We have used the concept of ethnography as explanatory critique in earlier research in three projects in Spain relating to teacher professional development and leadership for socially just schools. This research involved participant observations, interviews, informal conversations, document analysis and virtual ethnography. However, we have also…

Gunther Kress's multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation…

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and…

This exploratory study responds to the criticism that non-instructional faculty or "academic professionals" at American universities are the cause of "administrative bloat." The purpose of the study was to build from the work of Rhoades (1998) and Kane (2007) to examine whether academic professionals at an R-1 (very-high…

This article describes the trajectories of collaboration experienced by three individuals in three different roles (informant, research assistant, and supervisor) in two research projects about English as a foreign language reading in a higher education context in Argentina. Data come from reflection logs and retrospective narratives written by…

Educational philosophy has not discussed Foucault's publications on the Iranian Revolution and the related controversy. Foucauldian concepts are applied to education, though his only writings which "sidetracked" him from exploring power within the state, namely, his journalistic accounts of his visits to Iran, remain unexplored in our…

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty's critique of the 'what works' agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour…

Having participated in both the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education (NZAEE) and Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) Research Symposia of 2016, the authors provide a critical analysis of the opportunities provided during these symposia for researchers to position themselves within the environmental education…

This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

In this article, two government education policies for primary schools in England are scrutinised, the Phonics Screening Check and Baseline Assessment, both claimed by ministers to be 'evidence based'. What has become a high-stakes test rather than a diagnostic assessment, the Phonics Screening Check, introduced in 2012, now dominates early years…

This "in process" Conclusion to the Special Issue (SI) "Global politics of knowledge production in EER: 'New' theory and North-South representations" (The Journal of Environmental Education) aims to highlight relevant issues and acknowledged limitations and silences from the sample of critiques presented in the SI, all built…

Institutional research management (RM) is increasingly seen as a strategic force, not only to raise the research output per academic, but also the quality thereof. RM, therefore, has to attend to researcher development (RD). How RD is achieved, as part of RM, is still viewed as an embryonic field with attendant calls for additional research.…

This review provides a critical appraisal of Kubow and Min's paper. It teases out their conception of "liberalism" and argues that the classical notion of liberalism as a political theory that advocates individual liberty based on assumptions of the unencumbered autonomous individual has lost currency. This is because over the years…

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the…

This article reports on a co-produced project based in South Africa which aimed to support the development of youth committees in Safe Parks operating across Ekurhuleni municipality, by building young people's capacity to claim greater voice within their communities through participatory arts practices. Drawing on recent perspectives in the field…