Sotiria Grek

Educating Europe follows a political sociology approach for the analysis of the education policy domain in the European Union. The book will examine the ways in which an education policy field has been constructed in Europe since the early 1970s. It will explore how this field has never really been peripheral or ‘secondary’ as, perhaps its silencing from mainstream EU integration studies and political science has rendered it to be. Rather, it will show the ways that governing education has been integral in the processes of creating a European home market, at the heart of the neo-mercantilist project in the ‘80s, as well as during the later dominance of the neo-liberal ideology in the’90s-2000s and the efforts to create a competitive supra-state. It will develop an original understanding of the role of international organisations by establishing a preliminary, alternative perspective in the policy learning literature, which has so far been dominated by the idea of the transfer of practices and ideas from ‘Europe’ to the nation. It will explore how policy problems are constructed, the processes that institutionalise them into ‘objective’ and ‘real’ public issues and their legitimation through the fabrication of relevant monitoring instruments and the need for action.Educating Europe will be of key interest to students, practitioners and scholars of education policy, EU studies, European studies, comparative education, sociology, and social and public policy

This book covers the construction of international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, and the growth of its ‘disembedded’ laboratory i.e. networks, spaces, materiality, travelling, translations. The book follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to examine the research-archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009). The archive reveals the shifting and heterogenous transnational networks that contribute to the development of social science research beyond fixed time and space dimensions, and that extends social science beyond individual ideas, researchers, environments, institutions and universities. These are practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities. In other words, the archive represents the socio-material manifestation not only of the intellectual trajectory of a key education actor but the growing organisation of a whole scientific field at the time.

This Open Access book offers a novel perspective on the role of quantification in the making of education utopias through an analysis of expert knowledge and its producers. Drawing on empirical findings from the European Research Council funded project ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (METRO, 2017-2022), Education, Quantification and Utopia focuses on the ways that metrological realism has constructed a well-supported epistemic infrastructure, built on relationships and practices that go beyond the mere objectivity and reliability of numerical evidence. The book’s chapters outline how the production of new forms of education expertise have led to ideational and institutional interdependencies, and ultimately the making of an intricate, fragmented and opaque knowledge and governance web.

This Open Access book offers a novel perspective on the role of quantification in the making of education utopias through an analysis of expert knowledge and its producers. Drawing on empirical findings from the European Research Council funded project ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (METRO, 2017-2022), Education, Quantification and Utopia focuses on the ways that metrological realism has constructed a well-supported epistemic infrastructure, built on relationships and practices that go beyond the mere objectivity and reliability of numerical evidence. The book’s chapters outline how the production of new forms of education expertise have led to ideational and institutional interdependencies, and ultimately the making of an intricate, fragmented and opaque knowledge and governance web.

This open access book conceptualises the Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures that connect numbers, networks and governing paradigms.The book approaches quantification not merely as a tool for governing, but rather as a broader epistemic system through which global public policy is produced. This book focuses on the role of international organisations in shaping and implementing the 2030 Agenda and demonstrates how the SDGs have transformed and accelerated trends in quantification.

This open access book conceptualises the Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures that connect numbers, networks and governing paradigms.The book approaches quantification not merely as a tool for governing, but rather as a broader epistemic system through which global public policy is produced. This book focuses on the role of international organisations in shaping and implementing the 2030 Agenda and demonstrates how the SDGs have transformed and accelerated trends in quantification.