Challenging the Research Complex: Engaged and Committed Scholarship

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Critical Comparative Education: Understanding the Research Complex and its Consequences

Proposal

What we try to do as researchers and teachers and in our contributions to public policy is to tell the story of many puzzles. Yet, not all scholars are the same. For critical theorists, research cannot be separated from political struggle; hence, scholarship and activism are inevitably part and parcel of our life journey. Paulo Freire speaking of the politicity of education, argued that politics and education cannot be easily separated. The same applies to scholarship and political struggle, which cannot be easily dissociated, not even for purely didactic purposes. We conduct research and teaching to change the world, not simply to observe as detached scientist what happens around us or to manipulate knowledge as social alchemy or as social engineering.
Critical scholars do not share with technocrats the illusion that manipulating knowledge, using technocratic means and the stern application of instrumental rationality, will solve most if not all the problems of education. Our voices and commitments come from our life experience. The well-known Feminist adage “the personal is political” could not be more appropriate here. Therefore, our lived experience conditions and may also enhance our voices and commitments. Many of these premises are currently advocated by a large number of social movements, NGO’s, grass-roots organizations and community organizations as well as critical intellectuals and contestantaries forces in institutions of higher education. This narrative is beginning to make inroads in political parties as well. The intellectual scholarship of Author 1 has been consequential in this model of understanding the reasons why colonization and domination still play major roles in Africa and also in most parts of the Global South.
The issues we are addressing are also very instructive for new or young scholars. Very legitimate questions that new scholars have are: How to build a solid, lasting, meaningful research agenda? What is the role that a research agenda plays in your academic trajectory linking teaching, research, and commitments to civic life, professional associations and communities? How a research agenda can produce new knowledge?
Author 1 furnishes a set of formidable answers to these questions through his research and findings. Author 1 has a unique voice with a penchant for clarity.

Author

• Carlos Alberto Torres, UCLA