Participatory Action Research: Communicative Action and the Public Sphere.

Participatory action research has an extensive history in many fields of socialpractice. Our aim in this chapter is to develop the view of participatory actionresearch that has shaped our own theory and practice during recent years. We begin with a short overview of the evolution of our own thinking and the influence of several generations of action research. In our chapter on “Participatory Action Research ” for the second edition of the Handbook, we identified several key approaches to action research, the sites and settings where they are most frequently used, several crit-icisms that have been advanced for each, and key sources to explore them (Kemmis & McTaggart,2000).The approaches identified were a somewhat eclectic mix—participatory research, classroom action research, action learning, action science, soft systems approaches,and industrial action research.We summarize those approaches again here but do not reiterate our views of them in this chapter. We acknowledge the influence of each approach on the field and as stimulus to reflection on our own ideas and practices. For our current purposes, we proceed to develop a comprehensive view of social practice and reflect on aspects of our own work that we term “myths, misinterpreta-tions, and mistakes ” to move toward reconceptualizing research itself as a social pra-ctice. Thinking about research as a social practice leads us to an exploration of