Action research in critical scholarship: Negotiating multiple imperatives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v17i1.1520Keywords:
Action research, critical scholarship, transformative participation, participatory urban planning, slum upgradingAbstract
Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approach, while action researchers often see the work of critical scholars as elitist and not grounded in people’s everyday experiences. This article draws on an action research project with residents in urban informal settlements in Malawi and their partner organizations in the period 2013-2017 to discuss how research can negotiate and achieve its multiple imperatives of being critical and rooted, explanatory and actionable. It shows how the action research approach with its collaborative elements helped the research project avoid what Louis McNay (2014:4) calls “social weightlessness” in political theorizing – “an abstract way of thinking that is so far removed from the actual practices and dynamics of everyday life that, ultimately, its own analytical relevance and normative validity are thrown into question”. The article reflects on the possibilities and limitations of the integrated approach developed in the project and suggests that action research in critical scholarship is a way to avoid ‘social weightlessness’ in theorizing while at the same time responding to some of the critique made against action research for not engaging with structural inequality and systemic change at scale.
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Freire, Paulo 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
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Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina. 2012. Political presence and the politics of noise. Space and Polity 16 (3), 287-302.
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and diagramming techniques in Flowerdew Robin and David Martin (eds.) Methods in human geography. Harlow: Pearson 144–66
Kindon, Sara, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby. 2007. Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge.
Kobayashi, Audrey. 1994. Coloring the field: Gender, ‘race,’ and the politics of fieldwork. The Professional Geographer 46(1), 73–80.
Kobayashi, Audrey and Linda Peake. 2000. Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millenium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, 392–403.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Levin, Morten. 2012. The academic integrity of action research. Action Research 10(2), 133–149.
Manda, M.A.Z., 2007. Grassroots-led urban development: potentials, achievements,
limitations – experiences in Malawi. Paper presented at the 8th N-AERIUS Conference, London.
Manda, Mtafu .A.Z. 2013. Situation of Urbanization in Malawi Report, prepared for the Ministry of Lands and Housing, Lilongwe.
Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Boston, MA: Beacon.
McFarlane, Colin. 2011. Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Wiley Online Library.
McNay, Louise. 2014. The Misguided Search for the Political. Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Miraftab, Faranak. 2004. Invited and invented spaces of participation: Neoliberal citizenship and feminists’ expanded notions of politics. Wagadu 1(Spring), 1–7.
Miraftab, Faranak. 2005. Insurgency and spaces of active citizenship: The story of Western Cape Anti-eviction Campaign in South Africa. Journal of Planning Education and Research 25(2), 200–217.
Mitlin, Diana and Sheela Patel. 2014. The urban poor and strategies for a pro-poor politics – Reflections on Shack/slum dwellers International, in Parnell, S. and Oldfield, S. (eds.) 2014. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, Chapter 26: 296-308, London and New York: Routledge
Mohan Giles. 2006. Beyond participation: strategies for deeper empowerment in Cooke Bill and Uma Kothari (eds.) Participation: the new tyranny? London: Zed Books, 134–67.
Mohan, Giles and Kristian Stokke. 2000. Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism. Third World Quarterly 21(2), 247–268.
Moini, Giulio, 2011. How participation has become a hegemonic discursive resource: towards an interpretivist research agenda. Critical Policy Studies 5 (2), 149-168.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? Social Research 66(3), 745–758.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
Mwathunga, Evance. 2014. Contesting Spaces in Urban Malawi: A Lefebvrian Analysis. Phd dissertation, Stellenbosch University. Available at: http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/86660 (accessed 01 January 2017).
Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the Waters – Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Illnois: University of Illnois Press.
Nagar, Richa. 2002. Footloose researchers, ‘travelling’ theories, and the politics of transnational feminist praxis. Gender, Place and Culture 9, 179–186.
National Statistical Office (NSO) 2010. Spatial Distribution and Urbanization 2010. Lilongwe: Government of Malawi.
Nowotny, Helga. 2003. Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge. Sci Public Policy. 30(3), 151-156.
Oldfield, Sophie. 2015. Between activism and the academy. The urban as political terrain. Urban Studies 52(11), 2072-2086.
Oxford Dictionary of Geography. 2015. A Dictionary of Geography. 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pain, Rachel, Sara Kindon and Mike Kesby. 2007. Participatory action research: making a difference to theory, practice and action in Kindon Sara, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby (eds.) Participatory action research approaches and methods: connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge, 26–32.
Purcell, Mark. 2014. Rancière and revolution. Space and Polity 18(2), 168–181.
Purcell, Mark. 2013. The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy. Wiley-Blackwell, UK.
Rancière, Jacques. 1992. Politics, identification, and subjectivization. October 61(Summer), 58–64.
Rancière, Jacques. 2001. Ten theses on politics. Theory and Event 5(2).
Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The thinking of dissensus: Politics and aesthetics. In, Paul Bowman & Richard Stamp (eds), Reading Rancière. London: Continuum, pp. 1–17.
Reason, Peter and Hilary Bradbury (eds). 2008. The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd edn. London: SAGE.
Refstie, Hilde. 2013. Doing it ourselves – Community mobilization and strategic planning in Senti settlement. NTNU, CCODE, and TRI, Lilongwe. https://actmalawi.com/2017/12/20/case-study-1-senti/ accessed 02.05.2016
Refstie, Hilde. 2014a. Building Representation and Partnerships – Chikanda Zomba, NTNU, CCODE, and TRI, Lilongwe. https://actmalawi.com/2017/12/15/case-study-2-zomba-chikanda/ accessed 04.05.2016
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Published
2018-02-28
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Refstie, H. (2018). Action research in critical scholarship: Negotiating multiple imperatives. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 17(1), 201–227. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v17i1.1520
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