A clear, student-friendly exploration of reflexivity in sociology, explaining how researchers’ positions, perspectives, and power relations shape knowledge production — and why acknowledging this makes research more rigorous, not more biased.
Doctoral progress reviews are framed as supportive and developmental. Yet for candidates pursuing reflexive, critical, or non-linear research, they often become spaces of misrecognition—where methodological ambiguity is pathologised, and intellectual risk is penalised. This article interrogates how audit logics, shaped by structures like the REF, reframe scholarly inquiry as compliance. It argues for a higher education culture that values complexity, temporal nuance, and epistemic diversity over bureaucratic legibility.
A beginner’s guide to critical realism in sociology. Learn about layered reality, structure and agency, emergence, and reflexivity, with real-world examples for first-year sociology students.