Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

Editorial

Jayne Osgood — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology gathers together an exciting collection of papers that seek to make contributions to the field of educational enquiry by taking the reader on unexpected journeys that are intentionally provoking. Traversing multiple continents and geopolitical contexts together these papers offer a series of unlikely entry points, as well as myriad opportunities to pause and consider what approaching research differently can potentiate in the pursuit of more critical scholarship and deeper connections to life on/with this troubled planet. In various ways the authors in this issue of the journal work with methodological innovation as the means to activate ethics, ideologies and philosophical ways of knowing and acting upon the world – that are sensed, that reverberate, and that also hold the potential to disorientate – with generative consequences. Or as McKittrick (2020, 16) stresses, there is a burning imperative for researchers ‘to read outside ourselves, not for ourselves but to actively unknow ourselves, to unhinge, and come to know each other’.

Editorial: Researcher positionality and race in color-evasive Nordic educational contexts

Ingrid Rodrick Beiler, Zahra Bayati, Eric Bergman — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

The editorial introduction to the special issue on researcher positionality and race in color-evasive Nordic educational contexts frames the necessity of this inquiry into historical and contemporary forms of racism and current discourses of Nordic exceptionalism. Reflecting explicitly on researcher positionality with respect to race and Whiteness can be seen as an act of interrupting the silence and avoidance that tends to characterize Nordic educational research. The articles in the special issue are summarized and connected to these overall aims.

Special issue: Turning the tides; the child and the political. Methodologies for integraled child politics in education

Anne Beate Reinertsen, Camilla Eline Andersen , Ann Merete Otterstad — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This Special Issue concerns the child and the political: the political child.

The call for papers asked for immanent and minor (transpolitical, transgenerational, decolonized…) perspectives in which child and childhood are seen as moulding collective futuring forces in a globalized world. The call asked to refrain from rights perspectives in a narrow juridical sense to avoid any type of categorization and compartmentalization. The call also asked to avoid universalized, major, or idealistic politics of the child, and as Marina Garcés (2022) asserts: “The western humanistic tradition must leave the expansive universalism and learn to think of itself from a mutual universality” (p. 92). Being human is thus seen as a collective and collaborative activity ultimately repealing any divisions between subject and object, adult and child, nature and culture, body and mind. What can children teach us about politics, we asked, and how can the child become more than an object of policies? Further, we asked what kind of childhoods are desirable, necessary, and possible to future?

The political child

Anne Beate Reinertsen — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This essay is an attempt to write un unruly force field in sustained expansions about the political child, life, philosophy, policies, and science. Unruly as in messy and stammering but open. Unruly about the political child as a force and carrier of immanence, unencumbered, and as an expression of a future. It implies a view of the child born with inalienable rights as a political subject and force of material and social transformation, and temporalities of writing being transformational techniques. Writing ultimately treated as an ecological practice and method that facilitates the production of collective subjectivities. Thinking the child, life, science, and the world politically means thinking with Chantal Mouffe’s (2015) concept agonism in combination with writing as continual Deleuze and Guattarian (2004a) becomings, active in life itself. There are thin walls between realisms, dreams and fabulations, and this essay is an attempt to strike a blow for freer, humorous, more philosophical, and political mindsets in our pedagogical sciences and imaginations. Therefore, there are also unruly words and sometimes not yet present.

Reflection on racialization, whiteness, and researcher positionality as 'not-quite-white' in the field of educational studies

Shpresa Basha — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This article draws on two autoethnographic vignettes from an ethnographic field study conducted in a Danish elementary school over six months. By unfolding two vignettes from photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs), the study analyses how researcher positionality relates to students’ experiences of marginalization and makes feelings of being racialized or othered come to the fore. The study proposes the notion of ‘sticky’ emotion and affect as an analytical lens that provides a more critically reflexive analytical framework to address the interactions between the researcher, racialized students, positionalities, and the research process. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion and reflection on racialization and whiteness to challenge the pull of racialization. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of whiteness and racialization, which is followed by methodological reflections on researcher positionality.

Keywords: researcher positionality, vignette, affect, ‘sticky’ emotion, racialization, whiteness, Nordic exceptionalism, ethnography, racialized students

Entangled Ekphrastics

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In this article, we articulate a research-creation process called entangled ekphrastics as an emergent response to -isms: racism, capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchalism, speciesism, and nationalism. Our collective gathered virtually, engaged with artwork, and co-created (entangled) poems. This research-creation process generated profound appreciation for disrupting conventions of traditional qualitative inquiry, pushing the boundaries of activism and artivism in the present moment. We wonder about how responding to the present through entangled ekphrastics moves us toward theoretical liminality, hospicing the crises of the present, and midwifing a future together.

