Critical Studies in Education

Critical Studies in Education is one of the few international journals devoted to a critical sociology of education, although it welcomes submissions with a critical stance that draw on other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, social geography, history) in order to understand 'the social'. Two interests frame the journal’s critical approach to research: (1) who benefits (and who does not) from current and historical social arrangements in education and, (2) from the standpoint of the least advantaged, what can be done about inequitable arrangements. Informed by this approach, articles published in the journal draw on post-structural, feminist, postcolonial and other critical orientations to critique education systems and to identify alternatives for education policy, practice and research. CSE also subscribes to a critical ontology and epistemology. It rejects the positivist view that social reality is 'out there' waiting to be 'found' and that researchers are able to maintain an objective distance from research subjects. Instead, the journal takes the view that researchers generate data rather than find them and that the representation of data is a form of analysis. For these reasons, we do not publish articles that separate 'findings' from 'discussion', whether they have discrete sections named in this way or not.