Transforming the Poverty Field – A Call for Papers to ARJ. March 2022

2013©Jhiwsel Luna Ríos / ATD Fourth World – Joseph Wresinski Centre / 6023-019-020_189

A global team of guest editors, led by Victor J. Friedman, associate editor of ARJ and Senior Fellow of the Action Research Center for Social Justice in Israel, and Bruno Tardieu, Managing Director of the “Joseph Wresinski Archive and Research Center” of the ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World Movement, are calling for papers (CFP) for a special issue of ARJ.

The goal of the special issue is to focus on both the potential and the challenges of action research for transforming the field of poverty. We argue that poverty can be seen as a social “field” composed of patterned relationships among individual and institutional actors that generate this core experience of suffering. Transforming the field means not simply relieving suffering, but at reshaping the relationships that sustain it. Furthermore, since social fields are created by people, they can only be changed by the people who create, or at least sustain, them through their actions at the individual and/or institutional level.

Action research for transformation (ART) puts a particular focus on developmental reflexivity, bringing these people, or stakeholders, together in learning processes that enable them to develop a critical awareness of, and then reshape, the patterned interactions and relationships that make up the field (Bradbury et al, 2019). Rather than reducing one group to being the “objects” of transformational efforts of others, transformation regards all stakeholders as learners acting to co-create a new social reality

We invite the submission of manuscripts that illustrate transformational action research aimed at changing the relationships and patterned interactions among stakeholders with the potential for reshaping the field.

Check out our CFP on the home page of Action Research journal.