Conference Agenda

Modern education research is animated by a powerful and persistent hope: that science can provide the knowledge necessary to realise a just, equitable, and “good” society. This hope has a history. It has travelled across educational policy, curricula, pedagogy, teacher education, and systems of assessment and evaluation, taking different forms over time while retaining a recurring faith in science as a vehicle for progress. In the contemporary moment, this faith is often articulated through a seemingly non-polemical language of “evidence-based” reforms, competences, and literacies, promising solutions to educational and social problems through neutral and objective means. International large-scale assessments exemplify this logic, translating students’ knowledge, skills, and well-being into indexes, graphs, and comparative models that propose “pathways” and “highways” toward social improvement and identify “what works” to unlock human potential.

This symposium takes these promises as its object of historical inquiry and examines continuity and change in how educational knowledge is produced, authorised, and put to use. Drawing on historical and empirically grounded studies, the symposium asks whether the orthodoxies of science that claim to enable educational change can, historically and practically, sustain that promise. What if scientific evidence in education is not only about facts or effectiveness, but also about ordering conduct, shaping expectations, and producing distinctions among kinds of people? What if the authority of science, when viewed historically, appears contingent, situated, and dependent on specific actors, technologies, and institutional arrangements?

Bringing together four papers and a discussant, the symposium assembles research that traces how educational knowledge has been supported, challenged, and transformed through shifting configurations of expertise, governance, and technology. While grounded in specific historical and empirical cases, the symposium situates educational science within European and transnational knowledge infrastructures, highlighting how ideas, metrics, and forms of expertise circulate across national contexts. The contributions examine how practices of classification, comparison, and measurement have emerged and stabilised over time, and how such practices have been mobilised to frame crises, legitimise reforms, and guide policy responses in different historical and geographical settings.

The symposium highlights a central paradox in the history of educational research: knowledge produced in the name of equity and improvement has often simultaneously contributed to differentiation, hierarchy, and exclusion. By foregrounding the historical conditions under which educational knowledge gains authority, the symposium also reflects on the responsibilities and limits of educational research itself. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates within the history of education about how research practices can recognise complexity and help us better understand and navigate contemporary global challenges.

There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire of modernity that science provides the elixir for enabling the good life in a just and equitable society. The desire of activating the good life and people haunts the 19th century emergence of the social sciences as they intersected with the formations of the welfare. The allure of the science in governing life is articulated in the Norwegian film, Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjøkkenet, 2003). The movie beautifully (and with some humor) explores the affective allure of the social sciences as it follows a caravan of researchers as it leaves Stockholm in the 1950s and travels to rural Norway to study men in the kitchen. The knowledge had been amassed about women in the kitchen. Observing men would complete that knowledge for designing domestic living in visions of the potentialities of good life. The utopic allure of science is instantiated today with the international educational assessments that calculates students’ knowledges, skills and well-being are indexed, graphed, and charted as “pathways” and “highways” placed in management models for all nations whose development of students (and teachers) anticipate the utopic visions of the kinds of people who embody the good life. The allure of the human sciences produces a particular kind of activism in modernity. Since the disciplinary formations in the 19th century, the human sciences have produced projections about the potentialities and differences of kinds of people as spaces of action. In this paper I explore the activism as moves through time and place in our project of science studies of education. One is to explore the human sciences as creating patterns of recognition for “seeing”, thinking, and acting. The sciences “act” as projection machines about the kinds of people that are talked indifferent ways – social kinds of people as the citizen, the professional, literate; and as a subjectivity that is mode of living such as the problem solver, the learner, and empowered. Second, the generation of patterns of recognition produce phenomena that embody desires - - ideals as expectations of experiences in the “will-to-know”. If I use the concept of motivation important to modern psychology, motivation is doubly descriptive and anticipatory of the potentialities of an ideal kind of person – a potential that also embodies its “other”, the teacher or child who “lacks” motivation to be excluded.

Daston, L. and Vidal, F. (Eds) (2004). The Moral Authority of Nature. University of Chicago. Daston, L. (1995). The Moral Economy of Science, Osiris, 10, Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science (1995), pp. 2–24. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. (1980/1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994. What is Philosophy?, Columbia Press, New York Foucault, M., 1971/1977. Orders of discourse: Inaugural lecture delivered at the College de France. Social Science Information, 10(2), 7–30 Hacking, I. (1994). Styles of Scientific Thinking or Reasoning: A New Analytical Tool for Historians and Philosophers of the Sciences, in , Gavroglu, K. Christianidis, J. & Nicolaidis, E. eds.Trends in the Historiography of Science. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 31-48. Hall, G. S. (1904/1928). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relation to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. New York, Appleton and Co. Latour, B. (2012). We have never been modern. Harvard university press.

