Educational research and the literary imagination

This article is intended as a contribution to the debate on the epistemology of educational research. It
explores what ‘seeing and thinking at the same time’ means in the context of educational research.
What might this look like if it were to borrow from the practices of literary criticism? What might
happen if we were to treat a research project as a work of literature? The author attempts to capture
the haphazard and unpredictable process through which research ‘data’ are gathered. This article is
an invitation to explore what a research project ‘knows’; to examine the contingent and unpredictable
way in which it discloses itself; and to illustrate how this disclosure is mediated by the researcher’s
locus in an academic field. The article is part of a broader exploration of why literature matters for
social science that can be traced back to the work of Pierre Bourdieu.