Organising Research Institutions Through Action Research

This chapter analyses how Action Research holds a genuine potential for promoting knowledge creation that can respond to the societal challenges faced by local communities. Initially, an inherent paradox of the knowledge economy is examined: that increased contextualisation of knowledge production does not necessarily lead towards greater acknowledgement of peoples’ everyday life experiences as part of understanding and developing sustainable solutions. To meet this challenge, the chapter presents the findings of a three-year Action Research project aimed at providing local communities with a greater say in future sustainability research. Upon analysing the findings of this project, it is highlighted how collaboration across sustainability experts and local urban residents might allow for new orientations within science to emerge. The fi ndings are analysed by building on the methodological framework of Critical Utopian Action Research. First, it is exemplified how the process of enabling free space for local residents to share their experiences of living in their local area provides the possibility to collectively identify and articulate societal dimensions of urban unsustainability. Secondly, it is examined how this process additionally might offer a free space for sustainability experts to confront the role of science, how it is done and whether it meets the challenges faced by urban communities. On this basis, the role of science in society is discussed in particular relation to sustain-ability, which is conceptualised as the ability of social and ecological life to sustain itself, and cannot be invented but can either be eroded or sustained by science. By conceptualising sustainability as an essential cultural question of the way people live their lives, this chapter argues for the need to address sustainability and the role of science in society, not merely with scientific but with democratic questions. The chapter addresses contemporary opportunities and barriers for community-based research to do so, taking into account the way science is currently being institutionalised, and calls for increased knowledge democracy that meets the inherent challenges of the knowledge economy.