Conference Agenda

Uncertainty is a core topic for the conditions of our time and especially in European inter- and transnational research settings, it is a given. With the complexity of Participatory Action Research designs (PAR), uncertainty necessitates a practice of organizing within process-oriented, participatory research. Depending on the rationality put in place, uncertainty may even have the quality of an epistemological position to value and to operate with as a researcher.

Reflecting on these three dimensions and discursive positionings of uncertainty within PAR in transnational complex research settings which encompass conditions, practices, and epistemologies, the symposium discusses uncertainty as a core dimension within collaborative research projects.

The exemplary case of the Horizon EU-funded project “Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogies and Democracy-as-becoming" (AECED) discusses these dimensions of uncertainty to consider. In its overarching Participatory Action Research strategy, the project’s six national partners have designed distinct phases and different levels of participation and opportunities to co-design, co-create, and co-analyse. The research design involves the highly diverse institutional settings of preschool, secondary school, Higher Education, and professional as well as organizational training. For a methodological foundation, a common methodological framework for transformational participatory action research was developed in an iterative process.

The symposium intends to present and discuss the underlying methodological understanding with respect to all six projects involved. Each one works with collaborative and participatory action research methodologies that usually have their grounding in a shared issue with participants. Based on this, the research process is to be understood as an emergent and iterative process of theorizing and verification that includes a series of steps or processes of planning, acting, observing, reflecting, and re-planning. Put into practice, the projects all follow a series of phases, which include designing (planning), trialling (acting and observing), analysing (reflecting) and redesigning (re-planning) in which a pedagogical framework and four practice guides are developed, trialed and re-designed with participants and stakeholders.

All of the projects intend to follow common principles, such as a) flexibility as the project evolves, b) willingness to co-construct and participate in collective problem-solving; c) awareness of how collaboration enables development of critical perspectives and self-directed learning, d) shared curiosity; e) willingness to engage in dialogue and reflection, f) transparency, g) openness to the knowledge and experience of all participants and stakeholders who have their own ideas about the topic of the project and h) collective leadership.

In addition to that, the AECED project encourages the use of arts-based and embodied methods which brings to the fore the embodied dimension of research processes and the entanglement of researchers, participants, and organizational practices.

The complex methodological design will therefore be discussed by the different contributions, firstly, to offer a space of reflection concerning conditions, practices, and epistemologies that engage with uncertainties. Secondly, the symposium will delineate strategies for Participatory Action Research that include uncertainties within processes of democratisation ‘in, of and between organisations’.

In recent years, calls for more participatory, horizontal, and democratic research practices have become widespread because such research can transform how people think, act, and feel. PAR is transformative because it enables participants to think and feel outside the habitual assumptions that inform everyday practice. Participating facilitates questioning and new learning from active engagement with participants and thus meets uncertainty as methodological decicion. PAR is a “research-to-action approach that emphasises direct engagement of local priorities and perspectives” (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020). As a methodology, it combines social analysis, (self-)reflective collective study of practice, and transformational action to improve practices or conditions (Kemmis et al., 2014; Berg &Lune, 2017; MacDonald, 2012; Fernie & Smith, 2010). This methodology values experiential knowledge and lived experience that can be used to address challenges of our life-worlds and achieve social change. In the presented project "Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogies and Democracy-as-becoming" (AECED), an EU-Horizon funded project with six partner countries, the potential for transformation is reinforced by the nature of the research intervention – namely, aesthetic and embodied learning (AEL) and the use of arts-based and embodied (ABE) pedagogies. Engaging and interacting within an aesthetic learning environment can enable people to surface feelings and thoughts about themselves and how they relate to others. Doing this collaboratively supports people in reflecting on their everyday assumptions and what they can learn from their experience of AELD and ABE pedagogies. In our project, we are aiming for transformational change through the application of the ABE-based Guides regarding the three dimensions of individual and collective transformation, institutional/organisational learning and epistemic reimagination. For this, a methodological framework for all national teams has been co-constructed as orientation and living document to serve the iterative PAR approach in its potential to initiate transformation on the individual, organisational and epistemic level of education for democracy. Connecting to this framing, the project introduces aesthetic and embodied learning, responsive pedagogies and democracy-as-becoming with a threefold notion of democracy: social togetherness, political self-governance (in organizing) and a care-economy based on solidarity.

Berg B. L. & Lune H. (2017). Qualitative research methods for the social sciences (Ninth). London: Pearson. Fernie, S., & Smith, K. (2010). Action Research. In L. Dahlberg & C. McCaig (Eds.), Practical Research and Evaluation: A Start-to-Finish Guide for Practitioners (pp. 95-110). London: SAGE Publications. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participa-tory action research. Wiesbaden: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-67-2 MacDonald, C. (2012). Understanding Participatory Action Research: A Qualitative Research Methodology Option. Canadian Journal of Action Research, 13(2), pp. 34-50. Seppälä, T., Sarantou, M., & Miettinen, S. (2021). Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research. London: Routledge. von Unger, H., Huber, A., Kühner, A., Odukoya, D., & Reiter, H. (2022). Reflection Labs: A Space for Researcher Reflexivity in Participatory Collaborations. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069221142460 Vaughn, L. M., & Jacquez, F. (2020). Participatory Research Methods – Choice Points in the Research Process. Journal of Participatory Research Methods, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.35844/001c.13244

