Conference Agenda

This symposium proposes research positionality as a key perspective for engaging with the changing conditions of knowing and acting in organizational education. How do we know and how do we act - in and between organizations - amid increased complexity, intensified demands for collective action and coordination across divides and growing ontological and epistemic conflicts? Research positionality addresses these questions by framing knowing and acting as situated, relational and distributed practices, drawing attention to how epistemic justice and power/knowledge relations play out in organizations. Placing research positionality centre stage highlights the ontological and epistemological processes, along with the social-material and participatory dynamics, that inform who and what gets to know, who is heard, and who is marginalized in learning contexts.

Rather than treating positionality as a matter of researcher reflexivity alone (Berger, 2013), following Denzin and Lincoln’s point that research is always conducted from within a situated framework (ethics, ontology, theory) that shapes what can be asked (epistemology) and how it can be examined (methodology, analysis) (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 11), we extend this understanding of situated inquiry by moving beyond the individual researcher’s standpoint. In this symposium we explore research positionality as a collective affair, “a Gesamtkunstwerk”, created through the relational, discursive and material conditions that shape knowing and acting. This resonates with feminist methodological scholarship, which likewise treats research as situated and collectively accomplished (Katila et al., 2023). Within this tradition, Phillips et al.’s (2022) describe participatory inquiry as the “power-infused co-constitution of knowledge and subjectivities”, underscoring research positionality as a relational and epistemic accomplishment. We therefore understand research positionality as a concept that captures how researchers and practitioners, in interaction with organizational, material and technological forces, co-produce the possibilities (or barriers) for knowledge creation. These dynamics are also reflected in organizational education (Weber 2019).

Current developments in organizational education such as co-creative approaches emphasize how knowledge is co-created through participation, while decolonial and posthuman perspectives pay heed to the inherent yoke between power and knowing and point to the tensions in the ‘co’ in co-creating knowledge. Taking more seriously the ‘co’ in the co-creation of knowledge in and between organizations calls for collaborative learning processes, participatory research designs, co-created data and hybrid human-machine-material learning ecologies that align with research positionality as an ongoing jointly reflexive practice (Russ, Petrakis, Whitaker, Fitzroy & Short, 2024; Phillips 2025).

In this symposium, we explore and reflect on how our own collaborative research designs and practices engage with and enact research positionality as a collective and ongoing practice (or fail to do so). Specifically, we:

• Address position-ality in relation to Haraway’s (2016) concept of “respons-ability”, foregrounding the interconnectedness of human and non-human actors and how this plays out in higher education research.
• Inquire if and how artefacts possess research positionality via interdisciplinary empirical work.
• Attend to research positionality in cross-organizational learning circles as co-research, asking how facilitation and inscriptions shape who gets to know and act.

Together, we aim to show how an approach to practising research positionality as Gesamtkunstwerk can strengthen organizational education’s capacity to engage with the changing landscapes of knowing, acting and learning in contemporary organizational life.

The responsibility of academic knowledge production in times of artificial intelligence, climate crisis, and war, to name but a few contemporary challenges, is the subject of intense debate in the scientific community itself (Elven, 2021; Oreskes, 2020). In the course of the ”becoming of an organization” (Musselin, 2007), responsibility of science is, however, also increasingly becoming an organizational issue. Our presentation draws on empirical material from the research project “Scientific Responsibility”, funded by the German Research Council, which examines (1) how German universities position and bring about themselves in the academic field with regard to social responsibility and (2) how academics are subjectivized within these contexts as ‘responsible’ academics. Our focus is the process of addressing the organizations themselves: What happens when universities are addressed as organizations with the explicit intention of discussing scientific responsibility? How do organizational actors respond to this inquiry, and how do they position the researchers involved? These questions highlight how positionality is co-produced in the interaction between researchers and researched organizations. To reflect and theorize this process, we draw on Haraway’s (2016) concept of responsibility as “respons-ability”. She emphasizes the entanglement of human and non-human actors, such as technologies, material arrangements, and institutional settings and understands responsibility as the ability to respond within these relational configurations. Similarly, positionality as a Gesamtkunstwerk foregrounds the interconnectedness of human and non-human actors across shifting temporal and spatial conditions. Rather than locating positionality solely at the level of individual self-reflection, this perspective conceptualizes it as a relational, dynamic, and performative accomplishment. In doing so, it engages with questions of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1978) and addresses the epistemic dimensions of organizational and educational research, particularly when studying higher education institutions and their understandings and discursive practices of respons-ability (Bozalek and Zembylas, 2023). Conceptualizing positionality as “response-abilty” enables a reflection on the double role of the researchers and the ability of organizational learning in the field of higher education: conducting empirical research that requires gaining access to and navigating the field with researchers from different generations and disciplines, while simultaneously being part of the field as individual academics, as a research team, and as members of the broader higher education landscape. By proposing this perspective, the contribution aims to advance debates on positionality in organizational research and to offer a conceptual lens for understanding responsibility as both an object of study and a performative practice of research itself.

Bozalek, V. and Zembylas, M. (2023), Responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability, Springer International Publishing, Cham. Elven, J. (2021), “The Negotiation of Social Responsibility in Academia. An Analysis of Ethical Discourses on the March for Science at German Universities”, Knowledge Cultures, Vol. 9 No. 1. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Pantheon Books, New York. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, London. Musselin, C. (2007), “Are Universities Specific Organisations?”, in Krücken, G., Kosmützky, A. and Torka, M. (Eds.), Towards a Multiversity?, transcript, Bielefeld, pp. 63–84. Oreskes, N. (2020), “What Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?”, Daedalus, Vol. 149 No. 4, pp. 33–45.

