Vol.:(0123456789) The Australian Educational Researcher https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-018-0281-z 1 3 Education research for the Anthropocene: the (micro) politics of researcher becoming (2017 Radford Lecture) Margaret Jean Somerville 1 Received: 18 August 2018 / Accepted: 3 October 2018 © The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2018 Abstract This lecture asks: How can education research address the big questions of our time, and what has politics got to do with it? It will trace moments and movements of researcher-(un)becoming to explore the (micro)politics of a lifetime of educational research. Politics is understood as both intimate and immense, as the intertwined politics of global conditions, and of the nation, with the intimately personal. It is about the researcher lives we all live. The approach was generated in a recent visit to Oulu, north Finland, where doctoral students asked me to present ‘tales’ of a researcher life. The lead student wanted to know how to manage a doctorate while raising three young children. As I have wandered back and forth over a lifetime of presentations, the shapes of key infuences emerged. Relations with Aboriginal people and Country have been there since before the beginning, and are incorpo- rated into my ways of being in the world. Feminist theories and their libidinal flows have been fundamental in shaping both my life and research, including their uneasy alliance with Aboriginal onto-epistemologies. Doctoral students have emerged as a strong generative force in my intellectual directions, moving me into all sorts of worlds I would never have entered otherwise. And fnally, Place, the places where I have lived and worked have been the crucial grounding of my body and being, primal and prior, but also the basis of thought. In further elaborating these diferent infuences, they culminate in the contemporary force of the Anthropocene, calling us to consider how the world is asking to be named, and how we can learn to be human diferently, for the wellbeing of the planet. In developing this address into a paper, I have decided, in consultation with, and supported by the editor Nicole, to preserve its original content as far as possible. The knowledge contained in the address belongs with the oral performance and images as much as with the very few written words that were used in the powerpoint slides. A small selection of images is also included. Keywords Education research · Anthropocene · Micro politics · Researcher becoming Extended author information available on the last page of the article