Empathy in action research

Abstract

Empathy is commonly referred to as “walking in another’s shoes” – it is the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experience. Sharing of lived experience is at the heart of relationality in action research (e.g. Bradbury & Divecha, 2020). When Orlando Fals Borda was experimenting on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in the 1970s his practice “did not follow a recipe, but instead, it was a kind of intersubjective and empathetic dialogue between researchers and the subject groups, one that would be adjusted to the particular circumstances of the research relationship.” (Pereira & Joanne, 2021, p. 55). Appreciating action research as a process through which empathy is built is not new, yet exploration of this dimension of action research has to date been limited (Dadds, 2008). Themed issues such as this one are the product of curation by the editorial team. The papers presented here were already published online and were not written to fit within an empathy themed issue. Taken as a whole the five papers in this issue shine a light on different dimensions of empathy building through their exploration of the relational and intersubjective qualities of an action research process.