Conference Agenda

During the 1980s and 1990s, Swedish preschool education underwent a series of significant discursive and institutional transformations. This period coincided with a slowdown in both the post-war economic expansion and the internationally record-breaking growth of daycare provision, while questions of decentralization and freedom of choice gained political prominence as Sweden shifted from one of the most centralized states towards becoming one of the most deregulated among OECD countries (Lundahl 2002; Börjesson, 2016; Hultén, 2019). This presentation examines the context in which the pedagogical philosophy originating from Reggio Emilia, Italy, came to be introduced and interpreted within the Swedish preschool context during this period. Rather than approaching Reggio Emilia as a transferable model or a clearly bounded pedagogical innovation, the study conceptualizes it as a historically situated discursive phenomenon whose meaning was shaped by pre-existing educational, political, and professional trajectories in Sweden.

The ongoing dissertation research on which this presentation is based addresses the following research question: How did Reggio Emilia intersect with the specific discursive and institutional conditions of Swedish preschool education during the 1980s and early 1990s? By focusing on emergence rather than origin, the analysis moves beyond linear narratives of pedagogical change and instead highlights the interplay between continuity and transformation in late welfare-state educational discourse.

Theoretically, the study combines Michel Foucault’s (2002) concepts of surfaces of emergence and discursive constellations with a theory of path dependency (Pierson, 2004). Foucault’s framework is used to identify the historical conditions under which certain pedagogical ideas, problematizations, and professional aspirations became articulable and desirable, while others receded into the background. The notion of path dependency (Pierson 2004) complements this perspective by accounting for the institutional and policy-related continuities that structured the space of possible change, shaping both the receptivity to Reggio Emilia-inspired ideas and the limits of their reconfiguration within Swedish preschool education.

Positioned in relation to influential interpretations of Reggio Emilia as either a paradigmatic pedagogical rupture or a transnational social movement in its own right (e.g. Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2007; Lind, 2010), I argue that the Swedish reception of Reggio Emilia functioned less as a break with established educational traditions than as part of a discursive reorientation, responding to a perceived crisis of professional identity and pedagogical legitimacy within the preschool sector. In relation to longstanding critiques of social-political framings of preschools as primarily an instrument of welfare and labor-market policy, Reggio Emilia was incorporated into an ongoing debate on pedagogical professionalism, early childhood education and the emancipatory ambitions articulated within the teacher union.

In 1957, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, in the context of the Cold War, caused a huge crisis of confidence in American science and technological development, opening the door to an internal debate about the soundness of its education system. A quarter of a century later, a second technological crisis, this time stemming from strong competition from German, Japanese and Korean companies in the automotive and steel industries, led to a new questioning of the American school system. The two crises have been considered decisive milestones, historical events that laid the foundations for what is known as educational globalisation and, specifically, for the hegemonic discourse of the OECD. In fact, it is known that the satellite crisis led the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), part of the OECD, to develop shortly afterwards the first international statistical indicators on the state of different education systems (Gorur, 2015). It is also known that the second crisis and the A Nation at Risk report would prompt the proposal to produce comparative data on national education systems and the INES project, the direct predecessor of what is now the PISA international test (Jakobi & Martens, 2007).

However, this official or canonical history of educational globalisation has almost always been told as an internal national story, a specifically American narrative that focuses on that country's particular reaction to an external impact or danger. A history and narrative that, in any case, omits or overlooks the role or contribution of the other national actors involved. What interests did European and other Western countries have in supporting the proposals of the OEEC/OECD? How did they receive and why did they accept the proposals of CERI, INES or PISA as valid? Why did they end up supporting their indicators and their educational policies or recipes? Based on similar approaches and questions, the most recent historiographical research has begun to explore the role of various national and local actors in the emergence of a space for global educational governance (Bürgi, 2017; Grek, 2019; Steiner-Khamsi et al, 2024; Ydesen, 2019). In fact, rather than assuming that national governments were mere pawns or passive recipients of US-backed international organisations, it is at least justified to raise the possibility that they too took advantage of successive international crises to advance and justify their own agendas (Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2018).

In this research, we return to one of those milestones or key moments in educational globalisation: the launch of Sputnik. However, instead of considering the impact of the flight on American society and its necessary consequences on the confidence and credibility of its schools, we try to look at the satellite from different geographical, political, economic and cultural coordinates: Franco's Spain. Thus, the window chosen to reconstruct the satellite's orbit has been the press of a peripheral European country, a country governed by an authoritarian regime, at a time when the regime was transitioning from a period of autarky and National Catholicism to one defined by developmentalism and technocracy. In fact, the Francoist press of the 1950s gave extensive coverage to the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, turning it into an information and propaganda campaign that occupied hundreds of front pages and newspaper headlines about artificial satellites and the conquest of space, about rockets, spaceships and the dog Laika, about atomic energy and the fear of the atom. And, of course, on schools and national education systems, which had become – in Spain too – too important to be left in the hands of educators (Tröhler, 2013).

