ABSTRACT
Is it still possible, or even advisable, to ask why it is that so much research contributes so little to democratic questioning of the powerful? Has research become just a tool for the powerful, the complacent, the satisfied? Radical research in social contexts implies a radical politics because it raises questions that make the powerful feel uncomfortable, even threatened. What makes research radical is this political dimension, it suggests the possible overthrow of a previously stable or at least dominant order of ways of knowing, thinking, believing, acting. But if there is an overthrow, won’t the resultant circumstances be just another orthodoxy secured through power and thus just as open to radical challenge, starting the whole process over again? Radical research, we argue, thrives in this apparent paradox. It has its counterpart in radical democracy, that project which as Mouffe (1993) writes is forever an ‘unfinished revolution’. It is unfinished because every individual is capable of asking questions like:
• Why do things have to be like this? • Why am I considered to be inferior to them? • Why do they have more than me? • So, what is actually going on here? Who benefits from these circumstances
and who loses? • Why can’t I do just whatever I want? • How do I stop them from doing whatever they like and in the process hurting
me? • Why can’t we all just get on with each other?
