An Ethos and Practice of Appreciation for Transformative Research: Appreciative Inquiry, Care Ethics, and Creative Methods

This chapter departs from the need to pursue transformative research, understood as the co-production of knowledge with and for societal stakeholders aimed at supporting and enabling sustainable change. It explores how Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and its underlying ‘ethos of appreciation’ (after Zandee & Cooperrider, 2008) can complement and enrich care-full and resourceful approaches to transformative research. It presents the five dimensions of an ‘ethos of appreciation’, and lays out their philosophical meaning, their resonance with the care ethics literature, as well as their practical application. It gives a detailed account of how five different creative methods were employed during a participatory action-oriented Ph.D. study in Finland, and in so doing, showcases how an ‘ethos of appreciation’ can be embodied and applied in practice. Finally, it discusses the methodological potentials and limitations of using creative methods, as well as the challenges and outcomes they yield to support transformative research that aims to enable care-full and resourceful participatory engagement processes.

Reserch for change: Towards a transformative research strategy for climate-resilient agriculture in Germany

Towards a transformative research strategy for climate-resilient agriculture in Germany

Walls, Cracks and Change: The Challenges and Opportunities of Critically Engaged Research Within Current Academic and Refugee Research Structures

Many consider academic research an important means to address societal inequality of marginalized groups, such as refugees. However, transformative research arguably requires critically engaged practices that consider and transform dominant exclusive structures permeating both society and knowledge production. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of such research practices, especially given power and (neoliberal) politics around knowledge production within Dutch academic and refugee research structures. Based on 14 researchers’ narratives, the results reveal how critically engaged refugee research is challenged by its marginalized position, academic pressures and culture as well as the recently emerged ‘refugee research business’. However, the paper also uncovers various ways in which researchers manoeuvre within challenging and facilitating structures by operating outside or in the margins of academic structures, making use of facilitating spaces and strategically employing dominant discourses. Finally, researchers arguably transform academic structures by challenging dominant research paradigms and transforming the institution of academics itself.

Thinking with autoethnography in collaborative research: A critical, reflexive approach to relational ethics

In this article, we propose a distinctive critical, reflexive approach to relational ethics in ‘collaborative, democratic and transformative’ research. Underpinning the approach is the view that the buzzwords of ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-creation/co-production’ may signify equitable, symmetrical power relations and, as a result, romanticise collaborative research as straightforward processes of inclusion. The approach integrates critical, reflexive analysis of the play of power in the ‘with’ in ‘research with, not on, people’ and the ‘co’ in ‘co-creating knowledge’ into the ongoing collaborative research process. As a main method for critical, reflexive analysis, the approach uses ‘thinking with’ autoethnography. In the article, we illustrate the approach by showing how we ‘think with’ autoethnographic texts to respond to discomfort and analyse the tensions in the co-constitution of knowledge and subjectivities in the preliminary phase of a collaborative, participatory research project on dance for people with Parkinson’s disease and their spouses.

The Yin and the Yang of Transformative Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity for scientists from diverse disciplines to collaboratively mitigate the singular calamity facing humanity this century. The ability of researchers to combine exponential advances in technology and scientific acumen has resulted in landmark discoveries in pediatric research and is surmounting the COVID-19 challenge. Several of these discoveries exist in a realm of research that is not classically “basic” or “clinical.” Translational research characterizes this domain partially, but does not fully capture the integrated research approaches that have spurred these discoveries. Herein, we share our perspective on the common themes underpinning the basic and clinical research. We also highlight major differences in the scope, emphasis, approach, and limitations of basic and clinical research that impede multi-disciplinary approaches that facilitate truly transformative research. These differences in research thinking and methodology are ingrained during training wherein the limitations of the chosen discipline, and strengths of alternate disciplines are not adequately explored. Insular approaches are particularly limited in impacting complex diseases pathophysiology in the era of precision medicine. We propose that integration of -omics technologies, systems biology, adaptive clinical trial designs, humanized animal models, and precision pre-clinical model systems must be incorporated into research training of future scientists. Several initiatives from the NIH and other institutions are facilitating such broad-based “research without frontiers” training that paves the way for seamless, multi-disciplinary, research. Such efforts become “transformative” when scientific challenges are tackled in partnership with a willingness to share ideas, tackle challenges, and develop tools/models from the very beginning.

The Challenges of Planning for High-Impact Research

In major universities, research must be seen in many dimensions: the different disciplines, basic vs. applied, incremental vs. transformative, disciplinary or interdisciplinary, single researcher or collaborative, and much more. A fundamental difference that receives increasing attention is the distinction between incremental research vs. transformative research. Incremental research takes existing research results to the next step while transformative research opens up whole new ways of framing questions, often challenging what is “known,” and leading to new paths of knowledge creation that could lead to new academic disciplines or completely new approaches to practical issues/problems. Incremental research is critical to bring existing results to their most valuable ends. Transformative research has high impact in opening up new paths to important knowledge, but it poses daunting challenges in being unpredictable, long term, and high risk. Providing appropriate infrastructure is critical for all kinds of research (e.g., facilities, lab space, special equipment, staff support). To assure sustained access to these resources, effective planning is necessary, which poses a significant challenge given the long-term, high-risk, and unpredictable nature of transformative research. To address these planning challenges, it is necessary to explore ways of creating an environment and resources that make successful transformative research more likely to happen rather than planning for incremental research. Such strategies include supporting uniquely powerful facilities that fit with academic strengths (e.g., a strong research reactor, radio-astronomy facility). Another is to maintain a supportive environment for interdisciplinary research. Yet another strategy is to orient performance evaluation away from productivity, which is the enemy of long-term, risky, unpredictable research. And lastly, it is critical to have a positive mindset for challenges to existing knowledge.