Reimagining Utopias: Theory and Method for Educational Research in Post-Socialist Contexts(55 Bold Visions in Educational Research)

Reimagining Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed volume addresses the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in the social sciences as they plan and conduct education research in post-socialist settings, as well as disseminate their research findings. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry that spans the fields of education, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book explores three broad questions: How can we (re)imagine research to articulate new theoretical insights about post-socialist education transformations in the context of globalization? How can we (re)imagine methods to pursue alternative ways of producing knowledge? And how can we navigate various ethical dilemmas in light of academic expectations and fieldwork realities? Drawing on case studies, conceptual and theoretical essays, autoethnographic accounts, as well as synthetic introductory and conclusion chapters by the editors, this book advances an important conversation about these complicated questions in geopolitical settings ranging from post-socialist Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The contributors not only expose the limits of Western conceptual frameworks and research methods for understanding post-socialist transformations, but also engage creatively in addressing the persisting problems of knowledge hierarchies created by abstract universals, epistemic difference, and geographical distance inherent in comparative and international education research. This book challenges the readers to question the existing education narratives and rethink taken-for-granted beliefs, theoretical paradigms, and methodological frameworks in order to reimagine the world in more complex and pluriversal ways.

Review :
"Reimagining Utopias is of great value to scholars engaged in researching individuals, education institutions and families with a socialist past, occasionally including first-generation, 1.5-generation, or even second-generation immigrants located elsewhere. I found myself fascinated by some of the methodological discussions in the book [...]. [This volume] substantially advance[s] the field of comparative and international education. By involving a large number of scholars who agreed to engage in research and writing on these topics, addressing burning issues of methodologies and self-positioning, and questioning the use of common theories and dispositions, these books call for further engagement and research." - Miri Yemini, "Re-configuring post-socialism: methodologies, theories, and reflections" (2019), in: Comparative Education [DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2019.1645988] "Some of the strongest points in the text are where the authors reflect upon their own positionality within the academy; each acknowledge their insider/outsider relationship to the cultures that they study, whether by way of heritage or length of time spent living and working in a specific country. Their reflections bring into question the oftentimes invisible or taken-for-granted assumptions and reductive thinking that can come to limit other alternatives for understanding post-Soviet regions as being in perpetual “transition.” [...] This work will likely enjoy a wide readership, especially as researchers across the disciplines grapple with how to position themselves in light of swiftly changing contexts, such as in Ukraine, where the expanded possibilities for change that defined the social imaginary after the Maidan Revolution have rearranged their shape in that nation’s ongoing conflict with Russia. Western frameworks and the complexity of local political struggles shaped by history and different forms of subjugation play an important role in every chapter featured in this book. This is especially apparent where each author shows how post-colonial considerations of knowledge and epistemic difference can shift the status of different populations in the present. Michelle Kelso’s chapter, “Reflections on Holocaust Education of the Roma Genocide in Romania” is a good example of when and how the role of a researcher may challenge locally accepted frameworks by re-situating knowledge. The book’s conclusion offers a pathway “to forge collective hope,” by thinking more critically about the varied impacts that researchers—in the broadest sense of the term—can have on the networks of people, ideas, and institutions bridging North America and post-socialist settings today." - Jessica Zychowicz, University of Alberta, in: Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale 47.2, Article 6 [Full article available here]