ABSTRACT. As emerging scholars in a School of Critical Studies in Education, we often grapple with what it means to be ‘critical.’ This occurs within our scholarly work as we wrestle with the potentials of and limits to critical research in the social sphere outside academia (and its institutions) and within and for it. In this work, we seek to capture our evolving engagement with the notion of critical research, its tensions and contradictions, both as a scholarly community and as individuals. We explore multiple meanings of power, autonomy and agency as we seek to address the central question – what it means to be ‘critical’ – from a range of starting points: decolonial projects in academia, critical studies in the digital age, international standpoints and community perspectives of criticality and a critical inquiry into academic writing practices. Written as a metalogue, this work comprises various textual elements such as emails and presentation scripts reshaped into a conversational form of writing that retains our voices and perspectives while simultaneously allowing for the practice of reflexivity. We use the form (and purpose) of a ‘critical’ performance to embody our desire to disrupt traditional academic spaces through collaborative storytelling. This allows resistant discourses of critical inquiry to materialise and catalyses continued conversations about (and for) critical research.

Keywords: performance ethnography; critical research; metalogue; power structures; reflexivity

How to cite: El Mazbouh, M., Webster, J., Morin, J., Marwah, S., Ahmad, M., Grant, B., Locke, K., & Sturm, S. (2025). ‘Critical’ research in education: Threads from the past woven into a tapestry of the present. Knowledge Cultures, 13(2), 183–210. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13220259

Received December 13, 2024 • Received in revised form June 8, 2025
Accepted August 1, 2025 • Available online September 1, 2025