Introduction to the new Editors

Abstract

For a new editorial team, Research in Education appears to provide a clear and obvious mandate – to publish challenging, well-written and theoretically innovative contributions to ongoing debates in Education, as well as generating fresh ideas and outlining new directions in Education research. Yet when one begins to think seriously about these three seemingly simple words, complexity arises. The UK government’s Research Excellence Framework defines research as ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’ (http://www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/assessmentframeworkandguidanceonsubmissions/ GOS%20including%20addendum.pdf). But while few would disagree with the importance of notions of originality, significance and rigour in relation to research, what is missing here is a sense of how research is also a rhetorical activity grounded in the use of particular assumptions and techniques in order to construct arguments that will be deemed authoritative and persuasive by particular audiences. Such a perspective foregrounds the differential and contested nature of research, highlighting how practices and assumptions that are deemed legitimate in one community of scholars, such as an emphasis on methodological rigour and transparency as a guarantee of research validity, may be deeply problematic to another community, that, for example, embraces a poststructuralist perspective foregrounding the pervasive and inescapable element of power relations as part and parcel of any claims to knowledge.