research.

The affordances of PAR for a school-community partnership to enhance learner support in socio-economically challenged communities

Although complex reasons exist for the poor state of education in socio-economically challenged communities in South Africa, improving parental support to learners is one approach to buffer contextual adversities. Yet, historically, collaboration between school and parent has been problematic. We hypothesized that a participatory action research approach might be useful to develop positive relations between teachers and parents. We report on the benefits of a PAR project undertaken by seven community parents and five teachers to enhance learner support in a primary school situated in a low-income area. Thematic analysis of focus group interviews with participants, triangulated by transcriptions of a final project workshop, revealed that participation in the PAR process enabled i) the development of contextually relevant content for an educational programme; ii) change in the assumptions of parents and teachers about their respective roles in supporting the child; iii) the personal/technical skills development of participants; and iv) positive outcomes beyond the project. The insights gain from this study highlight the benefits of PAR to enable schools to harness the wealth of knowledge and skills that exist in their community to enhance learner support and improve the quality of teaching and learning.

“I don’t feel studied”: Reflections on power-consciousness in action research with college student sex workers

An overarching component of PAR is that there should be participant engagement between researchers and other participants as members of a/the community under inquiry. This expectation while powerful, can also prove to be prohibitive for studies seeking to engage communities with stigmatized and/or criminalized identities, which was the case as I sought to engage a PAR methodology with college student sex workers. As such, along with study collaborators, we imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic, when the community component of PAR might be unsuitable or unattainable. Specifically, this process creates conditions whereby the researcher can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite subjects of research to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry.