Dear researchers, let me take this opportunity to share with you details of my new book entitled: What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm(Routledge 2025). The Introduction and the first two chapters are Open Access. I hope you find the expansion of WPR thinking in this volume interesting and relevant.
Sincerely, Carol
And now to our topic:
It would seem to be a truism that the political climate has changed since the election of Donald Trump. This change can be seen specifically in the concerted attack on diversity and inclusion programs in the United States. As a critical researcher, I have found myself asking about the relevance of the research perspective I support and use – specifically poststructural research premises – in times like these. In the previous entry (28 September 2025) I consider recent contributions that indicate the relevance of examining current political developments through reflections on “authoritarian governmentality”. In this entry I want to consider the interface between poststructuralist research approaches and political exigency – to what extent is research shaped and compromised due to current political developments?
I wish to emphasise that this question about the shaping of research priorities is not new – it is certainly not a creation of Trumpian politics. I have broached this topic in several earlier Research Hub entries. I begin this contribution by summarising some of the earlier arguments and linking them to current developments. Our focus is the possibility of and restrictions on unfettered research in authoritarian times.
Constraints on research
In a Research Hub entry on 31 January 2021, entitled “Critical interventions: What’s a researcher to do?”, I ask: “how ‘free’ are researchers to determine the subject matter of their research?”
I identity three interconnected forms of constraint:
(i) constraints that involve “navigating research with the powerful” (Aydorova 2020). The example I use here draws on Aydorova’s difficulty in accessing material on education policy in the Russian Federation due to “fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves.”
(ii) constraints imposed due to control over funding. Skilbrei (2020), for example, notes the pressure placed on researchers to be deemed “relevant” in order to attract funding, in her work on migration policy in Norway. She asks: “relevant to whom?”
(iii) “constraints” due to subjectification processes that influence researchers’ approaches to their selected topics. As just one example, I offer Tania Li’s (2014) argument that researchers, of necessity, play a role in “rendering technical” their projects and proposals. She (2014) describes the compromised role of anthropologists who “have to translate our dense, situated knowledge of people, places, and processes into a technical matrix of a manageable, fundable kind.”
I describe these three forms of constraint as interconnected because, clearly, those in positions of influence (in conventional governmental institutions, but also in academia and other large organisations) can be involved in limiting access to research material and to funding, and in promoting research practices that help to shape researcher subjectivities. I give the example of “evidence-based research and policy”.
The popular (and hence influential) protocol of evidence-based research and policy invites researchers to compete for funding in studies of pre-set problems. Problems, therefore, become taken-for-granted foci for analysis, and researchers become invested in both the thinking behind problem-solving and in the methods associated with such thinking (e.g. empirical studies of alternative interventions along the lines of scientific problem solving; see Research Hub entry 6 August 2018). I use problems here without quotation marks to indicate the common usage of the term to signal “things-that-exist”.
Our academic training in conventional qualitative and quantitative “methods” and positivist premises encourages the almost automatic triggering of this perspective. As just one example, in relation to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Waldow (2009: 481) notes: “The enormous resonance of the PISA debate has led to a massive expansion of empirical educational research of the PISA-type in Germany”. And with this research, Radhika Gorur (2016) argues, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to “see like PISA”.
While being attentive to these “indirect” influences on research protocols, it is becoming increasingly crucial to consider how researchers are to deal with authoritarian interventions. What’s a researcher to do?
Ways forward: reframing and reflexivity
A recent article by Østebø et al. (2025) tackles head on the issue of how researchers are affected by authoritarian regimes. They ask: “How do Northern Global Health scholars navigate authoritarian political contexts in their research in other countries?”
Their study is based on interviews with health workers in a country that they named Patria, due to a directive not to use the country’s commonly recognised name. The authors highlight the many ways in which researchers manoeuvred around sensitive topics and terms so as not to offend those with authority.
“To gain and maintain access, and to protect themselves and their local collaborators in a politically sensitive and authoritarian context, the researchers employed practices of ‘framing’. Such strategies included avoiding terms, scholarly references, and questions that were politically loaded; strategically conforming to the assumed apolitical language and methodologies of health research, and negotiating with and leaning on their local counterparts in processes of research dissemination and writing. (Østebø et al. 2025; Abstract).”
I describe the work of Østebø et al. (2025) as prescient. While we can assume that Patria refers to a country that is commonly described as “developing”, today Patriacould be the United States. Some of the parallels are frightening. In Patria, “anything perceived as challenging the regime’s dominant narrative or political order can be deemed politically sensitive”. The authors report that “some of the researchers we interviewed knew about or had colleagues who either had lost their research visa or research approval”. A few even had colleagues who had been deported “because they openly addressed politically sensitive issues”. Laws were passed in Patria “that prohibited researchers from engaging in work related to politics, good governance, and human rights”. The authors conclude: for researchers who work in authoritarian contexts, “such scenarios are well known” (see Glasius et al. 2018).
So, how did the Patrian researchers proceed? “They would leave out human rights language and use a more apolitical and less sensitive vocabulary” (Østebø et al. 2025: 7):
“While some of these framing practices were motivated by an interest in influencing and changing policy, they were also closely linked to, and spurred by, a desire to gain and maintain access to the field, protect themselves and their Patrian collaborators, and avoid political complications getting in the way of their research (p. 12).”
These researchers argued that, although they “adapt their wording and behavior to remain within the red lines” (Glasius et al. 2018), they are nevertheless able to produce meaningful and “excellent and informed scholarship” (Loyle 2016).