From flipcharts to digital devices, from curriculum materials to furniture, each artefact constitutes an essential part of an educational organization. A sociomaterial perspective considers educational artefacts simultaneously as parts of an organization and as actively constituting it. This contribution examines the research positionality of educational artefacts, questioning their conventional subordination to human agency in organizational education research. Despite the omnipresence of materiality in educational organizations, their position often remains invisible or subordinate to human cognition and agency (Fenwick & Landri, 2012). The prevailing humanist approach to education shows a persistent blindness towards how educational practice is, beyond expected outcomes, affected by materials. This approach primarily understands humans and their development, learning, and needs, conceptualizing materials as passive instruments serving predetermined educational ends (Sørensen, 2009). The classic subject-object dichotomy positions artefacts outside of and as mere means for human subjects. This presentation challenges this secondary role by asking: Can educational artefacts have a research positionality? And if so, what position might they occupy within organizational education research? The empirical material stems from an interdisciplinary study on educational artefacts within an organization striving toward inclusiveness for children with learning disabilities. Combining archaeological and educational sciences, the study draws on archaeology's foundational premise of positioning humans as homo faber: beings who become human through creating and using artefacts, whereby artefacts inherently hold potential for multiple uses (Wouters & Vansteenhuyse, 2025). Positionality refers to the social, cultural, and institutional positions from which researchers approach their work, including assumptions, privileges, and relationships with participants (Christolouka & Verdis, 2025). Starting from the positionality that humans are essentially homo faber, Material Engagement Theory advances this understanding: we are homo faber not merely because we construct objects, but because they simultaneously make us. The artefacts we create and employ are neither passive nor neutral; they actively shape who we are in any given historical moment (Ihde & Malafouris, 2019). Acknowledging artefact positionality means recognizing that organizational education research is materially situated, and that what objects are cannot be separated from how research unfolds. This reconceptualization invites researchers to attend to materiality as an active constituent of educational knowing and acting.

Christolouka, I., & Verdis, A. (2025). Mapping context through methodology: A framework for context-sensitive educational research. Learning in Context, 2(1), 100010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lecon.2025.100010 Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: Socio-material assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 1–7. Ihde, D., & Malafouris, L. (2019). Homo faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory. Philosophy & Technology, 32(2), 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0321-7 Sørensen, E. (2009). The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511576362 Wouters, R., & Vansteenhuyse, K. (2025). An archaeology of educational artefacts: Revealing invisibilities of the obvious objects of teaching and learning. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2591769

Organizational education is concerned with learning in, of and between organizations and therefore with how knowing and acting emerge as situated, relational and distributed practices, continually negotiated through positionality and power/knowledge relations. This contribution examines learning circles as a cross-organizational adult-learning format that simultaneously functions as practice development and co-research. Building on the symposium’s understanding of positionality as “Gesamtkunstwerk,” we conceptualize the learning circle as a “positional apparatus”: an arrangement of interactional formats, roles, pacing, and material-discursive conditions through which particular ways of knowing and acting become possible, while others are sidelined or rendered irrelevant (Barad, 2007; (Phillips et al., 2021). From an organisational education perspective, co- research is not merely a method but a learning infrastructure that connects knowing and acting through collective sensemaking and iterative inquiry. In such communities of inquiry, knowing and acting co-emerge as participants and researchers negotiate shared concerns while navigating organisational demands and research purposes (Weick, 1995; Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini, 2011). We ask: (1) How is research positionality enacted through the micro-practices of learning-circle work? (2) Which facilitation moves help sustain open inquiry and support epistemic justice in co-created inquiry? Empirically, the paper draws on ethnographic material from a Danish cross-organizational initiative in elderly care recruitment and retention, involving eldercare and employment services, social and health care colleges, and researchers. Based on 17 learning circle meetings, we analyse how the learning circles had to hold multiple orientations at once: sustaining inquiry around work dilemmas that mattered to participants, while also meeting organizational expectations and research purposes. This ongoing boundary work between interests, organizational imperatives, and project aims foregrounds positionality-in-practice. Analytically, we employ three sensitizing concepts: tension zones, a logic of care, and inscriptions to trace positionality in co-inquiry (Lotz & Aakjær, 2025). Together, they attune us to how differences, care, and inscriptions (artefacts such as templates, documents, recordings and transcripts) configure what can be said, done, and attended to, and thus who gets to know and act, through shifting distributions of authority, voice, and visibility (Orlikowski, 2007). To address the facilitation dimension, we introduce “situated moves” as a vocabulary for facilitation as positional practice: small adjustments in pacing, sequencing, framing, and tone that keep inquiry open without dissolving responsibility for intervention aims. We theorize learning circles as a positional apparatus and develop “situated moves” to show how positionality is worked with in practice - and how this shapes epistemic justice in co-created inquiry.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizational knowledge: The texture of workplace learning. Blackwell Publishing. Lotz, M. M., & Aakjær, M. K. (2025). Tension zones and a logic of care: Adapting learning circles as a participatory research method [Manuscript submitted for publication]. Qualitative Inquiry. Nicolini, D. (2011). Practice as the site of knowing: Insights from the field of telemedicine. Organization Science, 22(3), 602–620. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0556 Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435–1448. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607081138 Phillips, L. J., Frølunde, L., & Christensen-Strynø, M. B. (2021). Confronting the complexities of “co-production” in participatory health research: A critical, reflexive approach to power dynamics in a collaborative project on Parkinson’s dance. Qualitative Health Research, 31(7), 1290–1305. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323211003863 Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.