Daring, doing and muddling through

This reflective paper draws on my experiences as a doctoral student in pursuing my first action research project. A multi-year inquiry within a global women’s organisations undertaken through their young women’s leadership development work. A process that might well be described as daring, doing and muddling through. While my project may have started with daring, as I began the muddling through (Mead 2008) dampened some of that daring. When I wrote up my thesis, I was then advised to tidy my muddling. However, now post PhD, I have been encouraged to consider how I might tell the story of my research if I was more daring. A task I hope to develop through this paper and our discussion. There are a number of other papers written about the difficulties of undertaking action research projects (McArdle 2002, Mead 2008, Zhang et al. 2014), and as those papers offered comfort and guidance to me, this paper seeks to add to that tradition.