Hijacked by the project? Research which demands to be done.

In every edition of Research in Teacher Education we publish a contribution from a guest writer who has links with the Cass School of Education and Communities. Currently Pro Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University, Australia, Pat Sikes is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry at the School of Education, University of Sheffield. Pat is currently directing an Alzheimer’s Society-funded project ‘The Perceptions and Experiences of Children and Young People who Have a Parent with Dementia’. Her in-process and recent publications include Goodson, I., Sikes, P., Andrews, M. & Antikainen, A. (eds.) (2015) The Routledge handbook of narrative and life history, London: Routledge; Sikes, P. (ed.) (2013) Autoethnography,Sage Benchmarks in Social Science Series, 4 vols., London: Sage; Sikes, P. & Piper H. (eds.) (2011) Ethics and academic freedom in educational research, London: Routledge; and Sikes, P. & Piper, H. (2010) Researching sex and lies in the classroom: allegations of sexual misconduct in schools,London: Routledge/Falmer. In this article Pat Sikes discusses how a commitment to follow C. Wright Mills’s (1959) imperative to engage the sociological imagination ethically and critically can shape research agendas. She tells two stories from her career about research that she, in her own words, didn’t so much choose to do but which, rather, seemed to choose her to do it.