Crises, Knowledge production, and non-scalable Epistemologies: (De )Legitimizing (Education) Research

Crises are productive moments that initiate, speed up, and facilitate the dissemination of knowledge about a situation/problem we are facing, but also about how to tackle and solve them. Seeing from this perspective, crises may be viewed as discursive processes by which specific types and forms of knowledge production take place. Crises help knowledge to become naturalized – almost as natural entities, as it were. Denaturalizing crises appears thus as a first step towards understanding how (education) research is deployed in such circumstances.

Further, the politics of knowledge production requires attention if we are to scrutinize whether/how/when (education) research becomes enmeshed in attempts at legitimating/delegitimating particular solutions and/or policy options. By looking at the contexts, means and mechanics of knowledge production we might have a better grasp of processes of constructing epistemic authority. The ethnographer Anna Tsing argued convincingly how modern research/science is derived from colonial and imperial practice and thinking and pointed at scalability as their common characteristic. Scalability resp. scalable epistemologies are thus part and parcel of domination structures and over the past century have become standard in education research.

The presentation discusses how non-scalable epistemologies may be used to legitimate (local) education research that resists illegitimate dominance, surveillance and instrumental approaches to education.

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral • University of Münster (DE)

Full Professor of International and Comparative Education at the Institute of Education of the University of Münster, Germany, and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning and Education (CELE) of the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include education policy studies, comparative higher education, lifelong learning and life course. He has collaborated in and coordinated several national and international research projects and published extensively.

Understanding the Epistemic Spaces of Education. Doing Archaeologies in a Governmentality Perspective

The aim of the lecture is to present Foucauldian archaeology as a problematising method of inquiry to study education discursively within the wider framework of governmentality studies. This means, it is argued, to focus on the epistemic spaces of education in a general frame that looks at the interplay between the forms and limits of knowledge about education, the functioning of educational technologies and the ethical making of educational subjects.

The lecture is organized in three parts. First, archaeology as a method is framed within a more comprehensive analytics of government. Second, the archaeological method and its limits are presented using examples from different fields of analysis, including educational evaluation and digital educational platform studies. After a detailed discussion of the method, this part of the lecture will involve participants in a short practical activity whose aim is to offer a sketch of how archaeology works. To conclude, the lecture discusses archaeology as a tool for an affirmative critique of our educational present, that is as an analytics that allows us to enter in relation to education as a key part of our own historicity, to understand our fabrication within power/knowledge, and to enlarge the possibilities of going beyond the limits that the current historical forms of education, as knowledge and practice, impose on us as educational subjects.

Emiliano Grimaldi  • University of Naples Federico II

Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He is Director of the Study Programme in Digital Cultures and Communication. His work is in education policy sociology and his research focuses on the transformations of educational governance and governmentality, NPM reforms in education, and the interplay between digitalisation, privatisation, and education. Adopting a governmentality and archaeological perspective, he is currently working on digitalization and platformization in education, the rise of EdTech markets, the shifting spatialities and temporalities in digital education and the making of the digital learner.

The Policy Studies and the Politics of Education Online Seminar Series brings together a select group of leading scholars in education policy studies closely connected with EERA Network 23. The Online Seminar Series is organized by EERA Network 23 in collaboration with IE-ULisboa.

Thursday 22 May 2024 | 14.00 – 15.15 (GMT +1) | 13.00 – 14.15 (GMT)
Shifting Landscapes: Retrospects and Prospects in Global Education Governance
Maren Elfert (King’s College London) and Christian Ydesen (University of Zürich)

Thursday 22 May 2024 | 14.00 – 15.15 (GMT +1) | 13.00 – 14.15 (GMT)
There is power in a union: the politics of participatory research with education policy elites
Alison Milner (Aalborg University)