“Hunchifactuality”: Identifying and Alleviating Bias with Pragmatic Action Research.
Keywords:
Political Expression, Pragmatic Action Research, Action research, bias, positionality, comedy, satire, cultural democracy, anthropology, political scienceAbstract
This paper discusses how a pragmatic action research (AR) strategy assisted to identify researcher bias and positively influenced participant recruitment during my PhD project in Political Science. I started by recruiting participants through traditional text-based methods based on limited definitions of satire (see Condren, 2012; Phiddian, 2020) rather than more informal, practice based conversations at key annual festival events. My project aimed to locate and centre Australian comedians performing political and/or social justice inspired comedy as a potential form of political expression. I had both insider and outsider positionality (as both a comedian who did social justice inspired comedy and an anthropologist). In my recruitment practice I mistook my bias towards traditional knowledge production for rigour and dismissed hunches that would later prove to be valuable practice-led insights. This unconscious bias in my recruitment practice was revealed by initial recruitment failures, which were remedied by revisiting the core practice-led tenant of pragmatic AR.
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