Crises, Knowledge production, and non-scalable Epistemologies: (De)Legitimizing (Education) Research

Crises, Knowledge production, and non-scalable Epistemologies: (De )Legitimizing (Education) Research

Crises are productive moments that initiate, speed up, and facilitate the dissemination of knowledge about a situation/problem we are facing, but also about how to tackle and solve them. Seeing from this perspective, crises may be viewed as discursive processes by which specific types and forms of knowledge production take place. Crises help knowledge to become naturalized – almost as natural entities, as it were. Denaturalizing crises appears thus as a first step towards understanding how (education) research is deployed in such circumstances.

Further, the politics of knowledge production requires attention if we are to scrutinize whether/how/when (education) research becomes enmeshed in attempts at legitimating/delegitimating particular solutions and/or policy options. By looking at the contexts, means and mechanics of knowledge production we might have a better grasp of processes of constructing epistemic authority. The ethnographer Anna Tsing argued convincingly how modern research/science is derived from colonial and imperial practice and thinking and pointed at scalability as their common characteristic. Scalability resp. scalable epistemologies are thus part and parcel of domination structures and over the past century have become standard in education research.

The presentation discusses how non-scalable epistemologies may be used to legitimate (local) education research that resists illegitimate dominance, surveillance and instrumental approaches to education.

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral • University of Münster (DE)

Full Professor of International and Comparative Education at the Institute of Education of the University of Münster, Germany, and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning and Education (CELE) of the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include education policy studies, comparative higher education, lifelong learning and life course. He has collaborated in and coordinated several national and international research projects and published extensively.