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|\n| --- | --- |\n\nAaron M. Kuntz, University of Alabama Austin Pickup, Aurora University  \nAbstract  \nThis article questions the ubiquity of the term “critical” in methodological scholarship, calling for a renewed association of the term with projects concerned with social justice, truth-telling, and overt articulations of the social good. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work with parrhesia (or truth-telling) and Aristotle’s articulation ofphronesis (or practical knowledge), the authors situate critical inquiry as a political project of interrupting the present for a more socially-just future.  \nKeywords: Truth, Parrhesia, Critical, Phronesis, Methodology  \nThis special issue of Critical Questions in Education is dedicated to new understandings of critical methodologies in education. The repetition of the descriptive term critical is intentional in this case as the critical question we sought to engage asks what it means to conduct critical inquiry within the realm of education. That is, how might our enacted methodologies enable or activate elements of productive change that we imagine as necessary for the future of education specifically and radical democracy more generally? More than the relation of empirical results to various policy reforms (as is often the case in discussions of educational research) we sought engaged perspectives that interrogate larger order questions regarding assumptions of knowing and being (epistemic and ontic in order) that are necessarily implicated in the very act of inquiry. Further, we asked authors to link such assumptions with considerations for social justice; radical claims that we might be other than we currently are and that education might be a viable vehicle for social change.  \nAnd yet, we wanted to begin somewhat self-consciously. Indeed, the initial idea for this issue began with our shared concern regarding the overuse and fashionable ambiguity of the term, critical. As has been noted in the past, the term critical is ubiquitous in contemporary academic scholarship, particularly in relation to philosophical and methodological work.1 Far from noting a specific theoretical approach and/or time period (such as critical theory, associated with the Frankfurt School, for example), there now exist a host of approaches, conceptualizations, and techniques that share the critical descriptor, often without any overt connection to one another (critical geography, critical race studies, critical phenomenology, critical quantitative research, critical inquiry, are but a few of these examples) .  \n1. Aaron Kuntz, The Responsible Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, and Social Justice (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015) .  \nAt the same time, we are not yet ready to relinquish the term in our own work or in the work of those whose scholarship we have come to admire; critical is a term worth sustaining. As such, we thought it important to survey the contemporary field and developed a call for articles that provokes the term critical specifically in relation to methodological work. What might a critical methodology look like given contemporary socio-political and theoretical contexts? How might it be enacted? What does it require of the critical methodologist? How might these engagements be different (or similar) within the various traditions of critical inquiry?  \nIn counter-distinction to the ever-presence of critical distinctions, we remained similarly concerned with an apparent hesitancy to invoke terms such as truth and the good in contemporary scholarship, particularly within the field of education. Indeed, in conversations and written texts alike, scholars seem to go to extraordinary linguistic lengths to avoid claiming or otherwise uttering such terms for fear of over-essentializing or determining subjects, actions, claims (and more) . Given the intersection of our contemporary ","cbCairMJ14w70SAG","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCairMJ14w70SAG","pdf",364763,"English","# Abstract\n# Purpose and framing of critical inquiry\n# Questioning the term “critical” in scholarship\n# Truth and the social good in education\n# Philosophical grounding: parrhesia and practical wisdom\n# Calls for critical methodologies in education","[{\"question\":\"Why does the article question the ubiquity of the term “critical” in methodological work?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that “critical” is often used in methodological scholarship without a clear link to social justice, truth-telling, or an explicit orientation to the social good.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the article connect critical inquiry to truth-telling and practical wisdom?\",\"answer\":\"It draws on Foucault’s parrhesia (truth-telling) and Aristotle’s phronesis (practical knowledge) to situate critical inquiry as responsibility toward public good and socially just futures.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the article suggest is necessary for conducting critical inquiry in education?\",\"answer\":\"It claims critical inquiry in education must involve an overt political stance and explicit assumptions about truth and the social good, since schools are historically and socially constructed spaces.\"}]","Critical Inquiry for the Social Good - Methodological Work as a Means for Truth-Telling in Education | PDF",1792089414,18]