Love as an energizing feature of action research for territorial development

Presentation of the case

There are moments in praxis when we name our experience. Through the case in this paper, I name something I experienced in 2009-2011 as love. To do so, I am inspired by Freire when he described his writing process: “All I had started to experiment in Brazil years before, and the related knowledge I had brought with me to exile in the memory of my body, was intensely and rigorously lived by me in my years in Chile […] The clarification of the readings made me laugh with happiness, almost as a teenager, when I found in them the theoretical explanation of my practice or the confirmation of the theoretical understanding my practice had” (Freire, 2008, p.63). Following Freire’s wording, I share here an experience of love that I have brought with me in the memory of my body (and in a collection of poems) for a decade. This experience has influenced my intuitive facilitation of action research processes in this period, but I had never named it or written about it in an academic context.

During 2009-2011 my focus was on action research for territorial development (ARTD) (second-person action research), and I had not practised self-inquiry at that point. However, since 2018, I have worked with Action Research for Transformations (Bradbury et al., 2019; Larrea et al., 2021), which emphasizes the relevance of self-inquiry, and developed capabilities for first-person action research. Moreover, I have explored first-person action research for second-person action researchers (Larrea, 2020) in the intersection of Action Research for Transformations and ARTD. This has generated the conditions I lacked a decade ago to write about my experience.

The process I share as the case started when I came across a news item on the Internet about a collaborative project launched by an artist, inviting his followers on social media to contribute with their own pieces to an exhibition he was preparing. The fact that followers had sent pieces that required considerable time and effort, and that the artist used them as part of his art, led me to think that if I could understand why they were ready to do so, I would gain insight into what could motivate policymakers to engage in our ARTD, which was one of our main challenges. More specifically, for policymakers to engage in ARTD, they transition from making policy decisions on their own to collaboratively working with other territorial actors, and thus share their power to decide. The artist had called for, accepted, and integrated the followers’ pieces and made them his own art piece. In a way, he had given up his power to decide what the exhibition would look like, as it was the work of his followers that was exhibited. Yet, the whole project deeply belonged to the artist. It seemed to me that in the exhibition “giving up” felt like “achieving more together”. I wanted to learn how ARTD could do the same for policymakers. In the next sections, I will argue that love is the key to achieving this.

I read through the artist’s posts and found he combined fairly straightforward language with poetry, sharing not only the product of his art but also the process. It seemed to me that he was experimenting with dialogue and collaboration as part of his art. I decided to create my own account and started following him. In my first post, I shared this question:

“[Now] I’m trying to write my initial question. The one that made me embark on this trip. […] “Why am I ready – without hesitating- to make a contribution to his project?”

The self-inquiry process based on the previous question went on between 2009 and 2011. I participated by posting my own poems that reacted to what the artist shared about his creative process. As the focus of the case is on my learning process, I use my own poems as data.

What I find relevant about my participation in the artist’s experiment is that I felt unusually energized to transform my habits. I had never written nor shared poetry before. Moreover, the artist communicated in English, while my mother tongue is Basque, and I am bilingual in Basque and Spanish. English is only a third language mostly used in my professional life, which meant I had to make an enormous effort to communicate through poems in a foreign language. Still, I did. The source of this energy was, on the one hand, my expectation of self-development in an environment that felt very creative. And on the other hand, there was a strong will to belong to what was collectively going on in the experiment because it was beautiful. In my experience of territorial development, the aim was the efficiency of policies, and the results were often measured in monetary terms. Through the experiment, I dedicated my time and capabilities to a process that did not need to be efficient nor economically profitable, just beautiful. For me, beauty in this context meant wellbeing that was not derived from economic efficiency. Despite this change being motivating and energizing, there is no explicit trace of this experience in my previous ARTD work except in the preface of a book I wrote with James Karlsen:

“Finally, we want to thank the people in our lives that have helped us see the beauty in words, communication, and dialogue. Most of them are not visible in our professional careers as we shared parallel conversations in the outland of research [Parallel conversations and the outland are part of the language used in the experiment].”

