ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will examine two alternative but in some ways linked approaches to research which have a significant impact on contemporary adult education research. Both these approaches, in an important sense, overstep the implicit yet powerful limits set by more mainstream research traditions/paradigms. Emancipatory research does so by rejecting both the idea of research being politically neutral and the view that its purpose is to simply find out about the world. Instead, it understands itself as explicitly political, as being about acting to change the world rather than just knowing it, or to know it in the service of changing it. We then turn to a postmodern approach to research-an approach which can also be understood as overstepping the limits in that it identifies the process of research as itself constructing and constructed with a consequent need for a problematising reflexivity (what it itself is doing in researching) as an integral part of the process.