Affektive orienteringer af hvidhed:

Nadia Norling Tshili Klarsgaard — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Denne artikel er et opråb – og et nødråb – til de af os, for hvem det hvide privilegie kan være lige så usynligt, som det kan være behageligt. Med afsæt i et kritisk etnografisk inspireret feltarbejde gennemført i to danske børnehaver, stiller artiklen skarpt på affektive responsers ’gøren’ i relation til hvid forskerpositionalitet. Artiklen viser, hvordan hvidhedens affektive ladninger er socialt cirkulerende og magtfulde i deres orienteringer af kroppe, steder og (forsker)praksisser og dermed bidrager til opretholdelsen af den (u)synlige hvide norm. Artiklen argumenterer for, hvorfor affektive responser, som for eksempel vrede og usikkerhed, er gode at tænke med, når forskningens ambition er at forstyrre diskursivt medierede forståelser af normativ hvidhed, der optræder som en situeret del af racialiseret forskerpositionalitet.

Creolizing reflexivity:

Ioana Tistea — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This article contributes to ongoing debates on generating interconnected transformative possibilities for decolonizing knowledge production in Nordic educational research without erasing power differences and tensions. Drawing from my PhD research, I entangle various research practices from the previously ignored or discredited margins, which go beyond hegemonic gazes and approvals for legitimacy. I particularly highlight everyday knowledges stemming from multiple senses, encounters, and unexpected connections, which might seem from a scientific perspective less rigorous or considered research at all. These may disrupt Nordic exceptionalism and color-evasiveness in researchers’ racialised positionalities. I show how the concept of creolization intersects with the method of autoethnography as Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría with the aim of entangling multiple unequal knowers and knowledges, imagine and experiment with unforeseeable possibilities in and beyond research, and thus creolize reflexivity. This can expand the research imagination with regards to what constitute data generation and analysis, co-researching, co-writing, co-authoring publications, and presenting the research to wider audiences.

Beyond 'Where do you really come from?':

Eden Begna Gobena, Joshua D. Dickstein, Girum Zeleke, Kerenina Kezaride Dansholm — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Engaging with the complex dynamics of positionality, racialisation, and social demarcation, this study situates itself at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT) and understandings of reflexivity and positionality. It aims specifically to challenge and expand traditional understandings of ‘positionality’, which have largely centred on introspective concerns, such as how researchers’ individual experiences influence their methodological choices. As such, the paper argues for a more nuanced application of positionality, beginning from the Nordic exceptionalist post-colonial context where the societal self-perception is that Nordic countries are free of colonial legacies and uniquely progressive and egalitarian. To this end, the study employs a reflexive methodology deeply rooted in the authors’ own intersectional lived experiences. The paper critically engages with the potent, yet often unspoken question, frequently posed to people of colour in Nordic countries: ‘Where do you really come from?’ This intrusive curiosity is not just one of geographic origin but is intricately tied to perceived racialised positionality (PRP), highlighting a clear connection between the question and assumptions about identity and belonging. Furthermore, the query serves as a mechanism of social demarcation that separates ‘us,’ the presumed native Nordics, from ‘them,’ the racialised ‘Other.’ By focusing on this divisive question, the paper aims to dissect the social, ethical, and methodological implications of ‘perceived racialised positionality’ (PRP) – a term which captures the essence of how others’ perceptions of our racial identity can influence teaching and research specifically, and more generally processes and outcomes of scholarly enrichment of the ethical and intellectual landscape in Nordic settings and beyond.

The paper critically engages with the potent, yet often unspoken question, frequently posed to people of colour in Nordic countries: ‘Where do you really come from?’ This intrusive curiosity is not just one of geographic origin but is intricately tied to perceived racialised positionality (PRP), highlighting a clear connection between the question and assumptions about identity and belonging. Furthermore, the query serves as a mechanism of social demarcation that separates ‘us,’ the presumed native Nordics, from ‘them,’ the racialised ‘Other.’ By focusing on this divisive question, the paper aims to dissect the social, ethical, and methodological implications of ‘perceived racialised positionality’ (PRP) – a term which captures the essence of how others’ perceptions of our racial identity can influence teaching and research specifically, and more generally processes and outcomes of scholarly enrichment of the ethical and intellectual landscape in Nordic settings and beyond.