Over the past four decades, education policies across the globe have increasingly prioritized the identification and cultivation of technoscientific talents to empower the national economy and security in the face of global competition (Rasmussen, A., Ydesen, C., 2019; Li and Lowe, 2016). Such a shift of international education policy orientation from promoting social equity to cultivating elites has been framed as the product of transnational dissemination of neoliberalism and meritocracy that hold self-cultivation of excellence accountable for social mobility (Sellar and Lingard, 2014; Markovits, 2019). However, by considering neoliberalism a global monolith, education policy studies nonetheless cancel out sociocultural and geopolitical differences in talent development. This study aims to develop an STS-grounded account of talent cultivation as a sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) —a contested formation of cultural, moral, and political investments that shapes educational systems and subjectivities. Building on a completed book chapter, this conference presentation reframes the Chinese case of “cultivating technoscientific talents” as a strategic site for advancing a comparative international research agenda that attends to the historically specific moral–political infrastructures through which “talent” is made thinkable and governable.

The paper is organized around three linked questions:

1. How are “technoscientific talents” constituted—rather than merely discovered—through the interplay of moral conventions, social aspirations, philosophical vocabularies, and modern scientific methods in China?

2. Through what “technologies of power” (discursive, institutional, and epistemic) are talents classified, legitimized, and governed, and how do these technologies negotiate persistent tensions between excellence and equality, and between individual aspiration and collective futures?

3. How does the Chinese configuration complicate the tendency in international policy scholarship to treat “neoliberal meritocracy” as a global monolith, and what analytic leverage does this provide for comparing Western and non-Western regimes of talent governance under contemporary STEM and security/economy agendas?

The paper treats “technoscientific talent” not as a natural attribute to be discovered, but as a historically and ontologically constituted kind of person produced through the co-production of knowledge, social order, and educational governance. The analysis combines two complementary lenses: first, a social construction account of technoscience that challenges individualist myths of genius by showing innovation as a contingent outcome of collective practices (Reckwitz, 2017); second, Foucauldian analytics of knowledge/power/subject (Foucault, 1984), operationalized through scholarship on the looping effects of classification (Hacking, 2007; Bowker & Star, 2000). To connect these STS insights to the Chinese case, the chapter theorizes talent governance as an assemblage of social imaginaries and technical practices, organized analytically through three historically durable discursive schemas—masses/elites, heaven/man, and child/nation-state—treated as both conceptual apparatuses and practical mechanisms that render particular forms of giftedness politically legitimate, institutionally viable, and culturally intelligible.

The topic of this presentation is an impressive imaginary from the late 1960s that lies at the intersection of technologies, education, and geopolitical realities. After the Sputnik Shock in 1957, Cold War rivalry entered a new phase between the US and the Soviet Union, namely the Era of coexistence and competition: besides the space race, an educational race emerged in a transnational context (Somogyvári, 2018). Human resources and its organization (the management) emphasized more and more in this approach, including sciences and training: altogether these elements constituted the idea of Scientific Technological Revolution (STR), expressed in an influential work of Radovan Richta and his interdisciplinary team (1969). Automation, structural and systematic thinking, cybernetics, computers, optimization, and many others characterized this new discourse, presenting a utopian vision of an improved world where machines and processes will facilitate the hard work of production and teaching.

My other starting point is scientism in a secular, socialist world, where everything is scientific, from the ideological worldview to industrial work. Science might evoke religious elements in this sense (as politics did the same in authoritarian and totalitarian systems, see, for example, Gentile, 2006, and Voegelin, 1993), by offering ultimate and clear solutions, a linear development, and strong statements. This was a possible supremacy of science over religion, old content in a new framework (Schmidt-Lux, 2010). Science is a core point here, an elixir to every problem, giving ideal images related to the management of society, increasing educational efficiency, and so on – we can compare this with Western post-industrial theories too (Hoffmann, 1978).

The Scientific-Technological Revolution played the role of an imaginary that connected past, present, and future, seeking to redefine Marxism-Leninism through the lenses of the new technocracy. This fresh input was an unsuccessful attempt to legitimize the system and also had a significant impact on Western reception. The STR project was truly historical, offering the existing socialist education a better future, grounded in the same old ideology: historicizing this initiative opens the possibility of uncovering some of the roots of our educational ideas (see, e.g., Van Ruyskensvelde, Thyssen, Herman, Van Gorp & Verstraete, 2021).