Lost in Inclusion: Nomadic Translations Across Theory, Method and Territory

Social inclusion has become a widely shared normative commitment across research on education, health and development, yet its enactment often remains uneven and difficult to sustain. This concept paper develops the idea of “Lost in Inclusion” to examine how inclusion is translated, unsettled and partially lost as it moves across theory, method and territory. Drawing on practice vignettes from four years of a transdisciplinary community-based research project in rural Bolivia, the article explores three sites of tension: the encounter between epistemic openness and academic demands for certainty; the translation of participation into intervention-oriented action; and the recognition of children and young people as knowledge producers. Rather than treating barriers as pre-existing obstacles, the article argues that barriers may emerge through the very practices intended to enact inclusion. It distinguishes between where inclusion gets lost, as inclusive commitments become legible within institutional and methodological logics, and how researchers and partners may become lost in the pursuit of inclusion itself when its normative force makes tensions difficult to question. The article proposes a relational and ethically reflexive approach to inclusion-oriented research, in which success depends less on eliminating tension than on protecting the conditions that keep participation and recognition open to negotiation.