Conference Agenda

This paper examines the peripheral yet constitutive role of spousal labour and care in the production of international academic knowledge, with a particular focus on International and Comparative Education during the second half of the twentieth century. It challenges dominant historiographies of the field that foreground individual (typically male) intellectual achievement (Landahl & Lundahl, 2017), by instead analysing how knowledge production is relationally sustained through unpaid, informal, and often invisible work.

The empirical focus is Ingrid Husén (1917–1991), wife of the prominent scholar Torsten Husén (1916–2009), whose career was central to the institutionalisation and global expansion of International and Comparative Education. Often described as a “Grand Old Man” of the field (Postlethwaite, 2001), Torsten Husén occupied leading positions in international organisations such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and UNESCO-related bodies, authored over a thousand publications, and left behind an exceptionally large research archive. While his intellectual contributions are well documented, the social and affective infrastructures that enabled this career remain largely unexplored (cf. Grek et al., 2024).

The central research question guiding the paper is: How did Ingrid Husén’s spousal labour and care contribute to the formation, maintenance, and sustainability of international academic networks in International and Comparative Education between the 1950s and the early 1990s? A related question asks how care can be conceptualised not merely as background support but as an epistemically and relationally constitutive element of knowledge production.

The objective of the paper is twofold. Empirically, it seeks to make visible the concrete practices through which Ingrid Husén contributed to her husband’s academic career: domestic labour, emotional support, editorial assistance, travel companionship, hosting, and academic diplomacy. Analytically, it aims to demonstrate how these practices functioned as part of the infrastructure of transnational knowledge production, shaping both individual scholarly productivity and the durability of international research networks.

Conceptually, the paper is informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor–Network Theory (ANT), particularly their emphasis on relationality, mediation, and the distributed nature of scientific work (Latour, 2005). Drawing on María Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of matters of care (2017), the analysis reframes care as an ethical, material, and affective practice that sustains sociotechnical worlds. This perspective extends earlier STS moves from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern” by foregrounding maintenance, dependency, and obligation as central to epistemic life; ie viewing care as an epistemological category.

The study also engages with sociological literature on academic spouses, including concepts such as the “two-person single career” (Papanek, 1973) and the “incorporated wife” (Finch, 1983), while critically moving beyond frameworks that portray spouses solely as victims of patriarchal structures (Gudmundsdottir et al., 2019; Sjöberg, 2024). Instead, the paper argues that spousal care operates simultaneously as a site of inequality and as a productive force in the making of international academic fields.

By situating Ingrid Husén’s contributions within the broader development of International and Comparative Education as a transnational “disembedded laboratory,” (Grek et al., 2024) the paper contributes to ongoing debates on gender, infrastructure, and knowledge production. It proposes care as a necessary analytical category for writing more equitable and empirically grounded histories of educational science and global research networks.

After the end of World War II, in 1948, the Communist Party gained exclusive political power in Hungary, as it did throughout the entire region of East-Central Europe. As a result, Hungary also became a one-party Soviet-style Stalinist dictatorship. This was followed by the establishment of the system, which is referred to as the period of Stalinization. Stalinization extended to all areas of the state and society, including public education, pedagogy, and educational science. The research in this period of political history attempts to describe the direction and content of changes in the image of women, families, and parents with the help of one of the most relevant pedagogical journals of the era, Public Education. Accordingly, the research questions are the following: What kind of image of the family, what kind of image of parents, and what kind of image of women can be found in the Public Education between 1945 and 1950? How did the theme of school appear in all of these? How did this theme change over in this half-decade? What professional-pedagogical and non-professional elements did this issue build on? How did the Soviet Stalinist pattern manifest itself in all this? In other words, the research examines how the direction and content of these themes developed before and after the communist takeover in 1948.

