Researching for justice: using meta-ethnographic synthesis to develop knowledge for research for social transformation

ABSTRACT

In a special issue article on ethnographic synthesis from 2017, Karen Borgnakke addressed some of the challenging methodological questions and dilemmas associated with meta-ethnography by ethnographic researchers. The article compared meta-ethnography with evidence-based models for measuring learning effects in education, but highlighted that the founders of meta-ethnography, Noblit and Hare, described the methodology and its aims quite differently to this. Rather than the aggregation of findings, the aim was to, in the interests of social justice and social transformation, generalise findings from individual research based on critical interpretations of several ethnographic products. Using a qualitative synthesis of meta-ethnographic research from ethnographies on Sweden’s school system, the present article examines this aim further. It tries to generate and communicate knowledge about how ethnographers of education can engage in research to fulfil commitments connected to social justice and transformation. In short, it attempts to describe what this research can look like.

KEYWORDS:

• Meta-ethnography
• qualitative meta-synthesis
• social-transformation
• education justice
• organic intellectual

The present article derives from a qualitative meta-synthesis of recent meta-ethnographic research (e.g. Beach 2017a; 2017b; 2022; Beach, From, Johansson, et al., 2018; Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2020; 2021; Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021) and a recent book about the structural injustices created in and by Sweden’s tax-financed school system (Beach 2018). These works each departed from an acceptance of critiques of ethnographic and other qualitative research, which argue that while contextually rich and detailed individual qualitative studies of particular phenomena in ethnography can provide rich descriptions and insights, the absence of a connected-up analysis can also limit their usefulness. They attempted therefore to compare, contrast and synthesise findings from different individual ethnographic studies that had described and analysed education policies and practice from the inside of education institutions and to connect them together analytically in an effort produce generalisations about practice-oriented research for social transformation.

The intention with each meta-ethnography was three-fold. First, to expand the empirical horizons of the individual investigations by means of cross-case aggregation. Second, to extend the insights and knowledge about the phenomena under study from one study to the next. Third, by means of a vertical cross-case comparative analysis, to begin to develop and test an explanatory criticism of existing policies and research practices respectively, for social and education justice and social transformation. This involved thus, not only trying to unpick, explore and analyse the inter-connectedness of the different sites and practices described in different primary research, but also contributing practical knowledge about the positive and negative dialectics of schooling, research and leadership for social justice and educational transformation in the interests of dominated, exploited and culturally silenced groups.

Data and method

The meta-synthesis of first-order ethnographic studies in the meta-ethnographies selected for analysis in the present investigation involved cross-translations of the findings from different studies to advance both the knowledge and theory of practice (Noblit and Hare 1988; Uny, France, and Noblit 2017). Each individual article and chapter in each meta-ethnography involved research on migration, migrant education experiences and integration, social class and national policies relating to language, culture and diversity, ethnicity, epistemological and epistemic justice and injustice. Each payed attention to issues of equity and to tensions between education intentions and equity and justice outcomes in relation to policies that had been unable to overcome the difficulties of social reproduction in education and schooling and their meta-syntheses in the meta-ethnographies involved the following steps:

• Locating published examples of critical ethnography on issues of education justice and equality connected to class, race, gender and other social markers

• Exploring their abstracts, titles and keywords in order to identify a possible sample of research for further analysis

• Reading and re-reading the selected research examples and making cross-translations of their findings and main concepts

• Producing a meta-ethnographic research narrative related to the challenges toward education justice and equality in Sweden and how to cope with them in education research and practice

The meta-ethnographies showed some very clear common identifiers. The first was the recognition that critical ethnographic research clearly has an enormous potential to destabilise hierarchic power relationships and open up new ways of theorising participation in research in education institutions with/in processes of knowledge production with students and educators (Dennis and Huf 2020). However, in addition, it often fails to contribute to progressive change and may even oppose it. There is a contradiction, which the present article attempts to make use of by exploring the breadth and depth of its representation in each meta-ethnography in a further meta-synthesis. The intention is to generate theoretically and empirically challengeable statements about what socially just education research might actually look like (Elfreich and Dennis 2022) according to each individual meta-ethnography and what constructs their contradictory and non-contradictory features. Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2021) described a six-step process for meta-ethnographic analysis based on Noblit and Hare’s seven steps of meta-ethnography. Table 1 shows the basic details, of which the present study repeats steps 3–6 on a pre-identified and very familiar set of meta-ethnographic research products. Thus, instead of first-order ethnographic research products, the primary sample comprises meta-ethnographic articles developed from processes of qualitative meta-synthesis on original ethnographic studies.

Table 1. Six steps of meta-ethnography.

