Suchergebnisse

What are the crucial ingredients missing in our search for transformative – structural, cultural, political-economic – changes to entrenched systems of oppression right now? Why do so many smart, informed, data-driven efforts fail? This book says what's missing is ART: Action Research for Transformation, a contemporary expression of action research. The book offers surprising, counter-intuitive, and most importantly, experienced-based insights on both what ART is, and how to do it. It reveals pathways to disrupt the academic détentes regarding quantitative versus quantitative, objective versus subjective, macro versus micro, and asks what is knowledge and what is it for. The book offers practical approaches, tools, and case studies, while featuring personal narratives from a wide range of active ARTists about their successes, challenges, doubts, and perhaps most importantly, the joy and value they experience performing ART. Its preponderant thesis is this: the problems of eco-social crisis aren't "out there" so much as within, between and among each one of us, and the types of relationships we create with others. The book is therefore of value to educators and change leaders perhaps especially within our universities' professional schools.

International development NGOs (IDNGOs) have both flourished and been objects of cogent critique over the past twenty years. The populations and budgets of IDNGOs continue to grow even as concerns about accountability, quality, and cost persist. Meanwhile, major inroads have been made on reducing poverty, driven not by official development assistance (ODA) but by market forces.

Planned international development—Official Development Assistance—pretends to address complex, intergenerational problems. The pretense is endemic to, and necessary for, the continuation of the development enterprise, frequently leading to docile projects. Official Development Assistance's methodologies and methods are ill-matched for confronting such problems, while those of action research are well-suited to the task. Yet Official Development Assistance and action research are only infrequent and ephemeral bedmates. Research from five sites on three continents reveals five lessons for untaming aid through action research: (1) plan and develop programming iteratively and over long time frames to offer meaningful support to people's lives, (2) develop new connective tissue and relational capital, (3) commit to inquiry and learning in specific contexts, (4) incrementally confront culturally embedded practice in a safe and feasible manner, and (5) use methodology to develop safe and participatory spaces that engage tacit and explicit perspectives and ways of knowing. This article, the introductory essay to the Action Research Journal's special issue, "Development, Aid, and Social Transformation," argues that adoption of these five practices could help untame Official Development Assistance and make it more powerful, ethical, and transformative.