Research

Rationale

The research in FuturEd explores ongoing changes in education governance both on the global and local scales.  We recognised the urgent need to analyse the future of education governance with new concepts and broader social science perspectives, as the contemporary concepts of education governance are not sufficient in analytically describing all the concurrent changes that are affecting education today and in the future. Additionally, so far, these changes have been researched separately and through different research paradigms.

With the help and interference of life and behavioural sciences, as well as managerial reasoning and business initiatives, education governance is shifting towards more individually and personally tailored governance. Datafication and digitalisation are used as tools to pre-empt futures in order to manage the present, with a variety of stakeholders joining forces through transnational networks to operationalise such ideas, quite often appealing to marketisation and privatisation in education. Managing the present requires fabrication of a specific type of future-oriented learning subjectivities, in which structural problems, such as inequalities or lack of resources, tend to be considered as products of innate and quantifiable differences in behaviour, affects, skills, and competencies, justified by behavioural and life sciences. Furthermore, the simultaneous occurrence of these changes on different scales (global, national, and local) entails even tighter economically driven governance with far-reaching implications.


Research themes

By utilising, applying, and further developing the concept of precision education governance (PEG), we analyse the future education governance by scrutinizing some of the key changes and outcomes in education through three interlinked lines of research. To explore further our research themes, please follow the links below:

Global governance of education

The marketisation, privatisation, digitalisation and datafication of education

The rise of behavioural and life sciences in education

 


Our theoretical and methodological base of precision education governance has been developed in the Finnish, Nordic, continental European and Australasian partnership.

Among FuturEd-project partners from Helsinki, Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Malmö, Edinburgh, Shanghai, Vienna, Wisconsin, Umeå,  Madison, Victoria,  Hamburgh, and Melbourne, we’d like to thank the following scholars for their important contribution:

Daniel Nehring, Shanghai University

Tero Järvinen, University of Turku

Maija Lanas, University of Oulu

Katja Brøgger, Aarhus University

Thomas Popkewitz, University of Madison-Wisconsin

Marie Brennan, Victoria University

Ben Williamson, University of Edinburgh

Lisbeth Lundahl, Umeå University

Julie McLeod, University of Melbourne

Fazal Rizvi, University of Melbourne

Sigrid Hartong, Helmut Schmidt University

Daniel Tröhler, University of Vienna

Risto Rinne, University of Turku