Network
NW 15. Research on Partnerships in Education
Title
Relations and Relationality in Partnerships
Abstract
Scholarship on partnerships in education often centers organizational logistics, collaboration, relevance, and outcomes. Increasingly, however, contending with histories of power, coloniality, racism, and dispossession has drawn attention to the emotional, relational, and often invisible labor and influences that shape partnership. These dynamics raise questions about the prefigurative and speculative practices through which partnerships might anticipate, negotiate, and enact different relational futures as well as how partnerships are studied and written about. This special call invites conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine how educational partnerships are constituted through relations of participation, power, affect, materiality, and representation.
The Call
Partnerships in education offer promising organizational approaches for investigating and addressing pressing problems of practice. As the field has developed, scholarship has increasingly attended not only to what partnerships accomplish, but also to the relational, cultural, and interactional dynamics through which partnership work becomes possible. Emerging work further asks how partnerships might practice answerability to histories and ongoing relations of coloniality racism, land, and other forms of power (Kennedy et al, 2026; Sjolund & Lindvall, 2024; Hu, 2026; Wilson et al., 2025).
These developments invite continued critical attention to what constitutes partnership and how partnership unfolds. As others have pointed out, partnership work depends upon emotional, relational, and often invisible forms of labor. Affect circulates through partnership work in complex ways that shapes learning, meaning-making, and what partnership looks and feels like. Partnerships are also organized through relations that exceed the human actors conventionally understood to comprise them, including places, histories, technologies, funding structures, institutional arrangements, and other material conditions. Such plurality calls to mind what Akkerman, Bakker and Penuel (2021) have called “ontological synchronization,” or the ongoing process of “engaging, listening, and responding” as “continuous attunement to what is happening and matters at hand, and what future is being generated, including what values and judgments researchers themselves perpetuate in society” (p. 416). This sensibility to the “moving ontology” of our social worlds and the generative potential of partnership also raises questions about the prefigurative and speculative practices through which partners might anticipate, negotiate, and enact different relational futures (Light et al., 2026).
Attending to these dynamics raises methodological and representational questions about how partnerships are studied and written about. How might methodological and representational practices better account for relationality, conflict, uncertainty, distributed agency, and divergent understandings of partnership? And, what do the disciplinary traditions and conceptual frameworks we bring to studying partnerships make possible to see, or conversely, obscure? Such questions are consequential not only for how we understand partnership itself, but also for how problems of practice are identified, interpreted, and addressed. For instance, familiar challenges involving time, funding, organizational cultures, or competing institutional priorities are often discussed in terms of the practical difficulties they pose for collaborative work. Yet these challenges also take shape through particular histories, institutional arrangements, and relations of power, and may assume quite different meanings and consequences for those involved. How might attending to these conditions complicate our understandings of partnership challenges and the possibilities for addressing them? More broadly, how might different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying partnerships extend, trouble, or reorient what we understand equitable educational change to require?
This special call invites conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine how educational partnerships are constituted through relations of participation, power, affect, materiality, and representation. We are particularly interested in work across disciplinary, methodological, and geographical traditions that critically engages the assumptions through which partnerships are conceptualized, studied, and written about.
Contact Person(s)
Brianna Kennedy: Brianna.kennedy(at)glasgow.ac.uk
Blanca Gamez-Djokic: bgamezdjokic(at)nl.edu
References
Akkerman, S. F., Bakker, A., & Penuel, W. R. (2021). Relevance of educational research: An ontological conceptualization. Educational Researcher, 50(6), 416-424.
Kennedy, B. L., Bekir, S., & Henrichs, L. (2026). An illustrative case study of researcher roles and challenges in a Dutch school-level research-practice partnership. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 88, 101558.
Light, A., Lindström, K., Millen, T., Robinson, B., & Schröder, A. Affective Prefiguration: Anticipating Relations and Feeling Futures in the Anthropocene. Available at SSRN 7023451.
Sjölund, S., & Lindvall, J. (2024). Examining boundaries in a large-scale educational research-practice partnership. Journal of educational change, 25(2), 417-443.
Hu, C. (2026). Problematizing Research-Practice Partnership: Rethinking Mutual Benefit, University-Community Engagement, and Educational Equity. Educational Studies, 1-11.
Wilson, C. M., Hetrick, C., Smith, R. J., & Larsosa, J. (2025). Prefiguring research-practice partnerships to pursue racial justice in education. AERA Open, 11, 23328584251318299.