ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the 'virtue of unknowing' that flows from earnestly being lost and lost again. It suggest that the notion of 'capacity building' in social research is fraught with difficulties and may not serve to promote the ethical engagement of the researcher. Readers will be broadly familiar with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus, creator of the labyrinth, warns his son Icarus of the dangers of flying too close to the sun. Icarus falls from the sky, and everyone and everything turns away from the disaster. The chapter explores the virtues of what Keats described as 'negative capability': namely, to be 'capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. It examines the role of uncertainty and incapacity in a particular form of 'site thinking', namely educational studies, in an era characterized by clarion calls for 'capacity building' in educational theory.
