How do school leaders make sense of the mess of the regimes of the normal (Warner, 1993) when they themselves are beyond the norm? While we may be beyond the normal, we are also "awash in the flow of the everyday" (Manalansan, 2018, p. 2). Though we may resist and see ourselves as beyond the norm (Weiser et al., 2019), we are never…

Background: This article explores the methodological foundations for a utopian methodology as a form of Design-Based Intervention Research (DBR) that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating the more radical forms of educational activity systems that prefigure the utopian goal of an equitable and…

This paper draws on one of Pierre Bourdieu's core dimensions of social theory: the notion of capital. Bourdieu's work has percolated various academic domains and transcended disciplinary boundaries, thereby leading to new vistas and questions. It is in the spirit of generating "new vistas" that this paper offers considerations which may…

Praxeological turn in social research resulted in many examples of empirical studies using the concept of social practice. They are mostly case studies of a single or clearly defined practices, such as cooking, dancing or energy consumption. There is a lack of studies employing this concept as a framework for research on complex, dynamic and…

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces…

The author, Kris Gutiérrez, is a learning scientist whose work has centered on understanding the cultural dimensions of learning, with particular interest in understanding how to leverage youths' everyday concepts and practices toward more expansive and equitable forms of learning. Gutiérrez discusses the big ideas that informed her work in…

This collection of distinct scholarly essays deliberatively turns to queer experience and theorizing as a resource for constructing vibrant qualitative research designs. Queer theory offers a breadth of epistemological and methodological possibilities for qualitative projects that are too frequently overlooked for many reasons. These reasons…

Minority discourses rarely inhabit the intellectual space of dominant theory (masculinist, Eurocentric, White, heteropatriarchical, able-ist, bourgeois); thus, Black women's ability to be regarded as significant contributors to knowledge creation is negatively impacted. Art education is implicated in such oppression, as seen in the…

Aligned with the broader movement from structuralism to the post-structuralisms [Lather, P. 2013. "Methodology-21: What Do We Do in the Afterward?" "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education" 26 (6): 634-645; St. Pierre, E. A. 2009. "Afterword: Decentering Voice in Qualitative Inquiry." In "Voice…

Drawing from Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory, Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy and Hoy (1998) proposed an integrated model of teacher efficacy to aid the understanding of this complex construct. This framework, despite its richness and usefulness in framing teacher efficacy research within the education landscape, is barely examined in the…

In this short essay, I explore in a narrative style the following question: do narrative analyses of sport and exercise need to engage more fully with social theory in order to become more forceful in their arguments? More specifically, to have real impact, and to achieve what we are especially trained to do as qualitative social scientists,…

Sociomaterial theories, including actor-network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to…

Utilizing potential cross-pollinations of theoretical insights taken from approaches to educational and social research that have mostly emerged outside of the university and been generated by critical theorists and most recently indigenous researchers as work that has not only challenged the epistemological and ontological foundations of the…

This article explores the connections between official contemporary identity formation and colonial pasts. Using the case studies of India and Ireland the article explores how different traditions of theorisation are powerful in these formations. India and Ireland were two colonial domains that had many linkages outside the ambit of the British.…

Background and purpose: Relatively little research has been conducted on methodology within Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT is mainly used as a framework for developmental processes. The purpose of this article is to discuss both focuses for research and research questions within CHAT and to outline methodologies that can be used…