Action research for gender equity in a late modern society

Abstract

This paper discusses how action research could be a useful method in order to work for social justice in societies between the modern and the postmodern. The examples are locally bound, since they emanate from parts of Swedish society. However, by being contextually politically aware of how power rules in a local politcal context and how the local, in different contradictory ways, is a piece in a jigsaw puzzle which trancends local and even national boundaries—the principles for carrying through these action research projects for social justice could be used in other contexts. Theoretically, it draws on feminist poststructural theories and discusses concerns with the normalizing and regulative aspects of dominant discourses especially regarding gender equity. The two concepts ‘moments of normalization’ and ‘moments of equity’, which highlight the motor of the changing process in the bodies of the participants, are useful since they simultaneously highlight the ways in which power rules in local contexts as well as possible and different ways of creating possible and different rules for reaching what could be defined as ‘social justice’. It is argued that by analysing different arenas of practices in these ways the local is not seen as separate from the global.