Editors: prof.ssa Loretta Fabbri & prof.ssa Francesca Bracci
Civitas Educationis invites contributions for a special issue on postqualitative inquiry in educational contexts.
An Epistemological Configuration Under Tension
Educational research has long operated within a relatively stabilized epistemological configuration: a knowing subjectivity, a representable world, data available for collection and analysis, and methods capable of guaranteeing validity, clarity, and recognizability, whether in qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research.
This configuration is not merely methodological. It is an onto-epistemological formation that organizes what can be thought, named, and practiced as research. A process of disidentification is underway with respect to epistemologies more accustomed to consolidating themselves than to entering into conversation with different positionings (Lykke, 2018). Research epistemologies materialize in the apparatuses that regulate the production of knowledge: in academic relations, in evaluation criteria, and in processes of selection and recognition. They define not only what is to be done and how knowledge is to be produced, but also who is entitled to produce, teach, and transmit knowledge. Even “conventional qualitative methodology” (St. Pierre, 2017), which emerged in order to construct visions different from quantitative methodologies, functions as a container with clearly identified categories into which projects must be placed in order to appear legible and legitimate. Methods do not operate as technical supports; they are apparatuses for stabilizing thought and regulating intelligibility.
This configuration has not disappeared. It is, however, increasingly misaligned with the ontological, technological, and political transformations traversing the educational field. This is not a matter of updating tools or vocabularies. It is a matter of recognizing that the categories that have sustained modern educational research — subjectivity, data, analysis, representation, validity — can no longer contain the excess of research and its material and political implications.
This issue is entitled Postqualitative Inquiry: Deconstructing the Method, Reconfiguring Research, and proposals (which may be in English, French, or Spanish) are due by June 15th. Additional information, including submission instructions, is available through the link below.
https://universitypress.unisob.na.it/ojs/index.php/civitaseducationis/announcement/view/189
QualPage 