ABSTRACT
It would be naive to neglect the colonial mark on academic life; even when attempts are currently made to engage in decolonial endeavors, some degree of coloniality must be preserved unless scholarly institutions willingly accept to become something else. The defining traits of the academy, however, do not need to be read as inalterable, totalizing units; we could rather understand them as ever-changing conditions to produce authoritative, authorized knowledge. This idea is nurtured by both colonial and decolonial viewpoints; in fact, discourse criticism has revealed the politics of representation while decolonial theses have collaborated in undermining the Eurocentric claim for Truth. Thus, instead of discussing these critical and decolonial stances as two separate, distinctive narratives, it might be useful to resort to an image of intermittence, which brings about associated agentive emphasis on entanglement, incompleteness and impermanence. In this text, we delve into the volatile and unsettling scenario for educational research, in a particular context, in the face of the pedagogical, performative, ontological, affective and erotic turns. Particularly, we advocate in favor of an ethico-onto-epistemology that entangles discourse and material as co-constituents of all phenomena. Such post-humanist theory, known as agential realism, exposes the shortcomings of any single perspective, as well as the fictional status of certain grand narratives that we, however, still need. When it comes to educational research, tampering with grand narratives involves the commitment to relying on iterative, performative moves that can produce a myriad of narratives that cannot claim Truth but nonetheless matter.