I have chosen to use this case and the poems as data because I consider that they enable love as a methodological feature of action research to be explored more deeply than my regular research diaries would allow. By using them, I do not claim that the artist’s experiment was action research. My argument is that by transforming my understanding of love (though I had not named it as so yet), the artist’s experiment influenced how I facilitated ARTD with policymakers, and thus my self-inquiry process is an example of first-person action research for second-person action researchers. I have observed that the experiment has had two main influences on my facilitation. Firstly, my continuous attempt to find a place for emotion in our territorial development policy processes, where it is mostly ignored and sometimes even considered as manipulative or distorting. Secondly, I have facilitated action research processes not as a facilitator but as a facilitative actor. In other words, I care for the stakeholders, but I ask that they care for us (researchers) and facilitate our development too. These influences, which were not explicit until now, are nevertheless traceable in my writing about the invisibility of facilitators (Costamagna & Larrea, 2018) in ARTD, for instance.

Love as a methodology in social sciences and action research

The core of the case is naming my experience in 2009-2011 as love. In this section, I share the concepts that I found most helpful and the dilemmas I was faced with in the process.

Love as a methodology

My initial search was for contributions in the field of action research that addressed love. One of them is McInerney’s (2016, p. 278), who refers to the hermeneutics of love in action research for community development and argues for “careful listening, humility and action” instead of considering the interpretations given by authorities or experts on this concept. Pedagogy and educational action research also provide some definitions, with Freire (1996, p. 70) writing that “dialogue cannot exist […] in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. […] Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. […] love is commitment to others […] and […] it cannot exist in a relation of domination.” Drawing on Freire’s work, Radina and Schwartz (2019) claim that love is not just an option and that radical love is the only way forward, defining it as an “embodied state of being that refuses to be tamed, kept under chains and locked away from the masses” (p. 1). This connection with power is also explicit in the work of Bradbury and Torbert (2016), to which I will later return.

Beyond the field of action research, Boveda and Bhattacharya (2019) define love in social sciences as onto-epistemological, which I connect to Coghlan and Gaya’s (2014) distinction in action research between methodology, which is the philosophical approach, and method, which describes what the researcher actually does. Love in this paper refers not only to what we do (method) but also to its philosophical underpinnings (methodology), opening the question of whether love requires specific ways to interpret reality and generate knowledge, which I address in the methodological section of this paper. These authors also describe love as a hybridised way of knowing and being while we navigate different terrains. And this helped me interpret love as praxis and connect the concept to action research.

In feminist literature, Sandoval (2000, p. 180) interprets love as “a mode of social and psychic activism” and a “technology for social transformation” (p. 2), defining it as hermeneutic, a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects toward a differential mode of consciousness. She opens up again an epistemological discussion when she argues that this differential consciousness cannot be expressed through words but can be accessed through poetic modes of expression: gestures, music, images, sounds, or “words that plummet or rise through signification to find some void—some no-place—to claim their due” (p. 139).

Moreover, Fredrickson (2013) considers biological and behavioural features and writes about “micro-moments of love” (p. 17) in social sciences, describing love in these micro-moments as “the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviours; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care.”

Finally, Campbell (2018) helped me visualize the energy of love through her argument that once individuals experience love, they want more and the environments where this loving energy does not exist begin to feel empty, superficial, and in some cases, draining.

When I tried to make sense of my experience through these definitions, I was presented with three main dilemmas:

The dilemma between reason and emotion

Love is not an easy concept to propose in our action research for territorial development (ARTD) environments, focused on policy and politics. There is a fear that if we take the affective dimensions seriously, some participants can question the validity or worth of the knowledge generated (McLaughlin, 2003). Pyrch and Castillo (2001) argue that our academic training has tended to separate sense from soul, and policymakers often expect that separation in our research. Action research breaks with this expectation by conceiving participants as whole selves, with reason and emotion. However, this dilemma can be problematic even for action researchers (Dadds, 1995; Heen, 2005) and ARTD is an example of the need to challenge “the rational, cognitive models of reflection implicit in much of the action research literature” to facilitate personal, professional and, ultimately, system change (Leitch & Day, 2000, p. 179).

