Contemporary higher education – at the limit of comprehension?

Researching into the increasingly fast-changing societally and politically contexts of universities and higher education, put difficult demands on epistemologies and conceptual frameworks applied in such research. While the complexities of empirical contexts of higher education are often foregrounded in the research, the underlying epistemological challenges are more rarely brought up for critical discussion. In this session we explore the many-sided and often contradictory challenges we are faced with as researchers in order to grasp, sense, and interpret the high level of nuances, nestedness, and unruliness of higher education policies and practices intersecting across educational, institutional, societal, and cultural contexts. We present and discuss the ways we all share an epistemological root in critical realism but have each developed our own research approaches in order to capture the complexities of higher education policy and practice interrelations.

Our reflections are based on the following three questions, which each of us will reply to:

– What complexities within higher education are we researching into and why? Why do we give this the significance we do?
– How has an epistemological stance within critical realism helped us in our research?
– In what ways have we translated (operationalized) the critical realist stance into our own research framework (e.g. the multi-scalar approach, and nested context framework)? What are the affordances and constraints?