Book Review: Educational research practice in Southern contexts: recentring, reframing and reimagining methodological canons: edited by Sharlene Swartz, Nidhi Singal and Madeleine Arnot, Oxon, Routledge, 2024, 359pp., £35.69 (paperback) and available Open Access, ISBN 9781003355397

Abstract

Book Review: Opening with a sketch of the rather tense landscape of contemporary educational scholarship, Swartz, Singal, and Arnot, present a pressing aim to “open up the debate about ‘what works’ when researching Southern contexts” (p. 1). The editors’ deep reflection on this challenge impressively highlights their focus not just on the level of method, as so many edited volumes on research methods do; this itself revealing the effects of coloniality, which has sheared critical imaginaries from the production of knowledge fuelled by the “cognitive perspective of Eurocentrism” and a “growing techno critization” of knowledge production(Quijano, 2002). Instead, the focus goes deeper to encompass ontological and epistemological concerns, prior to “learning about first-hand experience of conducting research in such[Southern] contexts” to “recognise different cultural ways of being, knowing, and doing”(p. 1; original emphases), that lie outside the dominant Northern Anglophone systems of understanding, which have been deeply imbricated in domination and violence. Subsequently, the organisation and structure of this book is harmonious to the editors’ overarching goals and encourages the reader to engage with a diverse, robust and situationally rich volume of scholarship, taking them through themes of Centring, Reframing and Reimagining approaches to educational research, informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives