Abstract
Based on a recent inaugural lecture, this article presents a critical appreciation and analysis of the application of different research methodologies to selected social and educational research contexts. The analysis is set against the backdrop of an ontological question concerning the possibility of truth. Specifically, it seeks to explore the untenability of any notion of absolute truth in contemporary qualitative inquiry, and examines the corollary implications for determining the nature, role and status of research. It is argued that the ability to challenge convention offers the possibility and the productive capacity to unsettle dominant research methodologies, while also critiquing normative social and professional research practices. Utilising three contrasting methodological frameworks – Gadamerian hermeneutics; Foucauldian theory; and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory – the narrative follows a journey of personal development and shows how seemingly different and diverse theoretical perspectives can reveal critical new insights on contemporary social research issues and practices, cultures, and communities.
Introduction
This article draws substantially on an inaugural lecture, ‘Challenging convention(s): Methodological explorations in contemporary qualitative inquiry’, which I gave in May 2014 at the University of Chester. In many ways, the theme and articulated substance represent a very personal journey: one of discovery, challenge, curiosity, and sustained intellectual development, charted over time. It also reflects a keen emphasis on research methodology, the underpinning philosophies for the variety of approaches adopted throughout my career, dating back to my doctoral experience in the late 1990s.
One of the most difficult challenges in writing the inaugural lecture was deciding how best to capture the methodological diversity of my work. How to incorporate the spirit of a critically reflexive orientation in the content of the spoken lecture was thus a prime consideration. In practice, this involved thinking critically and creatively about which aspects to privilege and select in, but also, crucially, what to leave out of a growing body of work which has been increasingly characterised by inter-disciplinarity and theoretical eclecticism. In the end, the theme of research methodology resonated strongest and loudest, and spoke most persuasively of my academic identity. It reflects who I am and how I think, and, because of this fact, has perhaps received more critical attention over my career compared with other aspects of scholarly engagement. Thus, I elected to focus upon three significant yet conceptually disparate theoretical influences on my thinking and writing. Such methodological explorations reflect the apparent untenability of any notion of absolute truth, while simultaneously providing the potential of speaking a provisional ‘truth’ to power, across different and diverse contexts of social and educational discourse, research policy, and practice.
The title of the article itself presents an interesting point of departure and context for critical discussion methodologically. The etymology of the term convention derives from the Latin conventionalis, or the ‘nature of an agreement’, of what counts inter-subjectively, and of the use to which it is put, both socially and professionally. Here, the purpose is to raise some critical questions concerning the epistemological basis on which such agreements are reached in the absence of an ontological foundation of truth. In addition, I want to probe further in the light of often frequent concerns and disagreements in the field of social and professional research enquiry.
The first influence derives from an article co-authored with an early mentor and now retired colleague Professor Phil Hodkinson, entitled Can there be criteria for selecting research criteria: A hermeneutical analysis of an inescapable dilemma (Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998). The theme of the article challenges convention by questioning the basis on which the legacy and pervasive influence of a positivist epistemology, and its attendant preoccupation with method as a route to genuine knowledge, is conceptually premised. In this critique, the article challenges the apparent obsession with the search for permanent or universal criteria for judging quality in research. Yet I suggest that this analysis is not merely limited to the theme of judging research quality. It has, significantly, a much wider application to the concept of truth, as well as our understanding of the nature of convention in arange of social, educational, and professional research contexts. Reflecting back on the article, some 16 years on, it is appropriate to set the historical context in order to appreciate the argument hermeneutically. This approach is in any case wholly appropriate given theparticular emphasis on historicity that is fundamental and conceptually pertinent to philosophical hermeneutics.
Politics of research
At the time of writing, back in 1997, there had been a considerable shift in the politics of ‘what counts as knowledge’ within the field of educational research. The debate was perhaps sparked in the UK by Professor David Hargreaves, at the annual lecture of the Teacher Training Agency in 1996, when he argued that educational research provided ‘poor value for money’ (Hargreaves, 1996: 1). That is, in order to become a research-based profession such research would need to change both in type and, more significantly, in terms of how it was organised. The espoused concept was built on the philosophy of a positivist epistemology. The ideal of an accumulation of knowledge was promoted to ensure that teachers, much like medical professionals, were able to draw upon a ‘shared technical language’. This could be counted ‘authentic’ and replicable, and would paradoxically serve to determine research quality a priori through the assembly of an evidence-based medical model.