Step 1:	Assigning the focus and identifying suitable Boolean search items and strings
Step 2:	Using the items and strings to identify an inclusive sample of meta-syntheses addressing the focus and identifying key concepts, themes and ideas as a basis for reducing the sample in relation to the focus
Step 3:	Exploring the use of concepts and the development of ideas in the selected (called primary) sample for consistencies, similarities and differences through reciprocal, refuational and synthesising analyses
Step 4:	Drawing and testing and an overarching interpretation against individual studies in the primary sample
Step 5:	Refining the interpretation into a narrative and testing it externally, against other national and international research by other authors Refining the research narrative and submitting it to peer-review for scientific publishing and broader dissemination relating to:
Step 6:	How to conceptualise the phenomenon of interest in the research Based on significant similarities and differences in the sample sTo provide an account of the major challenges to education justice and equality and how to research and overcome them

The characteristics of the present investigation both align it with and distinguish it from a conventional qualitative meta-synthesis or meta-ethnography, in that whilst the methods are the same, broadly speaking, the sample is not. Together they make the investigation into a third-level abstraction of existing second-level meta-ethnographic abstractions of the semantic properties of heterogeneous interpretations in selected first-order ethnographic studies. In sum that is, a reinterpretation of the themes and ideas generated from previous interpretations of ethnographic interpretations as a new qualitative synthesis of qualitative syntheses of qualitative research articles, chapters and books. Table 2 (below) presents the research corpus and Tables 3 and 4 (afterwards) present the main emerging themes from these publications related to the two main research interests, namely the problems (positive and negative dialectics) of education justice and equity (Table 3) and the challenges of researching for justice and social transformation (Table 4), respectively.

Table 2. Bibliographic details and basic data of individual corpus texts listed by number.

1. Beach, D. 2010. Socialisation and commercialisation in the restructuring of education and health professions in Europe: Questions of global class and gender. Current Sociology, 58: 551–569. Data: National ethnographic case study reports from seven European countries written as book chapters in one anthology and one EU report. Highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in service professions over the course of the last century and their consequences for social justice and equality. 2. Beach, D., and J. Lunneblad. 2011. Ethnographic Investigations of Issues of Race in Scandinavian Education Research. Ethnography and Education 6: 29–43. Data: Seven articles, three book chapters, two books, two doctoral theses related to race and ethnicity in education and educational ethnography in Scandinavia. 3. Beach, D., Dovemark, M., Schwartz, A., & Öhrn, E. 2013. Complexities and Contradictions of Education Inclusion. Nordic Studies in Education, 33: 254–268. Data: Ten articles, two book chapters, two books, three doctoral theses related to educational equity and integration, not the least with regard to the need and existence of alternative contexts for youth in which to valorise their class cultural capital and values as socially important and educationally significant in ways that schools fail to capitalise on. 4. Beach, D. 2017a. Personalisation and the Education Commodity: A Meta-ethnographic Analysis. Ethnography and Education, 12: 148–164. Data: Twenty-one articles, two book chapters, two books, six doctoral theses to generate a meta-ethnography of research about schools, school experiences and learning for marginalised youth following the recent (post-market) introduction of personalisation policies in Swedish schools 5. Beach, D. 2017b. Whose Justice is this! Capitalism, Class and Education Justice and Inclusion in the Nordic Countries: Race, Space and Class History. Educational Review, 9: 620–637. Data: Nine research articles, five book chapters, one book and eight doctoral theses about education justice, equity and inclusion in education systems that have often been claimed to be more just, equal, inclusive than most, specifically those of the Nordic countries. Shows these claims to be questionable and describes the education systems as ones that have promised justice, inclusion and equity for all in formal policy but in practice actually fail to do so. 6. Beach, D. 2018. Structural injustices in Swedish education. Palgrave MacMillan. Data: Five empirical chapters based on developments from five original research articles that examine Sweden’s school system using ethnographic and meta-ethnographic data and methodologies that uncover and try to explain the structural injustices at the heart of the education system. 7. Beach, D. From, T., Johansson, M. & Öhrn, E. 2018. Educational and Spatial Justice in Rural and Urban Areas in Nordic Countries: A Meta-ethnography, Education. Inquiry, 9: 4–21. Data: Twelve articles, three book chapters, three books, ten doctoral theses to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in three Nordic countries. 8. Beach, D. and Öhrn, E. 2019. Closing Discussion. In E. Öhrn and D. Beach (Eds.), Young People’s Life and Schooling in Rural Areas, 139–153. London: Tufnell Press. Data: Six empirical chapters from six rural schools and their communities on social class and education relations in six rural communities. Explores how schooling marginalises local rural knowledge and leads rural populations to be ‘schooled’ through exposure to a, for them, culturally insensitive curriculum. 9. Beach, D., & Vigo-Arrazola, B. (2021). Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography, Qualitative Inquiry, 27(6): 677–688. Data: Thirty articles, one book chapter, two doctoral theses analysed to attempt to identify and explore cases where researchers have overcome the reluctance toward activism and transformation, what characterized these efforts and what seemed to support their success. 10. Beach, D. 2022. Exploitation of working class values, identities and labour-power in Sweden’s comprehensive school extension and neo-liberal reforms, Educational Review, 74: 1205–1223. Data: Thirteen articles, three chapters, two theses used to consider how educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 in Sweden claimed but failed to contribute to social justice, equity and equality, and how neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards led to further decreased relative education equity.

