POLITICAL, EPISTEMOLOGICAL, ECOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF PARTICIPATION

Abstract

After briefly introducing the paradigm of experiential, participative action research, four dimensions of participation—the political, epistemological, ecological and spiritual—are explored. The political dimension concerns peoples ' right to have a say in decisions which affect them, and is linked with participatory economics and the development of learning communities; the epistemological dimension concerns that nature of human knowing in a subjective-objective world; the ecological dimension counters the threats to the natural ecology which result from the positivist mindset; and the spiritual dimension suggests that one of the primary purposes of human inquiry is to heal the splits which characterise modern Western consciousness. I invented my own form of participative research—not knowing anything about other forms of participative inquiry at that stage—in the late 1970s as part of my PhD dissertation in the USA. I wanted to explore two-person relationships, and