Research encounters on the move : Reflecting on policy mobilities and researcher positionality in education policy research

This chapter reflects on emergent conceptual tools, methods and mindsets associated with policy mobilities to discuss how these insights help inform my understanding and practise of policy sociology in education. I hope to reveal the messiness associated with policy mobilities and make explicit the onto-epistemic implications of enacting such a methodology. Adopting a mobilities-informed policy sociology has provided me with new opportunities and spaces for research encounters (e.g. in-person observations, digitally-mediated interviews, social media searches, etc.), but it also raises numerous questions about how I can meaningfully and reflexively inhabit the social spaces through which policies move and mutate. The chapter deals with how I negotiated my own role and positionality as a researcher who employs ‘mobile methods’ to move within diverse policy networks and virtual spaces. Informed by my own experiences, I offer what can come from critical policy research that accounts for, and even embraces, the realpolitik of policymaking, movement and enactment.