The Action Research Podcast

Welcome to the first author interview in our mini series, Eco-Justice and Climate Action, where we aim to explore inspiring projects at the intersection of climate justice and action research. This series highlights work featured in the 2025 special issue of the Canadian Journal for Action Research, guest edited by Dr. Blane Harvey. We are excited to share these thought-provoking contributions with you.
In today’s episode, our co-hosts Joe and Shikha are joined by Ipek Türeli, Nathalie Malhamé, and Sarah Nabi who co-authored “Little Architects, Big Ideas: Climate Action Through Design-Based Learning, where big ideas meet small (but mighty) designers. Together, they reflect on their creative and inspiring collaboration in Montreal, Quebec, connecting Ipek’s work at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University, with Nathalie and Sarah’s fourth grade classes in Royal Vale School. They share their motivations behind the collaboration, surprise findings along the way, and the gratifying experience of exhibiting the students’ work at both institutions.
The conversation begins with introductions and the story of how the project came to life [2:00]. This led to exploring deeper connections between architecture, environmental justice, and experiential education [8:09] along with challenges and complexities that our guests Nathalie, Sarah and Ipek encountered and navigated in their project [13:18]. They then reflect on the role and importance of the undergraduate architecture students for the success of the collaboration [17:43]. We ask about the young designer’s work and what it may reveal about different understandings of climate justice. Through these examples, we explore the surprises and tensions that emerged in the final designs [20:37], leading into a rich discussion about why exhibitions became such a powerful space for sharing this work and supporting student learning [25: 08]. For such a rich and impactful project, we were keen to learn the lasting impacts [30:11] before closing with final reflection and even a mic-drop moment!

Thank you Ipek, Nathalie, and Sarah for sharing your time and work with us.
And thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, Vanessa Gold, and Adam Stieglitz.
Produced by Shikha Diwakar and Vanja Lugonjic.
Subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us.

Biographies:
Ipek Türeli, PhD, holds the Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice at McGill University, where she is appointed as Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. She is the creative director of Architecture Playshop, a web-based curricular resource to teach critical literacy to young children about climate action through design. This project began as an invited contribution to the Korean Pavilion on the theme of “Future School” at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2023, at the triennial “Golden Cube Awards”, Architecture Playshop was recognized with an Honourable Mention in the AudioVisual Media Category. Dr. Türeli has published a reflective piece about the curriculum development in the open-access architecture publication Platform.
Sarah Nabi is an elementary school teacher at Royal Vale School in Montreal, Quebec, with over 20 years of experience. A graduate of Vanier College, Concordia University, and McGill University, she specialized in psychology, art, and special education. She fosters inclusive, culture-rich classrooms through differentiation and project-based learning, leads committees and extracurriculars, and is committed to every student’s success. In Winter 2023, she partnered with McGill’s Architecture Department to implement the Playshop Project at RVS.

Nathalie Malhamé is a French teacher and New Teacher Mentor at Royal Vale School in Montreal, where she has taught for over 12 years. She received the Evelyn Eaton Award for her project Global Citizens of Kindness. Active on several school committees, including Governing Board, Staff Council and Truth and Reconciliation, she recently completed a certificate in educational leadership. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in sociology and a B.Ed.; She collaborated with the McGill’s Architecture Playshop team in 2023.
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This episode is part of our Eco-justice and Climate Action Series. Authors from journal articles in a Special Issue of the Canadian Journal for Action Research hop behind the mic and share the inspirations, process, and findings from their projects. Join Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar and special guest host Blane Harvey, as they interview an inspiring group of researchers, educators, organizers, and more, navigating the process of action research.

