Action research (specific) – Integration and Implementation Insights

Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

February 24, 2026February 12, 2026

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?

Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.

A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.

Seven quality choice points for contemporary action research

August 12, 2025July 29, 2025

By Hilary Bradbury.

How can action researchers empower system actors in impactfully responding to our deepening eco-social crisis? How can action research be a catalyst to successfully transmute the inexhaustible resource of human creativity in all spaces—self to society—toward addressing our global problems? How can we encourage deepening clarity of choices made to navigate a middle path between responding to problems within living communities and contributing to research-based theory?

Mitigating the worst of our global problems requires action research that draws on many kinds and sources of knowledge. In fact, it requires drawing much more from diverse people on the ground, who understand the problems at hand and can offer solutions anchored in their experience of what is meaningful for them.

The aim of the seven choice points described below is to support action researchers in:

deepening and speeding up the proliferation of good work,
connecting local niche experiments to global reach.

Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems

April 29, 2025April 29, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?

My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:

As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?

Two audiences and five aims of action researchers

September 13, 2021October 19, 2017

By Hilary Bradbury

Do action researchers have something to offer to the contemporary and urgent question of how to respond to complex real-world problems? I think so.

Action researchers, often working in inter-disciplinary settings, hold in mind that technical, practical and emancipatory goals of action research require us to develop facility in communicating with two audiences: the ‘local’ practitioners and the ‘cosmopolitan’ community of scholars.

Let’s start with the latter. The cosmopolitans are motivated by the question of what, if anything, can be contributed to what scholars already know. As a result these academic colleagues usually privilege the written medium exclusively. The local audience, however, is not served when action researchers write a manuscript intended for scholarly peers!

What can action research and transdisciplinarity learn from each other?

September 10, 2024August 29, 2017

By Danilo R. Streck

danilo-streck — Danilo R. Streck (biography)

A man raises his hand and brings up the following issue: “Our community is constantly affected by terrible floods that not only destroy our houses, but are the cause of sicknesses of our children.” This statement—in the midst of a participatory budget meeting in South Brazil—raised issues concerning the deforestation of riverbanks, the deficient sewage system, contested land ownership and occupation, among others.

Our research group is primarily interested in citizenship education and in supporting it through studying what makes learning possible (pedagogical mediation) within discussions about the allocation of resources for the public budget. Stories like this one remind us of the limits of a simplistic approach to understanding citizenship. In this case, citizenship and citizenship education was clearly related to health, to ecology, to urban planning, to farming, among other fields of acting and knowing.

Action research, broadly understood as collective (self) reflection in action within situations that one wants to change, is intrinsically an exercise of disciplinary transgressions.