Space, Place, and Social Justice in Education

Abstract

Here, guest editors N. Geoffrey Bright, Helen Manchester, and Sylvie Allendyke (formerly Sarah Dyke) introduce this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on space, place, and social justice in education. They explore how the thematic focus originated in a series of informal and formal discussions that came together in an international research seminar that took place in Manchester, United Kingdom, in summer 2012. That event considered how qualitative inquirers in education research are currently deploying the “spatial turn” in social theory to respond to a global context of increasingly asymmetrical power relations. Uniquely, that is, the Manchester seminar called for a discussion that articulated theoretical interrogations of space and place to practical approaches aimed at doing social justice in education and education research. Picking up topics raised by the contributing authors and relating them to their own work, the editors explore the connections, divergences, and novel productivities that are evident in the theoretical and practical approaches adopted, noting their fruitfulness for an ongoing practice of “entanglement” in which research, as an aspect of living justly, might reside.