The study, led by Sandy Rao of Wilfrid Laurier University together with Aman Ahluwalia-Cameron, Nicola Hodgson, Andreas Vavvos and Susan McGuire, draws on an empirical and reflective analysis of the first cohort of the Applied Critical Realist Fellowship, an international higher education initiative designed to support researchers who want to use critical realism in their work. Rather than treating the fellowship as a conventional curriculum, the authors treat it as a lived learning environment in which the perennial pedagogical challenge of making foundational theory accessible and meaningful can be observed in real time. Their guiding question is deceptively simple: what actually happens when people who are not philosophers try to learn a demanding philosophy together?

To answer it, the researchers turned to a concept borrowed from science and technology studies: metaphor-work, developed by Cowan and Rault in 2022. Metaphor-work describes the deliberate, collaborative use of metaphors, images and analogies as resources for reasoning, not merely as decorative simplifications. Within the fellowship, a subgroup of participants formed specifically to engage with critical realist concepts through this kind of figurative labour. Instead of parsing Bhaskar’s original texts line by line in isolation, members generated and tested metaphors for ontological depth, stratification, causation and emergence, negotiating which images captured the theory faithfully and which distorted it. The metaphor became a shared object of thought, something the group could point at, refine and argue with.

The analytical payoff of the study lies in what this process revealed about the nature of learning itself. The authors conclude that learning critical realism is not a purely cognitive achievement, a matter of grasping propositions and reproducing definitions. It is simultaneously cognitive, affective, relational and structurally mediated. Cognitively, metaphors allowed participants to hold abstract claims about an intransient reality and its emergent social strata in working memory long enough to interrogate them. Affectively, the work surfaced anxiety, excitement and the vulnerability inherent in admitting confusion about foundational ideas. Relationally, the group’s dialogue and mutual care provided the safety needed for that vulnerability. Structurally, differences in disciplinary background, institutional resources and access to philosophical mentoring shaped who found the theory approachable and who struggled.

This multidimensional account challenges a persistent assumption in research training: that theory is best transmitted through authoritative exposition followed by individual application. The fellowship’s experience suggests the opposite. When formal instruction is unavailable or uneven, learners can construct their own scaffolding collectively, and metaphor is one of the most powerful materials for that construction. Metaphors operate as what the authors, following earlier literature on threshold concepts, might recognise as portals into troublesome knowledge. Concepts such as emergence or the difference between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of science are precisely the kinds of ideas that Meyer and Land described as threshold concepts: ideas that transform how learners perceive a field, often causing disorientation before yielding genuine understanding.

The technical heart of the study is its treatment of metaphor as epistemically productive rather than epistemically suspect. Within critical realism there has long been a debate about the role of figurative language, reaching back to Paul Lewis’s 1996 analysis of metaphor and critical realism in the Review of Social Economy. Metaphors can mislead, reifying one stratum of reality into another or smuggling in assumptions the theory rejects. The fellowship subgroup addressed this risk by treating metaphors as provisional and revisable. A metaphor for generative mechanisms, for example, would be proposed, stress-tested against the text, challenged for the ontological commitments it implied, and then refined or discarded. This iterative negotiation meant the group was doing philosophy, not bypassing it. The metaphor-work functioned as philosophical reasoning conducted through images rather than despite them.

The findings have immediate practical implications for graduate education and faculty development. Doctoral students attempting critical realist dissertations frequently report isolation, a problem documented in earlier work by Hastings, Davenport and Sheppard on the loneliness of the long-distance critical realist student and their later account of thinking like a critical realist. The new study suggests that structured collective metaphor-work could be institutionalised within writing groups, research training programmes and interdisciplinary research centres as a deliberate pedagogical practice. Conveners need not be critical realist experts; they need to facilitate the disciplined generation, comparison and critique of analogies, creating conditions of dialogue, reflexivity and care in which difficult concepts become discussable.