Å se skjult rasisme i norsk akademia:

Tonje Baugerud, Usma Ahmed — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This article critically examines the reproduction of institutionalized whiteness in Norwegian academia and higher education. Employing autoethnography, the authors delve into their own racialized positionalities as researchers and educators in Early Childhood Education, reveling their entanglement in a specific pedagogical legacy that emphasizes White supremacist epistemologies and ontologies. The authors argue that this contextual reality is saturated in a color-evasive (Annamma et al., 2017) discourse where race often becomes obscured. Despite the continued influence of racialization processes on people’s life prospects, reinforcing inclusion and exclusion dynamics, Norwegian researchers, teachers, and students notably lack a language for discussing race. This article explores the potential and limitations of developing such a language to expand the discourse on race and racism in Norway. By scrutinizing the volatile and dynamic insider/outsider continuum, the authors contend that institutional whiteness must be critically examined through a decolonial lens, considering Nordic exceptionalism and color-evasiveness. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological conceptualization of institutional whiteness, the article conducts a critical investigation into how conversations about race are obscured in Norwegian higher education, particularly within Early Childhood Education. The authors engage in an autoethnographic account of how racism and institutionalized whiteness materializes in Norwegian academic spaces. Our utilization of autoethnography in the form of a conversational exchange serves to exemplify a methodological approach for articulating discussions on race, white privilege, and associated themes in the Norwegian context. This dialogue offers not only a template for navigating conversations within a discourse of color-evasiveness and race evasiveness but also underscores the inherent challenges and necessity for thorough reflexivity in such dialogues.

Editorial

Jayne Osgood, Camilla Eline Andersen, Mona-Lisa Angell, Ann Merete Otterstad — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This issue of RERM includes four papers that boldly attempt to propose ways in which educational research practices, traditions and methods might be enacted differently. They take seemingly foundational research methods (reviewing literature, ethnographic observation, walking methodologies) and transform them in to something less familiar that invite our readers to stutter and reappraise how else research might be done and with what outcomes.

Firstly, researching from Danish inner cities, Staunæs and Vertelyte draw on affect theory and a concern with moods and felt pedagogies in education to explore how hopes and anxieties are woven through school objects and architecture. Through minor interventions the authors propose that there are abundant possibilities to improve the inclusion of racialized students in the inbetween, and often pathologised spaces of school. This holds the potential to radically shift perceptions, prejudices and behaviours that are not always identifiable but that can be sensed through the minor gesture. The authors attend to the significance of language and what happens through translation and diffractive readings. They stress that concepts that travel require careful consideration when transposed into alternative geopolitical contexts. They take Ahmed’s ‘happy objects’ as a case in point to make visible the specificities of local context and what that means for advancing theory that can pay closer attention to time and space.

The next two papers address ways in which literature reviews – a staple element to any research project – can be up-ended and reimagined when post-foundational theories and practices are put to work. Naomi Pears-Scown makes use of Baradian theoretical concepts to think-with literature rather than merely review what is already known and organize a corpus of knowledge into useful categories. Through literature cartographies, Pears-Scown develops a mapping strategy that makes visible her affective engagement with literature through the crafting of found-poems which tell stories of the ways in which place shapes approaches to arts therapy in various geopolitical contexts. This novel approach to engaging with and encountering literature disrupts received wisdom about how literature should be reviewed and instead invites the reader to sit with the discomforts of expanding how literature stories can be told.

In resonance with Pears-Scown, the next paper written by co-authors Boks-Vlemmix and Aspfors, offers a similar challenge to orthodoxies surrounding what a literature review is and how it should be undertaken. In their experimental piece the authors offer glimpses into what gets generated when the emphasis concerns processes and practices of doing a literature review rather than what it represents. Like the previous paper, the authors are inspired by a cartographic approach that holds the potential to map the processes involved in becoming deeply immersed and affect with a body of literature. They take literature on Teacher Educator Professional Learning as a case in point to explore how mapping and tracing entangled concepts can generate unanticipated insights and present new lines of thought.

