Abstract
The following special issue, “Action Research for Transforming the Poverty Field,” offers five papers from around the globe that illustrate the role of action research in addressing one of the major challenges facing humanity today. It is an expression of this journal’s choice to focus on “Action Research for Transformation” (ART) by developing and publishing pragmatic scholarly practice pieces that contribute to attaining the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, (Bradbury, Waddell, et al., 2019), the first of which is to end poverty in all its forms. This issue was initiated as a collaboration between the
The five papers in this special issue reflect a global-local continuum of action research on poverty. Skelton et al.’s (2024) action research engaged the poverty field at the global level, bringing together 300 people experiencing poverty (and academics at a later stage) from over 19 countries from both the South and North to study “poverty as violence.” This process included individual interviews as well as face-to-face discussions at the national, regional, and international levels. Wetengere et al. (2024) focused on the poverty field at the national level, investigating poverty as experienced in Tanzania as part of a global study involving the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Bangladesh, and Bolivia. Their method, “Merging of Knowledge” (MOK), integrated the knowledge of different stakeholders: 216 people experiencing poverty (ages 12 to above 60, from throughout the country), 42 social welfare practitioners, and 25 academics. The scale of these two action research projects is rare, if not unprecedented, and was made possible because ATD Fourth World, the sponsoring organization, provided the resources and already long-term relationships of cooperation and trust with the participants experiencing poverty.
Gélineau et al.’s (2024) action research on food security focused on the poverty field in urban, semi-rural, and rural areas of Quebec Province, Canada. This project involved two groups. The research was coordinated by six experts experiencing poverty, two expert practitioners, two academics, seven delegates from community groups acting to combat poverty and enhance food security; one provincial health and social services representative, and four students. The participants in the data collection and analysis were much more numerous and diversified.
Blaak et al.’s (2024) action research focused on the poverty field at the community level, instigating a process to critically reflect on the relationship between citizens of a village in Uganda and the 18 NGO’s operating within that single community. Having discovered a striking difference between how the NGO’s evaluated their success and how the citizens perceived them, the researchers initiated a process of inquiry and dialogue involving over 37 community members and 15 NGO representatives intended to change that relationship. Cedeno’s (2024) Feminist Action Research focused on the poverty field at the group level, bringing together a group of 12 immigrant Latina mothers in an urban setting in the United States to inquire into societal and economic exclusion.
In this editorial, we share insights gained from the papers and our joint reflections. We begin by clarifying what we mean by “transforming the poverty field.” Using this conceptual framework, we then show how these papers illustrate the role of action research in facilitating transformations and, finally, we present a number of questions that need to be addressed by action researchers working in the poverty field.
Field, poverty, and transformation
Drawing on the field theory of Kurt Lewin (1951) and Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1998), we take a “relational” rather than “substantialist” view of social reality (Bradbury, 2022; Cassirer, 1923). In other words, our social world is not made up of atomistic things, but rather of configurations of social space that connect people and are created through interaction among them (Friedman, 2011). All human relationships, from couples to societies, are, in this way of constructing reality, to be considered fields. Fields are created by people, but once they are formed, they take on a life of their own and powerfully shape people, who internalize and reproduce them through their thinking, feeling, and actions. What makes field theory so powerful is that it focuses neither on the individual nor the environment as the unit of analysis but rather on the circular, reflexive processes through which individuals, in interaction with others, continually construct and reconstruct both their internal and external worlds (Kurland et al., 2021). Fields are characterized by four aspects: (a) the individual and institutional actors who constitute the field; (b) the nature of relationships among these actors, with a particular focus on relative power; (c) the
We see “poverty” as a global social field shaped by larger socio-economic fields and consisting of myriad interconnected local subfields, each formed from patterned relationships among individual and institutional actors that generate a core, multi-dimensional experience of suffering (Bray et al., 2019). Although economic deprivation plays a role in this suffering, we take a relational approach to poverty first noted by the ATD Fourth World, which coined the term social exclusion (Klanfer, 1965) to replace the then major explanation of poverty as a maladaptation to progress (Lasida et al., 2022). This focus on relationship was based on the felt, lived experience of Joseph Wresinski, the ATD founder and a person who grew up in extreme poverty. Wresinski wrote that people living in poverty “tell us over and over again that man’s greatest misfortune is not to be hungry or unable to read, nor even to be without work…(but) to know that you count for nothing, to the point where even your suffering is ignored. The worst blow of all is the contempt on the part of your fellow citizens” (Wresinski, 2001, pp. 98–99).
