Action Research

This feminist arts-based participatory research project with a group of homeless/street-involved women used group interviews and the creation of collective and individual artworks to explore their personal and political realities and share these with a larger audience. The project built trust and a sense of community, encouraged artistic skills development, and allowed to emerge an artistic identity to combat the stigma of the label ‘homeless’. Individual and collective empowerment came from creating artworks collectively but also, the recognition the women received through publicly sharing their artworks. Tensions and challenges emerged around art as education versus therapy, individual and collective works, the role and place of men, and mental health and the police, two things ever present in the lives of these women.

Action research on marginalization and exclusion often seeks to examine relations between recognition, respect, and inclusion, but addressing these topics is difficult. Theatre-based action research opens up a new way to communicate and make visible knowledge and experiences from below that have difficulties reaching the public agenda or influencing structures of power. In this article we follow the creation of a play and of scenes that address the life, sufferings, and wishes of unemployed people. The skills of actors, writers, and producers are worked into a critical utopian action research project and used to highlight and enlarge both critique and dreams in life outside the labor market. The article also discusses some of the reactions the plays received and the formation of knowledge linked to these processes.

In the spiral of action research all participants are expected to work together towards a continuously developing fulfillment of the aims of the project. The data collection is supposed to lead to critical reflection, strategy development, and implementation in cycles, actively involving all participants and researchers. However, communicating processes that go wrong can be difficult. Facing the final communication of an action research project on medical education, we were invited to give a keynote lecture at a workshop with other action researchers. We used this invitation as an opportunity to reframe the researcher—practitioner collaborations as the culturally recognizable stories in the gap between research and practice. This allowed us to continue the action research cycle with a group of research peers that had not been part of the original project. Through the use of photos, music and film clips, and in the frame of a fairy tale, we worked as in a socio-drama, constructing two parallel and illustrated narratives, inviting the peer researchers at the workshop to reflect on our experiences, and to bring in their own experiences. This communication strategy helped us and the research peers to work through the emotional impact of our research. It also developed our understanding of the project process, and supported the peer researchers to tell and share their stories, giving them new insight into their own research processes.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) involves collaborative construction of knowledge among researchers and local actors. Collaboration is particularly challenging for researchers when working with subaltern populations, as we experienced in a PAR project shared with young people living in extreme poverty in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The objective was to promote educational rights, based on a participatory diagnosis of factors associated with school abandonment. The main challenge was young people’s reluctance to address their school experience, due to stigmatization processes associated with school failure. Video production and dramatization helped us to overcome this blockage and to make youth perspectives visible to other social actors in the educational field. The article discusses how this happened during the PAR process.

Action researchers stress our need to know the world in many ways beyond the intellectual. Yet in the West such ‘more-than-intellectual’ knowing tends simultaneously to be dismissed as worthlessly ‘not-academic’ and reified as ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’). In this article, I explore ways in which a more comprehensive arts-informed inquiry might appear as a fundamental and normal way of making sense of being part of the world, rather than as a ‘nice to have’ added extra or decoration. First, I offer a detailed taxonomy for presentational knowing which goes beyond the (re)presentation of experience to explore how a stronger relationship between the arts and action research might look. Second, I show a way to respond to the world which is rooted in experiential and presentational knowing first, rather than predicated on ideas from the realm of propositional knowing. Third, I propose that as action researchers we consider ourselves to be Artists of the Invisible, working to create spaces which are potentially transformative for our selves, those we work with and the systems of which we are an intrinsic part. I include this framing as a route to a better quality, deeper, more satisfying, and influential action research.

The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We recount and analyze two vignettes of artistic interventions to illustrate the politico-aesthetic power of art to interfere with how the social is assembled and to provoke new constellations of what is visible and sayable. Such experimental forms of engaging with the public raise the issue of a minoritarian politics of participation. Rather than being just another tool in the researcher’s toolkit, taking into account these practices can illustrate and inform certain dimensions of what could be called performative action research.