What does it look like when research doesn't just study a crisis, but actively works to respond to it?
To answer this question, Action Research Podcast hosts Joe Levitan and Shikha Diwakar invite Blane Harvey to be a special co-host for this exciting mini-series on Eco-Justice and Climate Action, growing out of a 2-part special issue of the Canadian Journal of Action Research (2025), which Blane guest edited.
In this first episode, Blane joins Joe and Shikha to unpack the "what," "why," and "how" behind the special issue. This exciting collection brings together researchers, educators, and community collaborators across the globe who use action research to confront climate change and eco-injustice to share and reflect on their work.
A thread that runs through all of the articles is that action research is rarely neat. It's iterative, relational, and full of unexpected turns. This series features eight different stories, unpacking that messiness—and the good, bad, and uncertain that comes out of it—from a variety of contexts and perspectives. Expect fun stories, deep reflections, and an expansion of ideas about how action research can be used to work towards climate justice.
We invite you to listen in and share the special series with anyone in your network interested in eco-justice and sustainability, action research, or just want to hear from the humans behind collaborative research projects on your way to work or cleaning your kitchen.
The introduction opens with how this special double issue came to life, before diving into the core threads and commitments that connect its many contributions [02:10]. Blane shares how the editorial process was shaped by the very values action research is built on [05:11], and makes the case for why action research may be uniquely necessary in responding to the climate crisis [10:40]. The group reflects on the tension between global challenges and local action [13:45], closing with what Blane hopes both readers and listeners carry forward from this collection [17:36].
Thank you Blane for kicking off this series, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast.
The Action Research Podcast was co-created by Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, Vanessa Gold, and Adam Stieglitz.
Produced by Shikha Diwakar and Vanja Lugonjic.
Subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us.
Resources:
CJAR Special Issue Part 1
CJAR Special Issue Part 2
Check out the Leadership and Learning for Sustainability Lab:
Website
Linkedin

Biographies:
Dr. Blane Harvey is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University (Canada), where he leads the Leadership and Learning for Sustainability Lab. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans across the social and natural sciences on the themes of learning, collaboration, environmental change and education for sustainable development. Dr. Harvey’s research investigates how climate change knowledge is produced, validated and communicated, and how facilitated learning and knowledge sharing can advance climate justice and support action on climate change, especially within communities most vulnerable to its impacts. He serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Climate and Development and Subject Editor for the journal FACETS.
Dr. Joseph Levitan is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on community-based participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Sitting at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan works with communities to identify context-specific challenges, culturally grounded methods to address those challenges, and processes to put those methods into action. Through this work he has co-developed methods such as Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development, the Student Voice Research Framework, and Accidental Ethnography. He currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in Peru, Panama, India, and Canada.
Dr. Shikha Diwakar is a Dalit feminist scholar, educator, and policy analyst working at the intersections of caste equity, anti-colonial pedagogy, and transnational education justice. With over a decade of experience across two continents, she has worked in teaching, higher education research, university administration, and policy advocacy. Her work centers the lived experiences of first-generation Dalit women, using community-based participatory research grounded in relational accountability and Indigenous ethics. Shikha is also the long-time producer of the Action Research Podcast.

