Community resilience and action research

Post-quarantine world will certainly look different, but it is hard to visualise it yet. The ‘new normal’ will transform itself into a ‘newer normal’. What would life look like in a post-COVID-19 world? How much stronger do we aim to come back as individuals and communities? Designing a future starts with critical thinking and reflection, on the past, as a dialectical process, to better analyse and understand human actions driven by ideologies that shaped and nurtured it, as “ideologies are symbolic, affective, behavioural, and relational” [2]. Critical thinking is a tool for civic engagement and self-reliance [3]. The conscious reflection on the past experiences and actions give us the power to reconstitute our social life and assist in strengthening our future social actions. The reflection on the pandemic times needs to be captured in some form, systematically and employing multidisciplinary lenses to produce the counter-hegemonic narrative to create tools for social change [4][5]. The future is complex and specific disciplinary paradigms cannot provide the solution to construct new modes of social operations. COVID-19 has yet again taught us the relevance of participatory, collaborative and emancipatory action research [6][7][8] as we face and examine the problematic situation [7].