Conference Agenda

Research Problem

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, educational institutions have become sites of systematic military propaganda implementation. Federal policies mandate military-patriotic activities across schools, kindergartens, colleges, and universities, obligating teachers to implement programs regardless of personal convictions. This creates fundamental violations of children's rights to education free from ideological indoctrination and raises urgent questions about educational policy under authoritarianism, institutional compliance mechanisms, and long-term societal impacts of systematic childhood exposure to military glorification.

Traditional research in authoritarian educational contexts faces severe access restrictions — direct observation, surveys, and institutional data collection are typically impossible. However, a December 2022 federal mandate requiring all Russian state organizations to maintain VKontakte social media accounts has created a comprehensive public archive. Educational institutions must report conducted activities, transforming the platform into documentation enabling empirical analysis previously impossible in closed regimes.

Research Questions

This quantitative research investigates: (1) How has military-patriotic activity intensified since the invasion? (2) What thematic patterns characterize military-patriotic events, and how have these evolved (humanitarian aid collection, letter writing, camouflage net weaving, military training, "hero's desk" installations, etc.)? (3) How does militarization intensity correlate with settlement size and regional characteristics — are capital cities less militarized than rural areas? (4) Does regional war casualty rate correlate with educational militarization intensity? (5) How does propaganda targeting vary by student age — from preschoolers (3-6 years) through pre-recruitment teenagers to university students? (6) What role do state youth organizations ("Yunarmiya", "Movement of the First") play in structuring propaganda activities? (7) How does the mandatory "Conversations About Important Things" classroom hour function in practice? (8) How do teachers, students, and parents navigate institutional pressures to participate in activities conflicting with educational or ethical values?

Objectives and Approach

This research provides systematic empirical documentation of military propaganda policy implementation at national scale through computational social media analysis. We collected 88,959,026 posts from 67,712 educational institution VKontakte accounts (January 2022-December 2025), using a three-stage filtering process to identify 885,665 verified military-patriotic events. The study maps temporal dynamics of propaganda intensification, identifies variations across institutional types and educational levels, reveals geographic patterns in policy enforcement, examines organizational actors structuring activities, and analyzes mechanisms explaining variations in propaganda intensity. Qualitative interviews with teachers, students, and parents complement quantitative findings, capturing lived experiences of navigating institutional pressures.

Conceptual Framework

This research draws on educational policy studies examining how authoritarian states control educational content through top-down mandates, and sociology of education analyzing how institutions reproduce state ideologies through curriculum, mandatory activities, and institutional rituals.

The framework builds on scholarship demonstrating authoritarian regimes' use of education for indoctrination and political socialization (Neundorf et al. 2024; Testa 2018), post-Soviet "re-Sovietization" processes (Lem 2022), and how early ideological exposure shapes long-term political attitudes (Voigtländer & Voth 2015).

Central to the framework is institutional compliance — how schools navigate federal mandates while managing relationships with teachers, students, and parents through varying enforcement mechanisms and adaptation strategies. The framework also considers childhood militarization as systematic socialization, raising questions about long-term psychological impacts.

Significance

This research addresses critical gaps through methodological innovation applicable to authoritarian contexts globally: transforming mandatory social media reporting into large-scale quantitative documentation. It provides empirical evidence at unprecedented scale documenting systematic militarization affecting millions of children.

The findings contribute to comparative educational policy scholarship on authoritarianism, sociology of education regarding institutional ideology reproduction, and childhood studies concerning militaristic socialization. The methodological approach offers a replicable framework for studying closed educational systems internationally. Beyond academic contributions, the research provides evidence for European and international human rights organizations, educational practitioners, and policymakers addressing educational instrumentalization in authoritarian contexts.

Across many education systems, assessment reform has been promoted as a technical solution to pedagogic overload, student stress, and political controversy. Low-stakes, pass/fail, or competence-based assessment regimes are often justified as widening pedagogic space and reducing performative pressure. Yet little research has explored how such assessment arrangements may themselves function as powerful mechanisms of governance, particularly under conditions of heightened political control in strong states (Lim 2016). This paper addresses this gap by analysing how weak assessment can govern strongly, reshaping what counts as legitimate knowledge, worthwhile pedagogy, and professional judgement in citizenship education during times of securitisation.

The paper draws on an empirical study of Citizenship and Social Development (CSD), a compulsory, more tightly framed and conservative senior secondary subject introduced in Hong Kong following the 2019 political crisis and the enactment of the National Security Law (Vickers and Morris 2022). CSD replaced Liberal Studies (LS), a formerly high-status, enquiry-oriented and progressive subject that combined public examination assessment with a consequential school-based enquiry component. While LS was criticised for fostering political contestation, it authorised pedagogic openness and conceptual depth through its evaluative design. By contrast, CSD is assessed through a low-stakes pass/fail regime with a very high passing rate and the removal of extended enquiry.

Mobilising Basil Bernstein’s (2000) concept of the pedagogic device, with particular attention to evaluative rules, the paper interrogates how changes in assessment reconfigure pedagogic power in practice. Rather than treating assessment as a neutral measurement tool or as a simple proxy for stakes, the analysis conceptualises evaluative rules as a social grammar that regulates what is worth teaching, how much effort is justified, and what forms of knowledge are professionally safe to pursue – the familia Foucauldian theme on power-knowledge relations and policy enactment (Ball et al. 2012; Singh et al. 2013; Singh 2017). The paper also draws on later Bernsteinian scholarship to highlight the temporal, consequential, and discriminatory dimensions of evaluation (Wong 2017).

