Multiple enactments of method, divergent hinterlands and production of multiple realities in educational research

Abstract

What do different research methods and approaches do in practice? The article seeks to discuss this point by drawing upon socio-material research approaches and empirical examples taken from the early stages of an extensive case study on an interdisciplinary project between two multidisciplinary fields of study, education and computer sciences. The article examines how divergent disciplinary hinterlands influence the enactments of research methods, and how the choice of research approach affects the types of knowledge and realities produced in the research process.

Keywords:

• educational research
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• actor-network theory
• socio-materialities
• observation
• research methods

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all the members of the Ensemble-team for their continuing support and participation in this study, as well as the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for their grant (ES/G032025/1) for making this research possible. I am also very grateful for professor Richard Edwards at the University of Stirling for his insightful comments and suggestions for the improvement of the paper.

Notes

1. The names used here are pseudonyms.

2. In addition, the observation notes could also be seen as enactments, and mobilisations of educational research, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary research project and the aims of such project.

3. Personal communication, September 2009.

4. Performative turn in social theory is a move away from the tradition of representationalism (cf. Schatzki, 2001), a humanist, dualist tradition, which assumes a single, underlying, definite reality out there and perceives an ontological distinction between what is represented and the practice of representation. This leads to epistemological questions of whether or not, or to what extent the representation corresponds to the underlying reality. This is at the root of paradigm wars between subjectivism and objectivism, the natural and the social sciences, etc. (Barad, 2003; Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). In science and technology studies (STS), including ANT, critical scrutiny of representationalism emerged only after the focus had changed from studying the nature and production of scientific knowledge to examining the actual practices and dynamics of science (Barad, 2003). The performative alternative (which emerged from a strand of post-humanist critique, see Miah, 2008) suggests focusing on the practices of research, on doings and actions, and understanding how realities – ontologies – are shaped in action instead of debating over epistemological validity and reliability of representations of reality (Barad, 2003, p. 802; Jensen, 2004, p. 232; Mol, 2002).