36 - Ethical Inquiry in Educational Research

Summary

This chapter is organized according to two complementary sections. The first examines ethical practice as an extension of liberal humanism, a series of operating assumptions that present select claims of discrete subjects and individualized responsibility. Liberal humanism colludes with capitalistic claims of value and a foregrounding of articulated rights over and above any semblance of collective justice. From this frame extend a series of research practices that “make sense” in particular ways and according to procedurized claims of ethical practice. Part two engages with an alternative ethical practice that is termed “relational materialism.” Relational materialism refuses the governing processes endemic to liberal humanism in favor of an affirmative ethical practice animated by transformative potential – the resistive assumption that we might become otherwise through generating a future yet unknown. Rather than solely describing or reconstituting the normative status quo (as is seen in conventional research), relationally materialist inquiry begins with an ethic of refusal such that we might experiment with alternative ways of living that are not governed by the ubiquitous claims of liberal humanism.