Subsequently, the release of the report by James Tooley and Doug Darby: Educational Research: A Critique (Tooley and Darby, 1998) further added to the view that educational research was not making the contribution to understanding that it should. It was becoming rather, as Chris Woodhead (a former Chief Inspector of Ofsted) put it in the foreword, ‘at best no more than an irrelevance and distraction’ (p.1). Together, these interventions exacerbated a somewhat depressing scenario, and further escalated paranoia surrounding the theme of quality in educational research. This activity, according to its many detractors, should always be judged against preordained criteria, which should provide the defining rules for research engagement, in particular the view that outcomes should render explicit the effects as well as effectiveness of what teachers do in classrooms. The corollary implication would displace the idea that outcomes are the very things which follow research activity, i.e. emerge and ‘come out’, rather than being either fixed or paradoxically predetermined in advance.
In many respects, little has changed in the last 16 years. Similar arguments continue to be made regarding the purpose and role of educational research. In the UK, for example, this is manifest in a variety of ways that continue to reflect the impact of a neo-liberal imaginary. Indeed, the emphasis is also germane and more widely applicable to other western Anglophone societies, including New Zealand, Australia, and the United States (Allach, 2013; Connell, 2013; Denzin, 2009; ERA, 2012). In the UK, the pervasive influence of globalisation and neo-liberal politics has resulted in the further regulation and control of the educational improvement agenda. This is especially true in terms of what counts as valid, relevant research and how education has curiously come to function as a governmental apparatus. (Examples of this tendency are former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove’s mooted independent review of initial teacher training to define what counts as ‘effective practice’; and the idea of the alliance of ‘teaching schools’ [a projected 600 schools by 2016] to encourage ‘research and development’ linked to strategic priorities and thus to impact on practice.) Such developments reinforce the view, in relation to David Hargreaves’ thesis, that teachers, and not university academics, are the ones who should be doing educational research in order to improve on practice.
More than this we have seen, in the UK and elsewhere, a tightening up of the apparatus of peer reviewing in a variety of academic and educational research contexts; for example, in the UK the submission of abstracts to the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, where the prevailing criteria of quality, timeliness, national/international significance, and impact on practice, policy, or theory are now enshrined in the reviewing process. In similar vein, we have witnessed comparable developments in the publication process of the British Educational Research Journal. This includes the emphasis and shift in cultural politics towards empirical research and empiricism more generally, and in relation to what counts as ‘good quality’ research, where alternative research perspectives and approaches (including, for example, postmodern and/or post-structural work and critical race perspectives) are more marginal and considerably less conspicuous. It is significant that both examples align with the discourse and prevailing view and criteria of the Research Excellence Framework (or with a similar nuance in Australia (Excellence in Research for Australia, 2012) and New Zealand (Performance-Based Research Fund, 2014)), where stories of ‘impact’ are inseparably interwoven with notions of international excellence, if not always perceptibly ‘world-class’ research.
Lastly, but no less significantly, we can observe the presence of conventional, ‘realist’ research criteria: validity, reliability, and generalisability, elaborated in many popular social science research texts. These are not merely linked with education but can be found in association with other research contexts including, for example nursing, social work, sport, and sports coaching. Thus, the critical question is to ask and further understand why this might be the case: that research must comply with particular preordained standards and rules or run the risk of simply being classed as not research. If we can achieve this it might be possible to assess how to entertain a fresh and more radically compelling perspective. For example, producing more open research can demonstrate greater recognition of the need for diversity, and yet do so with a moral compass that shows more humility, less certainty, and a willingness to proceed with ever greater caution, virtue, and integrity.
