Introduction: Sustainability Science as Co-Creative Research Praxis

This chapter explores the relationship between collaboration and creativity within social sustainability research. Aimed at stimulating further reflection and debate on the role of ‘co-creativity’ in enabling transformative sustainability agendas, the chapter acts also as an introduction to the entire edited collection. A key guiding question posed from the outset is how co-creative research practice, as a generative process, can best support the emergence of alternative—potentially even transformative—ways of being in the world. The discussion proceeds with a conceptual review of creativity, followed by a detailed explanation of how co-creativity is defined for the purposes of this edited collection. The remainder of the chapter looks towards the nurturing of co-creative practice within social sustainability research; particular attention is given to socially inclusive forms of co-creative and engaged research praxis. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches that, through action and reflection, stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. Accordingly, emphasis is placed throughout this chapter on co-creative research practice as requiring a retained sensitivity to the importance of researching ‘with’.

Educating Perfinkers: How Cognitive Tools Support Affective Engagement in Teacher Education

Our intention is to share our lived experiences as educators of educators employing Imaginative Education (IE) pedagogy. We aim to illuminate IE’s influence on our students’, and our own, affective alertness, and to leave readers feeling the possibility of this pedagogy for teaching and learning. Inspired by the literary and research praxis of métissage (Chambers et al., 2012; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2010), we offer this polyphonic text as a weaving together of our discrete and collective voices as imaginative teacher educators. Our writing reflects a relational process, one that invites us as writers and colleagues to better understand each other and our practices as IE educators (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). It also allows us to share with other practitioners our struggles, questions, and triumphs as we make sense of our individual and collective praxis: how IE’s theory informs our practice, and how our practice informs our understanding of IE’s theory. This text, like IE’s philosophy, invites heterogeneous possibilities.

“You’re the One That Was on Uncle’s Wall!”: Identity, Whanaungatanga and Connection for Takatāpui (LGBTQ+ Māori)

Takatāpui (Māori LGBTIQ+) challenge static notions of relationality and belonging or whanaungatanga for Māori. Explorations of Māori and LGBTIQ+ identity can often polarise experiences of family as either nurturing spaces or sites comprised of actors of spiritual and physical violence. However, such framing ignores the ways in which cultural practices for establishing relationality for takatāpui extend beyond dichotomies of disconnection or connection within families and into spaces of new potential. In this paper we outline a bricoleur research praxis rooted in Māori ways of being which underpins the research. We engage in photo-poetry as an analytic tool, constructing poetry from our interviews with Waimirirangi, a twenty-year-old whakawahine (Māori term for trans woman or trans femme) and bring them into conversation with the images she provided as part of the broader research project. As the interface between her ancestors and future generations, Waimirirangi demonstrates the potentiality of whanaungatanga as a restorative practice for enhancing takatāpui wellbeing.

Equity Trends in Mathematics Education: A Content Analysis of Meta-analytic Research

The purpose of this quantitative content analysis (QCA) was to characterize equity-related trends in meta-analyses of mathematics education studies. An a priori keyword search and retrieval process produced an initial pool of 156 studies. After applying the prescribed inclusion criteria, the initial pool of studies was reduced to a final sample of 32 studies. These studies were coded and analyzed as part of the QCA. The coding and analysis were guided by a critical quantitative research lens, which examines how numeric trends can help to unpack systemic and systematic practices that support the agenda of the dominant cultural group. The results indicate that 62.5 percent of the reviewed studies lacked an equity focus, while most equity-focused meta-analyses examined challenges related to student ability. Moreover, 14 out of the 16 or 87.5 percent of the equity-related moderators had a statistically significant influence on effect size variance. The results of this study suggest that across most mathematics education meta-analytic studies effect size magnitude is impacted by equity-related moderators that are often absent. The researchers provide implications for meta-analytic thinking and equitable research praxis in mathematics education.

Illustrating the Outcomes of Community-Based Research: A Case Study on Working with Faith-Based Institutions

Incoming immigrants to places like Canada tend to be religious and thereby have sympathies counter to prevailing secularizing trends that emerge in research praxis. This paper presents an illustrative case study of Community-Based Research (CBR) that starts from the community to be studied. We illustrate how CBR can be an effective tool for engaging community stakeholders in solving community problems when stakeholders are part of faith-based institutions. This is accomplished by drawing on Ochocka and Janzen (2014) and Janzen et al. (2016), who discuss the hallmarks of CBR that we used to structure a case study with The Salvation Army (TSA). This paper focuses on TSA as a religious institution and how CBR supports TSA’s adjustment to enhance its relationships with a community it finds itself serving: newcomers. We first outline the hallmarks of CBR and show how they are expressed in our case study. Second, we extend Ochocka and Janzen (2014) and Janzen et al. (2016) by focusing on the functions of CBR to illustrate further the outcomes that can emerge from this sort of approach and make recommendations for researching with faith-based institutions.

On the politics of discomfort

This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: (1) engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and (2) embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource.