Putting the steam back into critique?‘Gathering’ for critical–dissensual collaborations in education policy research

Introduction

A gathering, that is, a thing, an issue, inside a Thing, an arena, can be very sturdy, too, on the condition that the number of its participants, its ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, not be limited in advance. (Latour, 2004: 246)

Dissensus, as one of the key ideas that we draw on, brings into question the terms by which we agree to disagree. Its politics forces thought toward active engagement with this questioning of the agreed disagreements (for example, when it agreed that there is a ‘for’ and ‘against’ in a debate and the terms of the argument and the process for unfolding this dispute are laid out beforehand).

A politics of dissensus, like any politics, is concerned with ‘What particular choices present themselves in this here and now?’, ‘What is at stake in those choices?’ and ‘How might those choices be made?’; but, unlike the politics of consensus, where those questions are ruled out of play after a consensus has been agreed, in dissensus those questions continue to remain active (Verran, 2015: 54).

Before we do that, though, we will briefly discuss our work in light of Latour’s question, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’ (Latour, 2004). This will show why our thinking about how our education policy research ‘critique from afar’ (research on others) may have faltered; and we hope it will help to make clear why we are proposing resources for doing critical research, with (a diversity of) others.

Critically collaborative beginnings?

With respect to the topic of this paper one might say that what we term ‘critical collaboration’ is a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, the ‘critical’ part aligns with the critical policy sociology work of Stephen Ball (e.g. Ball, 2008): working against the power relations that constitute education as integral to the ongoing reproduction of inequality. On the other hand, our use of ‘collaboration’ signals an orientation to research that does not aim to ‘reveal’, understand or otherwise explain social processes. Rather, the aim is to work in these processes, and change them, with others. Thus in the contradiction of the critical collaboration combination we are trying to extend our work on thinking about and doing research as ontological (Singh et al., 2014) – shifting into territory opened up by Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemologies – where responsibility for what comes to matter (in both senses of the word) is embedded into knowledge work and its relationally emerging realities.

Latour offers us a way into the ‘critical collaboration’ contradiction.

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. (Latour, 2004: 246)

How might the unmasking calculation we have highlighted above be interrupted? What is an alternative to reflexively realised epistemological diffidence? We offer two suggestions. The first has two features. The first feature is to ‘move’ from epistemological diffidence to epistemological certainty; the second feature is that this certainty involves working with ontological indeterminacy. So, rather than being diffident about knowledge, the approach we are pursuing here would acknowledge the ‘ongoing-ness’ of reality, so that realities are not secure until they are practised (see Barad, 2007); they are indeterminate. This places ‘us’ in the thick of the ‘ontological action’ and brings to the fore the responsibility that goes with being ‘involved’ in what comes to matter (in both senses, see Barad, 2007).

The second suggestion relates to this ‘certainty’ work in dissensual relations. This is not optional, as we see it. Certainty, and who ‘we’ are, has to be composed along the way – in dissensus. Furthermore, this work is undertaken in the full radical openness of unfolding indeterminacy. To summarise: instead of epistemological diffidence, work toward ‘knowing with certainty’ – being certain of what ‘we’ know, how, and so on (though how we might compose this certainty, and the ‘we’, is part of the process). So we (the ‘we’ composed in the process) reject the desire to unmask while at the same time attempting to work toward epistemological certainty. Whenever something feels as though it might be ‘revealed’ or ‘understood’ there has to be a certainty about this. It is not possible to say that we have ‘found’ this but then use a diffidence escape clause. The first step toward gathering therefore is to move from epistemological diffidence toward indeterminate, dissensual, certainty.

