Improving Researchers’ Capacity to Address Injustice: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Many education policy researchers have turned to critical policy analysis as a means to better understand and examine injustices in education and beyond. However, such work is still uncommon in educational journals. In this introduction, we describe the purposes of this special issue and offer readers a framework for understanding critical approaches to education policy research, its general tenets, and how it differs from other kinds of policy research. We then outline the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We highlight analytic moves that researchers of all kinds can make based on the critical education policy research tenets we discuss. The introduction concludes with suggestions for where we hope the field will go next.