ABSTRACT
Practitioner research, in one form or another, has been with us for around a half a century following the initial influence of Lewin (1947).1 The process has been seen to serve a variety of knowledge interests (Habermas, 1972) ranging from the technical rational interest-how do we solve this problem?, through the interpretive/hermeneutic interest-how do we understand this practical problem?, to the rarer emancipatory interest-how can we locate this problem in a wider social discourse and address it
such that we enhance the opportunity for participative democratic engagement with it? In this contribution, we wish to explore this notion of practitioner research as an emancipatory project with a critical edge, focusing particularly upon the complex links between purpose, ethics and quality. The contribution thus falls into two parts. In the first, we amplify the relationship between practitioner research as a form of critical social inquiry, while in the second we focus explicitly on ethical dimensions and measures of quality.
