GREDI has always had four lines of research: interculturalism, participation, gender, and research methods. Over time, funding bodies’ priorities and the evolution of the group’s members have given rise to other projects related to teaching practice, positive conflict management, service-learning, and research methods such as social network analysis.
Participation
GREDI has always had four lines of research: interculturalism, participation, gender, and research methods. Over time, funding bodies’ priorities and the evolution of the group’s members have given rise to other projects related to teaching practice, positive conflict management, service-learning, and research methods such as social network analysis.
Gender
We take the feminist paradigm as an interpretative framework that, thanks to the use of concepts created or given new meaning through the paradigm itself (such as androcentrism, patriarchy, gender, gender-based violence and sexual harassment), allows for the visibility, illumination and identification of phenomena that would be irrelevant or insignificant from other positions and perspectives.
In this line of research, we take a critical stance towards the subordination of women and gender-based discrimination. From an intersectional perspective, we analyse the forms of social oppression that emerge at the crossroads between gender and other bases of discrimination, such as class, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age and functional diversity,
Such conceptual reflections cannot be disassociated from social action and transformative practices with major political implications. The political dimension of our practices entails an active, participation-oriented commitment to social change.
Some of this line of research’s projects and publications are the work of GrediDona, a group of gender researchers targeting social transformation (http://gredidona.blogspot.com.es/).
Interculturalism
Ever since GREDI was established in 1992, interculturalism has been the group’s most authentic frame of reference for guiding research activity and action geared to knowledge transfer and dissemination.
From a socio-critical perspective, this line of research currently focuses on reflection and theoretical evolution, as well as on the promotion of social innovations consistent with the intercultural project, as an appropriate response to the needs that have arisen from globalization, the transnationalization of migrations, and the management of multiculturalism in our postmodern social contexts. Adopting a global, systemic outlook, interculturalism is a challenge in all reality’s micro, meso and macro environments.
Methodologies and epistemologies for transformative research
The roots of our interest in research methodologies lie in the make-up of the group, which arose from the Department of Methods of Research and Diagnosis in Education and comprises researchers who teach or have taught methodological subjects. In more than two decades of intense work on studies of a descriptive and comprehensive, evaluative and transformative nature, we have been able to explore different methods and trends, propose models and incorporate cutting-edge techniques.
On the basis of that experience, our concern for ethics and social responsibility in research has led to epistemological and methodological reflections and questions in more recent times. Owing to our critical attitude, we query and systematize the ways in which we generate knowledge, promoting, among other things, non-heteropatriarchal practices, the co-production of knowledge, and/or dynamics of reflexivity and diffraction.
In this line of work, we promote dynamics for redefining research methodologies with a view to studying situations in a way that shows respect for and commitment to individual and collective agencies.
@GREDI_UB