Dear all,
a call for paper on knowledge, power and crowd sourcing;
please distribute it widely!
For a pdf version check Action Research website:
http://arj.sagepub.com/site/cfp/call_for_papers_index.xhtml
I will be happy to answer any question!
Best
Chiara

***


Call for Papers for Special Issue of Action Research


Action Researchers Engaging with New Technologies and
Communicational Forms: Democratizing Science and
Re-Examining Power in an Era of Crowd Sourcing.


Call for papers to be submitted by January 2014


Many action oriented (Reason and Bradbury, 2001) and
participatory approaches (Greenwood and Levin, 1998) were
initially aimed at sharing researchers’ results with
interested people and at taking multiple voices into
account. Today a much greater interest is developing for
deepening the democratic and collective character of
knowledge creation and, particularly, of knowledge
production, within the Action Research (AR) community.
Knowledge includes tools, interpretive frameworks,
products and practices constituting the social heritage
individuals acquire in their becoming part of a community
and through experiential learning. In contrast, science is
often presented as a systematic, objective and
methodologically-drawn on form of knowledge aimed at
providing explanations and predictions on specific issues.
This results in an organised body of theoretical
assumptions and working practices aimed at increasing or
systematising a specific field of knowledge. Both these
domains are increasingly affected by the diffusion of
citizen and user generated knowledge in conventional
science, made possible by, amongst other things, the
internet and the increasing popularity of blogging and
social media and networking sites.

AR is has always been influenced by people’s participation
in all the phases of a research project, from sketching
the topic, to defining the relevant variables, to data
collection, up to and through the interpretation process
(Noveck, 2009). The current trend in AR is oriented toward
enabling people to more actively collaborate with research
activities - for example by using personal technological
devices, information communications technology and sharing
collected items or findings via ‘peer‐to‐peer’
processes. Non‐professionals are not only included
in the data collection and presentation phases, but they
have become proactive agents in the definition of research
programmes and framing of questions (Kemmis, McTaggert,
1998). Increasingly, knowledge is collectively produced by
large groups of users that can perform functions difficult
to automate or expensive to implement, e.g., crowd
sourcing, (Howe, 2008), the Open Street Maps project
(Haklay, Weber, 2008), - which ask people to integrate
individually collected geographical information in a set
of annotated maps. And there is the WIKI phenomenon with
user-generated knowledge not merely deployed in an already
defined scientific research framework (‘extractive
research’) but also gathered, made visible, and shared in
web 2.0 spaces, prior to being used by researchers.
Scientific inquiry thus shifts from being solely a process
for people, to being a process advanced among and by
people (Nielsen, 2006; Goodchild, 2007). In this call for
papers, we are interested in how this shift is enabled by
the use of the internet and Information and Communication
Technologies more generally.
People’s participation in the investigative process
implies that the results are unavoidably biased by their
stories, personal beliefs and political positions; the
situated‐ness of their observation points; and their
embedded‐ness in bodies/contexts/environments.
Interestingly, contemporary epistemology addressed these
criticisms in connection with the very possibility of
objective research (Stenger, 1977). The adoption of more
audacious participatory methods expands and amplifies the
process whereby ‘subjectivities’ enter knowledge
production, thereby becoming an unavoidable component of
it.

The use of participatory methods forces us to consider the
relations between knowledge and power (Barry, 2001;
Harris, 2012). Non‐exclusionary scientific practice,
such as participatory research, makes evident the link
between scientific knowledge and socio‐political
power because it requires science to exit the ivory tower
of objectivity and divest itself of the naturalized sense
of authority it allegedly grants. Scientists increasingly
have to prove the solidity and efficacy of their tools for
interrogating the real in the worldly disorder of everyday
life. Diffuse knowledge generation processes may herald
the re‐charting of socio‐political structures
of power, as knowledge and its production techniques are
made available for a larger part of the population.
Public involvement in science production may increase
direct participation in political life and encourage an
expansion of public debate on the most pressing issues
affecting society (Latour, 2004; Latour, Weibel, 2005).
This aspect is particularly relevant today when the
governance of public affairs seem to be more and more in
the hands of experts and technicians. Indeed, the
exclusion of people in the top‐down scientific
research model is entwined with their exclusion from the
governance of public affairs ‐ and even from public
debate in general (Flyvbjerg, 2001). In a knowledge
society where the availability of scientific and technical
data and of Information and Communication Technologies
broadens the power of those who produce and hold it, the
proliferation of participatory research programs may help
reverse the geographies of power (Rushkoff, 2004).


