WAKING The Action Research Agenda for Climate Change
We celebrate Chinese Ne
w Year in my family and now is the opening of the year of the Fire Rooster. My clever, talented action research practicing buddy, Aftab Erfan, sent us her lovely Cockadoodledoo card. ‘Stay woke’ a term now vogue in the USA where it’s taken from African American culture. To be woke means to remain socially aware, alert to injustice. That’s the inspiration both for New Year’s resolution and for this blog. Many issues intersect in what we wake to and this blog is about how action research can help.
Waking also implies a new time. Like the one we felt on the Women’s Marches. A time of pro-test (not only con-test). Waking is about learning to move with grace, ease and resolve in and through the Great Transition underway. We seek intersection of the good, the true and the beautiful, in personal, interpersonal and impersonal ways. Now to work.
Waking to Climate Change as an action researcher meant that in January I was in Oslo, Norway, invited to bring the language and ideas of action research to the climate change community, gathered by Dr. Karen O’Brien, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for work with IPCC. Being Norway we met at a ski resort (accessible by city transit of course –
love Norway!) in which there was less snow than there was in Portland. A full 16” had fallen and just lay there paralyzing the city because Portland has no snow removal infrastructure. What an opening (sad) joke for a climate change conference.
Climate change and action research is the meeting place of the limits of conventional science (the physics is clear, denying it is akin to denying gravity) and the aspirations and perseverance of stakeholders with a change agenda. How can we share action research practice/inquiry – our wisdom, our limitations – with those who want to know about how sustainable transformation.
The most fruitful conversations for me – a woman very concerned with what’s really true for us now – were the ones that recognize the deep existential insecurity that paralyzes our change efforts. We’ll come back to this later with an agenda setting paper that is emerging from our days of brainstorming. For now sharing a comic book that resulted from the project ClimaAdaPT.Local in Portugal: http://climadapt-local.pt/en/download-the-comic-book-special-report-adaptation-to-cc-in-portugal/
WAKING blog is where Action Research stays “woke.” Your comments and contributions are always welcome.
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