Restorative action research: Fostering wellbeing as a collective, relational, vital endeavor

Abstract

This paper presents restorative action research - a relational, collective, vital approach to fostering wellbeing. It is based on cooperative inquiry carried out by six academics over three years, for the purpose of enhancing their own wellbeing in the increasingly precarious world of higher education, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the concept of “vital assemblages” as an analytical tool, the paper illustrates how restorative action research enhanced the participants’ sense of feeling alive, active, and joyful at a time of great stress. This relational, collective, vital approach to wellbeing offers an alternative to the dominant individualistic, internal framing of wellbeing. It is relevant to organizations outside of academia, as echoed in the idea of “networked wellbeing” emerging from the Global South. Restorative action research is also a political act with transformational potential, because it creates social spaces that enable people to free themselves and resist, if only a little, the influence of organizations and other dominant fields that cause illbeing and threaten human society.