Engaged Research

Engaged research “is concerned with social problems and … gets actively engaged in addressing those problems.” (Banks and Mangan , 1999, p. 11).

Patti Lather (1986) writes of “research as praxis”: a process of mutual teaching and learning in which “researchers involve the researched in a democratized process of inquiry characterized by negotiation, reciprocity, empowerment….” (P. 257). She critiques the notion of research as a value-neutral investigation of existing facts, citing Namenwirth (1986) who writes: “Scientists firmly believe that as long as they are not conscious of any bias or political agenda, they are neutral and objective, when in fact they are only unconscious.”

Banks and Mangan (1999) describe a project they called “the Company of Neighbours” in which research was used to catalyse a small town with knowledge that empowered community. In the 1970’s Hepsler, Ontario was a busy town in an industrial heartland. By the 1990’s, deindustrialization, urban regionalization, and global market forces all contributed to its transformation into a dreary suburb inhabited by commuter-residents who seemed disconnected each other. Through action-research conducted over a three-year period, the project enabled the rediscovery of a collective local history and the reconstruction of a meaningful, living community.

The research began with recording people’s stories and understandings of their existing social practices, and then involved an action phase in which this community knowledge was developed and challenged. As the researchers interviewed people in Hepsler, respondents told them repeatedly of the submersion of their community into a large, impersonal society (p. 57). Yet strong social networks did exist, in “hardly worth mentioning” groups that gathered at coffee shops, Tupperware parties, and curling rinks. Another clear theme that emerged from respondents’ stories was a strong interest in Hepsler’s history and a sense that it was being lost. These themes united in the action phase of the project, in which multiple groups worked to pull off a huge “Hepsler picnic,” reviving a proud tradition from the town’s history. Researchers facilitated rather than directed the action, allowing space for the community’s internal capacities to grow.

Action research is related to Narrative Inquiry. Banks and Mangan (1999) write: “By soliciting stories told individually and in groups, we began to perceive the community as it is seen by those who live there. And by fashioning new stories, new forms of community narrative, we begin to forge new meanings around which people can structure their lives. Thus the Company of Neighbours seeks to locate both a community narrative, or the story of the town as told by its inhabitants, and a narrative community, a new form of polity that can tell its own story, and thereby fashion a different ending to that story through collaborative action.” (p. 22).

Art as Engaged Research

A group show at Xchanges Gallery in Victoria, B.C. included the work of nine artists inspired by field research experiences. The artists participated in Earthwatch's Pacific Northwest Conservation Research Initiative. For two weeks they worked alongside volunteers and professional scientists, conducting field research, gathering data and learning the tools and methods of scientific research. Upon returning home, the artists created artworks exploring the research experience and what they had learned in the field in order to share the experience with their home communities.

Claudia Lorenz, a Victoria-based painter and mixed media artist who is also a student in the University of Victoria’s Ecological Restoration program, considers art a form of research that is vital for yielding and constructing emancipatory knowledge of the environment. She says: “Contemporary environmental art practice needs to help shift the existing, unsustainable perceptions and paradigms of human/environmental interactions…. It is not enough to simply apply aesthetics to the work of ecologists.” See http://www.earthwatch.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=dsJSK6PFJnH&b=692025&ct=2869045

References

Banks, C. K. and M. Mangan. (1999). The Company of Neighbours: Revitalizing Community through Action-Research. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lather, P. (1986). "Research as Praxis." Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 257-277.

Namenwirth, M. (1986). Science through a feminist prism. In R. Bleir (Ed.), Feminist Approaches to Science (pp. 18-41). New York: Pergamon Press.