This year’s ECER conference asks us to consider what is our role in uncertain, risky times and what promises we can keep. As researchers, we can turn attention to what it is that we do - our own practices and their consequences - how things ‘turn out’ in seemingly unpredictable ways (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) are related to how we set about to understand them.   

Each paper in this symposium discusses how dominant practices in the disciplines travel across cultural contexts in particular ways, leading to tacitly accepted ways of researching these practices. The theory of practice architectures explains that particular conditions constrain or enable practices, but what about the ways in which research approaches are taken-for-granted in coming to know research problems in different cultural settings? What is considered a genuine practice problem across settings? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand the problem? How are these taken-for-granted research practices constraining different forms of knowing the problem and therefore the potential directions that research projects can unfold?

These four papers focus on the theory-method nexus of coming to know practice architectures across culturally diverse and intercultural settings. The authors pay close attention as to how the theoretical framework offered by the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis, et al. 2014; Edwards-Groves, Grootenboer, Wilkinson, 2018) requires particular epistemological and ontological considerations. Such considerations shape the methodological choices and research traditions adapted for use in projects that respect the diversity and knowledges of the peoples in the various educational practice sites and facilitate emancipatory and socially just research beneficence.

In this era of educational risk (Edwards-Groves et al, 2018) and uncertainty, the symposium aims to assist researchers in intercultural settings with imagining what is possible; what is now their role and what educational promises they can keep via their research practices. As members of the international Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) Network (see https://ips.gu.se/english/cooperation/networks/pep), the authors of each symposium paper illustrate how they are tackling these contemporary threats to social justice in education for disenfranchised learners.   Our practices trouble the taken-for-grantedness of research traditions. It is our hope that those who attend this symposium, who have an interest in socially contextualised research and issue of social justice will take some inspiration from the connections we attempt to illustrate between the theory of practice architectures and enabling critical onto-epistemological consideration in research approaches.

Edwards-Groves, C., Grootenboer, P., & Wilkinson, J. (Eds.)(2018).Education in an Era of Schooling. Critical perspectives of Educational Practice and Action Research. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing Practices, Changing Education.