Wednesday 4 May 2022, 16:00-17:00

Room 213 St Andrew's Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH

Infrastructuring numbers: the education SDG and the generative power of failing metrics

The presentation traces the development of the epistemic infrastructure of the education SDG in order to examine the ways that the incremental build-up of the discourse, technical expertise and necessary – though always fragile– alliances facilitated a paradigmatic policy shift in the field of education: this is the move from the measurement of schooling to the measurement of learning. Through an analytical lens that examines the entanglement of the material, semiotic, as well as political and temporal/spatial elements of the infrastructure, the article shows how the SDG4 as an epistemic infrastructure enabled a fundamental re-orientation in the field of global education governance. The article discusses the ways that quantification, despite –and often thanks to– its failings, ‘folded’ contested discourses, decision-making, politics and ideas into its processes. Thus, the paper argues that the making of the SDG4 represents a paradigmatic policy shift; one that is not only to be traced in the move from schooling to the policy prioritisation of learning outcomes, but in the very production of global public policy through the work of the SDGs as epistemic infrastructures.

About the speaker

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO). She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021).

First published: 29 March 2022

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