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

Strategic Uncertainties: Ethics, Politics and Risk in Contemporary Educational Research offers new\nperspectives on contemporary educational research in a wide range of contexts and settings. The\nauthors provide fresh insights into the ethics, politics and risks of educational research through their\ndeployment of up-to-date concepts and methods. They also bring educational research ‘to life’ as a\nseries of meaningful and significant issues and dilemmas, and by drawing on the voices of ‘real-life’\nresearch participants and practitioners.\nIn 2001, a theme issue of the Queensland Journal of Educational Research (Coombes & Danaher,\n2001) was published under the title Cui Bono?: Investigating Benefits and Interests in Educational\nResearch. In that issue, a group of authors from a range of academic disciplines explored the notion of\nwho benefits from educational research and how such benefits might be identified, evaluated and\nweighed against potential costs to the research participants. The purpose of the contributors was not to\nview the intentions and results of research through rose-coloured glasses (‘everyone benefits and\neveryone is happy’) but to establish, as honestly as possible, whether the perceived benefits of a\nparticular research project would actually occur without some cost to those involved. The key concepts,\nwhich were the focus of each article, were therefore the benefits and costs of educational research.\nIn Strategic Uncertainties, the focus of attention shifts to the potential risks of educational research\nand to the strategies that researchers might employ to minimise or from some perspectives try to\neliminate these risks (and from other perspectives to embrace and celebrate such risks). Educational\nresearch, by its very nature, is concerned with people; it cannot function in a sterile vacuum. Where\npeople are concerned, complete agreement among the participants can never be guaranteed. Thus\nstakeholders may compete for powerful speaking positions. Research projects, though conceived with\nthe best of intentions, may serve to highlight the gap between researcher and researched by reinforcing\nthe socioeconomic and educational inequities of their relationships with one another. These particular\nrisks, among many others, emphasise the ethical and political dimensions of relationships among the\nparticipants and subject to critical scrutiny claims that research projects confer particular kinds of\nbenefits. Educational research is indeed a ‘risky business’, but this should not deter researchers from\nengaging in the practice. It is the purpose of Strategic Uncertainties to apply theoretically informed,\nmethodologically rigorous and experientially grounded critique to the ‘murky shadows’ and ‘no-go\nareas’ of contemporary educational research.\nThe title of this book, Strategic Uncertainties, is taken from the text of Ian Stronach and Maggie\nMacLure (1997), Educational Research Undone: The Postmodern embrace. The authors focused on\npostmodern researchers’ efforts to avoid being caught in the snares of:\nthe binary oppositions that have traditionally promised the comforts of certainty in philosophical\nthinking – between reality and appearance, reason and superstition, causes and effects, meaning and\nlanguage, identity and imposture, local and universal etc. – they choose not to choose between them, not\nto work to transcend them, nor, importantly, to ignore them, but instead to complicate the relations\nbetween them. (p. 5; emphasis in original)\nAccording to Stronach and MacLure (1997):\nThe kind of opening which such work attempts is that of the rupture – or interruption and disruption – in\nthe (uncertain) hope that this will generate possibilities for things to happen that are closed off by the\nepistemologies of certainty….These are uncanny openings, then. They rupture things, not in order to let\nthe light pour in, but to make it harder to see clearly. They open spaces which turn out not to be spaces,\nbut knots, complications, folds and partial connections. It is impossible even to tell for sure whether they\nare openings or closings, since they are also blocking manoeuvres, which would prevent escape routes to\nhappy endings…We try to practise this kind of strategic uncertainty throughout, and within this book.\nOur aim is to mobilise meaning…rather than to fix it. (p, 5; emphasis in original; emphasis added)\nElaborating and expanding on these propositions by Stronach and MacLure (1997), the content of\nStrategic Uncertainties is a set of accounts by contemporary educational researchers of the ethics,\npolitics and risk of their own research projects. While those accounts draw on a multiplicity of\ntheoretical, methodological and empirical resources to frame and inform their respective engagements\nwith educational research, they have in common a general commitment to, and at the same time an\nongoing interrogation of, the ideas encapsulated in the term ‘strategic uncertainties’.