The study also speaks to a structural inequity in global higher education. Access to philosophers of science, to Departments capable of teaching metatheory, and to the time required for deep theoretical reading is unevenly distributed across institutions and regions, particularly between the global North and South. Initiatives such as the Applied Critical Realist Fellowship, and the educational development scholarship of researchers like Chris Bouhey and Sioux McKenna, highlight that the capacity to teach theory is itself a resource requiring cultivation. By theorising metaphor-work as a collective pedagogical practice that does not depend on expensive philosophical infrastructure, the authors offer a scalable model for theory-informed research training in contexts where such infrastructure is thin. The practice is low-cost, transferable across disciplines, and compatible with existing forms of collaborative learning.

Crucially, the authors frame the learning they observed as an emotionally and relationally supported process rather than a cold transfer of content. Participants’ affective responses were not noise interfering with cognition; they were constitutive of it. The care members showed one another, the patience with repeated confusion, and the willingness to revisit failed metaphors created what the analysis describes as conditions for reflexivity, the hallmark disposition of critical realist inquiry itself. In this sense the pedagogy mirrored the philosophy: just as critical realism insists that knowledge production is a socially situated, stratified and fallible process, the fellowship’s learning was socially situated, layered across cognitive and emotional registers, and openly revisable. The medium became a lesson in the message.

The study’s contribution is therefore twofold. Empirically, it documents how a specific international cohort grappled with one of the most philosophically demanding frameworks in contemporary research, providing rare granular insight into the mechanics of metatheoretical learning. Theoretically, it elevates metaphor-work from a scattered set of classroom tricks into a named, analysable collective pedagogical practice with implications for interdisciplinary learning, graduate supervision and professional development across the applied sciences. For the growing community of researchers in social work, health research, management, psychology and environmental studies who cite critical realism as their framework but struggle to explain it to colleagues and students, the message is encouraging: the way into difficult theory may not be through solitary philosophical endurance, but through the shared, careful, sometimes playful labour of finding the right words and images together, and then, crucially, finding out together where those words and images break down.

Subject of Research: Collective metaphor-based pedagogy for learning critical realism in higher education

Article Title: Learning critical realism in higher education: metaphor-work as collective pedagogical practice

Article References: Rao, S., Ahluwalia-Cameron, A., Hodgson, N., Vavvos, A., & McGuire, S. (2026). Learning critical realism in higher education: metaphor-work as collective pedagogical practice. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01777-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01777-0

Keywords: critical realism, metaphor-work, pedagogy, higher education, collective inquiry, threshold concepts, interdisciplinary learning, graduate education, faculty development, applied philosophy, Learning, critical

The study draws on qualitative field data analysed through a critical-realist and political-economy lens, a methodological combination that allows the researchers to look beyond visible hazards and interrogate the hidden structures that produce them. Rather than treating landslides or dried springs as isolated technical failures, the authors trace them to entrenched mechanisms: political patronage networks that award contracts to allies, weak governance that fails to enforce safety codes, and a dominant narrative that equates infrastructure with development regardless of how it is built. These structures, the paper argues, are not background conditions but active causal engines behind Nepal’s growing disaster toll.

The empirical texture of the research is striking. The authors document bulldozer-led road construction that slices through unstable slopes without adequate drainage or retaining structures, a practice so aggressive that local communities have coined the term ‘dozer terrorism’ to describe it. They describe the annual fiscal-year budget rush, in which local governments scramble to spend allocated funds before the financial year closes, leading to projects approved and executed in weeks with minimal environmental assessment. Tunnel blasting for hydropower schemes has destabilised hillsides and drained the springs that mountain villages depend on for drinking water and irrigation. Unregulated extraction of sand, gravel, and stone from riverbeds and slopes further weakens the terrain, while unsafe settlement expansion pushes homes onto land that engineers would classify as hazardous.