To effectively integrate love as a methodological feature, ARTD needs to reinforce the role of emotions. And what can help contribute to this is to consider that feeling is an integral component of the machinery of reason (Damasio, 1994). The effective deployment of reasoning strategies depends “on a continued ability to experience feelings” (p. xii). Thus, the absence of emotion and feeling can be damaging. In turn, the brain, proper education, and survival influence how we experience such feelings and, consequently, love requires not only feelings and reason but the interplay of both.

The poems I later use as data show how I dichotomized reason and emotion and struggled to experience their interplay.

The dilemma between power and love

In the social sciences, love is described by some authors as unconditional love for humanity. Post et al. (2003) write about a type of love that is thankful for the very existence of others, showing concern for them, and attending to their various needs while seeking nothing in return. They refer to love as an unselfish, enduring, disinterested benevolence extending to all humanity. Another example is Carspecken (2018), who approaches love as a method and rationale for social research, interpreting it as a stance of unconditional fellow feeling or solidarity, affection, and friendship. Love in this approach is an ethical ideal, an implicit claim that other human beings concern us and that their well-being should concern both authors and readers.

In taking this position, Carspecken (2018, p. 2) explicitly moves away from the “more common modern North American usage of the word as eros.” An example of this usage of love as eros in action research is the work by Bradbury and Torbert (2016). They define eros as “the soul surging forth to know the other, to learn from and grow with and through that other, a surging that brings with it love” (p. 10). They suggest that eros/power is a revitalising experience that occurs when love and power conjoin through inquiry between people in friendship-based communities of inquiry.

When searching for the explanation of the energizing nature of love in the case, the literature that described love as unselfish, disinterested, and unconditional did not help. The energy I refer to did not come from the ethical ideal of love. The concept of love that resonated with my experience was the idea of growing with the other, and this was described as the result not of love but rather of love and power (Bradbury & Torbert, 2016).

Following this thread, I use Kahane’s (2010) interpretation of love and power to analyse the data in the case. This author defines power as the drive of everything living to realise itself with increasing intensity and extensity and love as the drive towards the unity of the separated. The degenerative side of power is the lack of love, and the degenerative side of love is the lack of power. He argues that processes often get stuck because we think we must choose between one or the other.

Inclusion and exclusion in dialogue as a dilemma

If I had to choose one question that remained unanswered during my experience in 2009-2011, it would be whether there had been dialogue with the artist through the experiment. When I started writing this paper, I followed Freire (1996) and his argument that love is simultaneously the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. My data questioned the existence of what I understood as dialogue because poems seldom answered one another directly. Furthermore, the centre of the space was occupied by the artist and his work, relegating the contributions by followers to a collateral space that often felt disconnected. Notwithstanding, the experiment resonated with dialogue and love because there was an emergent shared language that we all, including the artist, used.

What helped me address this dilemma during the writing process was the contribution of Phillips et al. (2018), whose perspective on dialogue focuses on both inclusion and exclusion. These authors de-romanticize dialogue, arguing that collaborative research (I make an analogy with the artist’s collaborative experiment) encompasses both inclusion and exclusion arising from the intrinsic complexities of dialogue. They conceptualize the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in terms of the tensional interplay of multiple voices whereby certain voices – discourses constructing particular forms of knowledge and subjectivities – are dominant and others are marginalised.

I now interpret that, in action research, dialogue is the complex way in which love -with its generative and degenerative sides-can emerge even when one voice dominates and others are marginalised. The role of facilitation is to transform this tension into more inclusive and generative forms. This understanding of inclusion and exclusion not as a dichotomy but as two sides of a dialogue helps me interpret, in a later section of this paper, that dialogue did take place between the artist and me.

Art-based action research and poetry

In the conceptual framework, I argued that the differential consciousness brought on by love is not expressible through words but can be accessed through poetic modes of expression (Sandoval, 2000). In this section, I coherently share art-based action research as my methodological framework.

Art-based action research

Art-based action research refers to the “use of the arts, in various forms, as the basis for inquiry, intervention, knowledge production and/or information sharing” and includes strategies such as painting and drawing, mural making, drama and performance, collage, poetry or other creative writing, fashion design and music creation (Wilson & Flicker, 2014, p. 58). It can be useful to make sense of “being part of the world”, and it is something that we as action researchers can employ to create spaces that are potentially transformative for ourselves, those we work with, and the systems we are part of (Seeley, 2011, p. 83).

