Ian Stronach
Biographic Data
| ID | 161958 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Stronach |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Stronach |
| SIGNATURE | STRONACH I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Manchester Metropolitan University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 205 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
“Intertwangerlings”
The article introduces the concept of the “intertwangle,” a concept grounded within the gentle collisions of delegates at the 13th International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois and the simultaneous retelling of multiple autoethnographies of such encounters. Through such encounters and “retellings,” perhaps a different way of thinking about autoethnography is developed. The article presents a story of a journey to an…
Can National Identity Ever Have “Fundamental Values”
This brief article acts as an introduction to this special edition on Fundamental British Values (FBV). From the outset, it is important to state that we as a group of contributors believe it is fundamental to value Britain and all of its peoples in different and differing ways to those espoused in the Government Prevent Agenda, FBV, and the “media’s moral panics” about the terrorist within
“Fundamental British Values”
Here we give shallow answers to the ‘deep’ questions raised in the title of this piece. We slight the question of ‘value’ as mainly ‘interested commodities’ and throw darkness rather than light on the now increasingly troubled question of ‘British’ identity. Our approach is not to define “Fundamental British Values” (FBV) (as we will show, that proved impossible) but to represent the multiplicity of contradictory contents that invest its form. In…
Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz
Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered "unprofessional" approaches to qual…
Disabling XAuthors, Disordering TextsX
Drawing on Badiou's writing, we develop new insights on some central notions of the discourse on "disability." We offer eight agonistic, intersecting trajectories addressing these concepts. Drawing on authorial voices, we criticize the grammatical and rhetorical maneuvers we have previously undertaken as we represent ourselves aiming for forms of participatory engagement, thus offering both critique and self-critique. Previous poststructuralist a…
A Reflexive Autoethnography of Doctoral Supervision
This article traces elements of the learning of a doctoral student. It concerns attempts to bridge a number of gaps between supervisor and student in the process of studying for a PhD. In particular, it portrays differences in culture, gender, family, age, and experience and how those differences influenced the thinking of the student. A layered discourse of readings, misreadings, and rereadings is developed, drawing on the substantive literature…
Deconstructing the Intercultural Learning of a Doctoral Group Undertaking Qualitative Research—Or how not to do a ‘White PhD’
This article looks at the intellectual and linguistic dilemmas of an international doctoral group and juxtaposes these with some of the existential challenges the group faces. The intention is to offer a kind of ‘dialectical tacking’ between doctoral thinking and doctoral experiences more broadly. The overall aim of the piece is to think in front of each other while developing a sense of ‘equality’ in relation to group contributions. Each of the …
Economic ‘revelations’ and the metaphors of the meltdown
This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro‐capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK Financial Times , whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors of the ‘meltdown’ are significant and performative, allowing variously moralised narratives to emerge as implici…
Raising and doubling ‘standards' in professional discourse
In this article, a deconstructive survol of the term ‘standards' suggests that the concept contributes to an ‘outside-in' professionalism masquerading as ‘inside-out' professionalism. In examining a case of ‘standards' in action, the authors point out the inadequacy of ‘standards' as tools of appraisal with remainders, reductions, displacements, elisions and embellishments – mistranslations – being inevitable. The second part of the article addre…
The X-Factor
This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek's formulation of Lacan's "prisoners game," whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances…
Arts based research
The Politics, Poetics, and Practices of ‘Touch’ engendering private parts and public wholes
This article sets out in two different directions. Its spine is a post-structuralist examination of ‘touch’ as a cultural, historical entity and as a contemporary taboo in audit cultures. It ends up in a Deleuzian notion of touch as a ‘survol’ (survey) of the senses, both reflexive and transformative — claiming the articulations of a double ontology. The second register or ‘rib’ of the article sets out to act as a disruption of that narrative, cl…
Setting the Scene — Unruly Times, Untimely Rules
Towards a Theory of Santa
This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with…
Eight Contentions for an Educational Future
This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the "Great Recession" and have radical implications for any notion of a "knowledge economy" and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that neither a "scientific capitalism" nor its socialist equivalent provide a basis for future thinking and advocate a new begin…
Back to the Future? Some Dystopian Thoughts
