Call for papers on research culture

ARJ Associate Editors, Joanna Wheeler, Katherine Collins, Micol Pizzolati and Tetsu Hirasawa, at Action Research journal, are organizing a Special Issue of the Action Research Journal to explore the different ways researchers influence the cultures in which they work.

They invite papers by October 2025 …

“This Special Issue will foreground questions of how research cultures, university systems and institutional processes can be challenged and changed.

We are especially interested in receiving articles about the ways that you have addressed specific challenges and how they have been overcome in practice. We are equally interested to hear about attempts to effect change that have not been successful, and your reflections on why change was difficult to achieve.

There are many small yet significant ways that research culture, university systems and institutional processes can shape how action research is done. As researchers and scholars in action research, we spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the big research questions. Those include paradigm conflicts, ethics, representation, and not least, how to address mounting social and ecological crises. In the reality of doing action research, it might be the small, procedural things that make all the difference as to whether our work reflects our values. In terms of research culture, there may exist a minor clause buried in a standard contract, or a strict interpretation of who can have what role on a funding application.

The cumulative impact of research culture’s procedures and rewards, along with the many interactions within a culture, can be very significant for us as researchers, personally and professionally. And yet, except for institutional ethics and review board policy, little attention has been paid to these issues when we write about the findings of our research. We therefore invite action researchers to share the challenges you have faced in your institutional settings, and how you have directly met and moved through these (or not) in praxis.

We welcome contributions from any discipline, inter or transdisciplinary work, and comparative papers that reflect on differences between situations, disciplinary, and/or institutional contexts.

Papers could address any aspect of how research cultures, university systems and institutional processes affect your action-research. Some issues that we have experienced or identified through discussion with colleagues include:

Institutional opposition to doing research differently;
Institutional corruption and attempts to interfere in the research process or results;
Epistemic challenges and hierarchies of evidence leading to research being valued differently;
National, sector, and institutional bureaucracy and policies including research funder priorities and policies;
University-centric ideas about legitimate knowledge and evidence;
Challenges of leading research teams working with action research and/or in participatory ways;
Shared intellectual property rights and equitable approaches to publishing;
Forms of collaboration, especially across paradigms;
Incorporating action research into students’ experiences negotiating their ideals and practices with institutional cultures and assessment frameworks;
Navigating different disciplinary perspectives, frameworks, practices;
Completing institutional ethics reviews while adhering to action research principles;
Gaining recognition in institutional review frameworks;
The impact on people’s careers to working as an action researcher;
The impact on people’s emotional well-being/health of being against conventions of the system.

Papers should explicitly address how action research principles and practices themselves might help overcome any of these challenges.

We recognise that there are risks to scholars and practitioners to directly naming problems within their own institutions, and we welcome creative approaches to protect anonymity and mitigate risk.

Rather than presenting a catalogue of faults, we hope that this Special Issue will be successful in making visible challenges presented by the university in doing action research and offer concrete ideas of different ways they can be addressed.

Papers, of no more than 7,000 words, must be submitted by 1 October 2025 via the Action Research Journal submissions page. Papers should explicitly address how action research principles and practices themselves might help overcome the challenges explored.

See the full call here: Wheeler, J., Collins, K., Pizzolati, M., & Hirasawa, T. (2024). Action research cultures: Transforming university systems, norms, and practices. Action Research, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503241307491

Questions may be address to Joanna Wheeler: joanna@transformativestory.net

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Call for papers on research culture

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