Section one section introduction [to Strategic uncertainties: ethics, politics and risk in contemporary educational research]

Abstract

It is hardly surprising that five of the book’s 14 chapters – more than one third of them – are concerned with engaging with the strategic uncertainties of researching language and literacies. This proportion reflects the centrality of language in meaning-making in all societies, as well as the multiple ways – implicit as well as explicit, covert as much as overt – in which literacies empower some individuals and groups and disenfranchise others. As the authors represented in this section of the book ably demonstrate, researching language and literacies is a strategically uncertain enterprise – or a ‘risky business’, as several of the authors in this book term it – imbued with ethical and political responsibilities and imbricated with risks connected directly with people’s life chances and lifeworlds.