Introduction

This book emerges from the annual CARN conference held in Vienna in November 2011. This conference brought together more than 250 academics and practitioners from 30 countries across six continents working in a number of rapidly changing fields of research in many disciplines like social work, health and palliative care, education and community development. Their common interest was to use collaborative action research not only in order to understand complex social contexts but also to intervene by including and empowering the people who strive to improve their situations and social environments or develop the organisations in which they work. Since the diversity and quality of the presentations of current action research projects was impressive, the idea to publish a book easily found a team of editors from the ranks of the conference organisers, the CARN coordinating group and its associated journal Educational Action Research.