This article reflects on the future of European educational research (EER) and its politics of knowledge. EER is interpreted as a field of power/knowledge, where a hegemonic epistemic framework is raised that assembles an evidence-based epistemology, a "what works" political rationality and a technocratic model of educational research. This implies the marginalization of the debates around the social, political and epistemological stakes of EER. The article argues for the centrality of these issues into the debate and identifies some challenges for EER. Firstly, a point is made for an aesthetics of educational research work that has criticism as its inspiring principle and combines a problematizing disposition with the practice of research as inquiry. This implies also the extensive engagement of the EER community in a democratic and open normative dialogue with all those with a stake in education. Secondly, the article identifies two related epistemological challenges: (a) the making of epistemological pluralism as a distinctive trait of EER; (b) the exploring of the potentials involved in the practising of specific epistemological ruptures that concern the reframing of time, space and difference as constitutive categories through which we understand educational reality.