This special interest group (SIG) is based within the Institute of Education, University of London, but includes and welcomes members from across all three IoE faculties.

Members of SIG group are concerned with:

 1. the exploration of practices relating to the production and relay of knowledge and theory in academic and other contexts;

 2. the development of research education.

 1 and 2 cohere in the sense that research education constitutes the relay for the reproduction of academic knowledge production practices. Approaches to knowledge production will include the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of scientific knowledge, epistemology and the nature of theory, the recontextualisation of knowledge between fields of practice, ideology and discourse, constructive description. Approaches to methodology will include consideration of the relationship between the theoretical and empirical fields of research and the interrogation of research methods. Issues brought to the foreground by developments in new technologies and media are likely to be one focus.

 Objectives:

 a) to constitute an active forum for the exchange of ideas on theory, knowledge and method;

 b) to foster collaborative research and writing within the group and between members of the group and other partners within and outside of the IoE;

 c) to stimulate postgraduate research in this area;

 d) to develop strategies and programmes in the area of research education, in particular, within/between the faculty/ies and the doctoral school.