Table 3. Main themes in individual corpus texts relating to justice and equality.

1. Presence of a neoliberal convergence, its modes of development and negative consequences for justice and equity. Social class differences in the history of education and care. The dialectics of neo-liberal reform and economic exploitation. 2. How issues of race and ethnicity and the relationships in education between Scandinavians and (im)migrants are represented and researched in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. 3. Growing up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with high rates of poverty, joblessness and multi-dimensional poverty in stereo-typed urban contexts and territorial stigmatisation. 4. Tensions between personalisation and privatisation policies with justice and equity. Continued social reproduction in education and its curriculum relations. Policy mismatch. 5. False ideology, policy mismatch. Negative consequences from turn to market politics by worsening but not originating education injustice and inequality. 6. Myth of educational equality. Racial/ethnic, social class and other multiple structural injustices at the heart of the education system and education politics. 7. False ideology about rural areas and peri-urban suburbs as ‘backward and negative towards education’. Spatial injustice. 8. Neglect of rural perspectives and differences, class and gender. History of material exploitation and the external control of conditions of economic production. 9. Mechanisms of schooling and differentiation based on performances in racially and class biased curriculum. Normalising ideology and hierarchy-legitimising myths that stabilise oppression. 10. Operational stereotypes in relation to educational attainment. Racism. Historical continuity of capitalist oppression and exploitation. Reform failure.

Table 4. Main themes in corpus texts about researching for justice and transformation.

1. Analysis of and engagement in hegemonic struggles over education control and symbolically mediated interactions between habitus and social structure within relations of domination. 2. Need for a critical analysis of the use of the term (im)migrant(s) instead of race and and/or languages for understanding the politics of race and ethnicity in relation to education. 3. Lived experiences and community participation, giving voice, taking perspective, advocacy and intellectual engagement. 4. Embedded lived experiences and community participation, giving voice, taking perspective, advocacy and intellectual engagement. Policy ontology and historical contextualisation. 5. Immanent criticism and linked historical material and critical policy analysis. Embeddedness and co-analysis. Empowerment through engagement and trust. Forming new alliances. 6. Treating the ruling class hegemony as threatening analytically, through clear communication ‘upwards’ and engaging in political discourse, collaboration and alliance. Activism. 7. Involvement and long-term engagement of the researcher in everyday life. Learning from participants and interactions with them in context. Challenging the myth of common schooling. 8. Uncovering the differences between schooling and an empowering rural education. Embeddedness and advocacy for education and against urban-centred schooling. 9. Embeddedness and interaction to gain and use knowledge to engage with people in processes of change in the interests of education justice. Historical awareness as an organic intellectual. 10. Empowerment of communities as the subjects of their own research as praxis. The challenges and potential contractions of immanent criticism methods and critique of ideology.

As Noblit and Hare (1988) and Uny, France, and Noblit (2017) indicate, the methodology of ethnographic meta-synthesis of qualitative research provides a unique process of translation by comparing metaphors, descriptions and concepts in one research account, with those in others. Using reciprocal and refutational methods to produce a line of argument, like other qualitative meta-ethnographies the present study has resulted in a narrative synthesis from the analysis of differences and similarities in the work reviewed.

Results

Two features sit at the centre of the present narrative synthesis. They relate to differences in conceptualising justice and in doing research for justice respectively as important in accounts of research/ers struggling to change conventionally dominant socially hierarchical educational orders in just directions. Three side-headings organise the presentation of results, followed by an attempt to extrapolate what socially just education research might look like, which is the main intention with the present article. The three side-headings are (i) Differences in conceptualising justice and research for justice; (ii) What is wrong with traditional intellectualism?; and (iii) Learning from Geoff.

Differences in conceptualising justice and research for justice

There are differences in different researchers’ guiding notions about education justice and the challenges of research for educational justice and equality. They map onto and obtain reflection in terms of their practices and correspond to differences of perspective and action, for instance between conflict, consensus and post-modern/structural or postcolonial (social constructivist) perspectives and theories. Waquant (2004) writes about an analytic of domination spanning a spectrum of social forms from cognition to interaction and including space and institutional discourses and categorisations (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2000). They include an educational sociology/social-psychology of the West, such as for instance of Bourdieu (1991; 2004a), and/versus theories and perspectives from the postcolonial south, such as by Fanon (Ranasinghe 2019). Sernhede (2018) describes also distinctions along the lines of physical and social space in these terms as levers and outcomes of basic mechanisms of ethno-racial subordination (Bourdieu 1991; 2004a; 2004b; Bourdieu and Sayad 2004/1964) and as factors of domination and power (Beach 2017b; 2022; 2004b; Waquant 2004).

