Patricia Gaya Wicks University of Bristol, UK

Patricia Gaya, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the School of Economics, Finance, and Management at the University of Bristol. Patricia completed her PhD at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath. Her research and teaching practice focuses on how we might create more inquiring, socially just and ecologically sustainable organisations and communities. She is passionate about the importance of critical conscientisation, and the development of an attitude of inquiry as a pedagogical imperative. Patricia is a critical management scholar as well as an action researcher, most interested in the means by which we might create spaces and processes which enable dialogue and participation amongst diverse groups of stakeholders, especially those whose voices might previously have been marginalised or excluded from such political spaces. She is especially interested in organisation-community collaborative relations, and in the creative, spiritual, and holistic means by which we might develop our consciousness of our participation within a sacred planetary system.

Patricia completed her PhD at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath. She is Associate Editor of the international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal, Action Research and co-founder of ARCIO, the University of Bristol’s centre for Action Research and Critical Inquiry in Organisations. Members of ARCIO are committed to researching in participative and capacity-building ways in organisations and communities, and to using arts-based, narrative, and feminist methods in their research and scholarship. Patricia also served on the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of Action Research (2014), published by Sage.