As illustrated by Bradbury (2015, 2022), ART provides an approach to transformation precisely because it has developed as relational research that integrates individual change with change at the organizational, institutional, and social levels. From a field theory perspective, we understand “transforming poverty” as reconfiguring the four aspects – actors, relationships, rules of the game, and meanings/frames –to significantly reduce, or put an end, to this multi-dimension experience of exclusion and suffering. Since the poverty field is both “inside us” and “out there”, transformations involve individual and social changes that feedback on each other. Transformation focuses not so much on scale as on a holistic shift in which all of the components of the field realign to create a new social reality.
The paper describing the Merging of Knowledge, as carried out in Tanzania, provides a good example of this approach to transformation. The convenors of the process faced resistance not only from academic researchers and practitioners, who thought including people living in poverty as co-researchers a waste of time, but also from people experiencing poverty who feared that their input would not be considered valuable (Wetengere et al., 2024). By the end of the research, however, it was almost impossible to distinguish which of the co-researchers was a person experiencing poverty, a social practitioner, or an academic researcher. In the mini-conference, one of the Tanzanian participants, a well-known academic, said, “I am a different person…People living in poverty…were very different from what I was thinking…I’m a transformed person, that the people who I thought could not learn anything, I learned a lot from them.” Furthermore, personal transformation was relevant to social transformation as indicated by a participant with lived experience of poverty who remarked, “I thought that knowledge only came from academics but after participating in this research, I know that our knowledge can help eradicate poverty.” (Wetengere et al., 2024, p. 9). In the following sections, we look at the papers in this special issue through the lens of the four aspects transformation specified above. Despite the differences in scope and scale, each of these studies illustrates how changes among the actors, the nature of their relationships, their framings, and the rules of the game produced important transformations at different levels.
Transformations in the poverty field
Actors/stakeholders
The five papers in this special issue all focused on people experiencing poverty as co-researchers together with other stakeholders in the poverty field, such as academic researchers, practitioners, institutions, and policy makers. The inclusion of people with lived experience of poverty as co-researchers is not only essential in action research but is in itself a step towards transforming, or potentially transforming, the field. All of the studies placed great importance on clarifying that the professional researchers were facilitators whose task was to create conditions under which the people experiencing poverty could formulate their knowledge. Skelton et al. (2024), for example, illustrated the transformative effect experienced by people living in poverty when they were able to meet, talk, and think together as members of a global group with similar experiences. Rather than having their knowledge be appropriated by others, they were able to “take their knowledge on a journey.”
Relationships
The papers in the special issue show that true participation requires changing relationships, particularly power relationships, among the stakeholders. The poverty field imposes hierarchies that govern relationships among different actors and people living in poverty are almost always at the bottom, where they experience silencing and shame. These hierarchies continue to shape relationships even when different stakeholder groups come together with the best participatory intentions. The knowledge of people experiencing poverty must be placed on equal footing.
Wetengere et al. (2024) described a very systematic process, including workshops, peer groups and team-building for all participants to try to equalize power, prior to bringing together people living in poverty, practitioners, and academic researchers as co-researchers. Cedeno (2024) applied a feminist action research approach to a financial literacy course with Latino mothers. Rather than being recipients of a pre-planned curriculum based on assumptions about what these women needed to know, the participants were co-designers, using their knowledge to continually negotiate content and activities to meet their needs. In addition to acquiring important knowledge and skills, the reflection and interaction engendered by this process fostered solidarity and enabled the participants to free themselves from the hegemonic hold on their consciousness that led them to feel powerless.