Looking for what constitutes these practices and patterns is an essential feature of critical research, along with acts by researchers to help directly empower marginalised culturally dominated groups when researching for justice in critical ethnographies for social justice and transformation according to Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2021). Examples given were Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2020), Vigo-Arrazola and Dieste-Gracia (2019a; 2019b) and Vigo-Arrazola, Dieste-Gracia, and Julve (2016), which formed a key dividing line between successful and unsuccessful research for justice according to the analysis (Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021). Waquant (2004) identifies this line too, in relation to the work and perspective of Bourdieu, which according to Wacquant cuts against social science as an instrument of self-appropriation and describes an engaged ethno-sociology for change.

Conducting research as an ethno-sociology for change instead of as a tool or process of mere description and analysis (Tummons and Beach 2020) was the point Waquant (2004) was making. The present analysis would give support. However, in line with Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2021) and Vigo-Arrazola and Beach (2021), it would also add that unfortunately research rarely engages in trying to transform structures actively in the way Waquant (2004) describes. Bagley and Castro-Salazar (2017) and Yacine, Wacquant and Ingram (2004) do, but they also describe this kind of research commitment as rather rare in critical ethnography of education (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021). Yet it is imperative for social transformation, in line with Gramsci’s writing (1971) and as demonstrated for instance in the seminal work of Pablo Freire.

Explaining why researchers elect not to commit toward engaging in active social transformation directly is challenging and arguments vary (Tummons and Beach 2020). Perhaps over-theorisation is involved. Yet the engagement described by Yacine et al (2004) is not based primarily on the appropriation of different (and different types of) theory to enliven data and help it to speak up counter-hegemonically to dominant understandings. It is about understanding a standpoint theoretical position and adopting it, instead of dwelling on the way to define and apply concepts of agency and structure (Beach 2020; Tummons and Beach 2020). Rather than these traditionally venerable commitments, transformation concerns the scientific researcher’s organic linkage to a culture and full engagement in furthering the interests of that culture (Yasine et al. 2004). It involves reversing the polarity of the relationship between scientific research and community, by putting the subjectification of research for a community before the objectification of community as an object of analysis for science. This is something ‘venerable’ commitment seems to obstruct (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021). Harding (1995) seems to argue somewhat similarly. Tummons and Beach (2020) explored the concept of research for and about community and community relations in this respect, which as they wrote, some members of the research community may experience as rather challenging and may resist.

Using Hammersley’s descriptions of UK ethnography of education and how analysing agency as the primary interest became hegemonic there, Tummons and Beach described how a peculiarly British model of ethnography of education had led to an emphasis on interactionist ethnography and a research hegemony that risked obstructing the development of other interests to those of (idle) analytic description alone. Researchers had learnt that it was simply wrong to be political and committed, even when they may have felt a natural commitment to be so (Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021). Politics was not science according to the dominant hegemony, as to conduct politics as science undermines the value and usefulness of research (Hammersley 2006). Community before science and commitment before venerability is the message for research for social justice and social transformation but there is a structure of opposition toward political research and the active involvement of research participants in research, which has fundamentally blocked the development of research for social transformation (Tummons and Beach 2020).

Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2021) identified three types of self-labelled critical ethnography of education in their meta-ethnography and the other examples in the sample fit within these categories. They identify the need of giving voice to participants when uncovering and critiquing oppression and acts of cultural domination and marginalisation in relation to teaching, examination and curriculum design and development. Efforts to engage actively with communities in helping to uncover the cultural power relations seen through the original ethnographic publications analysed in each work are present too. Beach and Vigo-Arrazola (2020) termed this kind of ethnography of education as involving critical researchers not only embedding themselves in the daily work of schools but also changing their behaviour in their research (Vigo-Arrazola and Dieste-Gracia 2019a; 2019b; Vigo-Arrazola, Dieste-Gracia, and Julve 2016). It required avoiding putting the interests of research and researchers above changing situations in the interests of justice and fairness (Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021).

Two examples come from Ares (2016) and Bagley and Castro-Salazar (2017) in critical arts-based performance research. Denzin (2009) discusses aspects of this kind of work too and Batsleer (2016) provided an example of fusing critical ethnography with forms of participant action research to similar goals of community and justice first, as did Dixson, Byras, and Jeffers (2015). Their respective reference lists contain further examples, as does Beach (2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2019; 2021).

