Conference Agenda

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation between critical reflexivity, especially when it comes to theory application in education, and disciplinarity as it pertains to the field of critical education studies. We argue in the paper that this relationship is a significant one for the field to reflect upon and take seriously, as a way to strengthen criticality in education internationally and foster a heightened form of intellectual accountability. This is an important activity because the field of critical education studies provides an important alternative to positivist and sham ‘value-free’ conceptions of research quality, conceptions that have dogged the education field and often reduced its power and potential to the status of handmaiden.

That said, questions can be raised over the ‘strength’ of the critical studies field, and consequently its ability to influence and shape educational narratives around topics such as reform, quality and educational justice. One of these questions relates to what Bourdieu referred to as ‘critical reflexivity’ (Bourdieu, 2025, see also Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), the capacity of academics to question their own intellectual positions both conceptually and empirically. It is open to debate the extent to which critical reflexivity applies to the critical education field (Murphy and Costa, 2022) and concerns remain regarding the levels of ‘epistemological vigilance’ (Winzler, 2021: 1117) in evidence in critical educational studies research. This is a concern as criticality by itself is no excuse for unchecked subjectivity and positionality, or what Lynch calls ‘epistemological hubris’ (Lynch, 2000: 47).

A related question relates to the issue of disciplinarity and the challenges raised by such a disparate and heterogeneous field. This is evidenced by the sheer quantity of ‘critical’ papers produced every year. Journals have proliferated and opportunities for publishing critical work have soared – not only in journals that are ‘traditionally’ more critical such as Critical Studies in Education and British Journal of Sociology of Education, but also across more specialist journals such as Gender and Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Globalisation, Societies and Education. These journals cover a wide range of educational policies and practices, regions and scopes. The published work also encompasses a vast array of conceptual and theoretical paradigms and positions.

While such range and scope can be viewed as positives and reflecting a field that is strongly interdisciplinary and conceptually diverse, it also raises questions about the level of quality control in critical studies, and the extent to which the field is ‘disciplined’ in its approach to research quality and its own criticality. It can be argued that the discipline of critical education studies requires its own form of critical reflexivity to strengthen and enhance the potential of critical education work to develop new approaches and confront hegemonic ideas, including, potentially, our own.

Engaging with this issue inevitably raises questions about intellectual ‘gatekeeping’ and what counts as legitimate knowledge. These are important questions and in order to engage with these questions, we aim to deploy the concept of ‘critical disciplinarity’. Used previously by Chandler (2004) as a plural for critical studies disciplines, we use it here as a bridge between Bourdieu’s critical reflexivity and Max Weber’s conception of disciplinarity (Murphy, 2022, Weber, 1949). In particular, we explore how Weber’s politicised take on disciplining as intellectual ‘fortification’ could offer valuable insights into contemporary constructions of criticality, an exploration driven by the core question: how can disciplinarity bolster the potential for criticality, rather than constrict it? The paper addresses the implications of this for the development of intellectual communities of practice within critical education studies while also making connections to broader debates over academic freedom.

This presentation asks how critical pedagogy might be rethought under conditions of polycrisis, where overlapping crises (climate change, systemic inequality, political fragmentation, wars, genocide, and ongoing conflicts) appear to be recursively entangled rather than discrete problems amenable to conventional analytical frameworks (Morin & Kern, 1999). Within such contexts, I suggest that critical approaches in education mobilised through clearly demarcated categories (for example, oppressor/oppressed or complicit/resistant) and teleological narratives of progress may prove inadequate for addressing non-linear, recursively entangled complexity.

Drawing primarily on Edgar Morin’s paradigm of complexity (Morin, 1992; 2006), supplemented by affect theory, feminist epistemology, psychoanalytic insights, and postcolonial theories of entanglement, I explore what I term a generative praxis: a mode of critique that works from within acknowledged entanglement and implication rather than from imagined positions of exteriority (Rothberg, 2020; Nuttall, 2009). I argue that this reorientation is particularly urgent in out current context where responsibility, agency, and hope are frequently framed either through individualised moralism or paralysing accounts of systemic collapse (Bryan, 2022; Zembylas, 2022a).

