Abstract
Newsflash: we are rethinking our use of social media for ARJ. I suspect that our new efforts to create more interactivity through the journal website along with better use of an integrated blog, Facebook and Twitter will begin to bear fruit soon. I ask you to keep an eye out for changes coming along and to be more engaged with us – sharing voice – as we move to embrace technology that allows for collective voice to develop.
Speaking of voice: for this issue the theme of voice is central. Who has voice? Who doesn’t? Who shares voice? Who won’t? Who needs voice? The articles together offer many contributions on the participatory dynamics of supporting others in coming to voice.
Though many animals have voice, we are a unique species given our sophistication with subtle communication. I have spent much of the summer reading about theory of mind and am amused and sometimes stunned to learn how deep our concern with reading self and other goes. Theory of mind (essentially being in touch with what I and you may be thinking about self and other) is intimately linked to capacity for voicing and testing what we are thinking and feeling. As action researchers we struggle valiantly in this often subliminal landscape to be more inclusive and more inviting of others and more inquiry oriented with ourselves. We believe that our struggle follows an emancipatory trajectory toward a participative rather than reactive or overly self-protective way of living.
Rajnish Kumar Rai brings PAR to improving police effectiveness. The heretofore ‘power over’ strategy of policing is being recognized as incompatible with democracy. Thus policing is coming to be more about ‘power with’, in which giving voice to trainee police themselves is a practice of overcoming the traditions of interpersonal and institutional domination. Raj suggests that the study reveals that the training must seek to give voice to the learners and help them to discover an agency through which they can critically reflect on the needs of their job and fulfill them. Action researchers get to imagine a world in which the police are trusted to as part of a system of justice for all.
Bethany Letiecq and Leah Schmalzbauer share their work on community-based participatory research (CBPR) with Mexican migrants. In their work I saw CBPR as a way in which those with voice help those without to find and express their own voice. Ameliorating health disparities and promoting justice in marginalized communities are just a few of the significant outcomes.
Nina Amble’s work brings us to a deeper appreciation of giving voice to the emotional self. Given our growing understanding of how emotion tinges all cognition, this deeper level of appreciation and practice with self reflection on emotion feels like an important contribution to our practice as action researchers. It would seem also that there is an important gender perspective here. Nina’s co-researchers are women care workers – women usually being better at identifying and voicing emotion and doing caring work. At the risk of sounding quite politically incorrect, as such we (women) give voice to a more emancipated self than might the men we love. This is liberating. Action researchers are invited to imagine a world in which people are in touch with emotions in a way that sustains our capacity to care.
Karin Anna Elisabeth Berglund and Caroline Wigren-Kristoferson share of their work using pictures and artefacts to give voice to new worlds. This work continues the important stream on the use of arts in action research which formed a special issue. I can’t help but think that a ‘picture speaks a thousand words’ and how important it is to embrace more artistic forms in our work. I have personally found that doing so has been delightful as well as offering access to those whose primary self-expression may not be linguistic eloquence. In this way we embrace more ways of knowing and diversity of voicing.
Geralyn Hynes, David Coghlan, and Mary McCarron describe enabling increased participation as a process of including more and different voices. Having developed their insights in the stressful and often hurried environment of acute care hospital wards, the authors underscore the practical (if difficult to practice) concern with consciously engaging competing voices. For those administrators and physicians who have traditionally held more power in a hospital, the presentation of evidence in which objectivity and parsimony is given greater voice has too often drowned out the more detailed narratives that include a patient’s personal details and biography offered by nurses. But old power distinctions are coming to be re-negotiated in the inter-professional teams who deliver increasingly complex healthcare worldwide. Hynes et al. work is an important contribution to educating future healthcare providers.
Gemma M Carney, Tony Dundon, and Áine Ní Léime think through the dynamics of social policy creation. They offer a vision of a more deeply informed policy that can be created through inclusion of voices that heretofore have been left out of policy-making or have been misheard only as antagonistic activist voices which engender reactivity and containment rather than embrace. As fragmentation of our society comes to slow down effective policy-making, the kind of work described here offers a way to rethink how to overcome fragmentation and govern through the collective voice of the people and for the people.
Summer 2012, Portland, OR, USA