ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how education research became interdependent with new governing agendas, often characterised as more horizontal, applied, and thus aspiring to be more democratic and even – more recently decolonial. The discussion is based on a historical analysis of a number of policy texts concerned with education research, as well as scrutiny of academic literature on research policy in England from 1945 to the present. Much recent policy and academic discourse, I suggest, characterises new knowledge forms as socially-responsive, and as potentially democratising knowledge, because of their apparent inclusive, interactive, iterative, problem-focused, and trans-disciplinary character. At the same time, the emergent global ‘poly-crisis’ that envelops societies, compounding issues such as inequalities, global health, climate change, and migration, has led to discourses about the need for even more agile and adaptable knowledge production. I suggest that such an analysis is insufficiently attentive to the ways education research became one of the key engines of creating the knowledge economy, and discuss the implications of this interdependency for the development of new critical education research for tackling the major crises of our time. The chapter concludes with enquiring about the possibilities – and impossibilities – of continuing to do critical education research today.