The presentation develops three interrelated propositions. First, I argue that we are always already entangled in the systems we critique. Under conditions of polycrisis, causes and effects loop back upon one another, making it impossible to isolate singular sources of injustice or to locate responsibility entirely “elsewhere”. Morin’s complexity thinking offers resources for engaging such conditions without reducing them to either/or binaries or linear causal explanations (Morin, 2006).

Second, I contend that critique is always an affectively mediated practice. Drawing on psychoanalytic and affect theory, I show how unconscious investments, emotional attachments, and defensive responses shape how critique is taken up or resisted in educational settings, particularly in relation to difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Zembylas, 2022b). This is especially evident in pedagogical encounters involving climate change, racism, and colonial violence, where rational argument alone often intensifies resistance rather than enabling reflection.

Third, I argue that hope must be understood as a practice rather than as a precondition for critique or an outcome deferred to the future. Building on work in critical pedagogy and affect theory, I conceptualise hope as something cultivated through collective pedagogical work that remains responsive to uncertainty, contradiction, and complicity (Zembylas, 2022a; Thiele, 2017).

Across the presentation, I illustrate these arguments through pedagogical examples drawn from climate education, anti-racist training, educational leadership, and decolonising curriculum work (Bryan, 2022; Dadvand, 2024; Zinga & Styres, 2019). Taken together, these examples show how generative praxis can remain hopeful while refusing both paralysis in the face of complexity and false certainty grounded in simplified narratives of transformation. The presentation speaks to shared European and international challenges in critical education, particularly in relation to climate anxiety, post-truth politics, and institutional constraint.

This conceptual paper explores the onto-epistemological commitments of doing critical sociology, particularly in relation to the use of qualitative data. Critical scholarship frequently pushes back positivist epistemologies, including tacit claims of discovery of a singular social reality ‘revealed’ through enquiry. As a result, critical requires scholars work – at least in principle – to make explicit the evidence base of their interpretive claims rather than assuming that research participants’ meaning is given, self-evident or can ‘speak for themselves’ (Mazzei & Jackson 2012). Yet, the ghosts of positivism, brute data, ‘normal science’ and singular objective social realities continue to haunt educational research, even those of the ‘critical’ persuasion (Alvesson 2003; Clegg and Stevenson 2013; St. Pierre & Jackson 2014). The broader field of (critical) qualitative educational research appears to be hesitant to be overly critical or analytical of participants’ voices (Hammersley 2008), granting a ‘special epistemic position’ and authenticity to first person accounts (Potter & Hepburn 2012: 567). This is arguably particularly the case when researching timely and pressing topics with those from the social margins and identity groups across European nations (e.g. refugees from warzones such as Ukraine and Gaza, LGBTQ+ youth, white working class school pupils, black and people of colour in universities) with the apparent assumption being that simply giving voice ‘speaks truth to power’.

This paper then asks “what are the onto-epistemological assumptions made about qualitative research and how might these facilitate or stymy criticality?”. I do this by firstly exploring some of the onto-epistemological assumptions invoked by conventional qualitative research methods such as interviews, and interrogating how these assumptions may or may not be ‘critical’ but captured and rule-bound by dominant research ‘imaginaries’. In doing so I assert that critical scholars need to ask themselves what onto-epistemological assumptions might they be invoking by giving voice in unproblematic ways, and which positions might they desire to occupy as critical scholars.

Secondly, I argue for the need to look to both the ‘deeper’ workings of scholars we frequently deploy and to the intellectual traditions beyond education – those fields whose main interest lay in non-educational contexts – such as philosophy, political theory, and social theory. For example, Bourdieu – whose work is almost mandatory in some branches of the sociology of education – had much to say about the extent to which researchers should take at face value the utterances of research participants (e.g. Wacquant 1992). Further, when wrestling with what counts as a ‘critical’ approach to data generation, knowledge claims and so on, we may find that such debates have been continuing in other fields for decades. These include issues relating to the consideration of the ‘incorrigibility’ of social actors’ perceptions (Taylor 1985), and the historical conditions that give rise to certain objects of study coming into and out of existence (Hacking 2002) – all of which have bearing on how researcher view the world, and the purpose and function of research.