However, in addition to this (and perhaps contrary to our suggestion for dissensual certainty), the power of critique in education policy research plays (unwittingly?) into the immensity and interconnectedness of problem–solution matrices (problems and their putative solutions linked with and linking ecological, Anthropocenic disaster, terrorism, ‘Trumpism’, economic nationalism, and so on) from which ‘we’ (researchers) are no longer able easily to stand apart. So, while ‘we’ may focus on policy or education, we cannot allow this focus to remain only here. We have to be able to ‘think par le milieu’ (with, and in, the middle of things) (Stengers, 2005). Attempts to explain or analyse what others are doing require ongoing and direct engagement with the problems that they themselves face. We have to work with, and into, the situations created by both their own responsibilities and obligations (Stengers, 2005) – and ours. At the same time, however, we must work in the middle of how connected ‘things’ are – our so-called ‘open’ social systems (see Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999) – in the midst of entangled emergent nature–culture systemic responsibilities (see Barad, 2007).

Building on these two beginnings, our task here is to create theoretical–methodological resources to enter into (both as a way to enter into and as resources used toward that end) situations for ‘gathering’ (in the Latourian sense). However, and we think that this is crucial in light of the indeterminacy of things, after this entry the resources must be able to survive in circumstances for which they might not be well-suited (after all, they have been made elsewhere). They will have to withstand the ‘objections’ that our emerging research situations raise against them, and, if they are found wanting, we need to find others, or augment them, but in any case make a ‘response’ (see Haraway, 2015; Heimans et al., 2015).

‘Cautioning’ collaboration

This article emerges from a number of partnership research projects concerning education and inequality (see Glasswell et al., 2010; Heimans et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2014; Singh et al., 2013 for details of these). Our key problem, as researchers working in so-called disadvantaged schools and communities, concerns the relation that education (and education research) has to inequality. Poverty persists despite years of research and policy interventions. One of the paradoxes of education research is that so much has been completed, especially through sociological work, but so much still remains unchanged; the possibility of reducing inequality through understanding its possible (re)production through education continues to elude us. However, we do not of course wish to suggest that this is just a problem of research, its methods and outcomes, that can somehow be elided from the circumstances that has made this kind of research work possible.

With respect to ‘cautioning’ the starter concepts we propose are bound up in the following:

Our complicity with, and within, milieus (Stengers, 2015) that reproduce inequality, asking: how can we work as critical researchers in full recognition of our complicity in, and with, the objects of our work; recognising that our ‘system’ (research, education, democracy and so on) re-produces inequality so that whatever criteria (our theory/methods/analytics/interpretations/revelations) by which we are able to judge others and our own work are always part of the problem, and connectedly.

Gathering the ‘starter concepts’

The starter concepts for Latourian ‘gatherings’ we are articulating here are intended to open up space for new arenas of thinking about seemingly intractable social problems. They are based on what we have learnt in the process of doing design-based co-inquiry research (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012) in high poverty communities. Two questions guide our thinking.

How would we do it differently next time; and

Rosi Braidotti summarised the practical–theoretical angle we are aiming for here. It is work that aims for new configurations of thinking toward

[a] new generation of ‘knowing subjects’ who affirm a constructive type of pan-humanity by working hard to free [ourselves] from the provincialism of the mind, the sectarianism of ideologies, the dishonesty of grandiose posturing, and the grip of fear. (Braidotti, 2013: 11)

With these beginnings in mind the ‘starter concepts’ that we discuss here have emerged out of an abductive process of field-working in philosophy (Heimans, 2016); and the idea of ‘doing’ concept work arises from Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation for philosophy to create concepts (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). This process has involved visiting workplaces (schools and universities) interviewing researchers, district administrators, teachers and principals, trying to make sense of those interviews, reading and writing widely, and attempting to do justice to this process. Our approach has been to slow rationality down (Stengers, 2005), worrying about what is coming to matter (Barad, 2007) (next). It would be better here to write more about the ‘process’ of deriving the ideas to follow, but the truth is that they have not emerged in a linear or progressive manner:

They have not arisen out of predetermined analytic processes, or the detection of themes; and

Rather, they have jumped out of the haptic connections of thinking/writing/reading (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005): a diffident, non-productive, non-reductive set of largely imaginative and un-reconstructable, anarchic processes tending toward flattening out our hierarchies of thought, often arriving unwanted and blurry, while we have been engaged in other practices. ²

The starter concepts are:

‘Unforesee-ability’;

Interlude: partnerships and practice?

