Research as Innovation: An Invitation to Creative and Imaginative Inquiry Processes

The paper investigates research as a process of social transformation. We call this process research as innovation. We examine what sort of methods, resources and practices we can embrace as researchers who acknowledge what is, to us, the most important aspect of examining the social world – finding ways to go on together (Wittgenstein, 1953). That means the focus is on the participants, the process and the context. In other words, research is always situated and, depending on these situational features (e.g., participants, processes, and context), different methods are likely to be considered useful in different moments. If our attempt is to be innovative – to create new possible ways of making sense of the social world and to create the possibility for new ways of acting – we must remain fluid in our approach to research and sensitive to local, cultural, and contextual features of a given inquiry process. We begin here by providing a brief overview of some of the main distinctions between the scientific research tradition and research as a process of social construction. Our attempt, as stated previously, is simply to make visible the taken-for-granted and broadly unquestioned understanding of research so that we might open the possibility for a plurality of approaches. We then move on to discuss social construction and research as innovation. We will close with some illustrations of research approaches that fit squarely within the constructionist attempt to focus on relationality, participation, collaboration and the creation of potential and possibility.