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Summary

Activism

All research enables change; activist education policy research seeks explicitly and primarily to achieve specified changes to educational arrangements, practices, cultures or structures to alleviate the effects of disadvantage. Yeatman (1998) provides a useful definition of a policy activist as ‘anyone who champions in relatively consistent ways a value orientation and pragmatic conception of policy which opens it up to the appropriate participation of all those who are involved in the policy process, all the way from points of policy conception to delivery on the ground’ (p 10).

This definition, with its focus on values and participation, signifies a shift from how policy activism was first conceptualised by Heclo in the 1970s (in Smyth, 2012). Here, the policy activist ‘was a kind of knowledgeable policy technocrat who was prepared to carefully watch developments’ (Smyth, 2012, p 180). Intellectually, the activist disposition in policy research originated with the Frankfurt School in Germany, which advanced a critical approach to scholarship that ‘aim[ed] to go beyond simply understanding and critiquing social, political and economic relations, towards seeking to change the world’ (Savage et al, 2021, p 308). An important strand of critical education policy sociology continues this activist tradition (see, for example, Apple, 2013; Blackmore, 2014; Gorski and Zenkov, 2014). Whether it is called (socially) critical or activist, such policy research intends ‘taking aim at both the ideological and practical work of schooling [and/or higher education] and connecting it to the wider structural issues that dominate public education’ (Tilleczek, 2012, p 254).

Activism in policy research may be achieved in several ways, singly or together. One form of discursive achievement is through employing a methodology centred on co-construction where individuals or groups affected by a particular dimension of oppression contribute as partners in the research design and/or research process. For example, Tilleczek (2012) ‘committed to working with and for young people to collectively make fissures visible to those in policy and decision-making positions’ (p 254). Co-constructing or co-producing research can also be used as a sort of self-reflexive activism whereby power imbalances located in higher education might be problematised and disrupted to the wider benefit of communities and education (Duggan, 2021).