This study intervenes in contemporary STEM and competence-based curriculum reforms (U.S. Department of Education, 2016) by shifting the analytic focus from how learners solve problems (Dewey, 1933; Schoenfeld, 2007) to how “problems” and “real-world situations” are historically fabricated as knowable, governable, and pedagogically actionable. Working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and curriculum history (Popkewitz, 2004; Baker, 2017), the chapter develops a performative historiography that treats “situations,” “problems,” and “problem-solvers” as material–discursive entanglements rather than pre-given entities. The conceptual core is Michelle Murphy’s notion of the phantasmagram—epistemic infrastructures that animate facts with affect and erase their own conditions of production—read through posthumanist STS theories of performativity. From this standpoint, curriculum history becomes an inquiry into how infrastructures of knowing (simulation, modelling, diagrams, laboratory “situations,” and thought/physical experiments) make certain crises feel urgent and certain solutions appear necessary. Empirically, the study follows a translation pathway from Cold War experimental social science to contemporary problem-solving pedagogies. It examines (1) coding practices that rendered “group behavior” legible for managerial intervention (Bales, 1954), (2) micro-scale simulations such as Alexander Mintz’s “bottle” experiment, which materially scripted panic, cooperation, and survival as solvable order problems (Mintz, 1951), and (3) the scaling of these logics into planetary imaginaries through Spaceship Earth, where finite life is staged as a pedagogical situation demanding anticipatory control and systems reasoning (Fuller, 1969). Read together, these cases show how “real-life situations” become curricular common sense: learners are positioned as preemptive problem-solvers operating in environments where crisis is assumed, risk is productive, and futures are governed through simulation. This presentation uses this genealogy to open a next-stage research program on policy mobility and crisis pedagogy. Three forward directions are proposed: (a) a comparative mapping of how “future competency" travel across international education policy circuits and national curricula; (b) an STS “phantasmagram audit” method for analyzing curricular materials and edtech platforms that operationalize crisis through modelling, gamification, and scenario-based assessment; and (c) design-oriented research with teachers to develop alternative situation-making practices that cultivate accountability and collective inquiry without defaulting to preemption and survival rationalities. In doing so, the project positions STS not as an external critique of education, but as a methodological resource for rethinking what counts as “the real world” in teaching, learning, and curriculum governance.

Baker, B. (2017). To show is to know? The conceptualization of evidence and discourses of vision in social science and education research. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(2), 151–174. Bales, R., & Flanders, N. (1954). Planning an Observation Room and Group Laboratory. American Sociological Review, 19(6), 771-81. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press. Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think. Chicago: HENRY REGNERY COMPANY. Murphy, M. (2017). The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Popkewitz, T. (2004). The Alchemy of the Mathematics Curriculum: Inscriptions and the Fabrication of the Child. American Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 3-34. Fuller, R. B. (1969). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Schoenfeld, Alan. (2007). Problem solving in the United States, 1970-2008: Research and theory, practice and politics. ZDM: the international journal on mathematics education 39(5), 537-51 U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement. (2016). STEM 2026: A Vision for Innovation in STEM Education. Washington, DC: Author.