Finally, Louisa Allen explores the potential of smell, with all the senses and beyond the human, for educational research. She takes the reader on ‘smellwalks’ which presented themselves as an unlikely research method during pandemic lockdown. Allen provides detailed accounts of the ways in which smellwalks came into being in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand and enabled a deep exploration of pandemic-transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper offers a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology as a means to consider smell through multisensory conceptualisations where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. Further, the paper theorises the act of smelling as unbounded and ultimately, always more-than-human. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape.

Together these papers offer important ways to reappraise approaches to research methodology in education that have become so deeply embedded that they unwittingly shape conventional expectations of how research should be done, has always be done. Each of these papers offer exciting invitations to interrupt this routine way of thinking. Respond to the invitation to pause, to ask, must we do it that way? The way it has always been done? What happens if we question and dare to experiment with alternative approaches? When theory is mobilized through research that seeks to pursue alternative lines of inquiry, what then? When theoretical concepts are taken up in/to ‘foreign’ spaces what happens to them? How do they travel? What do they agitate? What do they make possible? Aligned with the aims of this journal, these papers individually and collectively, invite a pause to business-as-usual in educational research.

Jayne Osgood

Camilla Andersen

Mona-Lisa Angell

Ann Merete Otterstad

Editors

Scaling as Methodological and Material Activation Technique

Mirka Koro, Amalie Strange, Abhik Chakraborty, Minna Sorsa — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In this methodological paper, we propose that knowledge production and worldbuilding creations (in the context of scholarship) often provide a sense of activation and urgency to act. Namely, we focus on scaling as one possible activation technique for qualitative inquiry building on particular worlds, potential relationships, and emerging ‘(dis)order’ within the world. Scaling as an activation technique and the concept of scale enable scholars to consider their relationality with others, to identify within themselves relationalities regarding their areas of study, to consider how close/far data, knowledge, and participants are and become, which theories and practices are foregrounded and backgrounded, and how relationality within scales and scaling might operate. First, we discuss the relational nature of scaling and how scales are situated in relational spaces. Then we draw from the past scaling traditions and situate scaling in the context of mountains and mountain matter(ings). Finally, we share two scaling activation examples and conclude with a discussion about boundaries and the limits of humanely perceived relationalities and scaling. We propose that nonhuman and/or more-than-human ‘scales’ are particularly pertinent to understanding the limitations of human knowledge and various forms of relationalities.

Brown researcher, white schools:

Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau, Saara Loukola, Ida Hummelstedt — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This article is a cross-racial reflexive analysis between a biracial brown researcher and two researchers racialized as white in the same research project on (anti)racism in Finnish lower secondary schools. Building on three vignettes, the authors highlight several ways in which a researcher's racialized position as non-white and as white can impact ethnographic fieldwork in a context dominated by Nordic Exceptionalism and normative whiteness. The authors problematize the position of insider gaining access and gatekeepers’ trust, before looking intersectionally at the dynamic of being a racial outsider, the conflicts and affects that come with it, and conclude with the onto-epistemological challenges of doing school ethnographic research and contributing to antiracist knowledge production. This contribution crystalizes under-researched dilemmas that call for the development of new ethnographic designs which center researchers’ racial positions and further reflection on the ethical, methodological and ontological implications of producing data on racism at school.

Attuning to what’s in/out of tune

Synnøve Kvile, Karin Murris — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

What does human exceptionalism and a human-centred analysis do to what counts as music, education and education research? This article troubles that question by ‘sticking’ to a video clip of two boys performing a song on a beach in rural Norway. Through a diffractive method of ‘Listening without Organs’, it traces the agency of sound waves and explores music education’s entanglement with everyday life. Through an agential realist analysis of the video clip as a phenomenon, we argue for the porosity of taken-for-granted research concepts such as ‘data’, research ‘site’, research ‘participants’, theories and methods. Knowledge-making as a worlding practice troubles human exceptionalism and opens up more parts of the world to love in music education research and practice. By extending the theory and practice of listening to include more-than-human and ‘lesser’-human sounds, concepts such as music, education and children are also stretched and opened up.

Navigating the Hyphen

Kudzayi Tarisayi — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This study explores the complexities of researcher positionality within migration research, focusing on Zimbabwean migrant teachers in South Africa. Employing an autoethnographic approach, it examines the fluid insider-outsider dynamics shaped by overlapping identities and socio-political contexts. Drawing on concepts such as translocational positionality and intersectionality, the research highlights how shifting positionalities influence both the research process and knowledge production. Reflexivity is central to addressing power dynamics and ensuring epistemic justice by centring the voices of marginalised groups. The study contributes to migration research by problematising traditional insider-outsider binaries and emphasising the ethical significance of transparency. Ultimately, this research calls for a nuanced understanding of positionality, demonstrating its importance in producing credible and inclusive knowledge that respects the lived experiences of migrant communities.

