Bhaskar's vision for the Centre

In 2011, Roy Bhaskar completed an "Academic Plan for the establishment of an International Centre for Critical Realism, Interdisciplinarity, Education and Social Research (ICCRIESR)". The Roy Bhaskar Centre is based on this plan. Bhaskar described his vision for the Centre as follows:

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The new Centre that is established will tap into, consolidate and help to focus and develop current activity in educational studies and more generally social research in a critical realist (and interdisciplinary) mode. 

 

Critical realism provides a way of transcending the dichotomous thinking customary in the social sciences. It is capable of reconciling conflicting orientations to empirical research and to theory, and to social justice. More generally, it suggests a way of reconciling and transcending (in a more comprehensive meta-theory) the conflicting insights and emphases of received meta-theoretical and methodological positions and perspectives, such as empiricism, neo-Kantianism, hermeneutics, constructivism, poststructuralism, etc. Thereby critical realism points to an inclusive and productive path to insightful and rigorous research practice, one backed by sound metatheory.

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Here we are concerned above all with the way in which critical realism can “under-labour” for education studies and education. The “under-labouring” metaphor was initiated by John Locke who said: “The common wealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”[1][2].

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References

[1] J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Epistle to the reader”.

[2] Philosophical under-labouring goes together with another norm for critical realism – the idea of “seriousness”, or the unity of theory and practice. Together, philosophical under-labouring and seriousness, along with the emphasis on the need for internal or immanent critique and the conception of philosophy as explicating presuppositions of human activities, gives rise to the conception of the role of critical realism in a discipline or field as promoting enhanced reflexivity and/or transformed practice.

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