Action Research: An Existential Phenomenology Method
This is the next part of my action research project which is an exploration of the use of metrics and administrative structures to plan complex areas of life… Read more
Action Research: Existential Phenomenology and Natural Science
This is the next installment of my action research project which examines how people’s lives are represented in bureaucratic paperwork and how the experiences people have can be understood… Read more
Action Research: The History of Action Research
This is the next part of my action research project which I have been using as a meaning making process in my own life as I have been struggling with trying to negotiate how my life is mediated through the worlds of policy, bureaucracy and distant finance. Read more
Action Research: A Method Reconstructed
This is the next part of my action research project focusing in on the effects and practicalities of outcomes and measurements bureaucracies when they are implemented in care and support processes of people’s lives.
You can read the previous section of this project ‘Action Research: Measurement and the Lifeworld’ by clicking HERE.
Action Research: The Outcomes Star and Developing Novel Methodologies
What follows is the start of my action research project deconstructing of the Outcomes Star, a metric bureaucracy instated in various support-need junctures which the person receiving support has to fill in and go over with the person who is giving the support. This is one of various types of bureaucracy which people have to face (both citizen and worker). Read more
Action Research: Outcomes and Measures Executive Summary and Recommendations
What follows is the executive summary and the recommendations which I make from my initial analysis of the bureaucratic burden which exists in the support-need juncture. You can read the prologue ‘Action Research: The Situation I am In; The View From The Other Side’ by clicking HERE. It gives an account of how this action research project came about and explains some of the motivations driving the project. Read more
Action Research: The Situation I am In; The View From The Other Side
What follows is the writing up of my lived experience of struggling with the over bureaucratisation of my life. It became a project when several years ago I realised that I was going between several agencies all tasked with supporting me trying to rehabilitate from a life where I had been homeless. I fell into what is categorised as ‘multiple needs’. Read more
Action Science: Epistemology, Knowledge and It's Contested Communities
Action science is an inquiry into how we design and implement action in relation to one another. It is a science of practice, whether the professional practice of administrators, educators, and psychotherapists or the everyday practice of people as member of families and organizations.
Action science calls for basic research and theory building that are intimately related to social intervention. Clients are participants in a process of public reflection that attempts both to comprehend the concrete details of particular cases and to discover and test propositions of a general theory. Read more
A Journey to Glimpsing the Dream of the Earth by Helena Kettleborough
In order to gain the energy and understanding to address the complex challenges and totally reshape society for both ecological and social justice, there is a rise in ideas advocating a wider paradigm within which to place our actions. Berry (1999), Berry and Swimme (1992) and Swimme and Tucker (2011) explore humanity’s place within the universe. They propose a New Universe Story, a way of exploring the world which sees human beings take our place within our 13,800,000,000 year old universe. From studying the social as well as ecological challenges facing humanity, Korten sees that only through ‘Earth as community’ can we find a comprehensive story which will enable us to address these issues.
For me a wonderful expression of how we might find our way into this ancient history is through cultural historian Thomas Berry. Berry proposes the idea of the Dream of the Earth, not a human dream but the dream of the whole Earth community (1988). How might we learn to express and understand what the earth wants rather than ourselves as a single species? How might we learn to see the Dream of the Earth as for ‘all the children’ not simply the human children of the earth but ‘for the children who swim beneath the waves of the sea’ and the ‘children who roam over the land and the winged ones who fly with the wind’? (Berry, 1999). Read more