Conference Agenda

This panel has a double aim: on the one hand, it will discuss the methodological intricacies and questions that the study of a unique archive, that of Torsten Husén, raises for archival research and histories of education more broadly. On the other, the panel will consider the conceptual challenges of studying the rise of an international education research community in the 1950s-1990s.

In more detail, by focusing on the internationalization of education research, the panel aims to examine the growth of a ‘disembedded’ laboratory and its constitutive elements, i.e. networks, spaces, materialities, travelling, and translations. As a point of departure, the panel follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to offer an analytical but also methodological perspective on the study of transnational research in education: first, through an examination of the making of the archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén; and second, through what such a rich resource tells us about the rise of education as a transnational discipline and policy field. The Husén archive is an extraordinary, large and comprehensive archive that contains what seems an entire set of documents, letters and cards that passed through Husén’s desk both at the university and at home. These formal, but also informal documents, bear witness to 50 years of work with global educational research through one of its key players.

The panelists will be examining the decades that saw the slow yet methodical construction of education comparative data for policy-making, the rise of cross border and international comparisons and the role of a modern, comprehensive education in these processes. Through a detailed analysis of the interactions of a range of actors, materials and institutions, the panelists explore the socio-cognitive processes that saw education as the sole pathway towards the governing of ‘a better society’. Such imaginaries of education have been in existence for centuries, nevertheless the notion that education science can and should be informing the making of education policy was a novel idea in middle of the 20th century.

Firstly, the panel will contribute to a methodological discussion of viewing educational research as a disembedded laboratory and how we can use scholarly archives to reconstruct this laboratory. From a methodological point of view, the panelists will focus on archive theory in order to problematize what can be found in the archive but also – and crucially – what some of the absences may be.

Secondly, and from a broader analytical perspective, the panel will shed light on some of the events in the development of an international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, where Torsten Husén was particularly involved:

1) The post war significance of the American support the development of the educational research in Europe for example the American Zone in Germany, American exchanges and sponsored visits to the USA, their support for [modern] comparative research data and linked innovations in schooling, all of which Husén was closely connected with.

2) The emergence of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement [IEA], where Husén functioned as chair for 17 years, and collegial links between internationally known researchers who subsequently invented major comparative knowledge, based on large-scale assessments, (which included organization, knowledge-building, and funding).

3) The panel will finally link the formation of the International Institute for Educational Planning, formed by the UNESCO, the World Bank and the Ford Foundation, to the further development of the field of comparison and commensuration, exemplified previously by the IEA. Although Husén worked in both institutions, they are distinguishable, for the IIEP had the main mission of supporting educational planning capacities in developing countries.