To be effective for social transformation, the meta-ethnographies suggest that an important task exists with respect to identifying the history of hegemonic struggles for justice without overly glorifying either earlier political achievements or ideal visions. They draw attention to things associated with reforms across time by exposing facts and generating data about reform ontologies, outcomes and their consequences for common people (Leaney and Webb 2021). Education justice has never been a strong factor in Sweden’s educational politics (Beach 2018; 2021), at least not in terms of outcomes and distributions of education capital, and perhaps this had never been an intention even (Beach 2022). Indeed the struggle for justice and equity in capitalist societies has always been more myth than reality according to the set of meta-ethnographies (Beach 2017b; 2018; 2021). Instead, overt and covert hetero-normative, classist, able-ist and colonialist ideologies in formal and hidden curriculum interactions have influenced curriculum content, examination outcomes and education choices across history. Moreover, although the hegemonic functions and struggles may have shifted form they have been ever-present and structurally homologous forms of contestation over rights to control the minds of the people, for instance in struggles between:

• Catholic and Lutheran religions and hierarchies as global and regional spheres of influence over the people by schooling their educators

• Church and the regent as the ultimate moral power in the state and

• Regent, government and capital in the recent period of capitalist hegemony

Wacquant’s considerations of Bourdieu’s early research and conceptual innovations centred on Bourdieu’s interest in and goals for social transformation (Waquant 2004), and his analytical concerns for cultural disjuncture and the fissuring of consciousness (e.g. in relation to habitus). These points emerge above too, in terms of the need, still, of analyses from a position of commitment across the long course of education history, when accounting for how, if and why, our so-called (and often politically self-termed) democratic projects of education had succeeded or failed to generate educational justice and equ(al)ity and to what extent. Looking across history shows a pattern of continued injustice and manipulation, and the potential of adopting what Gramsci (1971) called the role of an organic intellectual. According to Gramsci (1971), instead of developing science and research autonomously from a politically neutral position free from class interests, researchers should act as partners with dominated groups in struggles against the interests of the dominant class.

What is wrong with traditional intellectualism?

Gramsci (1971) described the historically (traditionally) dominant hegemonic position within science as one supporting and creating alliances for upholding a pretence of neutrality and objectivity, based on a system of solidarity of a psychological nature, and with a technical-juridical, corporate cast character between intellectuals. Sandra Harding (1995) expressed a similar idea, but also noted that this position of neutrality had always been false and untenable, once the state, the regent, the church or organised capital had begun to finance research and researchers as an institution.

Financing creates dependency relations toward financiers, and driven by financial transactions, research becomes a commodity produced through alienated paid labour. Moreover, although researchers have invented a system of rules to uphold so-called values of science and protect its ‘brand’, most individual researchers have little if any individual control over the system of rules, which operates as an overwhelming scientific authority over which they have no control. Rather than being neutral and objective autonomous professionals, researchers squeeze themselves between the rock of economic needs and the hard-place of rules of practice that cement a hegemonic bond between individual researchers as an academic class or cast (Harding 1995). A number of common points emerged in the analysis of the present sample connected to this issue for conducting ethnographic research for education justice social transformation. They highlighted the need/value of:

• Accepting that structural and ideological change are natural, continuous and integral parts of all struggles toward a changed consciousness and transformative action

• Accepting any/everybody’s rights and abilities to reason about experiences and processes of change within the flow of material history, and being able to engage in scholarship and raise their and others’ critical awareness to develop strategic action

• Understanding that social transformation must involve and engage everyone if it is to succeed and that interpreting and changing culture objectively demands resisting rather than accepting and reinforcing dominant ideas as a collective, and producing and supporting transitions in relation to a realistic alternative vision

• Treating venerability based on conventional objectivity and neutrality as a problem for research for justice and equality not part of a solution and unclothing the myths that have asserted that neutrality is a demand of objectivity and scientific validity

• Doing research that can connect symbolically mediated interactions between habitus and social structure within the relations of domination between identifiable social agents and/with/in state institutions

Yacine et al. described the research of the young Bourdieu and the formation of his intellectual dispositions as coming from an organic linkage that existed between his scientific and political engagements for liberation and social transformation (Cottle 2022) and Bagley (2009) argued similarly for the need to refashion methodologies in ethnography of education along these kinds of lines. They reflect Sandra Harding’s (1995) description of deep objectivity and the need to strike back against the norms of science set by the hegemony of traditional intellectuals (Tummons and Beach 2020) and they involve both producing qualitatively different knowledge against the anti-democratic, exploitative, marginalising and contradictory norms of intellectual hegemony (Bagley 2009; Bagley and Castro-Salazar 2017; Tummons and Beach 2020). In the sample of meta-ethnographies, they emerge in relation to researchers who:

• Challenge and confront any use (including their own) of coercive political, economic and cultural power, domination, and privilege and instead inviting shared control over research directions and products

• Reject ideas of researchers being special people; modern-day high-priests and priestesses; who are the unique possessors of magnificent expertise and skills

