ABSTRACT
The guiding idea of this chapter is that different theories generate different (partial) narratives and explanations, and that educational researchers are wise to cultivate ‘reflexivity’ and suspicion towards their favourite theories. Often as not, we are not aware of what these are. As a result, they act as filters that frame and shape our perceptions of the world precisely because we do not question them. A decade ago I wrote a book called Liberating Knowledge, which offered a reflexive
account of my experiences in adult education, feminist theory and practice, and research in various settings over a period of 15 years. The dual meaning of liberating knowledge is that on the one hand knowledge can be liberating (and what counts as knowledge is contestable as well as actually contested), whereas on the other hand, alternative and sometimes subversive ways of knowing can be liberated through teaching, research and other kinds of educational work (Barr 1999). Underpinning the book is what I called a ‘storied epistemology’, one that recognises
the power of narratives in enhancing understanding; in this case, stories about how knowledge is constructed in different times and places. Adopting an autobiographical approach, I set out to question the abstractions and pretensions of much disciplinary knowledge, whilst recognising, too, that personal experience is not immune from reflection, reinterpretation and critique. In other words, personal experience as a source of knowledge is not a ‘trump card of authenticity’ (ibid., p. 4). All of our understandings are open to reworking through exposure to other voices and points of view, including theoretical resources. Recognising this is a key to being both critical and personal. I was intent on avoiding a narrow view of ‘reflexivity’. This meant that in revisiting
three of my earlier research projects in the book I was explicit about wanting to locate this work within a wider social and historical context of knowledge production, shaped by the prevailing discourses, power relations, and material conditions. I described the project of the book in terms of ‘healing the breach’ between ‘words’ (discourses) and
‘things’ (material conditions). And I wanted to suggest how the self (itself) changes over time. That is to say, the reflexive self I assemble in the book, Liberating Knowledge, is not quite the same as the selves that undertook each of the research projects (or indeed the self engaged in writing this chapter at a sunny table in Culross, overlooking the Firth of Forth, a cock crowing insistently nearby). In the book, a central task I set myself was to review my past research for what it
masked as well as revealed, for its blind spots as well as its illuminations. In contrast with the original research I inserted myself as researcher into the research process and its products: I put myself ‘in the frame’. The three cases I drew on were all broadly in the field of women’s adult education.
They were:
