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Change is not made alone

Co-Researcher KOB

Welcome to HEdge Space
HEdgeSpace.net is an open-access community education platform. This 'Do-It-Together' toolkit provides holistic, participatory workshop practices that blend adult education, community arts, STEAM, and sustainability. It empowers community-led collaborations and inclusive decision-making, equipping groups with the practical and theoretical knowledge needed to transform dialogue into political action for a more equitable, sustainable world. Theses resources can be used by grassroots movement activists, civic groups, facilitators, educators, and researchers.

How this toolkit was created

This toolkit was co-generated through a community-based participatory action research project called Hedge Space. This project was developed through a transdisciplinary PhD, funded by Research Ireland* and conducted in the West of Ireland between 2020 and 2024. During the research project, community co-researchers helped design a series of holistic learning-for-action (praxis) workshops informed by their experiences of social struggle and activism.

What it offers

These workshops use experiential, embodied and creative activities to support groups to explore their lived experiences of struggle and together turn these learnings into meaningful, collective political action

The toolkit is adaptable for:

Formal and Non-Formal Education: Adult and community education, STEAM, global citizenship education, education for sustainability, socially engaged art.
Creative activism: Community arts, activist art, public art interventions
Collaborative Research: Transdisciplinary, arts-based, and participatory action research projects.

Grassroots movements and civic organizations actively utilize these practices to build community power, advance social and environmental justice, and foster dialogue that bridges the gap between civil society and state institutions.

Our Story

This page contains bios of our researching community. The co-researching community was formed through an open call for public co-researching participants interested in developing creative ways to appraoch social-environmental activism.

Public Events

Initial praxis workshops generated new workshops and events in collaboration with Red Rebel Clare and Galway, Climate Camp Ireland, and the Rekindle festival: Common Knowledge.

Language Hack - A Radical Glossary

Language, education and culture are tools of power which can be used to oppress or liberate people. One way to build community power for social justice action is to gain familiarity of the language that has been produced intergenerationally by social movements to describe how power works. This language describes both the key mechanisms used to build and maintain oppressive power structures, and; how people can build collective power to counter these structures in the interest of social-environmental justice. To help build this political literacy, this page contains a radical glossary of powerful language with short introductory descriptions.

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Holistic Praxis Workshops

This section contains workshop outlines and reports which illustrate how our holistic praxis process worked, the benefits and challenges of each workshop, and how these informed subsequent actions and learning resources. Each page also provides links to other resources relevant to each workshop.

Praxis, in the popular education field, is a group-based experiential learning-for-action process specifically concerned with social justice and lived experience of injustice. It involves collective reflection and dialogue on issues of social justice struggle to inform collective social political actions for just change (Freire 1970).

'Really Useful' Tools

These pages contain a collection of resources generated through this research and also by ally groups.

Links to Ally groups

This page contains link to local and transnational (ally) groups amd organisations

A massive thank you to everyone who contributed their time, knowledge, and labour as co-researchers on this project. Whether you came to one workshop or many, your collective lived experiences, activist insights, & ongoing curiosity have

have shaped a powerful 'learning-for-action' resource that will benefit communities in struggle. Thanks to (in alphabetical order):

This PhD was initiated by Giselle Harvey, an Irish artist, educator & activist-researcher. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8385-1681
The research was hosted by The Limerick School of Art & Design, TUS, & Funded by The Irish Research Council.
The PhD ran from 2020 to 2024, but PAR never ends.

Thanks to the Irish Research Council for funding this research through the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship
#LoveIrishResearch, Linkedin @researchireland, Instagram @researchireland, X @researchirel

*Note: The Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland amalgamated in 2024 to form Taighde Éireann Research Ireland

Katie Burke, Eve Campbell, Cynthia Cox, Kate Daly, Clair Fitzgerald, Christina Iancu, Nick Jones, Kat Gribkoff, Joe Nix, Claire Murray, Kate O’ Brien, Su Powel, Anna Swisher, Fiona Mae White, and guest Ciana Lucy Spel.

Acknowledgements