0

Social Constructivist Practice and ART. Hilary Bradbury and Ken Gergen talk.

A new Handbook of Constructivist Practice has arrived.   And with it a dialogue sponsored by the Taos Institute in which authors  chat together about their work. 

Ken Gergen, a luminary in the field of social science, frames the value of having this new book by reminding us that the experimental approach of empiricism is now a stranglehold. While enormously powerful in the natural sciences, empiricism  – presumed and untroubled in the social sciences – limits the relevance and reach of social science scholars and practitioners. And action researchers agree and cheer him on!

Ken and I had previously spoken about this when his important papers – that calls for new and action oriented social science – appeared in the journals of the American Psychological Association.

In the video we talk about my chapter in the new Handbook of Social Constructivist Practice (Bradbury, Action Research and Social Constructionism). In it I argue that Action Research/ART brings  pragmatism and social constructivism together. In doing so ARTist-social scientists get to place much more attention on the transformative potential of our work with stakeholders. By making relational space more central, we also get to tackle power dynamics that keep the status quo in place. My chapter describes, with a detailed example, how the practice of ART has transformed the journal of Action Research, given birth to the AR+ Foundation and opened new avenues to conversation with our sibling scholar-practitioners in the field of social constructivism and beyond. This is a larger and interconnected one – it’s the field of participative inquiry more generally. It’s a field with many inhabitants, one that, e.g., Karen O’Brien calls quantum social science. When we think of ourselves within a shared, interconnected field, then the stranglehold of material empiricism is not so strangling.  Ken supports and endorses ARTists applying our ART in university settings. Indeed! Some highlights from the dialogue with Ken Gergen:

27 mins in. Ken Gergen and Hilary Bradbury discuss how Action Research Transformations meets with Social Constructivism and how the new openness to multiple genres and artistic representation, that Mary Gergen highlights in her chapter, is a movement toward plurality and inclusion.

27-35 mins: Hilary Bradbury introduces Action Research Transformations as a contemporary practice that combines pragmatism and constructivism in three spaces: Relational, Conceptual and Experimental. The relatively new emphasis on relational space brings more timely attention to power dynamics. ART suggests political work of becoming an evolutionary cluster in transformation as we co-create the future together.

35 mins: Ken comments that Action Research had been around a long time and that he welcomes the refreshing ideas. The field itself was enriched with the appearance of the Handbooks of Action Research in 2000’s. They, along with the journal of Action Research, help further open action researchers to innovation.

Ken comments on Hilary’s chapter: “I see in your relational emphasis that you are further opening up the whole space. Action Research is not only about the experimental space that shapes the future. In taking relationality seriously – as the space in which this work happens – both among the people involved and the systems in which transformation happens- you’re opening up new theoretical questions especially with regards to structural power. This allows the action research to become theoretically cumulative. As it balloons out you can develop better theory.

But there’s a problem! The university is itself a pretty traditional enclave and rewards and allocates funds accordingly to an older non action research model. Ken asks:

Ken asks: Is there the opportunity and challenge here to develop Action Research in such settings as its own action research challenge? In university settings to bring in more voices, diverse practices, including action research itself. In this way action research can become a chief source of research orientation which allows more people – scholars and citizen stakeholders – to be drawn in.

Ken connects this possible opening of the Ivory Tower to the focus by Mary Gergen on the role of the arts in social science. With this new focus artists (and ARTists) follow, which naturally brings much more diversity of genre and new questions to our social science. He notes that Mary Gergen had started her chapter by asking why do we feel the stranglehold of a single genre in the social sciences – the genre of a deadening language about people, one that measures and comments on people. What might be other genres with people? Genres that are less rhetorically limited and which do not insulate us from commentary and feedback of the very people we work with, i.e., stakeholders to an issue. Such genres include theatre, use of imagery etc.

43 mins in Ken gave a lovely example of Mary Gergen’s own theatrical flourish – a striptease during a scholarly conference! – in which Mary both argued and demonstrated the multi dimensionality of older women in her study, much to the delight of other audience members.

I brought our conversation to a close by noting how much the relational space in which both Ken Gergen and Mary Gergen worked together, each egging the other on, is key to their delightfully revolutionary work over the years. Relationships and intellectual friendships matter!

It is not by accident, I say, that the dominant genre of deadening language comes from Newton and Descartes. Each was known to be quite non-relational; both were likely on what we call the autistic spectrum today, each renowned for their aversion to relationship, especially with women. But Galileo was different. And Mary Gergen’s chapter starts with Galileo’s treatise on the orbit of the Earth around the Sun in 1623. It was the last of its type among scientists for the intervening 300 years. Galileo’s multi-dimensional treatise had many rhetorical flourishes. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he was very close to his daughter with whom he talked through his ideas – see David Sobel’s book “Galileo’s Daughter.” But Galileo and his artistry was confronted by the institutional – theocratic – powers of his day. The real threat of being burned at the stake certainly scared him into the straitjacket of science that has straightjacketed the social sciences since. Sadly this is only now beginning to change. Happily this is now beginning to change! (And, side note, why we are so happy to have David Lorimir and the Galileo Commission as a friend to AR+).

In opening to new genres of artistic expression (theatre, photovoice etc, of which we have multiple examples in the field of action research) those involved create and co-create new worlds. We can imagine this has quite an impact on those involved, e.g., children preparing for climate transformations. Action is accessed, and differently, when we use not just  multiple methods, but multiple genres. More plurality, more protest and more innovation results.

This process of being in a relational dialogue – concerning chapters and ideas, universities and futures – became a fruitful reflection on how ART and Social Constructivism are related. Relational dialogue is also at the heart of how ART and AR+ operates today.

By the way, Ken’s endorsement of action research has a lengthy heritage.  As colleague Joan Walton at Yorks St John U. Center for Social Justice recently reminded me, back in 1955 there were already calls for a different approach.  As P.W. Martin wrote in Experiment in Depth:

“There is here an immense new field of activity for the social sciences, the sciences of man.  Whether they are capable of rising to such a challenge remains to be seen.  A development of methodology which involves a development of faculties latent in the scientist himself is not to everyone’s taste.  A development in scope and concept which relates the social sciences directly to the greatest social and psychological problems of the age is a widening of responsibility many would hesitate to accept.  But this much seems reasonably certain.  In the experiment in depth, social scientists have possibilities of action-research vastly surpassing in importance anything so far undertaken by man: an unexpected universe of experience, in which all the great inventions wait to be made.  …As and when (an) understanding of the human spirit is reached, psychology, science and religion can work as one, ( p. 254 1955 reprinted 1999).”   

Links:
Learn more about the New Handbook of social constructivist practice: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-social-constructionist-practice/book266523#description

Join the Taos Community and their monthly dialogues: https://taoslearning.ning.com/conversations/the-sage-handbook-of-social-constructionist-practice

Mary Gergen In Memoriam. Read Mary’s obituary here.

Check out the video below and find More about the Handbook and how to get your copy at this link: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-social-constructionist-practice/book266523#description