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…