Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as 'the ghost' and 'the phantom-limb', both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these…

Scientific teleological explanations cite end states as causes to account for physical phenomena. Researchers in science education have noted that students can use teleological explanations in ways that are illegitimate, for example, by implying that inanimate objects are acting intentionally. Despite such cases, several examples of legitimate…

This article offers a framework for the study of research governance effects on scientific fields framed by notions of research quality and the epistemic, organizational, and career choices they entail. The framework interprets the contested idea of 'quality' as an interplay involving notion origins, quality attributes, and contextual sites. We…

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits…

The subfield of Sociology of Education (SOE) concerned with the growth of neoliberalism through critically analysing its policies, discourses, and processes of subjectivation has made a significant contribution to education in the last 40 years. Whilst this scholarship has generated new knowledge about what happens to people, contexts and…

Although there is ample literature that explores what SoTL is and offers guidelines on how to do SoTL, we have not paid enough attention to the fundamental assumptions that underpin systematic scholarly inquiry itself, regardless of the context or the object of study. Instead, we seem to have a narrative that relates SoTL to the disciplines and/or…

The field of applied linguistics is a remarkable case of deep intersection of the skewed geopolitics of knowledge (epistemic inequalities) and language (the ascendency of English as both a topic of research and academic lingua franca). The dominance of the Anglo-sphere through epistemology and language in applied linguistics renders the process of…

Language revitalization is imbued with tensions, and while it often is emancipatory, reclaiming a language can be a painful, silencing experience. Processes of colonization have led to epistemological absences (Santos 2012), which may be conceptualized as manifestations of silence. Understanding how and why silences come about and linger today is…

Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and provide examples and tentative explanations of a number of statistical…

This paper considers what it could mean to say that epistemologies and methodologies are racially just or unjust. It has been argued that this has nothing to do with whether an individual researcher is racist: he or she could be anti-racist but still use an epistemology that is racially biased. To explore this issue, some pioneering research by…

In order to include all outlooks and perspectives on the world prevalent in contemporary society, countries like Sweden have replaced traditional religious education with worldview education. However, current worldview theory fails to make justice to two important facts concerning the contemporary religious landscape. Firstly, a great many people…

Adults with developmental disabilities and educational researchers have identified many holes in the practices currently used to educate non-speaking youth with developmental disabilities, especially those with extensive support needs (Kapp, 2020; Taub, et al., 2017). While technology cannot provide a magical, sweeping fix to barriers to…

The recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more-than-human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the…

Based on a study of five women's studies degree programmes, this article attempts to discuss pedagogical issues that are surfacing in higher education on account of the changing social composition of students since the implementation of reservations for Other Backward Classes in higher education. Critical pedagogy has not found much space in…

Social constructivism emphasises the role of meaningful interactions as a vehicle for learning. Meaningful interactions engage learners cognitively and socially with others to construct knowledge. Such interactions, however, require an environment specially designed to facilitate and guide learners' cognitive and social processes towards the…