Action Research and Researcher Activism

This chapter synthesises key insights from action research, a family of participatory, action-oriented approaches to inquiry and researcher activism. The chapter foregrounds the links between action research and researcher activism and the critical scholarship and social movements of the Global South, especially the political-pedagogical projects and liberation psychologies originating in Latin America. This analysis articulates the epistemological and social-psychological grounding for action research as a liberatory praxis concerned with dismantling the dehumanising impacts of colonization and oppression, and with furthering emancipation. Its relevance to W-O psychology lies in its critical yet future- and change-oriented attention to socio-psychological processes of oppression and emancipation within hierarchical social contexts with marked power differentials. Drawing on the authors’ empirical practice of action research and researcher activism in organizational and territorial contexts, this chapter offers orientating coordinates for those interested in taking some of this forward in their own research.