Philosophical hermeneutics in research
Through an appreciation and understanding of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1979; Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998), I argue it is possible to examine and challenge the assumptions on which hegemonic research processes and practices are often uncritically asserted and then casually propagated. A more constructive way forward can begin with the acknowledgement that the selection of criteria, to guide our judgements and research engagements, should be related to the nature of the particular inquiry, piece of research, or social and educational context under evaluation. This is because, for Gadamer (1979), the ‘project of formulating correct criteria, by which interpretations of the world [or indeed schools or other social and educational settings] can be made is a futile aim’ (Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998: 528). Similarly, the idea that it might be possible to expose truth through ‘method’ is an arguably inappropriate and mistaken view. Instead, following Heidegger, it is ‘the phenomenon of understanding that is crucial to human existence and the ontological character of its linguistic makeup that is central to our being’ (Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998: 528). Gadamer begins his analysis about the nature of knowing and understanding with a critique of the aesthetic consciousness. He argues that it is neither content nor form that is central to the aesthetic experience, but rather the actual thing which is meant that is most significant. Accordingly: the understanding of art does not arrive through a process of “methodically cutting or dividing it as an object” (Palmer, 1969: 168). Nor, for that matter, does it reveal itself through the artificial separation of its content and form. Instead, its meaning is derived from the context in which the experience (between the interpreter and work of art) has taken place, where it is both within and through the experience itself that meaning comes into being. (Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998: 528)
In the context of judging quality in research, Gadamer’s (1979) analysis suggests that although the content and form of written research are significant, they are not themselves central to the experience of reading and understanding such research. Lists of criteria imply, and further require the artificial separation of content and form from the context in which any reading takes place. Yet because interpretation and meaning derive from the experience of reading itself, this is one which unavoidably occasions the reader’s disposition and prejudices (located in a contingent historical tradition), as they are brought into view. Sometimes the encounter is challenging and uncomfortable, for placing one’s prejudices at risk involves being open and receptive to reflection and change, as horizons collide and merge through discursive interchange and meaningful dialogical encounter. In summary, this analysis suggests that: the process of judging research would be integral to the [r]eader’s experience of the text, and the choice and application of criteria, whether conscious or tacit, would emanate from the text, from the dispositions of [the reader], and from the historically, socially and culturally situated interactions between the two. (Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998: 530–531)
Foucauldian theory in sports coaching
The next part of the article shifts the attention and focus somewhat towards the influence of Foucauldian theory on my thinking, writing, and methodological orientation. Broadly considered, if Gadamerian hermeneutics is concerned with the project of exploring the ‘deep’ or ‘implicit’ meaning of culture and everyday practices, however positioned in relation to one’s self-understanding, then ontologically speaking Foucault is more concerned with the social effects of such everyday practices, and particularly with the role of institutions and their influence and bearing upon discursive practices. This is not to fathom a rule-governed system, but rather to trace their emergence in relation to dominant social practices. Such analysis sensitises us to the way that discourses speak into existence the practices to which they refer, which enables Foucault to raise the genealogical questions: how are these discourses used, and what role do they play in society?
Having previously employed Foucault’s panoptic metaphor (Foucault, 1977) to explore the technology of school discipline and its appropriation of power through the modern techniques of surveillance (Garratt, 1998), more recently I revisited his work to examine the idea and practice of safeguarding and child protection in the context of sports coaching (Garratt et al., 2013). This is a theme that has much greater resonance and meaning beyond the immediate social, cultural, and professional context considered here. The value of genealogical analysis lies in its recognition of the inter-relationship between discourse, power, and knowledge. Broadly speaking, all discourses represent more than simple words or linguistic units because they have a particular function, which varies according to context and can be often contradictory. When words and things meet they do so within particular relations of power in order to produce specific forms of knowledge. Such knowledge, in turn, makes it possible for some statements but not others to be made, and for people to be spoken about in particular ways. This manifestation is historically and culturally produced and arises at certain key moments in time.
Thus, methodologically, genealogy offers a productive way of studying discourse in order to reveal power-knowledge networks, where discourse produces meaning and certain effects. The kinds of objects and subjects are diverse, for example, teachers, coaches, and higher education professionals, upon whom, and through which relations of power are manifest and productively realised. In this way discourses are always uncertain, and truth infinitely deferred. There is no hidden essence contained within a policy or discursive text. As Foucault would say, genealogies have ‘several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies’ (Foucault, 2002: 5). Thus, ‘discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of an origin, but treated as and when it occurs’ (p.28).
I was able to apply this perspective and other elements of a Foucauldian conceptual framework to the context of safeguarding in sports coaching, one outcome from an ESRC-funded research project (Piper et al., 2012). Safeguarding’ sports coaching: Foucault, genealogy and critique (Garratt et al., 2013) draws critical attention to the influence and effect of policy discourse in constructing the field of sports coaching and in speaking into existence the particular practices to which coaching refers, and is further constituted epistemologically.
