0

LOVE AS AN ENERGIZING FEATURE OF ACTION RESEARCH

 

Miren Larrea published a paper entitled LOVE AS AN ENERGIZING FEATURE OF ACTION RESEARCH FOR TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT. It is part of the specially themed issue on Empathy in Action Research in 2022, Issue 3.

Miren explains: “I write this post after listening to the news on war, raising temperatures, famine and migration. It is overwhelming to sit down after that and write about how we want to transform the world, but it is also necessary.

For those of us working with action research for territorial development, the spaces for transformation are our territories (regions, provinces, counties, municipalities), where we work with regional and local governments in their policy processes. Transformation is a hard endeavor that takes time. Nevertheless, the challenges we are facing are urgent. In this paper I have explored love (intertwined with power) as an energizer of action research transformations.

Love as a dimension of action research was new to me and I knew that my usual methods would not be enough to grasp its meanings. So, I have used poetry to surface my understanding of it. Based on the lessons learnt, I have discussed challenges not only of territorial development, but also of the action research community worldwide.  

I hope that my learnings can be useful for action researchers around the world addressing different types of problems and working with diverse communities but sharing the will to grow with and through each other in their projects. Are you one of them?   

If you are, you might agree with me that, in the future, action research encyclopaedias could have love as an entry, together with widely acknowledged concepts as action, co-generation, collaboration, community, complexity, conflict, dialogue, empowerment, ethics, experience, facilitation, learning, participation, practice, process, reflection, rigour, search, or transformation.”

Read the full paper and note the forever DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14767503221107937