On being race critical

Abstract

In celebrating the critical insights of Zeus Leonardo's chapter, this response further illustrates why understandings of research in education must attend to the claims, inflections and subversions of history and geography in this 'other than natural' field of inquiry. Educational research, be it 'critical' or 'uncritical' in orientation, is marked by a range of practices always-already implicated in a relational complex of ideas, transactions and possibilities. On these grounds, decontextualized accounts of research, researcher and researched is little more than insidious; more hopefully, the 'more than' that is conceivable of educational inquiries in realizing and critiquing their range of uses and functions impels us to transcend the pretence that researchers can remain neutral as to the field's constitution and reconstitution. A critical historical reading is but one way of bringing this into sharp relief; by simply asking how democratic, engaging and emancipatory educational research actually is.