Many studies have examined the emergence of female students and its effect on university education and the development of academic scholarship (e.g. MacDonald, 2021; Martínez Alemán & Renn, 2002; Mazón, 2003; Nash, 2005, 2018; Parker, 2015; Popiński, 2019; Rowold, 2010). By contrast, the role of women as academic employees – professors, lecturers, researchers and institutional staff – has received less attention. However, in recent years, several studies have examined the role of the first female professors in specific national contexts and have moved beyond purely biographical approaches (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2007, 2020; Flecha-García, 2020; Polenghi, 2020). Still, this field of research is underdeveloped in Central and Eastern Europe.

In Hungarian educational historiography, women’s access to higher education has primarily been studied through student enrolment and participation patterns. While the feminisation of the student body is well-researched, the emergence of female teaching staff has not been a major focus of research, with only scattered references and anecdotal data available. As a result, little is known about the institutional positions, career trajectories, and structural constraints affecting women who worked within universities as teachers or researchers.

From the late nineteenth century onward, women’s participation in higher education expanded across Europe and North America. Following the admission of female students came the awarding of academic degrees, and by the mid-20th century, it was commonplace for female researchers to obtain doctoral degrees or habilitations. Nevertheless, women’s access to academic positions remained limited during this period. The growing presence of women in higher education systems around the world did not lead to a significant increase in their presence in academia. This suggests the persistence of gendered hierarchies within universities.

In Hungary, a ministerial decree issued by the Minister for Education, Gyula Wlassics in 1895 allowed women to enrol in selected areas of higher education. In the following years, the number of female students in higher education grew steadily. During World War I, their numbers increased dynamically. Following the war, the number of female students declined briefly, but in the 1920s, their participation in higher education began to grow slowly but steadily again. However, this trend was interrupted in the mid-1930s, when overall university enrolment, including that of women, began to decrease.

Against this background, this study examines whether the increase in female student enrolment at the University of Szeged after World War I was followed by a comparable increase in female academic employment. Focusing on the period between 1921, when the university was relocated to Szeged, and 1940, when it moved back to Kolozsvár, the research examines all identifiable female employees affiliated with university institutes who performed teaching or research-related tasks. By analysing the relationship between student feminisation and academic employment, the study contributes to international debates on gendered academic labour and institutional inequality.

Robert Birley (1903-1982) was an ardent supporter of encouraging the English to learn more languages and commit to a sense of belonging to Europe. As a former head of Eton College school and an educationalist involved with the reconstruction of education in Germany after World War Two, Birley was adamant that the whole English education system, whether fee paying or not, must learn to respect and connect with a wider experience of European languages and culture. Over 40 years since Birley’s death, schools and assessment processes in England are still experiencing conflicted and complicated pressures around the position of English and other languages within school buildings and timetables and amongst communities who often share and speak multiple languages.

Birley's BBC Radio Reith Lectures broadcast in 1949 began with 'The Problem of Patriotism'. Birley was not averse to confronting aspects of nationalism or inward-looking self-absorption in any national culture. Later in his career Birley’s work was focused on South Africa and the issues of Apartheid. Birley's biography 'Red Robert' was written by Arthur Hearnden and published in 1984 by Hamish Hamilton. Birley also featured in some collages which are illustrated in this biography, and it is one such collage that inspired the shape and development of this paper. In that particular collage (which appears as a glossy book illustration), Birley is shown pasted into an open top airplane waving at the viewer alongside various of his friends and colleagues. Despite the gravity and jagged contradictions which Birley faced in his working life collages such as this bring in an almost uneasy sense of the absurd with the scale of people and objects distorted and visually jumbled.

This chance encounter with a collage presented as perhaps a rather chirpy book illustration led me to wonder about Elizabeth Adams St Pierre's 2019 publication that touches on collage and experiment. I am also influenced by Ines Dussel’s 2017 reflections on ‘iconophilia and iconoclasm as particular politics of the image’. I found myself wanting to look at what might be salvaged and reassembled from Birley’s writing and presence in my own attempt to take notes using collage for this conference presentation.