Can Liberal Education Make a Comeback? The Case of “Relational Touch” at Summerhill School
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project 1 which focused on the issue of “touching” between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of “free” schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in r…
Sex, science and educational research
This article examines the state's contemporary construction of ‘sex’ as an educational problem in England. It does so by interrogating the notion of the ‘pregnant teenager’ as it is semantically and statistically constructed in accountability discourses, as well as research constrained within them. It then examines certain features of an exemplary solution to the problem, as proffered by one of the largest contemporary research projects into sex …
On promoting rigour in educational research
This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE underta…
Reflexivity, the Picturing of Selves, the Forging of Method
This article addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as "picturing," drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account o…
Enlightenment and the ‘heart of darkness’
This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo‐imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro‐politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad’s unsettling deployment of that same place as ‘the heart of darkness’; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that current…
Interesting times, and interested research
Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism
This paper is about the nature of contemporary professional identity. It looks at the ways in which 'discursive dynamics' come to re-write the professional teacher and nurse as split, plural and conflictual selves, as they seek to come to terms with a political impetus written through what the authors term an 'economy of performance' in uncertain conflict with various 'ecologies of practice'. The teacher and nurse are thus located in a complicate…
Room to Manoeuvre
Recent shifts within the popular conception of education as an aspect of the market economy positioning parent as consumer, teacher as producer and educated child as product have reformulated the various stakeholders as ‘partners' in the business of educating children. This article, based upon data collected in an action research and development project, attempts to open up an interpretation of the dynamics of home‐school relations in terms of a …
Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire
This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as ‘cultural performances’, and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms – as league tables – are a form of contemporary ‘spectacl…
Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism
This paper is about the nature of contemporary professional identity. It looks at the ways in which 'discursive dynamics' come to re-write the professional teacher and nurse as split, plural and conflictual selves, as they seek to come to terms with a political impetus written through what the authors term an 'economy of performance' in uncertain conflict with various 'ecologies of practice'. The teacher and nurse are thus located in a complicate…
Reflexivity, the Picturing of Selves, the Forging of Method
This article addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as "picturing," drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account o…
The student teacher in school
Current realities in the student teaching experience
Room to Manoeuvre
Recent shifts within the popular conception of education as an aspect of the market economy positioning parent as consumer, teacher as producer and educated child as product have reformulated the various stakeholders as ‘partners' in the business of educating children. This article, based upon data collected in an action research and development project, attempts to open up an interpretation of the dynamics of home‐school relations in terms of a …
Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire
This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as ‘cultural performances’, and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms – as league tables – are a form of contemporary ‘spectacl…
The X-Factor
This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek's formulation of Lacan's "prisoners game," whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances…
Can the Mothers of Invention Make Virtue out of Necessity? An optimistic deconstruction of research compromises in contract research and evaluation
This article offers a retrospective deconstruction of research compromises undertaken during ‘quick and dirty’ contract evaluation. The deconstruction identifies constraining changes in the nature of research contexts, but develops a positive view of methodological developments which might be regarded as creating ‘transgressive validity’. Notions of ‘hybridity’ in research methodology, and of ‘negotiation’ in research procedures are considered
Enlightenment and the ‘heart of darkness’
This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo‐imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro‐politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad’s unsettling deployment of that same place as ‘the heart of darkness’; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that current…
Joking with Disability
This article discusses the discourses of disability through a parallel `disabling' of its own text. It draws on literary as well as sociological sources in order to interrogate the nature and relations of the `tragic', the `heroic' and the `comic'. The authors offer the conclusion that the comic is never quite absent from the discourse of tragedy (after Kundera), and turn that insight back on their own text, in an attempt to refuse the solemnitie…
