From the Editors' desk. All is change

Hi everyone. I can't wait for my vacation from this blog!! Not that I don't love weekly blogging!! When it goes well there is immediate inspiration to articulate something that has been simmering beneath the conscious surface. And that may well be important.
I find myself thinking about change....”all is change” said Heraclitus and the Buddha said something similar a little beforehand too (it is possible that there was knowledge transfer between these very high cultures of northern India and Southern Greece at around 500 BCE --but I do not wish to digress...)
If “all is change” then what possessed Kurt Lewin to suggest a three phase change model that has been very influential in organizational action research and indeed even in organizational conventional research?! His model went something like: unfreeze the system, make the change, refreeze. It still forms the underlying basis of many change management theories models and strategies for managing change. It still informs much action research.
His premise is that the organization (or any system) is frozen in place - hence we seek to unfreeze things just to begin to make change. More rigorous understanding of reality (a la physics) suggests that all systems are, in fact, extraordinarily dynamic. From the microscopic level up, electrons are whirring around at unimaginable rates, configuring themselves over and over...and in apparently the same way as they just were! Who’d have thunk? Isn't that odd how it all comes together so nicely just the way it was?! Well what if we took scientific insight more seriously as action researchers and allowed ourselves experience that things are, in fact, exactly what they are, namely in profound flux. As such we could imagine how reality can become reconfigured much more easily than we secretly fear. Indeed, a revolution continues to spread across the Middle East, and simultaneously, yes, the Israelis and Palestinians are still at each other’s throats. Both facts are true, change and stubborn stasis. I think about this today as I spent the morning in a faculty meeting and listened to how much all faculty learn from our students about the degree of suffering there is in the workplace. For many our workplaces are simply toxic. This is especially troubling when we consider that the faculty I interact with most spend their time teaching people who work inside healthcare systems. Healthcare systems that make their own employees sick. Hmm.
When I consider that “all is change” then, and I work and teach as an action researcher, I can get in touch with actually how much capacity there is for improving things, after all. “It’s all good” as we say in LA and it could use a lot of improvement. I decide that the insistent reemergence of the status quo comes from fragmentation. There are just too many disconnects among us. However if we can combine our intrinsic capacity for change we'd get, well, change! And that means assuming we can align interests. OK, that is a hard part. But for now at least I have established for myself that acceptance of change as the foundation of how things are means that the spring board from which i invite others to jump with me (toward alignment of interests) is one that is right there -doesn't need to be created - it is how the universe actually is. Einstein is said to have said that the most important question to ask of someone is whether they think the universe is friendly or indifferent. I experience it as friendly. I believe the universe may actually even support non toxic work situations - ones more pleasing (psychologically and socially) to natural systems - we just have to get aligned. Now that’s where action research comes in!

Hilary Bradbury-Huang,
Editor ARJ
Portlandia, USA.

From the Editors' desk: Welcome Svante Lifvergren to the Associate Editor board at ARJ

I am pleased to announce that Svante Lifvergren, MD., who leads the Centre for Healthcare Improvement (CHI), Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg in Sweden has agreed to join us at ARJ. Svante will be part of the ARJ journal's associate editor board. He will lead the growing healthcare domain. I speak for all of my colleagues on the AE board -- Drs. Mary Brydon-Miller, Victor Friedman, Patricia Gaya Wicks, Davydd Greenwood, Meghna Guhathakurta, Marianne Kristiansen and Ernie Stringer-- in offering welcome to Svante.
Svante is both a scholar and practitioner. In leading CHI, he says the main idea behind the Center is to enhance quality improvement work in healthcare from a patient point of view, by facilitating learning about improvement across boundaries. In this way the action is toward a creative rather than reactive approach to health and wellbeing. Healthcare PAR is therefore very much alive and thriving in this arena. A large measure of the work is also educational - with Masters level courses offered to Healthcare leaders. Svante’s background as a physician and hospital administrator allows him bring practice and scholarship together. The education is designed to help these specialists think beyond technical excellence and toward greater systems alignment. That this all happening with strong government support in Sweden, one of the world's most advanced countries in terms of quality of life, women's activity in society and with little healthcare disparity across social and ethnic lines. Doesn’t that make us silently wonder if it's even relevant to other countries whose deep struggles with healthcare are only increasing? In fact to write of there being so little healthcare disparity across class and ethnicities makes me wonder if Sweden is somehow in a parallel universe! Nonetheless there too people who are living so long and using costly therapies pose problems. Problems like these have not really been addressed by healthcare and it seems that a more behavioral, humanistic approach is well placed to address resource allocation in an ethical way –action researchers working with health care consumers to acknowledge our human fear of death and even greater fear of incapacitation in old, old age. What does the future portend for all of us?! But I digress – even as I encourage action researchers to consider study designs on these complex issues…”dying well, dying participatively,” anyone? Besides where best to pose the difficult questions than in places that resource intelligent systems approaches to change.
Like all good action researchers Svante takes a networking approach to learning among hospital leaders across nations and continents. This is important given our commitment to being in dialogue with our colleagues in the developing world. We are lucky to have Svante join us. We also look forward to some more health focused special issues in the future. Welcome Svante.