Join us for this inspiring and thought-provoking discussion. Adam and Joe sit down with three members of the Restorative Community Solutions (RCS) team based in San Francisco: Earl Simms (executive director), Kezia "Zia" Martinis (community engagement lead) and Couper Orona (community engagement operations). RCS is a nonprofit founded in 2022, led by a group of dedicated professionals with a deep history of direct service, dedicated to “support[ing] those experiencing the transition back into society from institutional settings, homelessness, prison, jails, and treatment facilities” through peer support.
[00:02:27] We first learn about each guest and how their life experiences inform their work as well as [00:05:16] learn more about Restorative Community Solutions’s (RCS) mandate. [00:08:35] Adam asks our guests to describe the challenges of doing peer support in a non-profit context. Zia discusses the challenges of representation of all community voices. Earl talks about dynamics of contracting with government agencies in San Francisco with extractive approaches and the risks of policy violence—when policy makers are “10, 000 feet above the problem” they can’t “see the nuances and the different intricacies that are happening on the ground.” Couper ties it back to the importance of a trauma-responsive peer support approach.
Our hosts ask the team to reflect on their work through the angle of action research. They discuss the importance first of bringing that qualitative part that humanizes and works toward accountability, [00:20:02] “mak[ing] sure that people’s solutions are grounded in reality.” RCS’s action research question asks, “What is one thing that San Francisco can do to change your life?” [00:23:34] Earl reflects on how participatory action research came into the methodology of their work, and they describe how co-researchers co-create survey questions, help with focus groups, use different tools to synthesize data, and then formulate recommendations to different organizations. [00:28:47] As Couper argues, there needs to be “more guts” in city government and the way things are done because “there's so much uncaring… so much distance between folks.” [00:30:51] Earl discusses balancing different hats and [00:32:20] Zia emphasizes the importance of paying people a living wage and giving folks the agency to vote on policies that directly affect them: “The stipend that I received was more than I had pretty much made in my lifetime” and “I never knew three years ago that I'd be voting on a commission where I have a say in allocating all that proxy money.” [00:35:48] Adam asks the RCS guests “Where can you take this movement? How can you get involved with policy in such a way where your day to day grind is going to be what gets it there?”
Jump into this episode to benefit from the nuances of their important insights and the rich variety of concrete examples they share from their research experiences.
[00:52:10] Finally the team plugs a few things which we cite below. [00:54:26] RCS is looking for volunteers, “anybody that wants to be boots on the ground or has any kind of compassion towards this work we've done to help support that.” They are looking for lawyers, as well as any students. Just reach out to them! Or, as Couper throws in [00:54:49], “if you have a million dollars laying around or something, that'd be great.”
Thanks Earl, Zia and Couper for sharing your work with us.
You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha De Walker, Cory Legasic, and Vanessa Gold.
How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us.
To support the work of RSC, please contribute here.

Here are citations related to this discussion:
Foley, N. (Director). (2019). Couper was here. [Video recording]. Nicole Foley / Intersect. https://www.couperwashere.com
Hoskins, D. (n.d.). Safety and Justice Challenge. Safety and Justice Challenge. Retrieved September 15, 2024, from https://safetyandjusticechallenge.org/
Restorative Community Solutions |Life Coaching & Legal Services | California. (n.d.). Mysite. Retrieved September 14, 2024, from https://www.restorativebayarea.org

Guess what? It’s summer, July 2024, and the team is distracted doing summer things. So we are taking a little break this month before we sit down and get back into recording conversations with our upcoming guests for the episodes ahead. We also realized that we are in our fourth season, and we can now do what seasoned podcasters do: look back and share with you one of our team’s favorite past episodes.
With more than 30 episodes under our belt, this episode stands out to us from our first season that we recorded back on November 5th, 2020, during the height of the pandemic lockdown. And summer is a great time for reflection. With that, we give you, once again, Adam and Joe in Season 1 Episode 6’s discussion on “Reflexivity in Action Research with Dr. Lisa Starr”.
Thanks for tuning in, and now, onto our hosts.

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In this episode reprise, Adam and Joe have a conversation with Dr. Lisa Starr about the role of reflexivity in action research. To understand this complex topic, they discuss two chapters Lisa wrote using reflexive and autoethnographic methods. It just so happens (or was it more than a coincidence?) that Adam is working on the chapter in his dissertation in which he reflexively discusses his positionality, so he asks Lisa to share her expertise (12:34) on how to approach reflexivity in Action Research (15:51). Later in the episode, Joe asks Lisa about the frameworks to reflexively understand one's identity in her chapters (25:11).
If you are interested in the chapters mentioned in our podcast citations are below:
Starr, L.J. & Mitchell C. (2020, accepted for Publication). Traveling in Circles Along Roads Less Traveled in Awe of Open Spaces. In Mitchell, C, Giritli Nygren, K, Moletsane, R. (eds.) Where am I in the Picture? Researcher Positionality in Rural Studies. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press
Starr, L.J. (2019). Locating who (I am) in what (I) do: An autoethnography encounter with relational curriculum. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich & S. Chang Kredl (Eds.), Making/Unmaking Curriculum through Provoking Curriculum Encounters (pp. 103-115). William Pinar/Routledge for the Studies in Curriculum Theory series. New York, NY: Routledge.