The consequences are already visible across the landscape. The study records slope instability along newly cut road corridors, the drying of natural springs, displacement of communities, and biodiversity loss in fragile mid-hill environments. Crucially, the authors emphasise that these impacts do not remain confined to individual project sites. Disaster risk, they show, extends across roads, rivers, settlements, and entire infrastructure corridors, linking one community’s hazard to another’s downstream vulnerability. A road cut high on a ridge can deliver sediment and debris to villages far below; a tunnel that drains an aquifer can force families to abandon land their grandparents farmed for generations.

What makes the study analytically distinctive is its refusal to treat development as inherently safe or inherently risky. The authors argue that outcomes hinge on how, by whom, and under what conditions development is pursued. The same road, built with proper geological assessment, drainage design, and community consultation, can transform livelihoods; built hastily under patronage pressure, it becomes a scar that sheds landslides for decades. This reframing challenges both the triumphalist infrastructure narrative that dominates national politics and the simplistic view that all development in fragile mountains is destructive. The problem, in other words, is not development itself but the political economy that shapes its execution.

The critical-realist framework the researchers employ deserves attention in its own right. Drawing on the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the tradition of realist social science, the study seeks to identify the underlying generative mechanisms—patronage, fiscal incentives, institutional weakness—that produce observable events such as unsafe construction and subsequent slope failure. By blending this ontology with political-economy analysis, the authors offer what they describe as a methodological path for future research on the development-disaster interface, one that moves beyond correlational studies of hazards and toward explanations of why risky practices persist despite their known consequences.

The political-economy dimension of the analysis resonates with a broader international literature on disasters and corruption. Previous research has shown that corrupt practices in the construction industry, from substandard materials to rigged procurement, measurably increase disaster losses, and that the political economy of ‘natural’ disasters often determines who suffers and who profits. The Nepal study extends this line of inquiry into a mountain setting where the physical fragility of the terrain amplifies every governance failure. It also connects to earlier work by Nepali and international scholars documenting how road building in the Himalaya has repeatedly increased landslide activity, and how haphazard urbanisation in the Kathmandu Valley has followed a similar logic of risk creation.

The timing of the study is significant. Nepal’s post-2015 federal restructuring devolved substantial planning and budget authority to local governments, unleashing an unprecedented wave of rural infrastructure construction. While this decentralisation has delivered roads and electricity to communities long neglected by the centre, the new study suggests it has also multiplied the sites at which risk is being manufactured, often by local institutions that lack the technical capacity, environmental safeguards, or accountability mechanisms to build safely. The authors warn that disaster risk is likely to expand further as development penetrates ever more fragile landscapes and creates new exposure in places that previously had little built infrastructure at all.

The paper’s central prescription is correspondingly radical. Building mountain safety, the authors argue, demands more than coping capacity, early warning systems, or hazard management. It requires rethinking the very development processes that produce risk in the first place. Without a shift toward transparent, accountable, and risk-informed planning, Nepal’s present rural development model will, in the authors’ words, continue to normalise risk, reproduce disasters, and deepen vulnerabilities in the name of development. That means enforcing environmental impact assessment, curbing the fiscal-year spending rush, subjecting contract allocation to genuine public scrutiny, and treating geological and hydrological evidence as binding constraints rather than inconvenient formalities.

For the wider disaster research community, the study is a pointed reminder that the line between development and disaster is thinner than policy frameworks usually acknowledge. Every bulldozed slope, every blasted tunnel, and every budget-deadline project embeds decisions about risk into the physical landscape, decisions that will surface years later as landslides, floods, and displacement. The Nepal Himalaya, where some of the world’s most energetic tectonics meet some of the world’s most ambitious rural infrastructure ambitions, offers perhaps the sharpest available illustration of this development-disaster interface. Whether the region’s roads and dams become instruments of resilience or engines of catastrophe will depend not on the mountains, but on the politics that shape how they are built.

Subject of Research: Political economy of development-induced disaster risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article Title: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article References: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Keywords: Nepal, Himalaya, disaster risk, development, political economy, road construction, hydropower, landslides, critical realism, vulnerability, infrastructure governance, haphazard planning