Specific questions

Our interest in this special issue is to showcase papers
that deal with the current transformation of AR and
knowledge/science-power relationships, mediated or
facilitated by the recent proliferation of internet-based
networking and crowd sourcing possibilities.We offer the
following broad question along with some suggestions for a
multiplicity of topics on which we invite papers
- How and under what conditions - does the diffusion of
Information and Communication Technology in Action
Research contribute to:
* democratising knowledge creation and science in the
global public space?
* clarifying and strengthening the explicit positioning or
‘stance-taking’ of scientists’ engagement with their
object of research and its influence over the production
of research’s results?;
* the development of mediation tools and the exploration
of devices, procedures and machines that enable other
voices to be heard in the process of knowledge and science
generation?;
* critiques of participatory approaches, awakening and
deepening our questioning of the effectiveness of action
research in empowering people or in advancing scientific
activity?;
* bringing knowledge-creation and its outputs ‘out of the
lab’, and contributing to action research’s capability to
affect the political sphere and to re-shape the global
public space?;
* re‐inventing scientific practices/re‐shaping
scientific contents, bringing due consideration to
epistemological challenges in current AR (i.e., how
epistemological categories of truth, validity, paradigm,
methods… are reformulated in light of AR)?
* re-examining the relationship between citizens and
research, e.g. the role of civil society organisations
(CSOs) in the framing and designing research practices,
and using research results?;
* influencing policy, including case studies and analysis
of how the research process and the production of
knowledge by/with citizens can intervene in and shape
policy debates, official science, risk assessments, and
institutional choices?

We also acknowledge that interesting and relevant work on
the topic of this special call for papers may address
related but different questions and so we invite authors
to be in touch with the guest editors to see if their
paper fits within the envisaged parameters.
Questions should be directed to the special issue guest
editors, Dr Chiara Certomà ([log in to unmask]) and Dr
Michel Pimbert ([log in to unmask])


Deadlines, Reviews and Reviewers

The special guest editors for the issue are Chiara Certomà
and Michel Pimbert.Full drafts of papers should be
submitted online (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ARJ) no
later than January 25, 2014. Please note: all papers
should follow regular ARJ submission recommendations, that
is, 5000–7000 words inclusive, using APA style. It is
important to state clearly at the end of the abstract that
the manuscript is intended for this special issue.
More detail on how to offer a manuscript may be found at
arj.sagepub.com


References

Barry, A. (2001) Political machines. Governing a
technological society. London: The Athlone Press.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why
Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodchild, M.F. (2007) “Citizens as Voluntary Sensors:
Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0,”
Int’l J. Spatial Data - Infrastructures Research, vol. 2.
Greenwood, D. J. and Levin, M. (1998) Introduction to
action research: social research for social change.
London: Sage.
Haklay M. and Weber P, (2008) “OpenStreetMap:
User-Generated Street Maps”, Pervasive computing,
Oct.–Dec.
Harris, M. (2012), “No science, no evidence, no truth, no
democracy”, iPolitics, Jul.
Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd
is Driving the Future of Business. New York: Three rivers
press.
Kemmis, S. and McTaggert, R. (eds) (1988). The Action
Research Reader (3ed). Geelong: Deakin University Press.
Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature. How to bring the
Sciences into Democracy. Harvard: Harvard University
Press.
Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (2005) Making things
public-Athmosphere of Democracy. Cambridge (MA): Mit
Press.
Nielsen, J. (2006) “Participation Inequality: Encouraging
More Users to Contribute,”Alertbox, Oct.
Noveck, S. (2009) Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make
Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More
Powerful. Harrisonbourg (VA): Brooking institution press.
Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) (2001) The SAGE Handbook
of Action Research. Participative Inquiry and Practice.
London: Sage
Rushkoff, D. (2004), Open Source Democracy. Project
Gutenberg.
Stengers I. (1977), Power and Invention: Situating
Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.





Chiara Certomà

Post-Doc Research Fellow
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
Piazza Martiri della Liberta' 33, 56127, Pisa, Italia
[log in to unmask]
+39 (0)50 883819
http://cdg-lab.dirpolis.sssup.it/en/staff/academic/chiara-certoma/