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17 SES 08 A: Archives Without Borders: Trans-Archival Approaches to Educational Research
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17. Histories of Education
Panel Discussion Archives Without Borders: Trans-archival Approaches to Educational Research University of Zurich, Switzerland Presenting Author:Rethinking the history of education beyond the nation-state has long challenged methodological nationalism by accentuating relational and processual dimensions of educational phenomena (Middell & Naumann, 2010; Popkewitz, 2013; Roldán Vera & Fuchs, 2019). This reorientation has encouraged scholars to move beyond single sites and institutions as primary units of inquiry toward transnational and inter-institutional entanglements through which educational ideas, practices, and norms emerge. These shifts have significantly shaped archival research in the history of education (Richardson, 2019). Transnational and global approaches increasingly involve working across multiple archives to identify fragments, omissions and power assymetries that individual records may obscure that remain invisible within single institutional or national frames (Ravndal, 2023). Archival research thus becomes a means of interrogating how historically contingent systems of classification and governance were sedimented into archival categories (Saunier, 2013). While spatial and transnational turns are well established, their methodological implications for archival research remain underdeveloped. This panel advances a critical engagement with trans-archival methodology that treats archives as interconnected epistemological sites and traces how records, concepts, and classifications circulate across institutional, national, and temporal boundaries (Gilliland, 2016). Taken together, these developments call for a more explicit articulation of how trans-archival approaches operate as a research methodology and what kinds of historical knowledge they make possible. Therefore, the panel is guided by the following research questions:
The panel presents three empirical and methodological cases that operationalise and unpack key dimensions of trans-archival methodology: (1) a trans-archival history of transfers, translations and transformations between the OECD and selected national education ministries, (2) the development of a trans-archival database, and (3) a trans-archival analysis of interorganisational relations. Case 1: Transfers, translations and transformations between the OECD and selected national education ministries This case presents empirical examples of the dialectical exchanges through which educational ideas, instruments, and problem framings are co-produced between the OECD and national education ministries in Denmark, Brazil, the United States, and Australia (1961–2000) . Rather than presuming a fixed direction of influence, the paper treats it as an empirical question how initiatives emerge and are reshaped through iterative processes of transfer, translation, and transformation (Cowen, 2009). A trans-archival approach is used to trace how concepts, data, and policy rationales circulate across institutional boundaries and acquire new meanings highlighting the boundary work of knowledge brokers and organisational settings (Ydesen, 2021). Case 2: A Trans-archival Database on Intergovernmental Cooperation in Education In the lead-up to the 2030 deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals and amid declining perceptions of United Nations legitimacy (Montjouridès, 2022), the second case addresses fragmentation in global education governance records through the Database on Intergovernmental Cooperation in Education (DICED). DICED supports trans-archival research by integrating institutional repositories and by prioritising the standardisation, accessibility, and reuse of education policy texts (Wilkinson et al., 2016). The database enables researchers to trace intertextual linkages and citation networks across institutional borders, supporting analysis of how global educational values are co-produced and negotiated. Case 3: Interorganisational Negotiation of Authority through a Trans-archival Lens Drawing on archival materials from UNESCO and the Council of Europe, this case shows how educational authority emerges through relational and historically contingent interorganisational dynamics rather than fixed institutional mandates (Kranke, 2022; Zürn, 2018). Through a trans-archival analysis of documents, correspondence, and agreements of the two organisations, the study reconstructs how overlapping competences in higher education governance were negotiated, contested and reconfigured between 1952 and 1997. References Cowen, R. (2009). The transfer, translation and transformation of educational processes: And their shape‐shifting? Comparative Education, 45(3), 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050060903184916 Gilliland, A. (2016). Archival and Recordkeeping Traditions in the Multiverse and Their Importance for Researching Situations and Situating Research. In A. Gilliland, S. McKemmish, & A. Lau (Eds.), Research in the Archival Multiverse (pp. 31–73). Monash University Publishing. https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_628143 Kranke, M. (2022). Exclusive expertise: The boundary work of international organizations. Review of International Political Economy, 29(2), 453–476. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1784774 Middell, M., & Naumann, K. (2010). Global history and the spatial turn: From the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization. Journal of Global History, 5(1), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022809990362 Montjouridès, P. (2022). Is this the Future We Want? Understanding the Legitimacy of International Education Agendas. The Example of Equity in Education [PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge]. Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.89624 Popkewitz, T. S. (2013). Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 1–26). Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_1 Ravndal, E. J. (2023). Archives. In F. Badache, L. R. Kimber, & L. Maertens (Eds.), International Organizations and Research Methods (pp. 124–131). University of Michigan Press. Richardson, W. (2019). Method in the History of Education. In J. L. Rury & E. H. Tamura (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340033.013.3 Roldán Vera, E., & Fuchs, E. (2019). Introduction: The Transnational in the History of Education. In E. Fuchs & E. Roldán Vera (Eds.), The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (pp. 1–47). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17168-1_1 Saunier, P.-Y. (2013). Introduction. In Transnational History (pp. 1–12). Bloomsbury. Wilkinson, M. D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, Ij. J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., Mons, B. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3(1), 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18 Ydesen, C. (2021). Extrapolated Imperial Nationalisms in Global Education Policy Formation: An Historical Inquiry into American and Scandinavian Agendas in OECD Policy. In: D. Tröhler, N. Piattoeva, & W. Pinar (eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2022: Education, Schooling and the Global Universalization of Banal Nationalism, London: Routledge, pp. 119-135. Zürn, M. (2018). A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation. Oxford University Press. Chair Sophie Pia Stieger, sophie.stieger@ife.uzh.ch, University of Zurich | ||