Through this methodological frame, it was possible to trace the continuities in policy making over time, while also identifying significant discontinuities. These are what Foucault refers to as key points of diffraction, which change the historical emphasis with the resultant effect of transforming contemporary practice in ways that are not always positive. In seeking to expose the discursive terrain on which safeguarding and child protection policy have emerged and developed in sports coaching, it was equally important to recognise, quoting Foucault, that ‘discursive practices are relational modalities, with networks and connections’ (Foucault, 2002: 59; Garratt et al., 2013: 617). Their dispersion across the boundaries of different professional settings gives rise to new ‘practices’ in safeguarding across a wide spectrum of social discourse. Accordingly, the domain of sports coaching is subject to a ‘reciprocal determination’ or ‘interplay’ (Foucault, 2002: 33) between the professions. This is where coaching discourse on safeguarding and child protection meets the influence of similar discourse in the field of health, social work, and education, articulated through the crucible and transmitting authority of Working Together; a guide for inter-agency cooperation for the protection of children from abuse (DHSS, 1988) in tandem with the Children Act (1989) (Garratt et al., 2013).
The Foucauldian frame has significant explanatory power. Its shows how broader concerns about safeguarding and child welfare, coupled with extensive media reporting of serious cases of child abuse and child death inquiries, have produced a reactionary politics in sport. This is a form of politics with arguably serious deleterious consequences for coaching policy and practice (Garratt et al., 2013), because the profusion and ratcheting up of policy appears to have had an unsettling effect on the practice of coaching. Coaching pedagogy is now ‘governed’ by a fear of perceived professional malpractice (of the deviant coach or potential paedophile volunteer). This can be seen through an observing hierarchy of discourses of safeguarding and child protection. It is further reflected in an intangible quality, and effect, of what Foucault (1983) calls, the ‘conduct of conducts’; that is, the ways in which people are both governed and self-governed through a field of action, which guides the possibility of conduct by putting in place the possible outcome. In this respect, ‘acceptable practice’ is that which measures up to the rule and thus complies with the normalising gaze. In turn this gaze has had an arguably toxic effect on intergenerational relationships between coaches and young people, the manifestation of which has produced a situation where neither now knows how to anticipate and/or respond to the other.
Of course, all this is not to say that safeguarding discourses are unimportant. Rather, that it is possible to be serious about protecting children and young people without acting as if, and further encouraging them to believe, that all adults willing to support them are best regarded as potentially dangerous (Garratt et al., 2013). Methodologically, then, what genealogy does is show us that the discourse of safeguarding and child protection cannot be traced to an essence or single origin. Nor should it be construed as ontologically prior. Rather, it is to be seen as one among many competing discourses (albeit a dominant one through the abovementioned observing hierarchy). As such, its ‘truth’ is contingent on a complex constellation of networks of power, authority, and distributed governance.
What the Foucauldian framework shows then is that observed defensive practices between coaches and young people (for example, of coaches policing themselves as well as each other, conscious of concerns around touch and abuse) are, in fact, corollaries of a culture of extensive surveillance. This culture is manifested through intergenerational fear and mistrust, and exacerbated by an escalating and disproportionate paranoia around risk and protection. This is potentially damaging for sport, sports coaching, and, perhaps most fundamentally, what is considered quintessentially ‘human’. Moreover, the substance of this argument is also clearly relevant and more generally applicable to other social and educational contexts, not least, for example, in the context of higher education. Here similar safeguarding discourses are at least as prevalent as those in schools, sports coaching, and/or other spaces in which adults work, either professionally or voluntarily, with young people or other designated vulnerable groups. On this view, the preoccupation with the ongoing agenda to appease the safeguarding agenda has, it can be argued, served to exacerbate a culture of fear and mistrust (Furedi, 2002). The consequence of this has been an escalation of a ubiquitous politics of enhanced scrutiny and surveillance (Garratt et al., 2013).
Psychoanalytic theory and the body
Continuing on my journey, fashioning a shift from Foucault to Lacan, I seized an opportunity to respond to a flier for an international, interdisciplinary conference, ‘Talking Bodies: identity, sexuality and representation’, hosted by the University of Chester in 2013. The proposed theme caused me to reflect on the possibility of examining, in much greater depth, my own corporeality located in the liminal space between identity and embodied masculinity. The analysis would speak to and conduct a critique of the sport of competitive natural bodybuilding, in which I have been a long-term participant. It would interrogate the symbolic representation of a sub-culture that presents as one thing, ‘good, clean, proper’ (in essence ethically pure), while ostensibly practising another. The presumed benefit and outcome would provide an opportunity to challenge the convention of a deviant sub-culture, by revealing a series of untrue truths in relation to dominant cultural practices. It would also reach further methodologically through an exploration and arguably original application of theoretical ideas. This would take the form of a Lacanian psychoanalytic application to the substantive field of natural bodybuilding. Following the conference, the article was published in Qualitative Inquiry (Garratt, 2014).
