This qual hub is based around a new BA/Leverhulme funded project ‘The Gujarati Navigator: exploring journeys of information, knowledge and expertise’ that is working to re-explore the archival evidence of the Gujarati Navigator who guided Vasco Da Gama across the Arabian sea. Archival research plays a relatively small role in educational research, but critical work on the archives has the potential to shed new light on old stories and lead to quite different and more expansive re-tellings of narratives about subjects and disciplines. By re-examining archives in Mombasa, Kerala and the Bodleian, the project hopes to expand our understandings of the circulation of knowledge and expertise at the time, and to contribute to ongoing efforts to rethink the origin stories that are told about the subject of geography. It will offer an introduction to critical archival research and the concept of ‘unsettling’ the archives before reflecting on wider interactions between educational research and critical archival work.
