Associate ProfessorRuth Boyask

My research is concerned with how education systems can be transformed to support more democratic, equitable, and socially just forms of public education. Across my career, I have investigated the relationships between educational policy, governance, leadership, professional practice, and community participation, with a particular interest in how research can contribute to meaningful educational change. My work is characterised by a commitment to the communal production and practical use of robust, socially critical educational research.

A major strand of this research culminated in the publication of Pluralist Publics in Market Driven Education: Towards More Democracy in Educational Reform (Bloomsbury, 2020), which drew together empirical, methodological, and theoretical work undertaken over many years. The book challenges bounded and singular conceptions of public education, proposing instead that public education should be understood as pluralist, contingent, and constituted through multiple overlapping publics. This work contributed a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding educational reform in contemporary democratic societies.

Since then, I have focused on exploring what a more pluralist and community-centred approach to education might look like in practice. Through my leadership of the LitPlus research group, I have developed a programme of research examining children's reading and literacy as socially, materially, and affectively situated practices. This work investigates how schools, libraries, families, literacy organisations, and communities can collaborate to support reading engagement, wellbeing, and more equitable literacy outcomes. Recent projects have generated nationally and internationally recognised scholarship on reading enjoyment, reading communities, and material reading engagement.

Alongside this work, I continue to investigate educational governance, leadership, and system reform, and the role of research in shaping public debate and educational futures. These interconnected strands are united by an interest in how knowledge is mobilised, how communities participate in educational change, and how more socially just forms of public education can be realised.

Methodologically, I am a pluralist and pragmatic researcher. My work draws on a wide range of approaches, including case study, ethnography, digital ethnography, research synthesis, statistical analysis, participatory research, and community-based methodologies, selected according to the questions being investigated and the communities involved.

Collectively, my research has contributed to literacy education, educational policy, leadership and governance, professional learning, systemic educational reform, research methodology, and the mobilisation of educational research for public benefit.