This excursion proved interesting in a number of rich, challenging, and methodologically diverse ways. For example, as Dean (2003: 244) reminds us, while Foucault’s notion of discourse ‘so effectively accounts for the operations of power, it fails to distinguish the pre-discursive from what exceeds language’s grasp’ – i.e. that which cannot be symbolised. However, as with Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ (as power not invested in an individual but rather across individuals, discourses, and institutions), Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic Order, with its many cultural anchor-points, is quite similar. That said, for Lacan, the cause of desire is not merely a cultural construct located in discourse, but rather contained in an object: l’objet petit a. This object represents language’s impact on the body but is not itself discursive. It is rather a leftover after ‘culture’s symbolic networks have carved up the body’ and produced an ‘imperfect fit between language and corporeality’ (Dean, 2003: 244). It is the remnant that resists symbolisation and, in Žižek’s view, a hole in the Symbolic Order that reveals some secret to be explained (Žižek, 1996, n.p.). Accordingly, the object-cause of desire is extra-discursive, a thing which cannot be ‘mastered by language and therefore cannot be understood as a cultural construct’ (Dean, 2003: 244). Applied to the context of natural bodybuilding, the so-called ‘thing’ is the enigma and deceptive lure of the hyper-muscular and hyper-real. Conveying a deception, this is couched within the ethical frame of the Symbolic Order, with the promise and surface appearance of a pharmaceutically unassisted sport.
Natural bodybuilding as distinct from conventional bodybuilding presents as the ‘clean, pure and innocent’ counterpoint to the pharmacologically enhanced ‘Other’. Put simply (and somewhat unconventionally), it is bodybuilding without drugs (Garratt, 2014). The UK’s three natural organisations are thus posited as authentic representations of the hyper-real and hyper-masculine within a space of unblemished innocence situated at the locus of perceived excess. Yet the concept natural is not, de facto, as pure or complete as it seems. The status of such organisations, for example, as the embodied representation of drug-free competitive sport, produce a prima facie appearance of equality that in actuality reflects a ‘dividing practice’, in the Foucauldian (Foucault, 1977: 50) sense. The spoken purity of the ethical claim allied to a differentiated testing protocol in turn produces a moral hierarchy of difference between the governing bodies. Such technologies are observed through key differences in the rigour and authenticity of different testing protocols. The corollary implication is that polygraphing and urinalysis are technically flawed and therefore unequivocally imperfect (Garratt, 2014).
Moreover, ‘significant gaps in the ethical frameworks that define the sport are exacerbated through the syntactic juxtaposition of ‘natural’ and ‘bodybuilding’ as terms producing an uncanny paradox of the familiar and strange’ (Garratt, 2014: 3). It is a type of seduction in which the ‘normal’ body infiltrated by the image of the hyper-real desires to become a caricature and/or hyperbolic representation of itself. The bodybuilding subject is thus trapped in a narcissistic impasse in which the ‘natural’, so called, is made irreducibly contingent upon the image of the hyper-masculine self, a bigger, stronger, and more muscular body (Garratt, 2014). This is exemplified by ‘Lacan’s (1977) mirror stage, where the image of oneself reflected back produces a distortion that brings a mental permanence, yet also marks the subject’s profound méconnaissance’ (Garratt, 2014: 3). Such misrecognition, a product of forged images, of one’s ideal ego and self-satisfaction, produces an untrue truth for the subject. It is a means of identification and abridgement, through the imaginary order (how I imagine myself to be), as this articulates between self and ‘Other’ (Garratt, 2014). In this uncanny sense, the sport is ‘dependent on the hidden object of the hyper-masculine, which serves to engulf the subject in a realm of excess without dissonance’ (p. 3). Put simply, this is where the putative natural devoid of pharmaceutical assistance, strives to achieve the ‘look’ of the hyper-masculine bodybuilder in a context free of contradiction, if not ultimately of psychological crisis (p.4). The corollary implication emerges at the meeting point of the ethical and corporeal: is it ever possible that the natural body can become the object of its repressed desire? And, how can the hyper-masculine be realised within the Symbolic Order (that is, the person I am supposed to be and thus culturally anchored to) of a pharmaceutically unaided sport? ‘Paradoxically, flaws in the ethical frameworks create the very spaces within which it is possible to engage crisis: the phenomenon of ‘“muscle dysmorphia”… in the corporeal reality of the hyper-masculine’ (p.4).