From the Editor's desk: Students Against Nicotine

As I consider the papers of 9 (1), issues of inter-subjectivity leap to mind. By inter-subjectivity I mean the ways in which we as researchers interact, later I will use the word “commune,” with research subjects. Conventional research training prompts us to treat research subjects as passive, albeit, respected objects of data collection. Action research acknowledges the subjectivity of the research subjects, which in interaction with ourselves, becomes inter-subjective inquiry.  Our engagement as persons first and foremost allows for knowledge to be shared that otherwise might have gotten lost.

Consider the Tai Mendenhall, Peter Harper, Heather Stephenson, and G. Santo Haas paper, entitled: “The SANTA Project (Students Against Nicotine and Tobacco Addiction): Using community-based participatory research to reduce smoking in a high-risk young adult population.”  This is another excellent example of potential partnership between medical and action research approaches that together can tackle chronic illness or contributors to chronic illness as with the smoking cessation program described here.  Thus we see efforts at systems modification rather than solely disease modification.  Systems change starts, ironically, at the interpersonal level - by having ordinary citizens activated as co-producers of their own health.  Once again we see an integrative, inter-subjective and successful systems change.  One system at a time.


Read for yourself: http://arj.sagepub.com/



Hilary Bradbury-Huang, Ph.D.
Editor, ARJ
Oregon Health Sciences University
Portland.

From the Editors' desk: Hanson and Hanson on Welfare recipients

As I consider the papers of 9 (1), issues of inter-subjectivity leap to mind. By inter-subjectivity I mean the ways in which we as researchers interact, later I will use the word “commune,” with research subjects. Conventional research training prompts us to treat research subjects as passive, albeit, respected objects of data collection. Action research acknowledges the subjectivity of the research subjects, which in interaction with ourselves, becomes inter-subjective inquiry.  Our engagement as persons first and foremost allows for knowledge to be shared that otherwise might have gotten lost.

Consider: Cindy Hanson and Lori Hanson offer “Unpaid work and social policy: Engaging research with mothers on social assistance.” In the USA we might call it social welfare and be surprised the Canada too is also rationalizing benefits to the poor.  In fact, however, all industrialized countries seem to be doing this – even over the strikes of French workers.  Again, in that theme we see throughout the papers so far, taking an inter-subjective approach better humanizes those who are seen as passive recipients of charity.  The humanization allows a deeper understanding to emerge. We understand better why a work ethic is not so present when a woman may end up with less money when she gives up assistance to take a job, plus then is burdened by having to pay for child care that in most cases will not be the type of child care any of us would wish for our children. The authors remind us also that the concern for health and physical/material security is so much greater for mothers on assistance – a reminder that prompts compassion. Importantly this study also involved the participation of decision makers, so that the findings and insights were translated into positive impact.

Read for yourself: http://arj.sagepub.com/


Hilary Bradbury-Huang, Ph.D.
Editor, ARJ
Oregon Health Sciences University
Portland.

From the editors desk: Wamba on Critical Pedagogy

As I consider the papers of 9 (1), issues of inter-subjectivity leap to mind. By inter-subjectivity I mean the ways in which we as researchers interact, later I will use the word “commune,” with research subjects. Conventional research training prompts us to treat research subjects as passive, albeit, respected objects of data collection. Action research acknowledges the subjectivity of the research subjects, which in interaction with ourselves, becomes inter-subjective inquiry.  Our engagement as persons first and foremost allows for knol3edge to be shared that otherwise might have gotten lost.

