Oppression and marginalization are consistent features across the globe, as are resistance, joy, and the pursuit of liberation. Throughout history, social justice movements, social justice organizations, and scholars have acknowledged the potential and possibility of disciplined inquiry and research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose power and colonialism, and offer pathways to greater equity and freedom.
Emancipatory research (also referred to as critical or liberatory research) is an umbrella term that includes a wide set of research frameworks rooted in critical theory (e.g., critical feminist, disability, race, and queer theory) and an equally broad set of dialectic methods (e.g., narrative, arts-based, participatory, embodied, and action-oriented methods). These frameworks and methodological approaches share a set of emancipatory objectives that include: (1) redefining who is the researcher and who is researched, (2) shifting whose forms of knowledge are valued and centralized, (3) being attentive to social power, privilege, and intersectional oppression, and (4) advancing social justice and pursuing liberation for marginalized and oppressed peoples.
Within education—an institutional space dominated by White Supremacy, cis-hetoropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism—emancipatory methods provide a way to center the voices, experiences, and epistemologies of communities that have been, and continue to be, ignored and underserved. Pushing the bounds of the field, emancipatory methods in education elevate critical questions that push back on existing structural inequities and narratives, and seek to imagine, vision, and build new ways of being and learning.
Building on prior work that describes the importance of emancipatory research in educational policy and practice (e.g., Alvarez-Blanco & Torres, 2019; Behar-Horenstein & Feng, 2015; Motha, Makgamatha & Swartz, 2019), the proposed volume would provide readers with concrete examples of critically-oriented methods in education research, as well as in-depth explorations of the insights, learning and envisioning that are possible when one undertakes this type of research. This collective volume would help demonstrate how critical methods in education can serve as pathways for social change through their impact on the researchers themselves, their students and participants, and the communities and institutions within which they are embedded. Specifically, we hope that this collection of articles would
• expand the field’s conceptions of research methods;
• help researchers and practitioners to imagine innovative ways of answering pressing educational questions in order to promote individual and collective transformation;
• articulate the power and potential of emancipatory methods to build collective, justice-oriented understandings, capacity, and action;
• promote thinking around the creative ways that educators might engage education stakeholders (i.e., families, students and communities) the collective creation of knowledge;
• provide readers with a sense of the varied ways that emancipatory research projects can look and feel;
• provide readers with a sense of the critical questions that can emerge in emancipatory research, and how these questions/tensions can also serve as pathways to new learnings in education.
In addition, we expect that this volume might catalyze a dialogue among researchers and practitioners about the pedagogical and epistemological assumptions that underlie their work, their definitions of rigor, partnership and knowledge, and how they conceptualize the relationship between research and practice.
This Research Topic highlights innovative emancipatory approaches to educational research with a particular focus on manuscripts that define, illustrate, vision, and grapple with engaging critical methods in schools and out-of-school time programs. Among other possible topics, authors may (a) describe innovative methods for emancipatory research, (b) share learnings from a specific research context or project, (c) describe an emancipatory research journey, (d) grapple with a tension that emerges in emancipatory research, (e) consider the utility of emancipatory research for individual or collective transformation, or (f) consider how future educators, scholars and activists might best be trained in emancipatory methods. Regardless of their focus, all manuscripts should, take care to draw on critical frameworks; explore questions that centralize the needs, resistance or visions of consistently marginalized communities; address social power, privilege, and intersectional oppression as well as researcher positionality; and consider how their work supports the collective struggle for social justice or imagining or envisioning a more humanizing and just world.
We welcome empirical pieces as well as pieces that describe process-oriented aspects of the research, such as the relationships, processes, protocols, and tensions that emerge throughout the research cycle. Similarly, we welcome pieces that blur the line between research and practice, either as a result of authorship or location or method. To this end, pieces are not required to be written in the format of a traditional education research paper, and we are open to receiving essays, narrative or arts-centered contributions.
