The conference asks how education research can know and act amid shifting political-ideological conditions, datafication, and crises of credibility. Our paper responds via a dialogical/narrative autoethnography (Cann/DeMeulenaere 2020) that traces practice under pressure across two participatory projects located in different parts of the education ecosystem. Project “H” is a cumulative dissertation on narratives of discrimination and their relation to educational processes, combining feminist Collective Memory Work (Haug 1999; Doblmair/Hackl/Vogler forthcoming) with students at the University of Vienna and biographical materials from prior studies (e.g. participatory co-inquiries). It explores how barriers and discriminatory experiences shape, enable, and block educational trajectories, drawing on intersectional analysis (Riegel 2010, Hackl/Märker/Doblmair 2024) and abductive, grounded-theory logics (Dausien 1996). Project “D” is participatory action research with an austrian group for teacher protests, emerging in autumn 2022 through the campaign against acute teacher shortages and growing later when racist school policies added to the trouble. It interrogates how competing political claims on education enable or constrain concepts of Bildung, analyzing difference patterns between state-intended education processes and those articulated within protest.

Argument framing: We advance a political process-oriented conception of education research. Drawing on process oriented, feminist and participatory epistemologies, and a hegemony-informed view of empowerment, we treat methodological choices—timing, sequencing, authorship, visibility—as strategic acts in volatile fields. To resist the depoliticization of activist concepts, we frame empowerment not as a deliverable but as an open horizon that orients practice. Three tension fields organize our analysis: (1) levels of empowerment (individual, collective, institutional); (2) recognition and addressing within participatory spaces; and (3) reflection, (re)distribution of resources, and transforming conditions (Märker/Hackl/Strasser 2026).

Empirical focus: In project H, discrimination is examined as structurally embedded yet biographically processed: educational credentials promise participation, yet opportunities are unequally distributed (Miethe et al. 2017, Ahmed 2012 & 2017). Following Heinemann and Mecheril (2017), discrimination research becomes educational research when it probes how learning and Bildung are mediated or prevented by discriminatory relations. Combining biographical narratives with collective memory work (Haug 1999), the study seeks both understanding and emancipatory potential in co-researching experiences of discrimination. In project D Bildung is explored as both an object of political contention and a process within protest, mapping how protest-generated educational practices confront policy framings.

We trace in our research experiences how we articulate political process-oriented, hegemony-aware research that orients toward empowerment while holding contradiction. Articulating these thoughts in dialogical autoethnography helps us to grasp our entangled practices of knowing and acting. Institutionally, we propose recalibrations aligned with quality of education and the public good.

The design is a dialogical/narrative autoethnography across two participatory/action sites. The performed dialogue is both method and data, foregrounding how knowing and acting co-evolve through situated negotiation under pressure. The data sources are: reflexive journals and fieldnotes; anonymized memory scenes; biographical interviews and group discussions; protest artifacts (statements, placards, meeting minutes, media posts); ethics correspondence and risk memos; co-authored analytic notes; and recorded researcher dialogues. Procedures: - Stage 1 (Narrative curation): Each researcher assembles “pressure point” vignettes where discriminatory pressures and institutional constraints redirected research/action. - Stage 2 (Dialogic inquiry): Recorded conversations probe contrasts/resonances in tactics. - Stage 3 (Co-analysis): Situational/relational mapping identifies opportunity windows, countermobilization, brokerage ties, and shifting risk profiles; coding attends to the three empowerment tension fields (levels; recognition/address; reflection/resources/conditions) within a grounded, abductive logic. For an analytic stance, narrative analysis (voice, temporality, positionality) integrates with process coding (opportunities, challenges, transformations) and a hegemony-informed reading of empowerment (stabilizing vs. resistant effects).

First conclusions can be teasered as follows: To strengthen education research’s authority and public-good orientation in poly-crisis conditions, institutions should recalibrate expectations around visibility, timelines, metrics, and authorship, and resource the often-invisible labor of care and safety. Political process-oriented, hegemony-aware participatory research can meet policy relevance not by scaling metrics but by deepening methodological sincerity, responsiveness to political temporality, and solidaristic infrastructures that hold ambiguity without reproducing harm. Project/paper is still developing.

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