• Refuse to objectify others for personal gain or to exploit as private data, the first-hand stories they provide about their lives and experiences

• Treating data as co-produced collective knowledge and opening up (not coveting for themselves and restricting) access to intellectual resources

• Treating the ruling class hegemony as potentially threatening generally and in their own specific fields of practice

• Forming alliances to challenge this hegemony and rights to rule

Instead of telling others how things are and what to do, researchers engage with/in communities in creating different ways of thinking about common problems and ways to solve them (see e.g. Ares 2016; Batsleer 2016; Dixson, Byras, and Jeffers 2015; Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021). They withstand the convincing claims about the need for venerable forms of scholarship and values of neutrality and objectivity in class-based exploitative racist and patriarchal cultural history, and refuse to stand passively by as waves of fascism infect the global political landscape time after time, with neoliberal populism as the latest paradigmatic instance (Bright and Smyth 2016). The fundamental point is a simple one about understanding exactly is wrong traditional intellectualism, why and how this has shown itself to be the case in critical analyses of scientific history. For instance, the passive by standing of neutral objective research allowed fascism to advance as a form of ideological and political radicalism in inter-war Europe. Moreover, worse, not only was fascism allowed to grow unchecked as a mass-mobilising force, once established, supported by the establishment of proto-fascist governmentality, researchers ‘benefitted’ in their careers by racially and ethnically ordering ‘culture’ and history to support the growth and power of proto-fascist nationalism, often with violent and deathly consequences.

How can this happen in a country (like Sweden) with a massively public-taxation financed system of education where for seven decades, public funds have financed the full participation of all pupils in a common nine-year foundation school as a purportedly effective and fair investment in the public commons. The government claimed to build the system against the threat of fascism as an investment in social justice and equity. This was the basis of the broad support of the system too (Beach 2018). Yet first stable, and then, recently escalating inequality and the emphatic return of popularity for right-wing proto-fascist popularism has been the result (Beach 2022) and there are a number of points to consider here according to the sample of meta-ethnographies analysed for this article:

• A consistently large proportion of pupils from similar types of area and backgrounds (or with physical or intellectual disabilities) continually obtain less return from the common investment, which pays out differently in relation to place of residence, social class, migration profiles, registered disabilities and other features

• White (male) middle classes have benefitted most consistently from state investments through material returns in terms of performance outcomes at individual levels

• The public financing of schools is a disguised form of exploitation that reflects and reproduces inequality and injustices, most clearly based on colour, religion or physical abilities, sexuality, social class and place of residence

Critical analytical research works to identify these contradictions and to produce a radically hermeneutic, deeply practical, engaged knowledge according to the collective accounts provided about critical research for social transformation by the research sample. Forged from experience and circumstance as an engaging scholarship in its everyday form, it is present in the research of both the young and the mature Bourdieu (Waquant 2004; Yacine, et al, 2004). It aims to identify and unclothe mechanisms of injustice, as well as to develop avenues and forms of alliance for future action for social change (Beach 2020; Bourdieu 2004b; Bourdieu and Sayad 2004; Bourdieu and Wacquant 2000; Cottle 2022; Ranasinghe 2019). An article by Beach (2020) explored conditions for the development transgressive radically hermetic engaged knowledge for advancing critical consciousness and social transformation among student teachers. It developed through engaging with working-class students in higher education institutions.

Learning from Geoff

‘Hi Geoff, what did you learn today’, was the opening question in a research conversation with a young mixed-race student on an ITE programme at a major university who self-identified as coming from a working-class background and, as it emerged later, as also transgender. ‘The Calvin Cycle’ Geoff said, but he added that what he had learnt was probably not only what his tutors had meant him to. This bio-chemistry had made him think he said, primarily, and somewhat ironically, about ‘the privileges of learning about aristocrats of science from a curriculum that presented the dominant class as a moral productive force’ compared his own (Beach 2020). He also gave an example from history books he had read on British history when studying in England. These books had presented Gladstone, a former British prime minister, as the ‘leader of the British government that encouraged the British Parliament to abolish slavery’, which was ‘a very selective way to push history’ Geoff said. It externalised a crime against humanity; sanctioned by the British Parliament for centuries; and turned it into an object it claimed opposition to, and it hid an economic crime committed by Parliament against its own people in order to profit and reward slave owners. ‘As an educator’ Geoff said and not a ‘schooler’ (he was adamant about the difference) he would ‘find a way to decolonise the curriculum’ and teach about injustices such as these where:

• Gladstone’s government had taken a high-interest £15 million tax-secured bank loan from the Rothschild Bank to compensate slave owners ‘for lost assets’

• Gladstone’s father received a large slice of this pie and

• British tax-payers supplied the funding for ‘both the pie and the interest charged by the bank on the loan that the government took in order to bake it’ (Geoff)