In this episode, Adam and Cory co-host while Joe joins as our guest alongside Dr. Catherine Potvin. We learn about Catherine’s career as a biologist working on climate issues in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Together, Catherine and Joe explore their collaboration doing action research in both culturally grounded health care and education.
First, [2:50] Catherine and Joe center relationship-building with the Emberá community at the heart of their collaborations in Panama: it’s about persistence and long time presence. [5:02] Catherine shares an overview of her history working with Indigenous communities along with the deep shifts and re-orientations in her career: [6:24] “I realized I had everything wrong, like completely everything wrong. [...] I understood that if you want to keep the forest, you need to care for the people.”
Adam and Cory ask [7:50] about the contexts that inform the focus on reforestation and community empowerment and [11:27] the role of social scientists in working alongside biologists in these collaborations. [12:02] Dr. Potvin talks about the notion of reflexivity as “a total social science thing” and the importance of researchers positioning themselves in the work they do. She also talks about how important it has been to look at reforestation from an economics and training perspective, what Joe calls “learning for capacity building”. Their collaboration also helped support [16:20] a community-based collective decision-making process, and Joe names a few examples of its outcomes.
At this point, Joe [19:56] spends some time walking us through an understanding of culturally-grounded education and healthcare: It’s a “phenomenological pragmatist perspective” that asks [20:53] “How do we start from who we are and our experience, and then identify what matters to us?” Potvin [23:02] shares a few anecdotes from her experiences over the years of learning to approach climate science from a more culturally grounded approach, and some of the colonial systemic barriers that students and community members face.
Adam’s last big question [29:45] asks our guests: “To what extent are you identifying or acknowledging economic empowerment for the communities that you're working with in Panama as a way to conserve and preserve the community's Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge?” Potvin discusses [33:37] the need to “find a number of different economical pathways for women, for men, for youth, for elders that will allow them to live a decent life.” Joe brings the reality of “using resources from outside of the community, but also thinking about how to do that in a way that's circular and self-directed.” They both offer examples of projects from recent years.
Wrapping up, Cory and Adam share some takeaways and use the final moments to congratulate (and challenge) Potvin’s upcoming retirement. To which she responds, and we wanted to quote at length…
“You know, in ecology, when a tree falls, that's where the diversity of a forest gets recreated, right? Because there's all these new trees that will take the space of the old big tree, because the old big tree sucks up a lot of resources. And when it disappears, it creates opportunity for new trees, more adapted to the new reality to grow. So I think I see retirement that way, it's supporting and creating opportunities to go further than where I've been.”
Thank you both for sharing your work with us, and congratulations Dr. Potvin on your retirement!.
You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, and Vanessa Gold.
How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us.
Biographies
Dr. Catherine Potvin is a tropical forest ecologist and professor at McGill University in the Department of Biology. Her scientific research studies climate change, carbon cycling, and biodiversity in tropical rainforests with an additional focus on community empowerment and climate change policy. She was the first woman to receive the Miroslaw Romanowski Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, in recognition of her "significant contributions to the resolution of scientific aspects of environmental problems". In addition to her scientific research, she works on sustainable development with indigenous communities in Panama and on policy as a former UN climate change negotiator for Panama and leads climate change initiatives in Canada.
Dr. Joseph Levitan is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on community-based participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Sitting at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan works with communities throughout the Americas to identify context-specific challenges, culturally grounded methods to address those challenges, and processes to put those methods into action. Through this work he has co-developed methods such as the Student Voice Research Framework, Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development, and Accidental Ethnography. He currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in Peru, Canada, Panama and the United States.