There is a strong literature on partnership research that is growing and becoming more differentiated and nuanced as it increases in size. For example, Gutiérrez and Penuel (2014) highlighted some methods for researching education practice that ‘[do not] require researchers to specify ahead of time all the elements of an intervention, since practitioners participate in design, and implementation data inform an iterative design process that often transforms interventions’ (Gutiérrez and Penuel, 2014: 21). Gutiérrez and Penuel also asked ‘What is a partnership if the research plan is fully predefined by researchers?’ (Gutiérrez and Penuel, 2014: 21). Our present article offers an approach that draws on this line of questioning, but perhaps also makes a leap away from it. Simply stated, the conceptualisations we outline here involve researching with practitioners – taken in the broadest possible sense – as people who are affected by and/or contribute to problems in education (for example, parents, students, policy makers) but where the outcomes of the processes of participation are unforeseeable at the instigation of the research. This is one element of our proposal. We also work toward resolving a tension that Gutiérrez and Penuel identified between starting with a ‘germ cell’ idea and having research emerge ‘across iterations with and by participants’ (Gutiérrez and Penuel, 2014: 21) and having a fully developed design before starting.

However, is working with ‘practice’ as a dominant mode of rationality really such a good idea? Not if you read Popkewitz’s critique. He suggested that:

Practice is the contemporary equivalent of the medieval Philosopher’s Stone, seeking educational perfection through reforms that change teaching and teachers. The focus on practice is, at one level, born in the frustration that the massive efforts to reform schools since the second half of the 20th century have not been successful. The concern for practice is also historical. It embodies a particular style of reasoning about science found at the turn of the 20th century American Progressive social sciences to provide knowledge for responding to the changing urban and industrial society. Today, research on practice is defined as essential for educators to find successful strategies for meeting the social and educational commitments of quality and equality. (Popkewitz, 2016: 52)

Our ideas here also align with Tierney’s suggestion that, ‘The obligation of the intellectual has to be beyond the ivory tower’ (Tierney, 2013: 301). William Tierney was making the point, with which we agree, that while speaking to one another (for example by writing journal articles) as intellectuals is a likely and common modus operandi, it is just not enough. We need to do more, and to do this ‘more’, as a matter of urgency: the question, however, is how.

As suggested above, the methodological–theoretical thinking we will outline is not straightforwardly epistemological in terms of the relations between the ‘how’ – that is, what people in the research might do – and whatever knowledge is produced as a result. Rather, it aligns with Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemology where responsibility for what ‘comes to matter’ (in both senses of the word) is crucial. How we are able to put this kind of ‘ontological responsibility’ into practice is the key question and one about which we hope to contribute some ideas here. Fundamental to this is the understanding that research is performative (Law and Urry, 2004) – it changes the world – and it takes place in the world not on it. Research is reconfiguring ‘the world’ and what responsible research might be – becoming responsible for the worlds we create through our actions. As Barad has stated: ‘[W]e are responsible for the world within which we live, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices which we have a role in shaping’ (Barad, 1998: 102).

The rest of the article discusses each of the ‘starter concepts’ in turn for slowing down the rationalities inherent in educational research on one hand and, on the other, for enabling critical–dissensual collaboration to occur.