Taking the embodied reciprocity for democratising educational relations seriously, while maintaining our playfulness, we focus on thinking with the concept of the acceptive gaze. The analysis is set in the context of participatory action research in Finnish higher education. We apply the idea of ‘gaze’ from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (1968 [1964]; 2012 [1945]), Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1993 [1956]) existentialism and Jacques Lacan’s (1977[1973]) psychoanalysis, to trial the emerging comforts and controversies We consider the acceptive gaze as a reciprocal, concrete and embodied action. Due to its reciprocal character, acceptive gaze has two cutting edges when it comes to methodology. While it expresses mutual acknowledgement ‘to see and to be seen’ for the equalising classroom teaching methods, it simultaneously plays out as ‘to see oneself seeing oneself’ (see Lacan 1977 [1973], 80) moving towards research methods for unravelling educational settings. This ‘both-educational-and-research-method’ aims to open up the acceptive gaze towards the horizons of democratic becoming, and to see the emerging uncertainties both as troubles to tackle and moments of promise for bettered futures. Despite of its ocularcentric naming of the concept, placing vision over other senses and associating sight with reason (Oxford Reference 2024), we think of the acceptive gaze as a holistic, multisensory experience, not limited to visual sense; instead it covers other sensory signals and the sensuous presences (Ma 2015, 126). Furthermore, the acceptive gaze is a chosen orientation towards the other and the self, striving for a non-judgmental attitude enabling the fundamental differences to coexist and complement one another (Jääskeläinen 2023). We explore the possibilities of the acceptive gaze as an educational participatory practice in co-creating tolerance for the uncertainty which arises from unfamiliar and often uncomfortable feelings when addressing one's body as a reflective medium in different encounters (Payne and Jääskeläinen 2023; Jääskeläinen 2023). We propose that aiming the acceptive gaze not only contributes to creating safe enough learning environments (see Jääskeläinen and Helin 2021; Jääskeläinen 2023) that allow both attachment and difference-making but builds also resilience and capabilities to handle uncomfortable feelings when we engage in holistic learning. Therefore, it also accepts feelings of danger and movement outside the individualistic comfort zones, while keeping the sense of responsiveness and responsibility as educators and co-learners alert. As such, we argue that acceptive gaze strengthens democratic values such as responsiveness, equality and freedom, described in the Prototype Pedagogical Framework developed in the AECED Horizon project.

Jääskeläinen, Pauliina (2023). The Reversibility of Body Movements in Reach-searching Organisational Relations. PhD diss. University of Lapland. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-396-9 Jääskeläinen, Pauliina & Helin, Jenny (2021). Writing embodied generosity. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(4), 1398–1412. http://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12650 Lacan, Jacques (1977) [1973]. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) [1964]. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012) [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Ma, Yuanlong (2015). Lacan on Gaze. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 5(10[1]), 125–137. Oxford Reference (2024). ocularcentrism. Retrieved 19 Jan. 2024, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100245338. Payne, Helen and Jääskeläinen, Pauliina (2023). Embodied leadership: A Perspective on Reciprocal Body Movement. In Elgar Handbook of Leadership in Education ed. Philip Woods, Amanda Roberts, Meng Tian and Howard Youngs, 60–73. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.  Sartre, Jean-Paul (1993) [1956]. Being and Nothingness: The Principal Text of Modern Existentialism. New York: Simon & Schuster.

this paper focuses on the approach for metadata organisation which is elaborated within the Horizon project AECED and its Participatory Action Research (PAR) to conduct cross-case and cross-country comparative analysis of the effect of using aesthetic and embodied learning (AEL) on experiencing democracy-as-becoming. As cross-case analysis is a method to facilitate the comparison of commonalities and differences in the events, activities, and processes, including the units of analysis in different case studies (Khan & VanWynberghe, 2008), the comparison of contextual and research-related commonalities and differences becomes topical. Six project universities are dealing with differences in educational and cultural backgrounds; experiences in democracy and AEL; arts-based and/or embodied learning methods used; educational phases of research presenting 19 cases; epistemological and terminological challenges caused by national languages and pedagogies, etc. To cope with the challenges caused by research-related differences and prepare a system for comparative analysis, we created a matrix to achieve high transparency of data (Cruzes et al., 2015). The matrix does not contain primary data in national languages but metadata in English which come out of the analysis of each of the 19 cases separately in accordance with the comparison criteria identified as crucial for each PAR phase. Each cell of the Matrix has its hyperlinked code; its name is constructed correspondingly from the country code, case number, letters of the PAR phase and comparison criterion. This guarantees cross-case transparency, easy data input and access, meaningful vertical comparison of metadata related to each criterion and cross-group collaboration. Only one click on a cell with entering the password opens an interactive Word or Excel file for individual and group work for all the research participants. The hyperlinking of each Matrix cell supports access to the most important data from each case at any level of information compression (Khan & VanWynsberghe, 2008), but also provides flexibility to minimize the tension between criteria/variable-oriented and case-oriented approaches (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The matrix serves as a tool to produce a synthesized outcome while remaining adaptive to the uncertainties related to the iterative process of PAR.

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