Blaak et al. (2024) found that formal interviews with community members about the NGO’s operating in their village mimicked the community-NGO relations in which many informants spoke in ways seemingly aimed at accessing resources. However, when the researchers held a community dialogue to test the interview findings, people spoke up more freely about their dissatisfaction. As a result, the participants in this dialogue decided to invite the NGOs to a meeting to discuss the issues. They set up a committee of community members to design the meeting, set the agenda, and extended the invitation to the NGOs. This journey is described as a process that “turned the tables” of power in the typical relationship between community members and NGOs such that the former were transformed from recipients of services to actors who can speak their minds to the NGOs that purport to serve them.
Because hierarchies and societal stigma are internalized, it is not easy for people with lived experience of poverty to overcome the silencing even among themselves. Skelton et al. (2024) described a thoughtful, sensitive, and sustained effort to create conditions that enabled people experiencing poverty to come together, overcome fear, build trust, feel confidence, and break the silence. The experience of participation in knowledge creation was transformative for the individuals involved, not only in overcoming the trauma of poverty but also by providing tools for maintaining resilience and challenging the poverty field after the research The process was also transformative for ATD Fourth World, which developed new practices that rippled out into a variety of institutions with whom it works. On the other hand, Skelton et al. (2024) never completely overcame the tendency of voices from the global North to dominate and misunderstand those of the global South. Furthermore, bringing people experiencing poverty together with academic researchers to share their different kinds of knowledge was more problematic than they had anticipated; they realized that they needed to work more with the academics to achieve a transformation in the field.
Gélineau et al. (2024) pointed out that bringing people with a lived experience in poverty into action research processes informed by the scientific method places them at a disadvantage by implicitly leaving power for interpretation into the hands of academics and favoring propositional over experiential, practical and aesthetic ways of knowing. Using weaving as a generative metaphor, they developed a “woven collective analysis” process of carrying out action research. This approach systematically combines the different threads (i.e. voices of diverse stakeholders) into a single fabric that reflects different ways of knowing while ensuring that the experiential knowledge of people living in poverty remains the primary focus.
Rules of the game
The “rules of the game” are the norms that govern behavior and the ways that things are typically done in a particular field. Transforming the poverty field involves consciously changing the rules of the game that sustain relationships characterized by exclusion and inequality. Each study addressed the rules of the game specific to its context but there are a number of common rules that emerged: 1. Enabling people experiencing poverty to come together and form safe spaces of their own in which they can jointly reflect on their shared reality before they come together with other stakeholders. One of the central, and most difficult, experiences of poverty is the feeling of isolation and shame. When people experiencing poverty are able to interact and dialogue in peer groups, they discover common experiences and form a common identity based on who they really are rather than on how the field sees them. Creating their own safe social space, which we call “enclaves” (Friedman et al., 2018) or “transitional spaces” (Friedman et al., 2016), provides firm ground upon which to stand together when engaging other groups that enjoy advantages of status, power, and well-defined identities. 2. Providing people experiencing poverty with the time necessary to fully enter into and shape the research process on their terms. There is an important difference between the time needed by people experiencing poverty to share their knowledge, based on lived experience, and the time needed by academics, who focus mainly on causes and consequences. In the Merging of Knowledge method developed by the ATD Fourth World and practiced by Wetengere et al. (2024), one way to equalize power was to give participating academics one hour and people experiencing poverty two days within their respective groups. In other words, inequality in the provision of time, and perhaps other resources, is necessary for balancing power and this provision needs to be built into the process, not for purpose of righting past wrongs but rather for tailoring the process to the needs of each group, especially people with lived experience of poverty. 3. Providing people with the experience of poverty the opportunity to speak first. This rule implicitly challenges the assumption that academics are the source of knowledge. It also reverses the normal order of the poverty field, in which people experiencing poverty are silenced or have others speak for them. When more powerful stakeholders speak first, they set the terms of engagement and often place an insurmountable obstacle by establishing a fact or a claim that must contested or overcome before people experiencing poverty can express themselves and be heard. 4. Including a critical mass of people experiencing poverty in the research so that their voices and agenda can be not just heard, but also carry weight relative to other stakeholders. This rule was evident in all of the action research studies in the special issue, but, ironically, less so in the editorial team. In reflecting on the process of editing this special issue, the editorial team member with a lived experience of poverty, and who also possesses expertise in participatory research, pointed out that she was only one person out of six and that there needs to be more in order to overcome the power imbalance. Even though this team member had a strong and influential presence on the editorial team, we were mistaken, and risking tokenism, if we thought it was enough. 5. Enabling participants to speak the language in which they feel most comfortable, making two-way translation available at all times. Language differences among participants were an issue in four of the five papers (Blaak et al., 2024; Cedeno, 2024; Skelton et al., 2024; Wetengere et al., 2024). In each case, efforts were made to enable people to speak in their language or to switch between languages. Speaking their language makes it easier for people experiencing poverty to express themselves more freely, honors their identities, and addresses a major source of power imbalance. 6. Enabling experiencing poverty to exercise control over how their voices are interpreted. It is not enough just to be heard because the voices of people experiencing poverty are often distorted or interpreted in ways that reinforce preconceptions or interests of academics and other stakeholders, fitting their needs rather than those of people experiencing poverty. 7. Creating conditions that enable people experiencing poverty to not just produce knowledge but to use it. There are multiple ways of knowing, so people experiencing poverty need to be able produce knowledge that they see as relevant to themselves in the forms that they find relevant.
