ABSTRACT
Social innovation will find its value only when it creates social change, and this chapter envisages critical reflection as a starting point for thinking afresh. What positions are presented and possible for the ‘knowledgeable’ researcher when engaging with the ‘poor’ and ‘marginalised’? A peril is the consolidation of normative understandings without including local cultural knowledge. A prudent matter is whether research can contribute to social change as opposed to being mere academic buzzwords. Ideally, social innovation builds social value and sustainability by pointing to informants’ possibility for action. Social innovation and social work carry such promise, but, also, the danger of reduction to only macro-level concerns linked to techno-rational and instrumental theorising. This leads to the discussion of how to work with actors and groups as they explore their own experiences, unencumbered by dominant hegemonic forces and political projects, that take for given the desires and experiences of ‘subjects’. These matters are dealt with from an ontological example of global South actors, and from an epistemological approach of ethnography.