Art-based action research can bring difficult emotions to the surface in the process, creating favourable conditions to explore the interplay between reason and emotion. For instance, Brinton Lykes (2001, p. 364) uses storytelling, play, and dramatization to help participants “enact the unspeakable stories of violence and destruction they had survived or witnessed”. Meanwhile, for Leggo and Sameshima (2014, p. 542), art-based action research uncovers “beginnings long lost and conclusions mysteriously hidden”, and for Campbell (2018), it is a way of navigating through the intellectual chaos, exploring embodied knowledge and assigning new meaning to the interpretive phase of the research. Various authors point to the distinct roles that art plays in AR and the different moments during the process when it can be relevant. Pillay et al. (2016) apply these methods to gain insights into the texture, depth, and intricacy of their lived experiences, while Taylor (2004) uses art forms to represent tacit knowing, to which he then applies explicit analytic techniques to generate actionable explicit knowing. In Smith’s study (2016), art is taken as a source to create new ideas in and Van Lith (2014), in her paper, speaks about a relational layer of knowing brought forward through the making of art-based intersubjective responses to the data collected. The author Clover (2011) shares the participatory dimension of arts-based methodologies in AR, and in the work by Beyes and Steyaert (2011), intervention is reflected upon as a threshold where art and action research meet.

Among the arts-based methods, participatory theatre stands out (Camargo Plazas et al., 2019). Also gaining presence in the AR field is photography in the form of photovoice projects (Loignon et al., 2020). Similarly, we can find examples connected to music (Fernandes de Andrade & da Cunha, 2017) and poetry.

Poetry

“Poems, surrounded by space and weighted by silence, break through the noise to present an essence. Sensory scenes created with skilfully placed words and purposeful pauses, poems push feelings to the forefront capturing heightened moments of social reality as if under a magnifying glass” (Leavy, 2009, p. 63).

Poetry can play various roles in an action research process. Barrett (2011) uses poetry in three different ways: as data, as an interpretive device, and as a reflective medium. She conceptualises action research as a triple process of doing, thinking, and being that incorporates the powerful use of poetry. According to Hopkinson (2015), poems derived from practice are embodied knowledge, and it is legitimate to use them as data in AR processes. Indeed, poems can “express emotion, protect participant identities, and provide a generative medium through which to share results with broader audiences” (Stapleton, 2018, p. 1). Following this rationale, I argue that the knowledge I generated about love in the artist’s experiment is embodied in my poems, and through them, I can share this knowledge with an audience. That is why I use them as data in the following section. I have already stated that, by doing this, I do not interpret the artist’s experiment as action research, but rather that my self-inquiry process is first-person action research for second-person action researchers (Larrea, 2020).

The role of poetry in this paper is twofold:

(a) From 2008 to 2011, poetry was the language that connected me (the second-person action researcher) to the space the artist had created. Through poetry, language became the medium for producing aesthetic events that grasped the domain of my emotions (Páucar-Cáceres, 2005). Throughout that period, poetic expression helped bring tacit dimensions to the surface, enabling me to engage with them more consciously and draw on them to strengthen the research (Burchell, 2010). Consequently, although the artist’s experiment was not an action research process, poetry was my method for self-inquiry.

The data and its discussion

The following are the poems that I have chosen as data. They follow a chronological order to show my learning process. I entered the experiment with a question framed in my rational cognitive model (Leitch & Day, 2000): “Why am I ready – without hesitating-to make a contribution to his project?”. However, immediately after that, I wrote a post entitled “The line between reason and emotion is fading,” and it started like this: “After the emotional roller coaster of reading your old blogs, the line between what I think and what I feel is rapidly fading away. The more I know, the deeper it hurts.” I thus conclude that the experiment was, from the beginning, an exploration of the tension between reason and emotion (Damasio, 1994).

Based on that tension, I describe that initial stage as a hybridised way of knowing and being (the more I know, the deeper it hurts) while I navigated the unexplored terrains of art and emotions (Boveda & Bhattacharya, 2019).

