Like all historical and contemporary societies, Ireland presents contradictory patterns in relation to educational policy-making, provision and practice. On the one hand, official discourse aspires to educational inclusion and to the valuing of sociocultural diversity in educational institutions, and such discourse often generates educational innovations that assist particular groups in accessing education. On the other hand, formal education is sometimes complicit with broader forces of sociocultural exclusion and marginalisation, including in terms of ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. These contradictions have important implications for the design and conduct of educational research projects and for the work and identities of educational researchers. In particular, if educational researchers are to implement research that is effective and ethical, with the accompanying potential to contribute to empowerment of varying kinds, they must devise situated strategies that help to articulate otherwise unheard perspectives and that challenge underlying assumptions about educational aspirations and experiences. These strategies are opportunities for researchers to exercise the complex and dynamic leadership required of those who are afforded the opportunity and the privilege to interpret others’ lived experiences and worldviews, while also bringing to this process of interpretation their own insights into and understandings of the world. These propositions are illustrated in this paper by a carefully constructed distillation of a number of research projects that the author has led and/or to which she has contributed. Largely ethnographic and qualitative in character, these projects have traversed the various educational levels and sectors, and they have been directed at addressing several different research questions. Selected projects are clustered around the author’s interactions with two specific groups of learners: Irish Travellers (Kenny, 1997); and students with disabilities (Kenny, McNeela, Shevlin, & Daly, 2000). Examples of strategies that have been more and less successful in working collaboratively and respectfully with these two groups are canvassed, as are reflections on the reasons why certain strategies succeed in some contexts but not in others. More widely, the success or otherwise of these strategies is linked to the sometimes contentious interplay between educational marginalisation and educational empowerment – between formal education and educational research being complicit with forces of sociocultural exclusion and educational researchers working actively against the grain of such forces to generate new and more inclusive approaches to educational provision.

Kenny, M. (1997). The routes of resistance: Travellers and second-level schooling. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Kenny, M., McNeela, E., Shevlin, M., & Daly, T. K. (2000). Hidden voices: Young people with disabilities speak about their second level schooling. Cork, Ireland: South West Regional Authority.