Towards a Theory of Santa
This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with…
Can Liberal Education Make a Comeback? The Case of “Relational Touch” at Summerhill School
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project 1 which focused on the issue of “touching” between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of “free” schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in r…
On promoting rigour in educational research
This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE underta…
Eight Contentions for an Educational Future
This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the "Great Recession" and have radical implications for any notion of a "knowledge economy" and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that neither a "scientific capitalism" nor its socialist equivalent provide a basis for future thinking and advocate a new begin…
Fashioning Post‐modernism, Finishing Modernism
This article sets out to examine the policing of the so‐called ‘borders’ of ‘modernism’ and ‘post‐modernism’, arguing that such polarising metaphors are distinctions that cannot be made without self‐contradictions that would make even a post‐modernist blush. Instead, we must deconstruct the notion of boundary or border, drawing on Derridean formulations of difference in the fields of literature, feminism and post‐colo‐niality: what new metaphors …
Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz
Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered "unprofessional" approaches to qual…
Disabling XAuthors, Disordering TextsX
Drawing on Badiou's writing, we develop new insights on some central notions of the discourse on "disability." We offer eight agonistic, intersecting trajectories addressing these concepts. Drawing on authorial voices, we criticize the grammatical and rhetorical maneuvers we have previously undertaken as we represent ourselves aiming for forms of participatory engagement, thus offering both critique and self-critique. Previous poststructuralist a…
Economic ‘revelations’ and the metaphors of the meltdown
This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro‐capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK Financial Times , whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors of the ‘meltdown’ are significant and performative, allowing variously moralised narratives to emerge as implici…
Raising and doubling ‘standards' in professional discourse
In this article, a deconstructive survol of the term ‘standards' suggests that the concept contributes to an ‘outside-in' professionalism masquerading as ‘inside-out' professionalism. In examining a case of ‘standards' in action, the authors point out the inadequacy of ‘standards' as tools of appraisal with remainders, reductions, displacements, elisions and embellishments – mistranslations – being inevitable. The second part of the article addre…
Sex, science and educational research
This article examines the state's contemporary construction of ‘sex’ as an educational problem in England. It does so by interrogating the notion of the ‘pregnant teenager’ as it is semantically and statistically constructed in accountability discourses, as well as research constrained within them. It then examines certain features of an exemplary solution to the problem, as proffered by one of the largest contemporary research projects into sex …
No Problem Here’
The paper outlines the result of a one‐year project of action research into the prevalence and nature of racism in two primary schools and the implementation of multi‐cultural and anti‐racist guidelines in Scotland. Two schools are examined with respect to these factors by teachers. The conclusion is that the action research, although not officially supported by funding, except for a small amount from the University of Stirling, is nevertheless i…
The Rituals of Recovery
The Rituals of Recovery
Making a start
The authors are conducting an independent policy evaluation of the ESRC‐funded ‘Information Technology in Education Research Programme’ (InTER). The four‐year evaluation (1988‐92) in the first instance addressed the origins of the Programme and the processes of selection that led to the setting up of four consortia. The consortia projects are ‘Groupwork with Computers’ (Co‐directors: Michael Eraut and Celia Hoyles), ‘Tools for Exploratory Learnin…
Current realities in the student teaching experience
No Problem Here’
The paper outlines the result of a one‐year project of action research into the prevalence and nature of racism in two primary schools and the implementation of multi‐cultural and anti‐racist guidelines in Scotland. Two schools are examined with respect to these factors by teachers. The conclusion is that the action research, although not officially supported by funding, except for a small amount from the University of Stirling, is nevertheless i…
Fashioning Post‐modernism, Finishing Modernism
This article sets out to examine the policing of the so‐called ‘borders’ of ‘modernism’ and ‘post‐modernism’, arguing that such polarising metaphors are distinctions that cannot be made without self‐contradictions that would make even a post‐modernist blush. Instead, we must deconstruct the notion of boundary or border, drawing on Derridean formulations of difference in the fields of literature, feminism and post‐colo‐niality: what new metaphors …
Can the Mothers of Invention Make Virtue out of Necessity? An optimistic deconstruction of research compromises in contract research and evaluation