Østebø et al. (2025: 10) are concerned that the enthusiasm for “framing” research in terms acceptable to those in authority undermines the usefulness of such research: “we caution against an uncritical adoption of these practices in healthcare research” and call upon researchers to “examine the compromises we make”. Their caution rests on a poststructuralist premise that “research is an active component in the shaping of different realities and therefore is, at its core, a political practice” (Bacchi 2012: 142). Compromise, they would argue, comes at a cost. To support this critical focus, they introduce the notion of “political reflexivity”.
Østebø et al. (2025: 3) define “political reflexivity” as “the critical scrutiny of the taken-for-granted presuppositions and norms that guide our research, and of their relationships to the political environments and power dynamics in specific research locations as well as in academic research more broadly”. They stress that political reflexivity also demands transparency – “a willingness to examine and discuss our own political and philosophical leanings as potential biases” (p. 10). Their target therefore is health research generally rather than just the compromises compelled by authoritarian rule: “A turn to political reflexivity in health research can unravel some of the tacit assumptions, biases, norms and practices that are integral to the health care sciences and which students and researchers must critically think about” P. 1).
I have drafted several Research Hub entries on the topic of reflexivity (21 Oct. 2018; 5 Nov. 2018), and there is much debate about its usefulness. Referring back to Skilbrei’s (2020) work on migration policy in Norway, she notes the pressure placed on researchers to be “relevant” in terms defined by government funders:
“What is researched about migration at any given time, and thus what is known about migrants, is political in the sense that the research is directly or indirectly influenced by the priorities of politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs. (Skilbrei 2020: 3)”
In response, Skilbrie calls upon researchers to develop “reflexivity … as they take part in producing the realities they seek to describe”:
“By investigating the relationship between research and the context of knowledge, I seek to perform what Loïc Wacquant (2011) calls ‘epistemic reflection’. (Skilbrei 2020: 3)”
Isabelle Stengers issues a more generalized plea not to allow one’s research to be captured by a “State agenda” or by the narrow kind of “relevance” she associates with the “Knowledge Economy” (Muecke 2018). In her view the call for researcher “reflexivity” is limited in its usefulness: “it can easily mean paying attention to defects and biases to be avoided, and for instance to the way our own discrimination patterns and habits negatively affect the knowledge we produce” (Stengers 2008: 46). According to Stengers (2008: 41-42) there is a need to go further, to “make ‘us’ hesitate about our own conditions of thought”.
To this end I have developed the concept of “self”-problematisation as a research practice. “Self”-problematization is not an attitude; it is a practice of the self, an exercise in which one subjects one’s own recommendations and proposals to a WPR analysis (see Bacchi 2018: 10). “Self”-problematization is a key component in a WPR analysis – now identified as Process 7 (Bacchi 2025: 24) in order hopefully to ensure that it is included by researchers who adopt or adapt WPR. I need to ask, of course, whether “self”-problematisation is possible or even “relevant” in authoritarian contexts. With Østebø et al. (2025), I would argue that such a practice is a necessary part of current discussions about political futures.
Conclusion
Does poststructuralism then remain “relevant” today?
Poststructural interventions draw attention to the place of the subject in research protocols and to how researchers and research are always political. Interventions such as WPR aim to ensure that the terms of the conversation move beyond simple attempts to manipulate one’s analysis to disguise a research agenda, should that agenda be deemed likely to offend decision-makers. As Østebø et al (2025: 10) conclude, such interventions contribute to the much-needed development of “political literacy”: “an ability to critically discuss, recognize and examine how history, political culture and practices of power impact population health and health systems, and interact with our research.” I look forward to additional contributions concerning this vitally important topic.
References
Aydarova, E. 2020. Joker’s pursuit of truth: critical policy analysis in the age of spectacle and post-truth politics. Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2020.1831566
Bacchi C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: research as political practice. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi. Strategic interventions and exchanges, edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley. Adeleide: University of Adeleide Press. pp. 141–156.
Bacchi, C. 2018. Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a Poststructural Analytic Strategy. Contemporary Drug Problems, 45(1): 3-14.
Bacchi, C. 2025. What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm. NY: Routledge.
Glasius M, De Lange M, Bartman J, Dalmasso E, Lv A, Del Sordi A, Michaelsen M, Ruijgrok K. 2018. Research, ethics and risk in the authoritarian field. Cham: Springer Nature.
Gorur, R. (2016). Seeing Like PISA: A Cautionary Tale about the Performativity of Inter- national Assessments. European Educational Research Journal, 15, 598-616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116658299
Li, T. 2014. Anthropological Engagements with Development », Anthropologie & dévelopment [Online], https://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/495
Loyle CE. Overcoming research obstacles in hybrid regimes: lessons from Rwanda. Soc Sci Q. 2016;97(4):923–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu. 12346.
Muecke, S. 2018. Why “slow science” can improve the way we do and interpret research. The Conversation, 29 January 2018. Available at: https://theconversation.com/how-slow-science-can-improve-the-way-we-do-and-interpret-research-90168
Østebø, M. T., Maes, K., Gibb, G. and Henderson, R. 2025. Navigating authoritarian politics: towards reflexive framing in healthcare research, Globalization and Health (2025) 21:20, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-025-01115-6
Skilbrei, M. 2020. Taking on the categories, terms and worldviews of the powerful: the pitfalls of trying to be relevant, Identities, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2020.1805884
Stengers, I. 2008. Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism. Subjectivity, 22: 38-59.
Wacquant, L. 2011. From “Public Criminology” to the Reflexive Sociology of Criminological Production and Consumption: A Review of Public Criminology? Ian Loader and Richard Sparks. British Journal of Criminology,51 (2): 438–448. doi:10.1093/bjc/azr002.
Waldow, F. (2009). What PISA Did and Did Not Do: Germany after the “PISA-Shock”. European Educational Research Journal, 8, 476-483. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2009.8.3.476
Carol Bacchi 