Within the conditions of rapid educational reform in a global level, Inclusive Education appears to be gaining considerable ground in terms of the rhetoric developed by global organisations, national and international education policies and institutional and academic research and reform agendas. To consider this development as indisputably positive, would be rather simplistic. Relevant literature points to a linguistic adaptation issue, whereby all too often Inclusive Education terminology is being extensively adopted, albeit with its political connotations standing still and blank of meaning. Quite disturbingly, within the ethos of a ‘thin morality’ approach cultivated by the neo-liberal turn in social policy issues, Inclusive Education instead of confronting the social structures of educational inequality, is being ostensibly cited to provide ground for the creation of a highly structured individualised system of diagnoses and provision of services based on individual needs. Moreover, Inclusive Education is being increasingly encompassed in the expanding field of educational research relating to conceptions such as educational quality, ‘evidence-based policy making’, whose particular meaning remains rather contestable. Within this conceptual ambiguity and although the epistemological basis of these projects should admittedly consist subject of analysis by itself, it appears reasonable to consider whether, as far as Inclusive Education is concerned, we are confronted with an additional to discourses and practices, and perhaps, a more sovereign, distortion of the values that permeate Inclusive Education; one that concerns the field of research production. Inclusive Education grew out of the struggles against exclusion and disempowerment and to this extent, it is indissolubly connected with an insurrectionary approach that demands a politics of action to be taken on board. Disability Studies have broadened the epistemological basis of relevant research introducing conceptions such as ‘the politics of the possible’, ‘vision’, ‘hope’ and research paradigms that question prevalent oppressive research approaches. We intend to argue that these concepts are connected with a certain aspect of the ethical-imaginary thought that was successfully silenced, until completely forgotten, through the prevalence of the globalised instrumental rationality of modernity. To this extent, this presentation intends to approach the following questions: 1. What could possibly be the reasons that in a national level researchers and others involved in Inclusive Education are hindered from undertaking, through research, the action needed to promote Inclusive Education’s values and issues? 2. How could the reflection of the researcher be connected with regards to the concept of ‘hope’ as a driving force for research action?

Theoretical analysis, document analysis of national and international legislation and research projects.

Research for Inclusive Education is indissolubly connected with the conceptualisation of the ‘politics of the possible’. However for reasons that relate to institutional politics as well as research thought, this issue has not yet been widely attended. This paper claims that the conceptualisation of hope as an ontological/ethical issue that accomplishes Being through the creation of relations of solidarity is positioned against current conceptualisations of hope as making up for what is missing from the oppressed. These conceptualisations of hope relate to two quite different formulations of research process: in terms of the latter research activity originates from field of Utopias, wherein Inclusive Education is a desirable albeit unrealisable goal; in terms of the ontological hope, the critical questioning by the researcher of the prevalent order of reason in order to drive research action to the confrontation of the structural inequalities in education is part of an ethical process