Empirically, the analysis is based on classroom observations and interviews with pre-service teachers undertaking teaching practicum in Hong Kong secondary schools. Two lesson vignettes are examined in depth: one on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and another on the judiciary and the rule of law. Both topics were previously taught under LS and remain formally permissible under CSD, enabling a comparison of pedagogic enactment under different evaluative regimes. The findings show that weak assessment does not diminish governance but relocates it. Pedagogic control operates through an anticipatory evaluative gaze, in which teachers pre-emptively avoid interpretive openness, controversial examples, and conceptual elaboration, even in the absence of explicit prohibitions (see also Foucault 1977).

Under CSD, lessons tend to converge on descriptive, textbook-driven, and morally affirmational forms of knowledge. Critical depth, multi-perspectival reasoning, and engagement with contested public issues are perceived as risky, unrewarded, and inefficient. Teachers respond rationally by minimising pedagogic labour and prioritising coverage and compliance. Ironically, while workload is reduced and assessment pressure appears lighter, pedagogic power is intensified through the quiet normalisation of restricted knowledge and conservative instructional routines.

The paper contributes to international debates on curriculum reform and policy enactment in times of poly-crisis. It demonstrates how assessment regimes can govern indirectly, shaping professional common sense and knowledge practices without relying on overt coercion. Beyond the Hong Kong case, the analysis offers conceptual tools for understanding similar dynamics in other contexts where low-stakes assessment, political sensitivity, and claims of depoliticisation intersect. In doing so, it argues that assessment design must be treated as a central lever of pedagogic power if education research is to meaningfully address the changing conditions under which knowing and acting are organised.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a global resurgence of various forms of populism as strategies of political mobilization (Abromeit et al. 2015; Mudde 2016). These assorted populisms have influenced public discourses, institutions, and policies in notable and frequently concerning ways (Brubaker 2020; Wodak 2015, Žižek 2006). Their influence has extended to educational politics, governance, and policies in many countries and at all levels in educational systems (Douglass 2021; Hussain & Yunus, 2021; Piattoeva et al., 2023; Scott, 2020). As key ideological apparatuses of modern states, educational institutions shape what citizens know, believe and value, as well as what they can say and do (Althusser, 2006; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). This regularly makes educational institutions sites of political struggle and, in the current case, prime targets of populist influence and intervention (Dillabough, 2022).

Contemporary populisms have emerged globally, often with socially conservative or right-wing orientations toward governance and policy. In Hungary, Kocsis (2022) describes how an ‘illiberal populist regime’ has undermined university autonomy by installing ruling party officials in leadership roles, stifling critical thinking and enforcing a uniform, sanitized curriculum. In the U.S., the Trump presidencies (2016–2020; 2024–present) exemplify authoritarian populism marked by anti-intellectualism, rejection of science, and attacks on equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts (Burns, Green & Nolan, 2022). Similarly, in Nicaragua, Ortega’s populist-autocratic government has weakened education to entrench power, undermining democratic development (Maclure & Avilés, 2022).

When populisms aligns with nationalism, they can reshape educational governance to promote national identity, traditional values, and resistance to external influences. In Europe, this is seen in efforts to discredit international standards in favor of nationalist policies (Piattoeva et al., 2023), such as promoting Christian identity in Hungary’s secular schools (Neumann, 2023). Ethnonationalist forms of populism use nativist rhetoric to delegitimize public institutions and scapegoat particular social groups (Müller, 2021). In Finland, Vesikansa and Honkatukia (2022) show how racialized discourse depicts immigrant and refugee youth as violent and undeserving, oversimplifying complex issues like migration and school discipline.

However, populism is not universally regarded as authoritarian or anti-democratic. Some socially progressive scholars argue that certain forms of it can strengthen democratic governance and institutions like education. From this perspective, some populist movements reflect the genuine grievances of marginalized groups and thus serve as democratic opposition to elite-driven institutions that have long ignored their needs (Streeck, 2017). Populisms like these are seen to hold potential to expand public spaces for meaningful participation, dialogue, and collective civic engagement (Mouffe, 2018). Some educational scholarship focuses on how engaging with populist discourses and actors can foster democratic capacities and renewal (Mårdh & Tryggvason, 2017). Petrie et al. (2019) and Sant (2021) provide examples from adult education in Scotland and ans schooling contexts in Catalonia, respectively.

Considering the resurgence of populism and the varying perspectives on how to interpret and respond to it in the education sector, we will report findings from a scoping review of the international scholarly literature on populism and education. While educational research has naturally lagged slightly behind the recent rise of populism, a growing body of theoretical and empirical scholarship has formed on the relationship between populism and education at all levels. Our review (ongoing at the time of this abstract submission) aims to probe and consolidate this knowledge base by asking four related questions: (1) In what ways is populism is conceptualized? (2) Under what conditions does populism emerge? (3) What are the influences of populism on educational politics, governance, and policies? (4) What responses to populist influences are documented or proposed?