Accountability in higher education: global perspectives on trust and power

London Review of Education 125 real, actual and empirical' (149), but this is surely an unduly narrow conception of academic disciplines. Is this not a conception of knowledge that, in its concern with 'causal mechanisms' privileges scientific modes of thought? This suspicion is deepened through the remark that 'academic disciplines provide access to the natural and social worlds' ( Do we see here, perhaps, a double limitation in the critical realism project, in that it poses a 'real' world at its centre and then attempts to work out the relationship of understanding to that world: such a philosophy underplays both the felt sense of being human and, even more importantly, the role of the imagination in bringing new worlds and different worlds into view. This is crucial for a genuinely emancipatory curriculum and pedagogy for part of such an education will surely lie in liberating students' imaginative powers so that they can bring their own worlds into view; so that, in effect, they can become poets and creators of new worlds. Emancipation surely ultimately requires an imaginative emergence from the 'given' world into a new, although still feasible, world.