Frames
Frames are the meanings or logic that hold fields together and lend them coherence. They guide the definition of problems and their solutions, of success and failure, of what is desirable and what is considered of value. Frames powerfully shape how people perceive their social reality and play an important role in continually recreating and reinforcing the status quo. Changing the frame, or reframing, is fundamental to the transformation of the poverty field. Reflection can weaken the hold of the field and reframing generates a shift in people’s thinking, feeling, and action. Once reframing takes place, it sets in motion changes in the rules of the game, relationships, and even the actors (Kurland et al., 2021).
Action research, therefore, can be seen as facilitating a process of reframing that has the potential for transforming the poverty field. Reframing was evident in all of the papers of this special issue. Skelton et al. (2024) reframed action research as not just participatively collecting and analyzing data but in terms of “epistemic justice” – that is, enabling people living in poverty to develop their thinking and to think together so that their knowledge can emerge and empower them. Gélineau et al. (2024) challenged their own earlier framing of participatory action research that emphasized “ownership” by people with lived experience of poverty, but unintentionally increased vulnerability through the instrumentalization and reproduction of inequalities in the research process. Their collective woven analysis was an attempt to reframe the research process to one that seeks “hermeneutical and testimonial justice”.
Wetengere et al. (2024) framed their action research as a relationship-building process that merges the knowledge of all of the stakeholders into something new, making all stakeholders agents of anti-poverty policy development. Blaak et al. (2024) saw their action research as attempts to reframe the meaning of “collective learning”, particularly in international development programs, where learning is often a project activity to be “ticked off” a checklist. They reframed collective learning as an emergent process that transcends project boundaries and encourages practitioners to undertake “acts of defiance” that unearth new understandings of problems and open new opportunities and conditions for change. Cedeno’s (2024) feminist action research reframed “financial literacy,” moving away a deficit model that views it as simply a lack of knowledge and skills. Instead, she approached financial literacy as a process of questioning how society and institutions have shaped current socio-economic realities, and using reflective spaces to enable participants to recognize personal and family strengths, develop agency, and acquire new knowledge and skills.
Questions we ask ourselves
On the basis of our joint reflection, we set forth a number of issues and questions which arose in producing this special issue and reflecting together at the online mini-conference:
Conclusion
No one can really fight poverty without involving people living in poverty as agents of their own liberation. Research enterprises aimed at transforming the poverty field need to involve a critical mass of people in poverty who are invited to the table and have substantive roles. They need to be facilitated by strategies that allow for their people in poverty to think together among themselves and for solid preparation for joining in conversations with academics and other stakeholders on equal footing. Sufficient time needs to be taken to build trust so as to enable academic researchers, other stakeholders and people in poverty to act with each other. Power needs to be shared, especially in decision making, but people in poverty are the ones who need to have the final say over how their words are interpreted. They also must determine whether the benefits of participatory research are worth the risks for themselves and their communities.
This journal’s choice to focus henceforth on
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
