Exploring Action Research from a Social Field Perspective

In this piece we share our discovery process as action researchers in an online, global change initiative that emerged during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020. In the spirit of sharing our work "in the making" we aim to make visible our own reflection process and the questions that surface from it. In particular, we share and explore our realization that in order to fully serve the transformational intention of the initiative and the research itself, we needed to expand our research framework mid-process. The framework that best serves the emergent and transformative nature of the initiative is one that both supports awareness-based action and generates widely applicable knowledge; that integrates a variety of perspectives on social phenomena (first-, second-, and third-person); and that aims to bring systematic inquiry both to the observable phenomena and the deeper underlying dimensions. The approach requires us to make visible our assumptions and to integrate and validate different epistemologies, including relational, intuitive and aesthetic knowing. As such, the approach to research we suggest here can be thought of as an epistemological framework itself.