Conclusion
So, in bringing this article to a close, what might the analysis of an apparently deviant sub-culture have in common with the practice and plight of educational professionals? Methodologically, the Lacanian frame offers a persuasive language with which to explain and depict the significance of the extra-linguistic or remnant that resists representation. In similar vein, teachers often find themselves chasing an unrealisable goal. This chimera or illusory notion of professionalism, presents the putative concept, ‘good teacher’, as a figment resisting symbolisation. Thus, much like ‘good research’ or the ‘good coach’, the ‘good teacher’ becomes a representation of the ‘reality’ to which the concept ‘good practice’ points but can never truly reach. It is an enigma at once deferred and displaced by the emergence and symbolisation of the next new reform, curriculum innovation, or pedagogy presented through a new evangelism. Yet what all such discourses have in common is the ability to conjure the appearance of substance, and ‘truth’ in its absence. They render the uncertain certain, and further secure the provisional in the face of reality which has no true, fixed ontological status. In this context, educational professionals, much like their coaching counterparts, can be interpreted as performative individuals both empowered and constrained at the nexus of Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary orders. Alternatively, in the Foucauldian sense, they are conceived as the masters and slaves of their own professional subjugation. Thus, the ability to challenge convention allows the possibility and productive capacity and potential not to solve what are conceivably largely intractable methodological concepts and problems, but simply recognise them as such.
This latter point has strong resonance with, and significant implications for, our understanding of the concept and role of power, and in particular the effects of truth that power produces and transmits in a variety of social and educational research contexts. Power is not a sovereign force but a heterogeneous, complex social technology situated in the liminal space between individual agency, contemporary structures, and regulatory practices. Thus, its productive potential offers the possibility of new learning opportunities that may be usefully harnessed and developed educationally. In turn, these can aid our understanding of the various mechanisms that shape, for example, dominant research practices and their concomitant corresponding pedagogies. In deploying power’s productive capacity to question truth, a process of critical engagement can have a positive effect in unsettling and further resisting dominant research hierarchies that serve to construct and sustain contemporary orthodoxies. In the process, this can produce new ways of seeing and operating, as a means to challenge prevailing methodological convention(s).
The resultant positive value is an arguably less certain, but more critically diverse and theoretically enriched, range of methodological approaches to be applied to social and educational research contexts. Thus, if we move beyond the idea of power as possession or sovereign force, to appreciate its somewhat nebulous and characteristically dispersed nature, we can come to recognise the value of difference and multiplicity. We can also see the need to relinquish the current quest for certainty and ‘truth’. Indeed, much in the way that Foucault points to the great paradox of liberalism, which posits the sovereignty of the free individual against the requirement for ever greater regulation and control, there is a similar parallel tendency in the culture of contemporary qualitative research. This can be recognised as the interminable obsession to ground new knowledge in absolute certainty, while paradoxically repeatedly playing out the theme of uncertainty (Flint and Peim, 2012). To see the effect of power as an appropriation of discourse is not to dismiss the possibility of truth’s authority or, indeed, overlook the fact that, in practice, power does not fall evenly upon its subjects but typically favours some more than others. Rather it is to recognise truth’s fallible nature, such that new knowledge is inevitably a product of one’s ability to access power’s influence, where discourse can promote only, and no more than, a semblance of ‘truth’. Expressed a different way, this is simply a micro-politics that serves to unsettle the ambition to assert knowledge as essential truth. In this regard, methodological diversity offers the potential not only to challenge convention, but has a positive effect in ensuring that new philosophical approaches can be productively applied in ways that are more relevant and properly fit for purpose. Thus I suggest that critical involvement, rather than implicit resolution, is the methodological means through which competing narratives may be productively employed. They may then be used to critique the surface structures and appearances on which numerous contemporary social and educational discourses and regulatory practices are based and, disturbingly casually, accepted.