Intimate Accounts of Education Policy Research

The Practice of Methods

Camilla Addey, Nelli Piattoeva, Camilla Addey, Nelli Piattoeva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• From After Method to care-ful research (a foreword)
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What a mess: Intimacies, metaphysics, multiple senses and matters of concern in education policy research (an introduction)
• 2 Researching education elites twenty years on: Sex, lies and … video meetings
• 3 Following European experts as an embedded researcher: Multiple commitments, contingencies, and asymmetries shaping the academic self
• 4 Positionality, power and the postcolonial context: Meditations on identity, access and relations in education policy research
• 5 Opening the black box of peer review
• 6 Dressed for success? Making an appearance at an education technology event
• 7 Anecdotalization: From individual to collective learning through intimate accounts
• 8 A balancing act: The untold practice of network ethnography
• 9 Researching unsafe global education policy spaces in Mexico
• 10 Unboxing and unravelling in the archive of gender equity policy
• 11 Research encounters on the move: Reflecting on policy mobilities and researcher positionality in education policy sociology
• 12 Disentangling fast school policy at a slow pace
• 13 Encountering sociological theory in the field
• Not the last word (an afterword)
• Index