From critical thought to emancipatory action: Contradictory research goals?

This chapter has arisen from my reading of two books: Patti Lather’s Getting Smart (1991) and Martyn Hammersley’s The Politics of Social Research (1995). Lather’s book discusses feminist postmodernist research and pedagogy and Hammersley’s is a critique of Lather and other explicitly political research. In particular, Hammersley is concerned that emancipatory approaches to research represent the abandonment of the obligations of the researcher.