Starter concept 1: unforesee-ability – recognition of relevance to practice after the fact

We respond directly to the concerns and ideas that Gutiérrez and Penuel (2014) raised in their work, and Popkewitz’s (2016) critique of practice-focused research. Gutiérrez and Penuel (2014) suggested that relevance to practice should be a criterion for rigour in research. We believe that relevance to practice might become one criterion, but the status we attach to ‘relevance as recognition’ means that problems and solutions of people with an ongoing stake in the outcomes of the research create criteria that themselves are unforeseeable at the outset of entering a partnership. In shaping our thinking here we draw on Popkewitz’s critique of how research in education is trapped in the possibility of planning in the present for a desired future, where this hoped-for future is connected with changing teachers and their practices. He said that,

The designing of the present for the future appears in different nooks and crannies of research; from the idea that of research to identify ‘what works’ and the search for ‘practical knowledge’ and the reflective practitioners whose action research is to usher in what the researcher desires as the expert and effective teacher. (Popkewitz, 2016: 46)

Our suggestion is that relevance needs from the start to be openly directed to all the practices that are identified in the processes of working in partnership. Thus there is no single practice for which the partnership research will be relevant. How the research will be relevant, and to whose practices, are factors that will emerge over the time and space of the project. Second, we suggest that practices may change sustainably when the relevance to practice comes in the form of a recognition of this relevance post facto – so that long term change occurs when concepts that were previously unthinkable have a chance to enter into practices that practitioners recognise after the fact as being relevant in some way. How this relevance is accounted for and in what form it might appear in practices are unforeseeable from the outset. ³

Before entering into our first large-scale research partnership project, our research practices involved standard qualitative research procedures with assumptions about the places of theory, methods, data, and so on (even though we have undertaken this work ‘critically’). We have realised along the way, however, that these processes are deeply flawed when trying to work on and in the complexity and fluidity of partnership research. We are now using our writing to think through our learnings and are simultaneously embarking on changing our research practices (see Singh et al., 2014; Singh et al., 2013).

We are also working on rethinking other standardised research procedures such as the interview, via proposing the ‘intra-view’, or ‘intra-sensorium’, taking a process–relational approach. Here the ‘intra’ signals the move from ‘inter’ relations, where entities pre-exit relations, to the ongoing formation of phenomena out of relations. The ‘sensorium’ recognises the full panoply of ‘sense’, not just the ubiquitous ‘view’ that ‘I’ have of ‘you’. Instead, the ‘I’ and ‘you’ emerge out of relations and these are not just viewed as though through a ‘lens’ (perhaps theoretical and methodological, for example). The ‘view’ links with the rational mind ‘understanding’ an ‘other’. The sensorium involves other myriad ‘senses’ that compose ‘us’ (including of course, a more than human ‘us’ and other than human ‘sense’ (Bennett, 2009)).

Recognition as relevance to practice will therefore be likely to occur after the main body of the collaborative work has been undertaken. There may in fact be a strong relation between when the recognition of relevance occurs and how sustainable/impactful it is. Our thinking at present is that the closer to the end of, or even some time after, the collaboration, the more relevant solutions might be. Practitioners might only strongly recognise relevance after the fact. The strength of this recognition and relevance might therefore depend on deeply embedded recursivity that emerges from the difficulty of working together in indeterminate ways with the goal of creating dissensual certainties in/to emergent problems.

But how would this work in practice? The first thing to say is that this approach puts the researcher and expertise at risk. There will inevitably be a ‘long game’ where ‘attunement’ (see Manning and Massumi, 2014) is the primary mode of action; this is a kind of slow, improvised dance around concept–practice boundaries, with the occasional clumsy partner stepping on toes: ‘is it worth continuing to dance?’ is the question that arises from the stubbed toe. The test of the success of this starter is the arrival of a moment, of an ‘aha’, perhaps well after the collaborations have ended. For example, when doing research into the sustainability of a research partnership in schools serving low SES communities, many teachers told us that they did not realise how the low expectations they held of their students were such an important part of the problem of these students’ low performances on high stakes standardised literacy and numeracy tests. This ‘aha’ shifted their thinking, their presuppositions, about what their students could not do (for many, very well-rehearsed reasons related to poverty and disadvantage), to what they could do (to the fullness of their ability, presupposing their equality of intelligence (Rancière, 1991)).

