Strategic uncertainties: ethics, politics and risk in contemporary educational research

Abstract

Contemporary educational researchers encounter all kinds of ethical and political dilemmas and tensions in conducting research in postmodern contents. In doing so, they must engage with research as 'risky business', and they must enact strategies that will maximize benefits and minimize harm arising from their projects. The chapters in this book elaborate the authors' respective and multiple efforts to embrace these challenges. Each chapter takes up in different ways the idea of Ian Stronach and Maggie MacLure (1997) that research is full of 'strategic uncertainties' that create opportunities to question, disrupt and transform existing experiences of marginalization. One chapter is about Japanese and Norwegian whaling, one about research with English Gypsies and one about Venezuelan fairground people; other chapters depict research about Australian education. All the chapters demonstrate the international relevance of their research. The 14 chapters are divided into four sections: Research language and literacies; Research collaborations Researching environments and spaces; Researching technologies. Strategic Uncertainties contains theoretically framed and methodologically rigorous reflections on many of the ethic and political risks in educational research in the early 21st century, as well as practical strategies for engaging with those risks.