“You’ve untied forgotten memories

I reached a differential mode of consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) which I described as forgotten memories that I couldn’t reach on my own. The memories had been there before the experiment, only they were not accessible to me without poetry. Through his poems, the artist had facilitated my self-inquiry process (you’re the master of dialogue with the unknown making me write what I would not). I felt the energizing effect of integrating emotions in my inquiry. Nevertheless, I was also aware that this experiment was not within the formal and explicit delimitation of my (second-person) action research. Thus, I felt it was not real, and I did not know how to nurture the space to make it a safe one for learning. I was continuously afraid it would disappear (a twist and you’re gone).

The previous poem features love in the experiment as the soul surging forth to know the other, to learn from and grow with and through that other (Bradbury & Torbert, 2016). However, I struggled to make sense of it because I simultaneously felt the artist’s power over me. This was connected to the nature of the social media platform and its use by the artist. Nothing happened unless he provoked it, and it was his timing that everybody followed.

“I’m an emotional chameleon

I now realize that my experience of power did not deny love. Following Bradbury and Torbert (2016) and Kahane (2010), I interpret power and love as two sides of the same coin that need each other to be generative and energizing. When I wrote I don’t look for mercy, beat hard, I was saying that I was not afraid of power, but I longed for equal footing, a balance in power that would allow me to hit back. I felt invisible, an emotional chameleon, and love and power can only be generative when there is an acknowledgement of the other (Kahane, 2010).

Discouraged by this degenerative side of power, I felt I was a victim of research, a victim of my desire to understand what was not accessible to me.

“I’m no poetry

The energizing effect of poetry faded, and I considered my attempt to grow and learn through the artist (I’m no poetry, just scientific prose twisted to fit your geometry) as a failure (I can’t enjoy). Nonetheless, I could not leave (break my ties) because I simultaneously sensed that I was learning something deep (it’s still alive).

I interpreted that I did not enjoy the process because I could not fully experience dialogue. We were sharing our contents (poems), but were we talking to each other?

“Parallel conversations

The artist did not/could not acknowledge the others (followers) as specific individuals in a dialogue, which I have described as the degenerative side of power (lack of love). Moreover, by accepting this situation, I experienced the degenerative side of love (lack of power). This made me feel unstable, and I decided to leave the experiment.

“I surrender

My questions on dialogue remained unanswered:

“Was there ever an intersecting moment

As I advanced in the conceptual framework of this paper, based on Phillips et al. (2018), I now interpret that there was dialogue. This dialogue was made of both inclusion and exclusion, which I consider to be the most feasible dialogue in a situation where generative and degenerative sides of love and power interplay.

I end this section with a poem I wrote as a closure to my journey in the experiment. I think that nothing in the poem is a synonym of love. My choice of this word probably shows my inability at that time to constructively handle degenerative power and exclusion.

“we shared nothing

I depicted nothing as the ultimate union of the unbound, which mirrors Kahane’s (2010) definition of love as the drive to unity of the separated (I had not read his book when I wrote the poems). I also described it as recognition after absence, which I now connect to the tension between inclusion and exclusion in dialogue (Philips et al., 2018). Moreover, although we never directly talked to each other (parallel voices), I felt a strong connection (fusing structure) that materialized in a process of exploration and learning (every word a new step into virgin field). The hardest part of my experience was never being able to prove mutuality in the learning process, which made me feel extremely vulnerable (the further we go, the more on our own).

Final reflection: Love in the action research community

The action research literature integrates a series of concepts that are widely accepted as features of action research methodologies. The entries in the encyclopaedia of action research (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014) provide examples of some of the most accepted ones, including action, co-generation, collaboration, community, complexity, conflict, dialogue, empowerment, ethics, experience, facilitation, learning, participation, practice, process, reflection, rigour, search, or transformation. But love is not among them, even though from a methodological point of view, love would complement the rest as a drive to unity that energizes the process.

However, we do not only write about these concepts, but we also experience them. In my trajectory of interaction with action researchers around the world since 2008, I can identify love as a drive to unity in our endeavours to connect, work with each other, learn together and try to make action research useful. I have also found power in the form of the drive towards the self-realisation of action researchers and the different groups within action research. Over these years, I have felt the generative and degenerative sides of both. As a community, it is now the moment to explore their interplay so that we can, united, make action research a meaningful response to societal challenges.