Consider: Nathalis Guy Wamba’s “Research as critical pedagogy. Developing an alternative epistemology of practice: Teachers' action research as critical pedagogy” which really speaks to the educator in all of us. The author works from the premise that when we step into the classroom, we meet graduate students who have been disciplined by thousands upon thousands of hours in which they practiced the discipline of passively receiving whatever the teacher wished to bestow. That passive reception might have sometimes looked like resistance but it never looked like active co-creation of knowledge. Engaging our students as active partners is therefore difficult, but necessary. I am inspired to copy and paste a paragraph below from the ARJ Manifesto signed by dozens of leading action researchers around the planet. Profesor Wamba’s work exemplifies how to engage stakeholders traditionally excluded from being part of the research process. Interestingly we find them under our noses, in our very classrooms. Thus in a very different way this paper picks up the theme of the ( (1) issue to address how we might better commune with (rather than work on/give to) “othered” subjects.
At this time we are called to engage with unprecedented challenges that are inter-related and compounding; challenges such as poverty and injustice, climate change, globalization, the regulation of science and technology, the information and communication technology revolution, inequalities and fundamentalisms of all types. Conventional science and its conduct are part of these problems. Action researchers, therefore, are concerned with the conduct and application of research. We acknowledge the complexity of social phenomena and the non linearity of cause and effect and see that the best response to such complexity is to abandon the notion of understanding as a product of the enterprise of a lone researcher, and to engage local stakeholders, particularly those traditionally excluded from being part of the research process, in problem definition, research processes, interpretation of results, design for action, and evaluation of outcomes. In this way, we step beyond what has been labeled ‘applied research,’ into the democratization of research processes and program design, implementation strategies, and evaluation.

 From the ARJ Manifesto, http://arj.sagepub.com/

Read for yourself: http://arj.sagepub.com/



Hilary Bradbury-Huang, Ph.D.
Editor, ARJ
Oregon Health Sciences University
Portland.

From the editor's desk: Communing with research subjects by Debra Merskin

As I consider the papers of 9 (1), issues of inter-subjectivity leap to mind. By inter-subjectivity I mean the ways in which we as researchers interact, later I will use the word “commune,” with research subjects. Conventional research training prompts us to treat research subjects as passive, albeit, respected objects of data collection. Action research acknowledges the subjectivity of the research subjects, which in interaction with ourselves, becomes inter-subjective inquiry.  Our engagement as persons first and foremost allows for knowledge to be shared that otherwise might have gotten lost.

Consider  Debra Merkin’s “Hearing voices: The promise of participatory action research for animals.” This paper is remarkable for  how it pushes the limits out beyond the familiar “humans-only”  boundary normally used to determine who constitutes a research subject. The implications for all our work are quite thought-provoking.  Debra seeks to articulate a PAR approach that fully envisions those who are silent, most especially in inter-species studies. Her paper focuses mainly on participatory research with primates.  When I first sent this paper out for review, the reviewers included a colleague well known in the natural sciences. She responded, perhaps a tad huffily, that work with creatures so similar to humans (the warm and furry ones such as primates) really tells us too little about how to work with the ones who are very different, e.g., the worms or crocodiles.  I was not so sure. Now as I see the article in its finished form, I am in fact more sure than ever that the ideology of superiority that insists upon a strict boundary between human and other than human. When breached at all (and doing so with familiar mammals is as good as any place to start the breaching) is indeed so strong a re-sensitization that it can call into question how centrally we place ourselves and, more broadly, human interests in our inquiries. We may yet come to know that – as Debra quotes -  the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.  Therefore I see in Debra’s article a formal turning point for ARJ in expanding how we define research subjects.

Read for yourself: http://arj.sagepub.com/

Hilary Bradbury-Huang, Ph.D.


Editor, ARJ

Oregon Health Sciences University

Portland.

From the editors' desk: A People That Time Forgot

At the intersection of action research and religion, western and eastern values, I got this note from my action research colleague Meghna, based in Bangladesh - it raises all sorts of tough questions, doesn't it...(an animator is an action researcher)...enjoy!  Hilary Bradbury-Huang, ARJ Editor
From the files - A People That Time Forgot: the Sanyasis of Taraganjby Meghna Guhathakurta

