Following Covid-19’s acute phase, educational researchers/practitioners have been forced to reconsider their work, cultures, and institutions in relation to crisis, including in the entangled relationship between theory and practice. Yet, the pandemic highlighted other intersecting moments of crisis, including environment, political economy, communal- and identity-based violence and injustice, with consequences for education and educational research. 

This workshop enabled participants to consider how their work might contribute to the development of analyses of education-in-polycrisis that push beyond established limits. As we move through these intersecting moments of crisis, new material and historical circumstances emerge for experiencing learning, teaching, and researching. As a result, this session aimed to help our community to consider the idea and potential futures for social theory in its application to educational research.

This workshop:

• explored the social theories that are being effectively applied to educational research at the intersection of global crises, through the deployment of two critical case studies; and
• created a space in which participants can use these case studies and social theories, in order to reflect upon their own work-in-progress.

Connected areas for thinking through these considerations include: first, our identities, bodies and psychologies as researchers; second, our research practices and cultures; third, the structures of the institutions in which we work/research; and fourth, how we negotiate and implement our values in our research. Thus, the session was designed to encourage participants to consider how we might reimagine our work in education, in order to understand how we navigate future crises.