The Keynote Speakers
The Keynote Speakers
Making Waves as a Critical Researcher in Turbulent Times
In an era marked by political, institutional, and epistemic turbulence, the work of the critical researcher is more vital—and more precarious—than ever. This keynote explores what it means to “make waves” as a scholar committed to interrogating power relations and structures, justice, and intellectual honesty within the marketised and performative academy. Drawing on my own research on educational leadership, charisma, and the corporatisation of education, I argue that critical research has too often been neutralised—reduced to a style or posture rather than a transformative practice. I suggest that while deploying an identity lens has achieved crucial gains, it risks displacing structural analyses of power, class, and material inequality. To remain effective, critical scholarship must reconnect the symbolic with the material, the affective with the institutional. I propose a reimagined critical practice grounded in epistemic courage, methodological imagination, and a renewed sense of responsibility for the conditions of knowledge production. In turbulent times, to make waves is not to destroy but to renew: to disturb the waters of complacency, to sustain inquiry against orthodoxy, and to reclaim critical research as a creative, hopeful force in education and society.
Steven Courtney is Professor of Sociology of Education Leadership, researching and writing in areas including system leadership, charisma, depoliticisation and education privatisation, particularly in relation to the identities and practices of those constructed as educational leaders. As a recipient of the BELMAS Distinguished Service Award, he is a Distinguished Fellow of BELMAS. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Teaching and Learning, University of Manchester.
Prof Courtney is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies in Education, co-convenor of the MIE research and scholarship group, Critical Education Leadership and Policy (CELP) and co-convenor of the BELMAS research group, Critical Education Policy and Leadership Studies (CEPaLS). He is a member of the REF2029 sub-panel in Education.
Professor Courtney spent the first part of his professional career teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) in Paris before moving into the secondary state sector as a French and Spanish teacher in inner-London comprehensives. Following almost a decade in leadership positions, first as Head of MFL and then Assistant Headteacher, he moved to Manchester to complete an MA in Educational Leadership and School Improvement. Prof Courtney won ESRC funding for his doctoral work on school leadership in neoliberal times, for which, uniquely, he won best-thesis awards from the American Educational Research Association (Division A), the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS).
Professor Courtney's research uses critical approaches to make contributions to the fields of the sociology of educational leadership and policy studies. He carries out research which seeks to explain, illuminate and theorise education policy, and educational leaders' identity and practice in interplay with diverse structural features. These have included the school-inspection regime, heteronormativity, and education privatisation—this latter particularly through the lens of school-type diversification in England. He has researched privatisation in education internationally from a range of perspectives.
You can find out more about Steven here.
Creating Ripples of Hope: Bringing together narratives of the past, present and in times of global polycrisis
Many scholars now contend that we are experiencing a period of global polycrisis, in which crises across the world are not isolated but are intricately causally entangled and mutually reinforcing. Threats such as climate change, accelerating biodiversity loss, expanding warfare, and the proliferation of disinformation and populist discourses are collectively dividing societies and undermining humanity’s future prospects. This paper begins from the premise that hope is essential for generating the momentum required to move us towards greater social justice. Yet, hope is not simplistic. Far from just being wishful thinking, hope must be grounded in daily social realities. As Ghassan Hage argues, it is unevenly distributed: intersectionally differentiated and fundamentally psychosocial, that is, shaped by both psychological states and socio-structural conditions.
In order to move toward hopeful futures, we must understand the past just as deeply as the present. I draw on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to illustrate how the unacknowledged past shapes the present and sets the stage for possible futures. Narratives, whether textual, digital, spoken, visual, or algorithmic, not only describe the world but also incorporate power relations. They shape our collective sense-making, unite and divide communities, allocate responsibility, and provide the imaginative space to envision and work toward hopeful futures, or conversely, to foreclose them.
To ground these ideas, I explore histories of racisms and racialisation, showing how seemingly personal, everyday experiences are haunted by deeper histories that must be acknowledged if we are to generate ripples of hope capable of transforming our shared world.
Professor Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies within the Social Research Institute at University College London. Her fields of research include: Sociology, Applied and Developmental Psychology, Social and Personality Psychology, Public Health, Gender Studies, Clinical and Health Psychology, and Public Participation and community engagement.
Working across a number of European countries Ann has covered research in: -
Denmark: childhood, education, family studies, racialisation and gender, intersectionality, research methods, psychosocial processes
Finland: boys and masculinities, young people, intersectionality
Germany: boys and masculinities, intersectionality
Netherlands: racialisation; research methodology, intersectionality
Sweden: gender; narrative methods, norm criticality, pedagogy, research methods, intersectionality
Her recent funded research project areas include: boys and masculinities, young people and consumption and adult reconceptualisations of 'non-normative' childhoods', particularly of serial migration, visibly ethnically mixed households and language brokering in transnational families. She is a Co-I in the ESRC-funded Behavioural research UK.
Ann's most recent publication is "Accounting for lack of emotional engagement: Adults reconceptualising fatherhood" (2025) in Caring Fathers in the Global Context, pages 321-337.
You can find out more about Ann and her research and teaching here .