This article offers a retrospective deconstruction of research compromises undertaken during ‘quick and dirty’ contract evaluation. The deconstruction identifies constraining changes in the nature of research contexts, but develops a positive view of methodological developments which might be regarded as creating ‘transgressive validity’. Notions of ‘hybridity’ in research methodology, and of ‘negotiation’ in research procedures are considered
The student teacher in school
Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire
This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as ‘cultural performances’, and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms – as league tables – are a form of contemporary ‘spectacl…
Joking with Disability
This article discusses the discourses of disability through a parallel `disabling' of its own text. It draws on literary as well as sociological sources in order to interrogate the nature and relations of the `tragic', the `heroic' and the `comic'. The authors offer the conclusion that the comic is never quite absent from the discourse of tragedy (after Kundera), and turn that insight back on their own text, in an attempt to refuse the solemnitie…
Room to Manoeuvre
Recent shifts within the popular conception of education as an aspect of the market economy positioning parent as consumer, teacher as producer and educated child as product have reformulated the various stakeholders as ‘partners' in the business of educating children. This article, based upon data collected in an action research and development project, attempts to open up an interpretation of the dynamics of home‐school relations in terms of a …
Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism
This paper is about the nature of contemporary professional identity. It looks at the ways in which 'discursive dynamics' come to re-write the professional teacher and nurse as split, plural and conflictual selves, as they seek to come to terms with a political impetus written through what the authors term an 'economy of performance' in uncertain conflict with various 'ecologies of practice'. The teacher and nurse are thus located in a complicate…
Interesting times, and interested research
Enlightenment and the ‘heart of darkness’
This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo‐imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro‐politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad’s unsettling deployment of that same place as ‘the heart of darkness’; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that current…
Sex, science and educational research
This article examines the state's contemporary construction of ‘sex’ as an educational problem in England. It does so by interrogating the notion of the ‘pregnant teenager’ as it is semantically and statistically constructed in accountability discourses, as well as research constrained within them. It then examines certain features of an exemplary solution to the problem, as proffered by one of the largest contemporary research projects into sex …
On promoting rigour in educational research
This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE underta…
Reflexivity, the Picturing of Selves, the Forging of Method
This article addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as "picturing," drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account o…
Can Liberal Education Make a Comeback? The Case of “Relational Touch” at Summerhill School
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project 1 which focused on the issue of “touching” between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of “free” schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in r…
Back to the Future? Some Dystopian Thoughts
The Politics, Poetics, and Practices of ‘Touch’ engendering private parts and public wholes
This article sets out in two different directions. Its spine is a post-structuralist examination of ‘touch’ as a cultural, historical entity and as a contemporary taboo in audit cultures. It ends up in a Deleuzian notion of touch as a ‘survol’ (survey) of the senses, both reflexive and transformative — claiming the articulations of a double ontology. The second register or ‘rib’ of the article sets out to act as a disruption of that narrative, cl…
Setting the Scene — Unruly Times, Untimely Rules
Towards a Theory of Santa
This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with…
Eight Contentions for an Educational Future
This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the "Great Recession" and have radical implications for any notion of a "knowledge economy" and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that neither a "scientific capitalism" nor its socialist equivalent provide a basis for future thinking and advocate a new begin…
Arts based research
Raising and doubling ‘standards' in professional discourse
In this article, a deconstructive survol of the term ‘standards' suggests that the concept contributes to an ‘outside-in' professionalism masquerading as ‘inside-out' professionalism. In examining a case of ‘standards' in action, the authors point out the inadequacy of ‘standards' as tools of appraisal with remainders, reductions, displacements, elisions and embellishments – mistranslations – being inevitable. The second part of the article addre…
The X-Factor
This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek's formulation of Lacan's "prisoners game," whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances…
Sociology (29 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Political science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works)