Bruno Latour famously asked “Why has critique run out of steam? (2004). In this paper we draw on his ideas to present some resources for “gathering”- for doing education policy enactment research with others- which we are calling ‘critical collaboration’. We think that education policy research ‘critique from afar’ may have run out of steam and we make some proposals for doing critical research, but with (a diversity of) others. We offer resources for undertaking critical collaborative education policy enactment research – where ‘realities are not secure but instead they have to be practised’ (Law, 2004, p. 15). This extends the conceptualisation of enactment that Stephen Ball and colleagues have made; from focusing on ‘how schools do policy’ (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), to how researchers and schools (re)do policy together. Enactment is an ‘interference’ in reality (Barad, 2007; Law & Singleton, 2013), and is consequently ontologically political (Mol, 2002). This article is underpinned by our attempt to embrace this politics and to develop alternative resources to those that enable a ‘god’s eye view’ of policy enactment research (Haraway, 1988). As critical education policy researchers we have collaborated as policy actors with others in schools and this article forms part of our analysis of this work. In the first part of the paper we use Rancière’s (1991, 1995) work to discuss the relations between inequality and critique. We then discuss what we are calling ‘starter’ concepts as a contribution toward elucidating resources for ‘gathering’ and critical collaboration. Our theoretical deliberations are based on three empirical studies undertaken with public or government funded primary and secondary schools servicing vulnerable, high poverty communities in Queensland and the Northern Territory in Australia. The first project (2009-2013), titled Smart Education Partnerships (SEP) involved 12 schools, including 290 teachers across 120 classrooms working with university researchers in problem-solving dialogues around data-driven performativity, and then designing, implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of instructional innovations for approximately 3,500 students (author removed). The second project (2013-2017) involved two schools situated in the Northern Territory. And the third project (2016-2018) titled Learning for Teaching (L4T) involves some of the same schools that participated in the SEP project. However, the aim of L4T is to explore the enactment of critical collaborative inquiry in/with schools. The first and third research projects were funded by the Australian Research Council, while the second project was funded from a university research fellowship project.

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