Introducing ARJ Community blog: We come in partnership! - Hilary Bradbury Huang, Editor in Chief Action Research Journal (ARJ)

The editorial board of the SAGE Action Research Journal (http://arj.sagepub.com) has teamed up with colleagues at the Action Research Center at the University of Cincinnati to develop the ARJ Community Blog. Our purpose is to both connect journal readers to the issues and from there to encourage new concerns and directions to emerge.

The ARJ community comprises the women and men all over the world who work as action research scholar practitioners (or who wish they did)! We are –more and less—loosely connected through the international, peer reviewed SAGE journal "Action Research.”

What makes our work fundamental to the revitalization of social research more generally lies in its orientation towards taking action, its reflexivity, the significance of its impacts and that it evolves from partnership and participation. 

By getting to know each other better, we hope to work together more effectively to develop and share the Action Research orientation to knowledge as it increasingly becomes a viable alternative to conventional social science.  As such we see our efforts as sharing about models for increasing the relevance of conventional social research to wider society. 

The blog may be reached at: http://arj-journal.blogspot.com/

Community Health- Beth Miller

Hi My name is Beth Miller. I am a doctoral candidate in Health Promotion & Education at the University of Cincinnati. My area of concentration is nutrition and physical activity. I have spent years as a clinical and community dietitian and in wellness/health promotion in corporations and communities. I became involved in action research through coursework at the University of Cincinnati. It was only then that I made the connection between AR and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and have been a fan ever since.I have been involved in CBPR projects with Harmony Garden (http://www.hgarden.org/) and at the University of Cincinnati. I locate myself as an Action Researcher within CBPR. The connection to people through this type of collaborative research is rewarding and fulfilling. My interests in both wellness and action research were joined in my photovoice dissertation looking at stress in teens. I look forward to additional research in CBPR related to the effect of environmental and policy changes on determinants of health in communities. I will be facilitating the community health discussion with Deb Dole and Bernie Young. I look forward to our discussions!

Community Health Focus - Meet Deb Dole

My name is Deb Dole. I am a practicing midwife and faculty at the University of Cincinnati, College of Nursing. Action research and I found each other at a coffee shop in a local bookstore. I was a doctoral student with a head full of ideas, thoughts and questions surrounding the WHO, WHAT, WHY and the ever present HOW of a dissertation. I was invited by my dissertation chair to attend an informal meeting of women from many disciplines all interested in issues surrounding mothers, daughters, dialog and girls health. Someone mentioned a project involving Photovoice…a method that involves cameras, participants and the potential for real change – I was hooked! Real people…real stories…real change. I could barely contain myself. My action research dissertation was born that day. Check out this short intro video to PhotoVoice: http://www.photovoice.org/videos/pvfilm2010final.wmv

Why action research? This question was posed by the editors in the first issue of Action Research; Mary Brydon-Miller, Davydd Greenwood, and Patricia Maguire (2003) http://arj.sagepub.com/content/vol1/issue1/

My answer to "why action research?"... Health care research has primarily been conducted within the biomedical framework producing less than satisfying results for individuals, communities and researchers themselves. The quest for the perfect intervention has led us back to the community where health is defined and experienced locally and in the context of daily life. This is an example of discussion around work being done in the area of health disparities http://blog.case.edu/ccrhd/photo_voice/index

My colleagues Bernie Young and Beth Miller and I will be facilitating an ongoing discussion surrounding community health, health education and access to care issues. Please join us as we plan to devote the Thursday conversation to health related issues and action research.

Let the conversation continue…

Community Health Focus - Introducing Bernard Young

My name is Bernard Young. Over the past 40 Years I have been actively involved as a health professional working to monitor, assess, educate, support and refer clients concerning issues of alcoholism, substance abuse, HIV infection. AIDS, SIDS, family violence, mental health, sexual health, birth control, and sexually transmitted infections. In the last five years as a graduate student of the University of Cincinnati of Cincinnati in Urban Educational Leadership I have been introduced to Action Research (AR). I have found AR to be a method of practice that allows the use of theory, research and practice to solve problems in an ethical manner that brings the subject of observation into a balanced relationship with the researcher and the research. I have chosen to become involved with the blog as way to help expand the science and gain knowledge from the various approaches that AR and related approaches can take

Welcome to the ARJ Community Blog

A quick introduction…my name is Mary Brydon-Miller. I’m a professor of educational studies and urban educational leadership at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, USA, where I also direct the Action Research Center (www.uc.edu/arc) or join us on Facebook at ARC of UC). I’m an Associate Editor of Action Research (also on Facebook at ARJ Community) and decided to get involved in starting this blog because my students told me that without question this is where they go to get information about new ideas and initiatives. Together with a group of students and colleagues from the ARC who will be introducing themselves here as well, we agreed to lead the development of the ARJ blog and to coordinate contributions. We want to represent the full range of approaches to action research and to provide a forum for action researchers from around the world to engage in a discussion of the theory and practice of action research and the ways in which AR can be more effective in contributing to positive social, economic, and political change. I’m particularly interested in the ethical challenges of doing AR and will be writing each week on this topic. If you have particular questions you’d like to see discussed related to ethics and AR, please post them to the blog and we’ll do our best to respond and to open up the discussion for others to contribute to deepening our understanding of these important questions. I’m looking forward to learning more from my colleagues on the ARJ connectivity team and from all of you who read and contribute to the blog.

Wondering what Action Research is all about? Check out the website of Harmony Garden, one of our community partners here in Cincinnati (www.hgarden.org) whose work on improving girls health and wellness is a fantastic job of AR done right!