The special call on organizational education addresses organizations' current tensions and challenges. Participatory research methodologies (PAR) may significantly contribute to organizations and networks charting forward.

Unlike traditional research approaches, PAR involves the researchers as participants and embodied beings. It draws on their felt experiences as knowledge-makers, epistemic practices situated in discourses, and collective imaginaries (Castoriadis 1975). Especially in PAR (Bergold & Thomas 2012), design and arts-based research (Barone & Eisner 2012) strengthen the relational in-betweenness and connect different epistemic fields and their ‘worldmaking.’ As ‘worldmaking’ is based on senses, it is core in PAR settings. In the first part, we refer to body movement and visual and narrative approaches as participatory data gathering (Triple Symposium Part 1).

As PAR is based on systematically different perspectives between research and practice fields, we generate points of encounter that initiate shared processes of reflection and translation (Dewe, Ferchhoff & Radtke: 1992) in different organized and institutionalized educational fields. As emergent, co-creative processes sensitive to power/knowledge, difference, and embedded practices, PAR relates to learning for democracy in education (Seppälä; Sarantou & Miettinen 2021). Mirroring our understanding of democracy-as-becoming as a relational and lived experience, PAR is a critical inquiry that may change practice, values, and awareness. As a “practice-changing practice” (Kemmis, 2009: 463), it refers to relational perspectives between stakeholders and ourselves, to the researchers’ perspective between (auto-) and ethnography.

Two EU Horizon 2020 Projects, “Aesthetic and Embodied Learning for Democracy as Becoming”(AECED) and DEMOCRAT, reflect on the future potential of education for democracy in institutional settings (Woods et al., 2023). In AECED, 19 cases span primary -, secondary -, and higher education, as well as adult/professional and organizational settings. In DEMOCRAT, social movements and a bottom-up transformational approach are used. In these differently institutionalized settings, multiple levels of participation and opportunities to co-design, co-create, and co-evaluate are involved (Kemmis et al., 2014; Bryman, 2012). The second part therefore refers to multi-stakeholder PAR approaches (Triple Symposium Part 2)

The second part of the triple symposium reflects on some of the more fragile aspects of PAR. In developing research strategy the researcher(s) is/are limited by their knowledge, the responsiveness and capacity of fieldwork partners and time and consistency constraints. Such issues will be addressed in the three presentations of this symposium with a view on developing constructive reflections and strategies. PAR is not only (or primarily) oriented towards causality but towards making inferences about it (Bennett & Checkel 2014: 11). Process theory, hence, regards events, activities, and trajectories and pays attention to entanglements and involvement. Especially in such process-oriented research strategies, we ask how data analysis strategies can be organized. How do we deal with the different cultures, languages, institutional settings, methodical strategies, and research approaches used? How to deal with the enormous complexity of analysis? In which way onto-epistemic approaches can contribute here? (Bollier & Helfrich 2019).

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