ABSTRACT
This chapter situates paradigm talk with its insistence on multiplicities and proliferations in tension with a return to the kind of imperial science that some 40 years of paradigm contestation had, almost, displaced. Against the 'methodological fundamentalists' who are having their moment where critical researchers are being written off as ideologues'. The chapter focuses on paradigm talk as a 'good thing to think with' in terms of demands for practices of knowing with more to answer to in terms of the complexities of language and the world. In thinking about paradigm proliferation in the context of the constellation of discourses that typify educational research, worries about indigenous epistemologies based on cultural difference, conflation of epistemology and lived experience, and communicative breakdowns around epistemic incommensurabilities. From the National Research Council's 2002 report, Scientific research in education to Carnegie Initiative, there is an intensity of focus on doctoral preparation in educational research that is unlike anything we have seen in the past.
