DOI: 10.4324/9781003123613-1 What a mess Intimacies, metaphysics, multiple senses and matters of concern in education policy research (an introduction) Camilla Addey and Nelli Piattoeva 1 Scientists have a culture. They have beliefs. They have practices. They work, they gossip, and they worry about the future. And, somehow or other, out of their work, their practices and their beliefs, they produce knowledge, scienti fc knowledge, accounts of reality. So how do they do this? How do they make knowledge? (Law, 2004, p. 19) Why intimate accounts? How do scholars researching education policy, politics and the governance of education make knowledge? How do researchers give meaning to what they actually do when they “practise methods” – for example, make and enact meth- odological choices? How do they balance the contingent politics and ethics of the policy settings that they study with rising academic precariousness, pressure to publish and make a (fast) impact in scienti fc and political domains? The habit of creating smooth narratives of education policy and governance research con- ceals the complex and provisional nature of research-making in these settings, ultimately preventing researchers from seeing and theorising education policy, politics and governance in richer terms. So, how could scholars tell their meth- odological story some other way, and why does it matter? This book makes visible and stimulates scholarly discussion on the messy hin- terlands of education policy and governance research, which in conventional research reports are barely seen. This volume aims to render in education policy research what John Law’s After Method sought to achieve in the social sciences: “My hope is that we can learn to live in a way that is less dependent on the automatic. To live more in and through slow method, or vulnerable method, or quiet method. Multiple method. Modest method. Uncertain method. Diverse method” (2004, p. 11). In developing these methodological insights across the chapters in both explicit and implicit ways, this volume attempts to go beyond sharing intimate stories of doing research to thinking how these stories add to and perhaps transform some of our ways of working. In so doing, the book ech- oes Jenny Ozga’s call in her Afterword. It tries to shift from recording unease, doubts and mundane decision-making to putting these to productive use as