Where is European Research on Inclusive Education Heading? An Analysis of European Conference of Educational Research Abstracts Over the Past Twenty Years

As a multifaceted and dynamic field, inclusive education is progressively evolving from its original emphasis on ensuring educational access and rights for students with disabilities and special educational needs towards fostering a comprehensive culture of inclusion, participation, and empowerment for all learners. This evolution has encompassed a significant broadening of conceptualisations of inclusion to address diverse identities, intersecting forms of marginalisation, and systemic inequalities, redefining inclusion as a matter of educational provision but also of social justice and structural transformation. Inclusive education today entails critical engagement around equity, participation, and recognition, reflecting shifting societal expectations and the need for more responsive and context-sensitive education systems. Furthermore, the field has increasingly emphasised the co-construction of knowledge with marginalised communities, the necessity of transformative policy engagement, and the recognition of intersectional oppressions that influence educational access and experience. In exploring these transformative shifts, this chapter adopts and juxtaposes two complementary empirical approaches: (1) a qualitative inquiry based on video interviews with key members of the European Conference of Educational Research’s Network 04, and (2) a large-scale quantitative analysis of ECER research trends using computational topic modelling. The first, rooted in narrative and interpretive methodologies, foregrounds the lived experiences, personal trajectories, and affective investments of scholars within the Network. The second, drawing on techniques from science studies and digital humanities, systematically maps the evolution of research themes through statistical analysis of conference abstracts spanning over two decades. This dual-method framework enables an in-depth, phenomenological understanding of academic life within the network and a broader, data-driven perspective on the structural evolution of inclusive education research. By aligning these approaches, the chapter seeks to illuminate both the continuities and tensions between subjective academic experience and the emergent patterns revealed by computational modelling. Moreover, situating the analysis within the wider context of science studies, the chapter recognises inclusive education as both a pedagogical project and a dynamic knowledge field shaped by diverse epistemic practices, disciplinary boundaries, and technological mediations. It draws on conceptual tools from the sociology of science to interrogate how inclusive education is produced, legitimised, and contested through the interplay of communities, infrastructures, and knowledge technologies, thereby foregrounding questions around the production of academic authority, the role of conferences as knowledge hubs, and the ways in which research topics and disciplinary boundaries are assembled and reconfigured over time.2 WHERE IS EUROPEAN RESEARCH ON INCLUSIVE … 15 The European Conference of Educational Research (ECER) interlinks different national and cultural research traditions with widely varied disciplinary understandings and theoretical and methodological approaches (Keiner, 2010). European Educational Research Association (EERA) networks aim to provide a forum for this diversity and create a European research space with a culturally specific intellectual and social practice among educational researchers (Figueiredo et al., 2014; Lawn , 2002). This chapter explores transformative shifts within the European context; specifically, the role of EERA’s Network 04 Inclusive Education which. Over the past three decades, has reflected broader developments in the field and functioned as an engine for innovation, advocacy, and intellectual exchange. Network 04 has contributed to shaping the research agenda around inclusive education in Europe and beyond, providing a consistent forum for critical engagement with national and international policy, curricular practices, inclusive teacher education, and epistemological reflections on the nature and purpose of inclusion. The chapter is thus constructed through the articulation of these two empirical strategies. The first draws on interviews with a wide array of network participants—founding members, long-standing contributors, current convenors, and emerging scholars, whose voices collectively provide a textured, polyphonic account of Network 04’s evolution. These testimonies are both personal narratives and social artifacts that are indicative of the affective economies underpinning knowledge production around in/exclusion. The second approach utilizes the analysis app EduTopics: ECER, which leverages advances in computational social science to extract, cluster, and visualise research topics from a vast database of ECER conference abstracts. By applying topic modelling algorithms to this dataset, the analysis reveals latent thematic shifts, patterns of collaboration, and emerging research frontiers within the network and the wider field of inclusive education. Throughout the chapter, the structure and presentation of findings from both approaches are carefully aligned: each empirical section addresses comparable analytical questions such as the evolution of thematic priorities and negotiation of epistemic boundaries, enabling a dialogic interplay between qualitative depth and quantitative breadth. Recent research undertaken by the network’s convenors (Rix Inclusive Research, 2025a–d) informs the chapter. Drawing on video interviews with founding members, long-standing contributors, current convenors, and emerging scholars, the initiative assembled a polyphonic account16 F. DOVIGO ET AL. of Network 04’s evolution, illuminating how the network has both responded to and helped reconfigure the field of inclusive education. These testimonies shed light on the tangible transformations brought about by the network in terms of capacity building, research priorities, and institutional critique. Simultaneously, the EduTopics: ECER analysis app represents a paradigmatic instance of how contemporary science studies rely increasingly on digital infrastructures and algorithmic tools to render academic fields visible, traceable, and analyzable at scale. The use of machine learning-based topic modelling expands the empirical reach of the chapter but also invites critical reflection on the affordances and limitations of computational methods in education research. Accordingly, the chapter adopts a reflexive stance on the epistemological consequences of combining human and machine reading, qualitative and quantitative inference, and the co-construction of meaning across methodological divides.