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We encourage and promote models of educational research that draw critically as well as comprehensively on social theory, alongside meaningful and robust bodies of empirical data. As a group, we place ourselves without hesitation within an interpretivist and constructivist epistemology and ontology. We are committed to empirical research: at the same time, we are both robust and generous in the construction as well as analysis of data, which might be a few minutes of audio recording, or gigabytes of textual data, enfolded within and explored through social theory.
We reject needless theory-talk and spurious claims to theoretical innovation. We also reject positivist claims to the construction of naturally occurring data: someone somewhere has made a decision about what to count and why – and this is we argue always a decision based on theory.
Our focus on words in our research is predicated on the simple truism that it is through words that people in the world are able to talk about and make sense of both their actions and lives, and the actions and lives of others. We draw on anthropology, cultural studies, ethnography, history, philosophy and sociology; and on powerful and critical frameworks for inquiry that rest on the work of key figures such as Ricoeur, Latour, and Arendt.
We are committed to research that is collegial, critical, and coherent.
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