Change in (Educational) Policy

Many of our projects deal with the transformation of political structures, processes and actor constellations that accompany or are driven by growing datafication and digitalization.

We are interested in the role that federal-decentralized structures play in shaping or limiting data infrastructures, while at the same time becoming increasingly standardized and centralized through data infrastructures or data interoperability. Thus, a growing influence of national education authorities as well as centralized databases can be seen across countries. This puts sub-national decision-making autonomy under pressure. Additionally, processes of standardization, centralization and infrastructuralization are increasingly driven by intermediary actors that operate between educational policy, research, economy, and school practice and therefore often outside the classical educational policy arenas.

With our research, we want to increase our understanding of these new actor formations and contribute to a critical societal reflection of their growing influence. This also involves a systematic development of theoretical-methodological tools (e.g., network ethnography, policy tracing etc.) in order to make new forms of governance tangible, as well as the complex, multidimensional entanglements of actors and the changing forms of power.
See the dissertation projects of Annina Förschler as well as Lucas Joecks, among others, on this research focus.

HSU

Letzte Änderung: 19. March 2024