Waves of evidence: A novel approach to the collaborative enquiry of equity in higher education

Abstract

This paper introduces diffractive collaborative enquiry, a methodological innovation that addresses urgent practical challenges in higher education research and evaluation. By enabling real-time collaboration across heterogenous research projects in medias res, our approach overcomes traditional barriers of misaligned timelines and incompatible methodologies for joint analysis that typically delay university responses to student needs. Bringing together three distinct ongoing research projects at the University of Oxford—academic skills development, diversity of student experience, and mental health—we demonstrate how diffractive reading practices can generate actionable insights within the complexities of a collegiate system without extensive prior planning or waiting for evidence to emerge from completed projects. Our approach also examines how different datasets interact, illuminating connections between academic preparedness and institutional belonging. By maintaining productive tension between different data sources and perspectives rather than seeking consensus, our framework creates pathways for a more holistic understanding that supports responsive, equitable systems capable of interrupting the reproduction of institutional inequities. This work offers a transferable model for complex organisations seeking to leverage diverse ongoing research, evaluation and reporting for timely decision-making that promotes educational justice by addressing systemic barriers and centring the needs of underrepresented students.