ABSTRACT
The construction and selection of official knowledge – whether in the curriculum or the academic journal – is culturally mediated and politically constrained action. Academic journals are gatekeeping institutions: technologies for the codification of fields of knowledge and truth. In many communities educational inequality is increasing and schools and communities are facing urgent and immediate social and economic problems. Educational systems remain wedded to a model of education that has prioritized the search for generalizable, universal truths about teaching and learning to guide "evidencebased" funding and policy. In the face of racialized violence and heightened political conflict, there is renewed movement to counter persistent economic injustice and there is a powerful backlash against any gains won by cultural "minorities", migrants and refugees, women, LGBTQ and others. With the normalization of neoliberalism and evidence-based policy, there is a complex push/pull relationship between educational research and educational practice that may have a host of unplanned effects.