On 21st June 2006, I accompanied RIB researcher Mr. Dipen Sarker and Programme Officer Rana Sultana on a visit to the village of Sanyasis in Taraganj thana of Nilfamari district. This project sought to awaken the spirit of self-enquiry and development among a group of people called the Sanyasis who were devotees of the Lord Siva (Saivaites) and who sustained themselves through begging for alms (dakshina) not unlike the legendary Siva himself!
They were waiting for us with garlands and tilaks in hand. They welcomed us in traditional style with a decorated borondala containing rice, pradip, ( lamp) bananas and dhup (incense). They sang a song using the local folk rhythm of bhawaia and through jokar ( ululating). We were then led from one neighbourhood of the village to another withjokars and the sound of dhol (drums) accompanying us and wherever we went the borondala followed us and was laid to rest at our feet where we were ultimately seated in front of a large gathering of women, men and children. We were also told that many have not eaten until they had welcomed us. This was their tradition. When they gave us the garland of flowers they called it their daan (gift).
Once seated we were further "received" by three young children each with a dish of rice/daal and incense singing a song that was full of pathos.. The meaning was:
"Oh Mother do not cry for your lost child.

Look and see your child is being garlanded by so many people."
It was one of the strangest yet painful songs that I had ever heard being sung to welcome strangers in their midst!
We had barely started discussion under the "pandel" formed by sewing together different banners of workshops, when we were swamped by rain. We hurried and crowded together into a room, which was called "pathagar" which incidentally was built by BRAC for a library albeit in a community who did not know how to read and write! So it was used like a club where meetings were sometimes held. The discussion was continued there as much as possible amidst much din but them it gradually led to more singing all around.
Here are some of the fascinating things, which the community revealed about themselves.
Like the Lord Siva whom they adopted as their central deity, they were Sanyasis i.e. people who had renounced the world. As such they did not believe in any form of worldly possessions and hence did not believe in work or exchange to sustain themselves, hence their need to sustain themselves with dakshina. However in the absence of a supporting belief system in contemporary society, their act was looked upon more as begging. This was also critically looked at from women and men within the community as well. Their reason was that it was a painful way of sustenance which not only entailed physical exhaustion but also much humiliation ('soul murder'). Society gave them no value whatsoever. They were in a critical position of reevaluating their lives and yet had yet to incorporate a work culture in their day to day existence. This was a major challenge for the PAR practitioner.
Although the community sang as a whole in Sangkirtan, they did not sing for money or alms. They only used it for themselves and for their religion. Yet the tune and rhythm of their sangkirtans did not resemble the tune and rhythm we usually hear in kirtaans of the vaishnav cult. The words too differed. They spoke more of their pain and struggle than of other worldiness. Dipen mentioned that the first time he had entered the village he had met a man playing a flute beautifully. In his subsequent visit he had come across the same man who had given up his flute playing. He answered that he had no joy left in him.
Women married at a very early stage because like the Beday community they can go in search of alms only when accompanied by their husbands. Young girls were left behind. So in order to serve the community they were married off early. The village swarmed with children. Incidentally only three young girls were educated (upto class seven) in the whole community. One of these girls, Shobha Gir ( Gir is the common title), had become an internal animator. She said that her parents have agreed to educate her and her sister and she a Christian Missionary helped her with expensive books. BRAC had started a pre-primary school in one neighbourhood, and Dipen was in the process of starting a Kajoli Model ECLC in another neighbourhood. The Sanyasis had stated that they do not want their children to beg for their living like themselves. Youths of the village has already formed a Samiti and have started saving. They have asked Dipen to help them open a bank account in a nearby branch. This is the first bank account to be opened in the community!
Health is a serious problem as they mostly travel long distances by foot and proper nutrition is not guaranteed. To avoid expensive health treatment they fall easy prey to quacks. To meet expenses during crisis times, they have sold almost all the trees in their neighbourhood and homesteads. Many live in their own homestead land, and some live in land belonging to others.
There are four animators working in the village ( 3 men and one woman) and they have been able to get themselves accepted by the villagers after one month of initial suspicion that they were either missionaries or abductors! They have kept minute records of each meeting which I have asked them to copy and send so that we can extract more guidelines from them as how to proceed.
The challenge in this field is very distinctive from other Participatory Action Research ( PAR) related fields. Elsewhere the people already had professions albeit ones that were undervalued by society or had become redundant. Here it is the very concept of work or exchange (market), which needed to be addressed. Many women said that they made things like hand fans or sewed for themselves, but they had never thought of selling them for profit or as a form of earning. This will be a difficult terrain to cross, but an interesting one. PAR is helping them to address these issues, but I see that a certain amount of skill training and welfare (health especially) components may be needed as well as in the Harijans of Kushtia or Bedays of Lohajong.