Critical qualitative research in education: Notes from the field

Abstract

The state of the notion critical in theory and research is open to a yawning discussion.The political challenges that critical scholars have taken up are usually accompanied bymethodological frameworks that have been appropriated to fit the nature of their criticalenterprise. The “critical” of the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s, particularly in educational research andtheory has allowed distinct heavens for educational scholars in line with their different sociopoliticalpositionalities, usually in tangent with social theory and epistemology. This dissertationproject problematizes contemporary portrayals of the “critical” in regards to the question ofreferentiality and bordering and the associations between critique and critical, while examiningconstructions of the critical in the field of educational research through working its variousaspects such as mechanisms and functions of critical, alignments of critical, epistemic vs.empirical criticals, and homologic productions of difference within the critical scholarship. Thishas been done through analysis of research data conducted through systematic content analysisof education and educational research journals, as well as data from interviews with “critical”scholars at various US universities.Content analysis and interview data indicate that the problematic of defining the “critical”contemporarily have to do with the same feature that set the critical initiative into motion at thehands of the Frankfurt School members in the first place. That the members of Frankfurt Schoolenvisioned a rupture with the past (the Enlightenment) as well as with the future (the finality ofthe liberal bourgeois order) suggests a domain that thought itself as oppositional, hence political,to the existing order and its relations of power. Therefore, the critical as one of the buildingblocks of critical research theory and practice is employed for specific tasks relativelyindependent from each other, suggesting that attachments/attributions to the notion of criticalsuch as normative claims, political commitments, and value orientations carried the discussionover the realm of the identity problematic within the academy. Drawing on Bourdieu’s fieldtheory, as well as on patterns abstracted from content analysis throughout this dissertation, I alsoargued that the critical enterprise is not a static theoretical construct that is applicable acrossdifferent research studies. Nor is it limited to the realm of the theoretical; for its usage inempirical studies and the contextual and conceptual variations that its instances, from Germanidealism to French structuralism, etc., underline the need to adopt both theoretical and empiricaltools in order to explore the current manifestations of the critical enterprise. Moreover, thepolitical dimension of research construction and practice is inherent to the various aspects of thesocial, academic, and personal and is re-enforced through power relations within the field.