Call for Papers: Reaching out - participatory and engaged research for change

This call originates from the Danish Action Research Network conference: Reaching out – participatory and engaged research for change, organized by Aalborg University, taking place in November 2024 (here). The call seeks to shed light on collaborative and participatory approaches to qualitative research. In this moment of history, it is time to reach out – to reach out globally, to reach out culturally, to reach out beyond human existence and embrace all forms of life. Also in research, this calls for reaching out, contributing to the global, cultural, human, and more-than-human conversation about the future of our planet, environment, our society, and our communities.

The ambition of this special issue is to gather studies from research approaches and traditions that reach out and engage in society to contribute to critical and constructive change through qualitative, collaborative inquiries. This could be for instance action research, participatory action research, design-based research and related collaborative approaches to research. With this special issue, we wish to invite research traditions and approaches that strive towards goals of democratic participation and dialogue, engaging participants, communities, and society in an endeavor of change and local and global social value creation. We call for studies occupied with research approaches and methods for citizen involvement, democracy, education, learning, participatory organizational change, research-practice collaboration, design-based research, co-creation, sustainability, co-design, co-evaluation, and many others.

We need to address the political, societal, human, and more-than-human dimensions of local change.

While reaching out to society’s big agendas, we also need to address political and economic aspects of research. In the light of the increasing demand for research institutions to attract external research funding, and the pressure on businesses and organizations to inform their practices with research, we also encourage conversations about individual, organizational and societal freedom, and ownership of research. We need to address the political, societal, human, and more-than-human dimensions of local change. We need to get in dialogue concerning organizational-cultural and societal-cultural dimensions of worldviews and perspectives on value creation through collaborative research. How can we help and inspire each other? What kind of dilemmas and tensions do we experience in collaborative research?

We invite papers, suggesting the following themes:

• Environmental and social sustainability in an eco-social crisis perspective 
• Diversity in cultural worldviews and value creation in research
• Freedom, political interests, and ownership of research
• Aesthetic and arts-based processes of learning and change
• Organizational learning and leadership development
• Professional development
• Qualitative research and participatory research 

All these themes may be important aspects of research concerning leadership, organizational learning and development, user interaction and involvement, pedagogy, professional development and practice, co-production, inclusion, and many others. They may play out in fields like education, health, social work, sustainable business development, production etc.

Questions can be sent to the guest editors Lone Hersted (lhersted@ikl.aau.dk), Søren Frimann (frimann@ikl.aau.dk), Julie Borup Jensen (jbjen@ikl.aau.dk) and Britta Møller (Britta@ikl.aau.dk), Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University. Members of the research group Co-LEARN and Dansk AktionsforskningsNetværk (DAN – the Danish Action research Network).

To propose an article to this special issue of Qualitative Studies, please provide an abstract (max 500 words) to Britta@ikl.aau.dk no later than 1. august 2024.