Full Description
What do we actually do when we research education policy and governance? Why do we tame the messy hinterland of research into smooth accounts and what do we lose in the process?
In this volume, distinguished scholars in education policy and governance research discuss how the practice of methods is messy, subjective, and provisional. They approach methodology as riddled with tensions, doubts, troubles, and mundane decisions. Scholarship in this book shifts from recording the methodological hinterland to putting it to productive use as resources for thinking about the researched world and about research itself. This methodological openness helps to examine how research reproduces scholars' metaphysics, how research is a deeply embodied process encompassing all senses, how scholars' concerns interfere in the worlds they study, but also how these equally interfere with researchers. By challenging smooth methodological accounts which conceal the complex and provisional nature of research, this book offers new approaches in education policy and governance research that are more generative, insightful, and sincere.
Offering new ways of thinking about research methodologies, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education research and education theory, as well as social scientists interested in research methodologies more broadly.
Contents
Foreword: From After Method to care-ful research
John Law
What a mess: intimacies, metaphysics, multiple senses and matters of concern in education policy research (an introduction)
Camilla Addey and Nelli Piattoeva
Researching education elites twenty years on: Sex, Lies and... Skype
Sotiria Grek
Following European experts as an embedded researcher. Multiple commitments, contingencies, and asymmetries shaping the academic self
Romuald Normand
Positionality, power and the postcolonial context: Meditations on identity, access and relations in education policy research
Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar
Opening the black box of peer review
Radhika Gorur
Dressed for success? Making an appearance at an educational technology event.
Anna Jobér
Anecdotalization: From individual to collective learning through intimate accounts
Marcella Milana
A balancing act: the untold practice of network ethnography
Marina Avelar, Anna Hogan, Carolina Junemann and Dimitra Pavlina Nikita
Researching unsafe global education policy spaces in Mexico
Rosanne Elisabeth Tromp
Unboxing and unraveling in the archive of gender equity policy
Susanne Gannon and Kerry Robinson
Research encounters on the move: Reflecting on policy mobilities and researcher positionality in policy sociology in education
Steven Lewis
Disentangling fast school policy at a slow pace
Samira Alirezabeigi, Jan Masschelein and Mathias Decuypere
Encountering sociological theory in the field - a post-reflexive approach
Helene Ratner
Not the last word (an afterword)
Jenny Ozga