This paper explores two effects of science at the intersection of two realms – art and education – which emerged and gained traction in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both effects stem from the isomorphism of artistic discourse after the scientific, what we term the double bind of science and art, instilling in the modern individual both the desire and the ethos to transform themself into a new social actor: the creative individual. To examine the coupling of art education with scientific regimes of truth, we approach science as a historical phenomenon, presuming that (i) its notions are products of social and political conditioning, and (ii) it ‘acts’ in the sense that the reason of science simultaneously validates certain beliefs while excluding others, classifying and defining what is desirable and what is abject (Popkewitz, 2013; 2020). The first effect we set out to discuss concerns how scientific research created new regimes of visibility, which found legitimacy in the development of the modern human sciences and reformulated the previous paradigms of the copying apprentice (Szawiel, 2025) and the artist-as-genius (Author 2, 2014) into the creative individual as a new kind of person (Hacking, 2006). Drawing on Foucault (2003; 2008), we understand these regimes not as natural or given, but as constructed through the validating power of scientific knowledge, which made certain forms of creativity observable and categorizable. Human sciences codified talent and inventiveness into measurable capacities, thereby producing the very conditions under which an individual could be declared ‘creative.’ Secondly, we examine how science aided the redistribution of participation in aesthetic experience. Building on the theoretical background provided by Rancière (2004; 2010; 2013), we trace how scientific rationality infiltrated avant-garde art pedagogy to form new ways of life. Science, we argue, was the factor that legitimised the modernist quest to grant everyday experience and the most prosaic tasks of life the status of aesthetic practice. As such, the question of which activities are recognised as art, and which social groups are afforded visibility as participants in aesthetic practices, can be examined historically in relation to the social conditions that produced these categories. The analysis focuses on two modernist art schools: Moscow’s Vkhutemas (1920–1930) and Chicago’s School of Design (1937–1944). It demonstrates how specific teaching and learning proposals, grounded in scientific rationality, emerged and gave rise to a techno-pedagogical sublime centred on the creation of a modern individuality.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Hacking, I. (2006). Making Up People. Available online at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people (accessed November 07, 2025). Author 2 (2014) Popkewitz, T.S. (2013). The sociology of education as the history of the present: fabrication, difference and abjection. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(3), 439-456. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.717195 Popkewitz, T. S. (2020). The impracticality of practical research: A history of contemporary sciences of change that conserve. University of Michigan Press. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible. Continuum. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. Continuum. Rancière, J. (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the aesthetic regime of art. Verso. Author, 2026

This paper examines how a Swedish “reading crisis” has been constructed, stabilized, and acted upon through numerical claims about children’s vocabulary, particularly the 15,000 vs 50,000-word statement (Reimers et al. 2025; Author, 2019). While focused on contemporary debates, the study situates these developments within a historical perspective, showing continuities with long-standing educational and social anxieties about literacy, moral development, and civic competence in Sweden. It highlights how numbers are not neutral measures, but instruments that organize conduct, shape expectations, and guide policy in ways that resonate with earlier patterns of educational reform (Grek et al., 2024). Drawing on STS and Latour’s concepts of immutable mobiles, chains of reference, and the procession of angels (Latour 1987, 2001), the chapter traces how numerical claims circulate across contexts, acquiring authority and shaping practice. Empirically, the analysis proceeds in three steps. First, it maps public circulation, showing how numbers align politicians, teachers, parents, and commercial interests, depoliticize debate, and stabilize the belief that reading is inherently valuable. Second, it traces numbers back through research references, revealing uncertain origins and how tentative findings from reading research are transformed into precise, morally charged claims presented as objective and universal. Third, it examines how these numbers shape Swedish reading policy, influencing teaching practices and curriculum reforms while marginalizing alternative perspectives on literacy. The paper introduces numberfication as a concept to capture this process, extending Latour by showing how numerical form itself produces authority, mobilizes actors, and moralizes knowledge. Unlike standard chains of reference, numberfications are often irreversible: their origins cannot easily be reconstructed, yet they are accepted as true because they resonate with entrenched normative beliefs about reading. They operate as hybrid tools – both scientific and moral – that stabilize complex phenomena, coordinate diverse actors, and communicate actionable guidance across contexts. Numberfication also clarifies the role of faith in science, showing how trust in literacy’s civic and social value allows numbers to circulate persuasively even when empirical foundations are weak or absent. By conceptualizing numberfication, the chapter contributes to the history of education, STS, and literacy studies, demonstrating how numbers function as sociotechnical instruments that transform research into politically effective and socially consequential facts. The Swedish reading crisis illustrates how contemporary evidence-based reforms are historically situated, and how numerical authority often emerges from its capacity to align moral, civic, and technical logics across heterogeneous networks, rather than solely from empirical rigor.

Grek, S., Tichenor, M., & Bandola-Gill, J. (2024). Numbers as Utopia: Sustainable Development Goals and the making of quantified futures. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 26(3), 742-758. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora's Hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2001). ""Thou shall not take the Lord's name in vain" - being a sort of sermon on the hesitations of religious speech." Res 79(39): 215-234. Reimers, E., Martin Bylund, A., & Stenliden, L. (2025). Constructions of a reading crisis–representation of PIRLS 2021 in public discourses. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-9. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2025.2546889. Author, 2019