Starter concept 2: what/as if – politics in action

Politics, on one hand, opens up for examination the interests that knowledge producers and users might have in the search for solutions. A problem of teaching, for example, is a problem of those who teach and those who constitute what teaching might be and be able to do (e.g. researchers, policy makers, teaching experts).

Politics is not just a matter of exposing ‘capitalist’ interests or some hidden agenda about which we might be (perhaps rightly) suspicious. It means dealing carefully with the concerns that researchers and education practitioners have, and the obligations and responsibilities (Stengers, 2010) they have, regarding the full variety/cast of their respondents. Could matters of fact (for example in the sound identification of a problem and whose practice it is located in) be reconstituted as matters of concern (see Latour 2015; Heimans, 2012; Latour, 2004)?

In asking ‘what if we…?’, the policy matters, whose future about what might ‘be’ right to do as a solution, are not delayed into an interminably hopeful utopia where knowledge spins on the logics of knowledge makers – only to arrive later as a solution to a problem which was both determined by them and whose parameters have changed over time. In such a scenario, what it is to know/knowledge arrives too late, and the need for more knowledge-making arises. Whatever a practitioner has to learn as a proposed solution is already being made redundant, because the truth of whatever the learning is based on is both someone else’s and removed from the temporal, spatial and responsibility/obligations’ particularities from which it arose.

On the other hand, politics means two further things. First, it involves a reconfiguration of the sensible (Rancière, 2004) – the opening of a space that did not appear, on the surface of things, to exist – to open thought that could not be thought and speech that could not be spoken. Second, it involves the presupposition of the equality of intelligence that all people share and which might be verified in practice (Rancière, 1991). Both of these versions of the politics–knowledge relation involve radical breaks and reconfigurations that will be difficult to achieve and impossible to plan for.

Just to be clear about this, we think Rancière’s ‘equality’ is worth trying out and so we do not propose it here as something that should be aimed for in the future but, rather, as an opinion we seek to verify in practice. Equality has to be presupposed – or, as Rancière says, it is nothing. In this way we can begin to enact the as if. This also does not mean that all kinds of knowledge will be equally valued or valuable, or that there is equality among the positions that people occupy in the social space. ⁴

The reality of inequality is easy to see and depends on the ongoing delay that its verification instils. Hence the opinion that – in spite of the evidence that confirms the ‘rightness’ of inequality – people have an equality of intelligence and a capacity derived from this intelligence to act. Remembering that, those who have a part are the people who play a role in saying what counts as, for example, education. What are the roles that have capacities and functions assigned to them; that have a place in education; and how is the sensible of education distributed, who is ‘fit’ for, capable of, participation?

As Rancière wrote, it would be wrong to understand those without a part as simply an excluded group from the community. They are not only excluded, they also make up what might be described as a ‘constitutive other’ against which the ideal of the community is constructed, those whose qualities make them unfit for participation in the demos (Baiocchi and Connor, 2013: 92).

Rancière’s work cannot be easily categorised (Pelletier, 2009: 565), but, as Biesta noted,

The ingenuity of Rancière’s work lies first and foremost in the fact that he is able to show that what is carried out under and in the name of equality, democracy, and emancipation often results in its opposite in that it reproduces inequality and keeps people in their place. What matters, therefore, is not that we are committed to equality, democracy, and emancipation, but how we are committed to these concepts and how we express and articulate this commitment. (Biesta, 2010: 56–57)

Starter concept 3: educational design heuristics

Design heuristics are used in engineering and design (see Kramer et al., 2014; Kramer et al., 2015). They are tools that designers and engineers use for creating concepts and solutions to problems. Our use is related; however, rather than posit them as a tool we suggest that instead they are starter concepts. Thus in this sense they are by definition meant to start something, though they may change along the way. ⁶

Educational design heuristics are intended to be read together by citizens, policymakers, researchers, educational institution staff, the ‘no part’ (Rancière, 2007), as a provocation to action; as a resource for thinking/acting ‘otherwise’ about how to work on problems (which emerge out of ‘collaborations’ and ‘gatherings’) that have no easy solutions – but engaging with which, and making progress toward solving, are nonetheless both very important; and for thinking and acting educationally (Biesta, 2006).

