ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that how research is not merely descriptive, explanatory, predictive, or improving of the social world; it actively makes up that world. It presents the call for “actionable insights” in research as a strategy of governance by historicizing its resemblances to social anthropology's quest to provide “useful knowledge” for British colonial administrators almost 100 years prior. The chapter shows that how contemporary qualitative and quantitative modes of research fabricate notions of the child, the family, and the community so as to make pathological their target population of intervention and change. It discusses the limits of an ideological critique of educational research and proposes historicizing as a critical methodological strategy that avoids reinscribing the notions of difference it sets out to challenge. A popular educational research textbook offers some practical advice in its introduction to methods: a researcher must develop a sound plan for selecting a sample, collecting data, and analyzing data.
