Contributions to this two part symposium will address two interconnected questions. First, in an academic context sometimes referred to as ‘post-disciplinary’ and a wider social context of ‘post truth’ politics, we might ask what place remains for such notions as discipline, rigour, and systematic inquiry that have previously defined research and distinguished it from more casual inquiry. Does the ‘disciplined’ conduct of educational research constitute a constraint on research creativity or is it essential to the very honouring of a particular inquiry as ‘research’? (Bridges 2017;

In the context of a European Educational Research Conference we are also conscious that, notwithstanding attempts to create a shared framework for research assessment (EERQI 2011)  these notions are framed and constructed in different ways that reflect the social, cultural and intellectual histories of different nations. When we meet in the shared space of ECER, we risk all sorts of misunderstandings unless we develop our understanding of these differences.

This symposium is, then in two parts. In the first part Standish, Priem, Fendler and Keiner discuss the structure and construction of educational research in more generic terms. Standish tries to weave a pathway between, on the one hand, the orthodox ‘foundations’ approach to educational research, which, he suggests becomes stuck in footnotes to received ideas and over anxious about reinforcing boundaries and, on the other hand, ‘new-fangled disciplines that seek to legitimate themselves in jargon and deference to new ‘authorities’. He concludes by suggesting that the dominance of the English language in research discourse obscures alternative ways of seeing the world – a thesis that other contributions to this symposium will illustrate vividly.

Priem and Fendler ‘historicise’ our key notions of discipline, rigour and the systematic as inventions of a certain rational spirit of enlightenment which acquired value only temporarily during the 19^th century. Since then, along with the associated aspiration to ‘objectivity’ they have been critiqued, not least my feminist scientists, as ‘alienating principles’ divorced from the lived experience of human life. The paper examines new paradigms of research that transgress these traditional boundaries and creative endeavours, especially in the digital humanities, that seek to enrich and broaden the old disciplinary order.

Finally, in part one of the symposium, Keiner observes the connection between our key principles  and the construction of people’s intellectual identities. They serve too to integrate centrifugal forces of diversification and fragmentation, and, of course, they serve as instruments for exerting power in structures of scholarly self-governance. Keiner observes, as we have already warned, the elusiveness of these key terms – especially as they ‘translate’ across different languages . He sketches the advantages and disadvantages of seeking to retain and defend these tightly coupled concepts. Like Standish he seeks a pathway that allows the research community to reject superficiality, randomness and arbitrariness but also opens the way to reflexive and communicative principles of research engagement that support intercultural exchange.

These three papers all seem to allow some scope for the principles of rigour, discipline and the systematic in research, but they are also seeking to expand the research space in different ways, in particular to make it more open to different kinds of human experience, more sensitive to the different requirements and expectations embedded in different cultures and to support its communicative function in research conversations that run across these different cultures – in ECER and elsewhere.

Part two of this symposium will continue to explore these and other related issues but withcloser attention to the ways in which they are framed by historical and contemporary social experience in three countries: Italy (Conte), Norway (Kvernbekk and Jarning) and post Soviet Ukraine (Fimyar).

Bridges,D. (2017) Philosophy in educational research: Epistemology, ethics, politics and assessment. Dordrecht: Springer. European Educational Research Quality Indicators Project (2011). Final Report. http://eerqi.eu/sites/default/files/Final_Report.pdf. Accessed 24 May 2016.