An educational design heuristic is a framework with a dissolving frame. As a result, the ‘nature’ of the ‘work’ is constantly under renegotiation. An educational design heuristic is a crossing of ideas that do not line up easily. Where they do intersect, there are lines of tension – conceptual difficulties that we hope ‘invite in’ a range of materials, that create ‘lines of force’, and constraints with potential re-orderings that open up in the flow of working on things together. They are based on readings that are divergent and irreconcilable.

This divergence is purposeful so that ‘we’ might act together, not toward agreement, nor expecting that we will come to solutions with any speed; rather, what is implied here is a long-term commitment to ongoing disagreement – to taking seriously (in an ontological sense) the worlds of others and that other worlds are necessary and possible.

The educational design heuristic we suggest here puts together the work that Biesta (2014) has undertaken on the purposes of education (socialisation, qualification, subjectification) with Rancière’s (2004) work on questioning the alignment between given positions, capacities and roles, and with Barad’s (2007) emergent realism – to worry about the space–times that are emerging and what is coming to matter in the process in thinking about education’s purposes and positions, roles and capacities.

These three together will put thinking/acting out of order. Barad’s onto-epistemology could not be more contrary to Rancière’s non-ontological work. Biesta does draw on Rancière, though Rancière is not interested in making straightforward suggestions about the purposes of education. The question arises about how to mobilise these ideas into, and to create, new situations together. We began, in a current project, with reading Biesta together. Questions arose:

How does subjectification, and its linking of emancipation and education together redistribute who and what can make sense about what (and whom)?

Conclusions

A starter concept is thus conjured up for composing in disagreement: toward a politics and ethics of dissensus.

An ethics of dissensus, expressing a metaphysical commitment to emergence of worlds all of apiece in here and now’s, resists established power relations and transforms the negative moment of resistance into the creation of new modes of beings. The emphasis on discontinuous becoming and emergence that this analytic enables shifts the ethical problematic from the concern with universal (or relativised) norms enacted as consensus to tasks of transforming here and now’s beyond present limits. A politics of dissensus, as with any politics, is concerned with: ‘What particular choices present in this here and now?’; ‘What is at stake in those choices?’; ‘How might those choices be made?’; unlike the politics of consensus where those questions are ruled out of play after a consensus has been agreed, in dissensus those questions continue to remain active. Assenting here and now in going on together doing this, is limited and contingent. There is shared recognition that what we do together is subject to a continuing and active deferral of the always hovering possibility of withdrawing assent, of stopping things in their tracks (Verran, 2015: 54).

A starter concept is offered as a resource for opening up critique toward dissensus, to include a diversity of ‘others’, in substantive ways. These others include the people and objects we are researching with (for example teachers, students, technologies) and various theories, methodologies and so on. In addition, and this relates to letting others ‘in’, critical–dissensual collaboration affords the various elements of our research the opportunity to keep renegotiating productive settlements with others. Here we are thinking in particular of the relations between the empirical, theoretical and the aims of the research to make a difference.

If we are able to put at risk the presupposing we do that is bound up with our theories, the methodological tools they invite, and the perceptions we have of our work and its impacts, and the way we view the ‘empirical’ and ‘data’, and stop, what might we be able to do in that space that opens for and by dissensus? Whatever that becomes, we hope that it will be an ‘addition’ – one that not only adds to reality but also adds to the possibility of continuing to do critical policy research which expands criticality to the vagaries that such ‘addition’ invokes; and by ‘gathering’ in dissensus. This is how we see some new beginnings for our critical policy scholarship to inform policy differently, and with ontological dissensual diffidence.

‘Disagreement’ and ‘dissensus’ do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as ‘where are we?’, ‘who are we?’, ‘what makes us a we?’, and ‘what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?’ (Rancière, 2009: 116)