Can Action Research Strengthen Democratic Dimensions in Gender Mainstreaming processes and procedures? This chapter explores how an Action Research approach and methodology can promote more democratic processes and practices in a gender mainstreaming change- and development case study. Gender and equality dimensions can on the other hand, the author argues, strengthen and extend democratic empowerment and deliberating ambitions in action research.The empirical base is the experiences from a case study in a large Swedish innovation system organized as a Triple Helix model and a Mode II science approach. The innovation system consists of 7 industrial partners and 5 technical academic divisions.The first part gives a short background to action research elements within earlier Swedish (and partly Nordic) gender and feminist research until today. The second main part draws on empirical data and findings in a ‘successful’ case study in the above mentioned innovation system. It explores embedded participative processes, learning procedures and theoretical inputs in relation to democratic dimensions relating to an action research approach. The final part scrutinizes challenges for action research with a democratic ambition when embedded in large Triple Helix systems. It discusses the concept of “robustness in science” by Novotny, Scott and Gibbons, the “governing” participatory ambition of the funding agent. It discusses the reflexivity perspective on researchers’ – participants’ dilemmas in creating a space with allows critical edge that allows for telling unwelcome truths (Kemmis,2006).

Collaborative research embraces a multiplicity of practices in which social actors are invited to participate in the research process as co-producers of knowledge. But what is actually meant by "co-production" in collaborative research? Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research presents a range of critical, reflexive strategies for understanding andtackling the challenges emanating from the tensions that arise in the meeting between different participants, knowledge forms and knowledge interests. The chapters anchor discussion of ethical, epistemological and methodological questions in sustained empirical analyses of cases of collaborative knowledge production. The book covers diverse theoretical approaches such as dialogic communication theory, actor network theory, poststructuralist writing as inquiry, institutional ethnography, dialogic action research, and pragmatic action research. The empirical cases span a broad spectrum of empirical fields of social practice: Health services, organisational change, research, science communication, environmental communication in intermediary NGOs, participatory governance in relation to urban planning, and digital communication and virtual worlds.