ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss some of the experiences and challenges encountered in my methodological journey with critical realism. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I explicate the kind of theoretical packing done for my journey. Reflecting on why it initially appealed to me, I argue that critical realism is an invitation to consider possibilities of analytical anti-imperialism, defined as a heterodox mode of theorising about and/or investigating social reality that proposes to work with, rather than collapse, debilitating dualisms such as structure and agency and the causal and contextual. The ultimate offering of a critical realist anti-imperialism is its ability to articulate a qualified naturalism that is capable of countering the desire for ontic closure evident in both positivist and interpretivist social science. In the second section, I present a detailed account of the methodological operationalisation of critical realism in my own PhD project – a study of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys and masculinities in four western contexts. The aim of this account is to demonstrate using an empirical example what it means and entails to think about critical realism-informed methodology as anti-imperialist. In the third and final section, I conclude with some thoughts on critical realist research as a type of high-risk, albeit educative, research, whose methodological buttressing requires activism (progress for methodology) as much as practice (progress through methodology).
