Manchester Online Seminars on Evidential Pluralism: Evidential Pluralism and educational ethnography.
| Dates: | 21 July 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 16:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Rosa Runhardt, Jon Williamson |
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Evidential Pluralism and educational ethnography.
Evidence-based policy is typically grounded in a narrow conception of evidence, one that prioritizes comparative studies and quantitative meta-analyses as the preferred base for establishing causal claims. However, this prevailing theory of evidence—often implicitly adopted in policy contexts—faces serious limitations when it comes to capturing the complexity of social interventions, particularly in fields such as education. We argue that this narrow conception ignores the extensive volume of knowledge that is generated in research fields such as educational meta-ethnography. Far from being epistemically inferior, we contend that meta-ethnographies could make an essential contribution to the evidential base for policy. By analysing meta-ethnography using the Evidential Pluralism framework (which scrutinises evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation), we show that meta-ethnographic studies can be fruitfully reinterpreted as providing evidence of a mechanism complex. This evidence can play a crucial critical role, as meta-ethnography shows how the complex enables, reinforces, or counteracts a policy of interest. We will illustrate this potential use of meta-ethnography using an example, Holly Craggs and Catherine Kelly’s qualitative meta-synthesis of adolescent experiences of school belonging (2018).
All welcome! Please register for a meeting link from the MOSEP webpage (under More Information).
Speakers
Rosa Runhardt
Role: Assistant professor - Philosophy of Mind and Language
Organisation: Radboud Universitiet
Jon Williamson
Role: Samuel Hall Chair of Philosophy
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
