In 2018, a group of Lithuanian researchers, in collaboration with two US-based scholars, received a four-year European Union grant that seeks to enhance researcher capacities to conduct innovative research while participating in a project aimed at improving health care specialist education to work with people with disabilities. The grant grew out of professional and interpersonal dialogues and commitments to Lithuanian higher education and to creating access to new research methodologies and international networks for Lithuanian scholars. Due to the 50 year soviet occupation and scientific isolation from developments in research knowledge and methodologies worldwide, Lithuanian scholars have struggled with gaining access to the newest information and international participation in research networks and publications (Skukauskaitė & Rupšienė, 2017). While the access to resources  has increased over the three decades since Lithuania regained independence, researchers still face many linguistic, historical, social, and economic constraints to participating as full-fledged members of international scholarly communities. Lithuanian situation is not unlike that faced by other researchers in post-soviet, post-dictatorship, and developing countries, as our dialogues with colleagues in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary,  China, Pakistan, Mexico and Turkey (among others) have made visible.  Despite the challenges, many researchers, individually and collectively, locally and trans-nationally are engaged in dialogues and activities that seek to enhance the potentials for methodology learning and innovative research in their countries.  In this paper, we make visible how challenges can be overcome and the landscape of possible research approaches can be transformed by concerted actions of groups of actors committed to enhancing the potentials for innovative research in Lithuania.

Positioning the EU-grant as an anchor that represents new potentials for research development in Lithuania, in this paper we trace back the histories, actions, and actors that led to the grant proposal and created opportunities for research learning and transformations in research methodology in Education and Social Sciences across the country. In focusing on transformations in Lithuania, we make visible the invisible processes, practices, and relationships that shape what becomes possible locally, nationally, and internationally when people work together to promote and enact social and educational change.  We use the Lithuanian scholar’s access to and learning of qualitative and ethnographic research as a telling case that makes visible the historical, economic, linguistic, interpersonal and other contextual layers that shape what researchers in “peripheral” countries ( Salager-Meyer, 2008) can and need to do to develop and present robust research and participate in international research communities.

We begin the paper by providing a brief historical overview of the Lithuanian education as it relates to research learning and teaching. We then explore the literature that discusses the opportunities and challenges faced by “peripheral” and non-English speaking countries in an English-dominant global research environment. Following the contextual and conceptual review, we utilize data from two research projects in Lithuania to make visible the challenges and opportunities Lithuanian scholars encounter as they seek to learn qualitative and ethnographic research methodologies. We then discuss the actions, actors, interactions, and events that were created to address the challenges in research access nationally and to pave the way for proposing and receiving the EU-funded grant. In the final section we discuss how understanding the processes and practices that transformed Lithuanian educational research in the past 10 years provides a telling case for other “peripheral” countries who may want to transform their own capacities for and acceptance of qualitative and ethnographic research. This paper may be of benefit to researchers from countries with well-developed research knowledge and networks (e.g., US, UK) as it makes visible the importance of understanding historical, socioeconomic, and academic contexts that shape the need and potentials for research collaborations.

This paper is based on a qualitative research study about the teaching and learning of research as well as on the study that was developed for the EU grant. We also draw on reflexive accounts of the authors whose 5-year collaboration and long-time commitments to transparency and quality of research methodology created possibilities for enhancing qualitative research learning opportunities in Lithuania over time. These professional and interpersonal histories were also instrumental in shaping the design of the project that received the EU grant. Therefore, in this paper we utilize personal accounts, reflexive analyses and data from other research projects to make visible how the time, people, and resources (Barr & Dreeben, 1983) can be brought together in a particular context to shape the opportunities for research learning and transforming the landscape of educational research in Lithuania. Analyses are guided by principles of ethnography (Green & Bridges, 2018) and its overarching goals to understand what is happening in a particular social/cultural context at particular moments in time and overtime. The ethnographic perspective (Green & Bloome, 1997) drives our focus on the actors, actions, and the culturally relevant contexts that construct a multifaceted representation (Green, Castanheira, Skukauskaite, & Hammond, 2015) of the developing research culture-in-the-making (Collins & Green, 1992). Data sources include ethnographically informed interview conversations (Kelly & Green, 2019; Skukauskaitė, 2017) with Lithuanian faculty and graduate students, audio and video records and documents of research seminars conducted in Lithuania by international scholars; notes and audio records from meetings of the research team that developed the EU-funded grant; as well as the author’s narratives, emails, and conversations that helped us delve deeper into understanding the contextual, professional, historical, and interpersonal aspects of the processes and practices in transforming the educational research methodologies landscape in Lithuania. The data were analyzed utilizing Spradley’s (1980/2016) developmental research sequence and identifying domains and taxonomies of actors, actions, events, activities, and resources that were part of the cultural and academic research landscape in Lithuania. Sociolinguistic discourse analysis (Green & Kelly, 2019; Gumperz, 1982, 1992) grounded in the interactional ethnographic research tradition (Kelly & Green, 2019) was utilized to analyze purposefully selected audio and video records that made visible the challenges, opportunities, and transformations in research described by Lithuanian and international scholars.

This paper makes visible how people, time and resources come together to create new possibilities for transforming the research landscape in Lithuania, despite the historical, academic, economic and other challenges. Analyses of interview-conversations and reflexive accounts of the researchers demonstrates the key role personal agency and commitments to the larger national and international developments in research transparency play in creating research learning opportunities within and beyond the national boundaries. The paper also makes visible how a relatively small group of actors can create lasting change and transformations, despite the historical, economic, and other challenges in the national and disciplinary research environment. The case of transformations in the qualitative and ethnographic research methodology in Education in Lithuania makes visible the potential pathways through which members of “peripheral” countries and research communities can attain access to international research funding and participation in international networks.

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