Oppression and marginalization are consistent features across the globe, as are resistance, joy, and the pursuit of liberation. Throughout history, social justice movements, social justice organizations, and scholars have acknowledged the potential and possibility of disciplined inquiry and research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose power and colonialism, and offer pathways to greater equity and freedom.
Emancipatory research (also referred to as critical or liberatory research) is an umbrella term that includes a wide set of research frameworks rooted in critical theory (e.g., critical feminist, disability, race, and queer theory) and an equally broad set of dialectic methods (e.g., narrative, arts-based, participatory, embodied, and action-oriented methods). These frameworks and methodological approaches share a set of emancipatory objectives that include: (1) redefining who is the researcher and who is researched, (2) shifting whose forms of knowledge are valued and centralized, (3) being attentive to social power, privilege, and intersectional oppression, and (4) advancing social justice and pursuing liberation for marginalized and oppressed peoples.
Within education—an institutional space dominated by White Supremacy, cis-hetoropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism—emancipatory methods provide a way to center the voices, experiences, and epistemologies of communities that have been, and continue to be, ignored and underserved. Pushing the bounds of the field, emancipatory methods in education elevate critical questions that push back on existing structural inequities and narratives, and seek to imagine, vision, and build new ways of being and learning.
Building on prior work that describes the importance of emancipatory research in educational policy and practice (e.g., Alvarez-Blanco & Torres, 2019; Behar-Horenstein & Feng, 2015; Motha, Makgamatha & Swartz, 2019), the proposed volume would provide readers with concrete examples of critically-oriented methods in education research, as well as in-depth explorations of the insights, learning and envisioning that are possible when one undertakes this type of research. This collective volume would help demonstrate how critical methods in education can serve as pathways for social change through their impact on the researchers themselves, their students and participants, and the communities and institutions within which they are embedded. Specifically, we hope that this collection of articles would
• expand the field’s conceptions of research methods;
• help researchers and practitioners to imagine innovative ways of answering pressing educational questions in order to promote individual and collective transformation;
• articulate the power and potential of emancipatory methods to build collective, justice-oriented understandings, capacity, and action;
• promote thinking around the creative ways that educators might engage education stakeholders (i.e., families, students and communities) the collective creation of knowledge;
• provide readers with a sense of the varied ways that emancipatory research projects can look and feel;
• provide readers with a sense of the critical questions that can emerge in emancipatory research, and how these questions/tensions can also serve as pathways to new learnings in education.
In addition, we expect that this volume might catalyze a dialogue among researchers and practitioners about the pedagogical and epistemological assumptions that underlie their work, their definitions of rigor, partnership and knowledge, and how they conceptualize the relationship between research and practice.
This Research Topic highlights innovative emancipatory approaches to educational research with a particular focus on manuscripts that define, illustrate, vision, and grapple with engaging critical methods in schools and out-of-school time programs. Among other possible topics, authors may (a) describe innovative methods for emancipatory research, (b) share learnings from a specific research context or project, (c) describe an emancipatory research journey, (d) grapple with a tension that emerges in emancipatory research, (e) consider the utility of emancipatory research for individual or collective transformation, or (f) consider how future educators, scholars and activists might best be trained in emancipatory methods. Regardless of their focus, all manuscripts should, take care to draw on critical frameworks; explore questions that centralize the needs, resistance or visions of consistently marginalized communities; address social power, privilege, and intersectional oppression as well as researcher positionality; and consider how their work supports the collective struggle for social justice or imagining or envisioning a more humanizing and just world.
We welcome empirical pieces as well as pieces that describe process-oriented aspects of the research, such as the relationships, processes, protocols, and tensions that emerge throughout the research cycle. Similarly, we welcome pieces that blur the line between research and practice, either as a result of authorship or location or method. To this end, pieces are not required to be written in the format of a traditional education research paper, and we are open to receiving essays, narrative or arts-centered contributions.
