I have a background in Biology, but I've decided to do an Arts-based thesis for my Masters degree. This is mostly because I felt like my creativity was stifled to hell in the natural sciences and I didn't feel like I was allowed to put enough of 'myself' into my work. So when I read a passage like the following, it makes me very, very happy (because I am now allowed to do it!)...

"...Participatory action research is aware of its inevitable intervention in the social situations within which it operates and seeks to turn these to consciously-applied effect. Most participatory action research sets out to explicitly study something in order to change and improve it. It most often arises from an unsatisfactory situation that those most affected wish to alter for the better (although it can also arise from the experience of something which works well, which provokes the desire to reproduce or expand it).

The moving to new and improved action involves a creative ‘moment’ of transformation. This involves an imaginative leap from a world of ‘as it is’ to a glimpse of a world ‘as it could be’. Where existing situations benefit or promote some but disadvantage or subordinate others, then creative change may be construed as ‘political’. As well, participatory action research does not conceptualise this as the development of predictive cause-effect theory (‘if this, then that’). Instead, as in the slogan: ‘the future is made, not predicted’, it is more like ‘what if we…, then maybe’. Possibility theory rather than predictive theory. That is, human actors are both wilful and capable of thwarting research prediction, and wilful and capable of selecting and implementing theories or probabilities they want to see manifested! Conventional science sees this as undesirable ‘contamination’ and ‘bias’. Participatory action research sees this as a goal, and the stuff of which ‘real life’ is made or enacted...."

From: Wadsworth, Yoland. 1998. What is Participatory Action Research? Action Research International