Hopeful Things as Minor Interventions in Educational Atmospheres

Dorthe Staunæs, Mante Vertelyte — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Drawing on scholarship on affects, moods, and affective pedagogies in education, we explore how educators in a Danish gymnasium weaved hopes and anxieties into a school space and the specific things, such as books and bookshelves, to address and improve the inclusion of racialized students in school life. Based on a feminist new materialist and diffractive reading through translation of English-language based concepts through Danish grammar and language, we explore how the concept of the "happy object" as delineated by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed takes on a more hopeful interpretation when analyzed within the Danish educational context and language. We argue that ‘foreign’ concepts require careful consideration and adaptation to suit another (Danish) linguistic, cultural, and racial context. Making such adjustments is not just a matter of taking specificities of local contexts seriously, it is also a means of advancing theory that can inspire analyses conducted in a wider range of educational time-space-coordinates.

Slow and affective becoming-with in early childhood education as the initiation of cultivation

Alexandra Nordström, Sara Sintonen — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this paper, we explore slow and affective becoming-with in early educational contexts as the initiation of cultivation. A slow approach advocates varied pace and rhythm, diverging from goal-driven approaches. Affective intensities, including feelings, bodies, and sensory elements challenge Western understandings of child and childhood. Our starting point for this reconsideration is the Finnish scholar J.A. Hollo’s (1895-1967) educational thinking, emphasizing Bildung as a process and the initiation of cultivation. Exploring postqualitative and non-representational methodologies, we focus on the messy and mundane in-betweens in early childhood education. That is, altering how we perceive place by refocusing our gaze from a physical location to intricate, intertwining becoming-withs. By refocusing our gaze on the slow and affective here and now – by thinking, seeing, and feeling with Hollo – we aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on a post-developmental and post-neoliberal ECEC.

Re-turning the Child in Educational Research Methodology

Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud, Anna Rigmor Moxnes — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The methodological approaches we explore in this article are anchored in Manning’s (2016) concept agencement and Barad’s (2014) concept re-turning. By re-turning the soil of our doctoral dissertations (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022, Moxnes, 2019) and exploring agencement as a way of activating the child in research, we draw attention to minor issues within the ecologies of research practices. According to Manning the minor works through the major as a force from within, problematizing the major’s standardisations, opening norms and experiences to variations and potentialities. We re-turn our doctoral projects to actualise minor events by discussing the child as knower; childspacesmattering and child-events. Hence propose the child as political through agencement, and from this thinking of the child in research differently.

Under the table

Soern Finn Menning — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Centred around a one-minute short film of an everyday activity in a Norwegian early childhood education institution, this article will explore how thinking with video offers the ability to deconstruct and re-imagine taken-for-granted conceptions of children’s political participation. Sensitive to aesthetic dimensions of video, this research-creation emphasises bodily intensities and collective vitality often less noticed in childhood research. Paired with both a close and an in-depth reading of Manning´s (2016) minor gestures as political as well as Agamben’s (1992, 1995) conception of gesture, the use of the cinematic technique of montage enables us to challenge dominant methodological discourses in the investigation of children’s agency. While the major gestures of political child are often based on identifying children’s individualised subject-centred and discourse-based agency, this multi-modal article will explore how video as research-creation might contribute to reconceptualising political child differently.

Superpositioner. Om kvantfysik och barns blivande

Bosse Bergstedt — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

I denna artikel utforskas vad som kännetecknar barns blivande med superposition, ett tillstånd där allt sker samtidigt och överallt. Ett tillstånd som finns där före det att barnet placeras som subjekt i tid och rum. Med utgångspunkt i två bilder på mig och min farfar diskuteras i artikeln hur det är möjligt att med hjälp av kvantfysik förstå barns blivande. Hur barnets mikropolitiska handlingar kan ifrågasätta etablerade verklighetsuppfattningar och därmed också medverka till en bättre värld. Artikelns bidrar till metodutveckling inom postkvalitativ forskning genom att visa hur begreppet superposition vidgar förståelsen för forskning kring barns blivande (St. Pierre 2011; Myhre Otterstad & Waterhouse Lorvik 2023).