Critical Realism at Oxford Brookes University

David Aldridge, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Education, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
In September 2012 the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, together with the Farmington Institute, sponsored a conference in ‘Critical Realism, Religion and Education’ that was attended by over sixty delegates from around the world, including education practitioners, undergraduates and research students and academics from a wide range of disciplines. The mutual interest of the conference was the question of how issues of religion, reality and truth are to be addressed in educational contexts and communities. Keynote speakers, all of international renown, included Professor Roy Bhaskar, World Scholar at the Institute of Education, University of London and the originator of the philosophy of critical realism, a theoretical approach that is increasingly gaining recognition as a methodological ‘under-labourer’ for research in the social sciences; Professor Alister McGrath, the renowned theologian who began his career as a doctor of science; Professor Ference Marton, the originator of the ‘phenomenographical’ research methodology that has been highly influential in higher education research, as well as the distinction between ‘deep’, ‘strategic’ and ‘superficial’ learning; and Professor Andrew Wright, a leading expert in theological and religious education and the originator of ‘critical religious education’, which draws on Bhaskar’s philosophy.
The aim of the conference was to generate inter-disciplinary discussion and collaboration, and one fruitful outcome is that a volume of papers is now intended with Routledge. Another unanticipated outcome was the discovery of a significant number of colleagues across the university who are also interested in or working directly with critical realism, including Ivan Mitchell in the Business School, Professor Math Noortmann in International Relations and Law, and Johanna Woodcock Ross in Social Work. We have been successful in securing further funding from the Faculty to hold an internal symposium in September 2013 for colleagues and research students who are working with critical realism or interested in doing so. Leading researchers in critical realism will visit the university to form a panel of experts and colleagues will offer short presentations of their work in critical realism for discussion by the group. We plan to follow this symposium with a programme of related activity within and outside the faculty, including a critical realist reading group and the formation of an inter-disciplinary research centre.

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