Thirdly, I advocate for the development of sociologically and philosophically informed critical methodology studies as an emergent field that explicitly addresses onto-epistemological assumptions and the ‘research imaginaries’ that dominate our own research practices. Such an approach has potential to transform the field of critical studies in education, in part by being more attentive to matters of ontology and epistemology, but also via interrogation of research orthodoxy. This article attempts to lay some of the groundwork for this emerging arena of enquiry.

Recent studies increasingly frame higher education in ecological terms, articulating a condition, framework, or an aspirational ideal of pervasive interconnectivity between the university and the environment, wherein relationships among human and nonhuman entities are expected to permeate many spheres of life (Barnett, 2024; Li et al., 2022; Smit, 2025). Since the start of the 21^st century, higher education studies have seen an increase in eco-related vocabularies, often designating some relational constellation that involves a modern conception of digital technology, such as “digital learning ecosystem” (Nguyen & Tuamsuk, 2022, p. 2). Whereas some researchers trace ecosystemic thinking in higher education to a single origin (Koroleva et al., 2023), others point to multiple, overlapping discussions across spheres that extend beyond the university to include the city, industry, policy, and technology. As a result, the notion of the ecosystem remains conceptually ambiguous (Hui, 2020) and is frequently conflated with related terms such as market, cluster, or network from adjacent fields, particularly business studies, thereby calling for more careful conceptualisation (Audretsch et al., 2019).

This article aims to carefully map and synthesise ecosystemic thinking about technology in higher education literature, highlighting some of the origins, usages, and implications. At stake is a specific “mode of thinking”, a patterned way of framing, understanding, analysing and acting upon the world that differs from thinking in terms of, for instance, categories (Freeman, 2017, p. 2), networks (Knox et al., 2006), or relations more generally (Decuypere & Simons, 2016). People within and beyond the university are confronted by and engaging in a process that Hörl (2017) calls the “ecologisation of thought,” a tendency to frame and describe the relations between living organisms and their environment in terms of an ecosystem. This ecologisation is not neutral as “it gives rise to a new, ecological image of thought that assigns a fundamentally different value to the question of relations” (Hörl, 2017, p. 7). Research that employs these relational constellations is accused of being disconnected from nature and devaluing (sub)groups of entities (e.g., plants, animals, people) despite the attractive connotation with fauna and flora. Higher education practices and analyses risk relying on notions of ecosystems that are severed from the larger whole and becoming (too) self-evident as well as (only) instrumental (Barnett, 2024; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2016). The severance is likely the most noticeable in attempts to foster a so-called green environment and address issues in the geological spacetime of the Anthropocene, i.e., the contemporary era in which human activity has altered layers of the earth that are now in need of reparation (e.g., Bonnett, 2019; Stein & Andreotti, 2025).

However, ecologisation does not exclusively entail the way education scholarship thinks about the intersection between education and sustainability. There is a call in educational philosophy of technology to regard ecosystems in an ontological sense: as social and material configurations that can alter what it means to be human nowadays (Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2024). When ecosystems are understood as “media-technological infrastructures” (e.g., screens, servers, applications), it becomes apparent that these are all-to-easily regarded as substrates of social life or instruments of economic advancement instead of environments that can alter and govern how humans act, feel, and think (Hörl, 2017, p. 3). If higher education has indeed entered an ecologised condition (Barnett, 2024), and universities are characterised by digital and data-driven infrastructures (Williamson, 2018), it raises the following questions: What origins and modes of ecosystemic thinking about technology can be discerned in contemporary higher education studies? How does ecosystemic thinking configure the relations between (in)organic entities in higher education studies? What implications does ecosystemic thinking pose for higher education studies?