What Geoff challenges here is the relationship between the curriculum, patriarchy and the dominant class hegemony. Research had helped him unclothe how ‘the standard curriculum worked in dominant interests’ he said, and how now, as a teacher, he could develop and use alliances that could immobilise it. Our interview played a role in this kind of intellectual ability and agility Geoff said. Our conversations and his reading and experiences gave him ‘food for thought’ about:

How the curriculum misrepresented and ‘normalised’ the practices of dominant racist and misogynous, slave-owning classes in so-called ‘civilised and civilising societies … By controlling social representations and individual and collective representations of both able-bodied and disabled women and men, white, brown and black races, and upper, middle, and working class people, and what critical educators could do about this with the help of research’. (Geoff)

Throughout history schooling; rather than education; has represented and maintained definitions of working-class people and planation slaves of places like Madeira, the Caribbean Islands, and North, South and Central America as subhuman. It had dehumanised them, Geoff said (Beach 2020) and had made them appear to be objects of danger to society and themselves in state education projects and the official curriculum, rather than the creators of the material features of civilisation. Describing how he felt and how he resisted the temptation successful students must always confront in the face of their own success and others’ failings to be so successful (Beach 2018), he described remembering the goodness of the place he came from, of his background, and of the people he knew there (Beach 2020). This was, he added, how he had recognised the need to resist the dominant class hegemony, and deconstruct and criticise official history. The following was particularly important:

Working class kids are not pathetic victims of capitalist hegemony just because they sometimes cause trouble in school, or do badly there academically whilst middle class kids … get university degrees and middle class jobs … Their different attainments only reflect different choice outcomes within active processes of cultural production within social conditions of gendered class conflict … They are not expressions of some kind of natural intellectual superiority of the white upper- and middle class pupils. (Geoff)

Beach (2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2022) analysed how working with the official curriculum made some pupils seem more to be more worthy, by being able to strive upwards in line with dominant class values. Geoff is alluding the same thing above. He put things this way in a later interview:

The education system functions … by making it seem as if it was better to own factories and exploit labour, or to facilitate this exploitation from an executive position gained through educational conformity and ideological assimilation, rather than actually doing physical work … Elite classes get to feel good about themselves whilst we feel and seem bad, in ourselves and to others and teacher education pretends this does not happen and is not an important part of the primary function of education. Teacher education not only seems to want us to act as if current absurdities of injustice and inequality are perfectly normal, it seems to want us to learn how to oil the cogs of domination. (Geoff)

One of the main functions of western education systems that critical research for social transformation has to contend with, and find ways of helping people to overcome, is how schooling serves a structure of power through the creation of performance hierarchies. Dovemark discussed this in her thesis (2004) and Geoff does so above. Their point is that education success has always been a matter of making everyone think that we are all equally able to make right choices to get on, despite the structures of power inherent from material history and present in current social conditions clearly, evidentially and at every conceivable level opposing this possibility (Beach 2022). Critical ethnography of education has identified this time-and-again. However, for the interests of social transformation, as the meta-ethnographies suggest, it also has to show in addition that these unjust structures of injustice are human constructs and that because of this we can and should always struggle to try to make them fairer, and more just and egalitarian, than we have done to date (Beach 2018; 2020). It involves as Geoff indicates being:

• Able to avoid assimilation to the thought patterns impressed on us through the dominant class hegemony

• Able to recognise and hold onto an organic and positive relationship to one’s social origins and class as ‘someone who is in no way special’ compared to others from similar places and backgrounds

• Aware that members of a subordinated class, race, religion, position on a particular spectrum or sexuality, do not need venerable researchers to think for them. They can and do think for themselves already

The successful examples of critical ethnographic education research for social transformation are ones where researchers have recognised and acted in line with this (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021) and there is a potential strength here for social transformation in the future. Many prospective teachers today, especially but not only in early years and primary enrichments, are young women with alternative ethnic backgrounds to the white mainstream middle-class. They often come from migrant roots and have transnational backgrounds and if they can endure their studies and remain organic to the interests of their class, gender and the places they grew up in, this will serve them in developing a progressive form of transgressive class consciousness similar to Geoff’s. They will need this too in order to influence cultural production in schools in the future in ways other generations of assimilated middle class educators have not, and in the ways Geoff alludes to Beach (2020). The right research/ers in the right places at the right times may be of some value for social transformation and justice, particularly in strategic alliances with progressively inclined somewhat radical and critically aware educational leaders and teachers (Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021).

