Postmodern Perspectives and Action Research: reflecting on the possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to examine how action research, particularly the emancipatory goals of critical action research, might be reconfigured to take into account the discursive openness of postmodernism. This may require a loosening up of our sense of the purposes and practices of action research to incorporate a more critical gaze than is usually required of modernist projects. Attention is drawn to the possibility of opening up subject positions which allow the modern and postmodern to ‘speak’, so that heterogeneity and the recognition of difference might be better accommodated in the action research process.