Discussion

Based on a stepwise process of ethnographic meta-synthesis of earlier similar syntheses; i.e. meta-ethnography; from research about the struggle for justice and equality in education, the main message of the present article is that research for social transformation is a challenging but not an impossible prospect. This is the first opening point of the discussion section. The second is that differences in ways of conceiving the challenges of critical ethnography for educational justice and equality and social transformation are clearly important (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021). Giving voice and power to participants in the development of agency, and becoming involved in communities as public intellectuals and recognising the importance of histories of power and hegemonic struggle also figure amongst the important features (Vigo-Arrazola and Beach 2021). Yet they are not enough alone to bring change about. Chances for success increase when researchers challenge traditional approaches. Instead of remaining aloof and trying to change others’ practices, they change their own, including above all any desires to own the research process and the data it generates. They:

• Give up their power as venerable intellectuals and their exclusive position in the existing class structure so as to

• Become (or as Geoff does remain) organic with structurally and economically subordinated, politically marginalised and often socially stigmatised groups in the interests of justice and equality

Morally this choice should be an easy one for any remotely critical educational researcher, including journal reviewers and editors. Research for social transformation is not only about generating assured knowledge. It is also a social practice where researchers (and journal reviewers and editors) show who they are morally and where they stand in relation to their work. Do they/we research (and/or publish it) in order to support opportunities for all people to live a fair and decent life or are we researching in disregard of this, or even to allow some to have a good life, whilst/by marginalising, oppressing, exploiting and violating the lives and well-being (social, intellectual, political) of others? Struggling for justice in research practice often involves engaging in a socially, emotionally and psychologically challenging counter-hegemonic struggle (Tummons and Beach 2020), and very often may demand:

• Resisting rather than accepting and reinforcing predominant ideas

• Producing and supporting transitions in relation to an alternative vision and

• Treating venerability based on conventional objectivity and neutrality as a problem

What this means basically, is (a) doing research that connects symbolically mediated interactions across habitus within social structures that reflect the relations of domination between identifiable social agents within state institutions and society, whilst also (b) complementing and facilitating the reflexivity that has long been part of ethnographic traditions (Cottle 2022). It is about challenging and confronting any use (including one’s own) of coercive political, economic and cultural power to create or reproduce forms of privilege. Forming alliances to challenge hegemony and rights to rule is essential and must be vertically and horizontally non-contradictory (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021).

White (male) middle classes have benefitted most from state investments in education and research to date, and material returns at individual levels reflect and reproduce this inequality and injustice and this needs uncovering on the way to destabilising the multiple sources of power-imbalance connected to and based on colour, religion, physical abilities, sexuality, class or place of domicile or origin. These injustices date back to well before the introduction of mass education and have persisted across the period of its introduction across the globe (i.e. not only in Sweden), through to and beyond social democratic reforms, and into and within to the present neoliberal period of capitalist field hegemony (Beach 2018; 2020; 2022). The failure of reform to address injustice and inequality successfully should be part of the investigation (Beach 2017a; 2017b). There are multiple dimensions. Among those mentioned in the results section are how the curriculum misrepresents the historical practices and current actions of the dominant racist and misogynous descendants of the slave-owning class, in so-called ‘civilised and civilising’ societies. It does this by controlling social representations and common understandings of both able-bodied and disabled women and men, white, brown and black races, and upper, middle, and working-class people. Research(ers) should surely strive to uncover this. To use a currently popular phrase, if they want to work for educational and social justice and for social transformation, they need to understand why and how to research for a decolonised curriculum that works against dominant ideology, and deconstructing, criticising and replacing official history is part of the same challenge (Beach 2020).

An important yet often forgotten dimension of this according to Geoff, relates to acknowledging that working class, black, disabled, transgender and other marginalised and often culturally silenced groups are not pathetic victims of capitalist hegemony. They may for various reason cause trouble at school in different ways, and often they may do badly academically compared to ‘happy’ and engaged white urban middle-class kids who go on to earn university degrees and get middle-class jobs. Yet these outcomes are products of cultural power relations that make some pupils seem more worthy than others and being willing and able to avoid assimilation to such thought patterns that mediate and reflect the dominant class interest is important (Beach 2020; Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021). Gramsci (1971) discussed this in terms of attaining and maintaining an organic and positive relationship to an oppressed class and seeing one’s own skills as in no way special and above those of others. It demands recognising that members of subordinated classes do not need researchers to think for them, as they can and do think for themselves already.

Conclusion

Most of the problems of critical education research for social transformation are not unique to or uniquely special in relation to ethnography. Most of them are, according to the present meta-synthesis, structural (Beach 2018) and this is clearly seen when checking this claim against the many primary studies that formed the data for the ten case sample (corpus) of the present investigation. Yet there is always a double edge to structure. Structures not only cement alienation and hierarchy, they often do so by establishing philosophically inchoate and contradictory standards of practice as norms for social equity and social transformation that must be overcome (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola 2021; Tummons and Beach 2020). This is a challenge. Elfreich and Dennis (2022) discuss it in terms of establishing an ethics of praxis. They recognise that researchers are not free from the social order or state control. They have break free and to do this they need to generate a counter-hegemonic force and new alliances in forms of research activism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).