PhD Courses in Denmark

Course description, incl. learning objectives and prerequisites:

The field of education is overloaded with categories. “Good” and “bad” students, instruction and teachers being the foremost, but also categories of e.g. gender, nation-ness, race, and class, and categories of feelings such as performance anxieties and stress is operating. So is politically formulated categories such as “inclusion” and “competence”. Also society and the state at large is overloaded with educational categories. State crafting and the governance of citizens have increasingly become educational and categorized the population to be governed accordingly.

As social science-humanities scholars of education, our research often focus on exploring such categories, but also we bring in preconstructions of such categories in our theoretical apparatus and due to our reading of the history and practices on the field we are studying.

The course targets the challenge and question of how to establish categories in empirical material in education research with a focus on sociological, historical, political science and ethnographical approaches.

How do we as education scientists establish theoretical approaches in the form of categories as optics to study the empirical material? How to establish a conversation with the material and the actors we are studying? How to make the empirical material answering us back? These methodological questions are crucial challenges for scholars working empirical with researching education and upbringing, and the disciplines of history of education, educational sociology and ethnography and education policy studies offers different possibilities and problems in this context.

At this one-day course we will establish a common laboratory for PhD-scholars dealing with research in educational issues across social sciences and the humanities to discuss and get inspired by senior scholars who work with similar challenges. We will share our laboratory work and challenges with each other.

The learning objectives is:

• to develop the competence of the participants to establish dialogues between empirical material and theoretical tools with a special focus on the question of categories and the process of categorization
• To extend the knowledge of the participant concerning the newest methodological development within the empirically and social-science/humanities (SSH)-based education research.

The course provide and put into dialogue:

• insights from the laboratory of four senior scholars speaking from respectively a transnational ethnography of education perspective (Li); a history of experience and welfare state studies-      perspective (Buchardt)  an affect theory based perspective (Vertelyté) and a new materialist inspired policy ethnographic perspective (Madsen).
• discussion of and response to problems and data from the participants own laboratories.

Programme outline:

8.45-9.00:          Arrival and coffee

9.00-9.15:          Jin Hui Li: Introduction and main angles on the methodological problem in focus today

9.15-9.45           Manté Vertelyté /case from the lab

9.50-10.20         Mette Buchardt/case from the lab

10.20-10.40       Questions and discussions

10.40-11.00       Break

11.00-12.00       Comments on papers and feedback divided in tracks: Each PhD-scholar: 20 min. (5 min. presentation; 5 min. feedback from a peer-PhD scholar; 5 min feedback from a senior scholar; 5 min. questions from plenum).

12.00-12.45       Lunch

12.45 -13.15      Miriam Madsen/case from the lab

13.20- 13.50      Jin Hui Li/case from the lab

13.50-14.10       Questions and discussions

14.10-14.30       Break

14.30-15.40       Comments on papers and feedback in tracks

15.40-16.00       Short recap and goodbye: “Two things I take with me today”.

Description of paper requirements, if applicable:

1 page project description, 1 page description of a methodological challenge concerning interpretation of empirical material, 1 page of except from empirical material (field work, interview, document, historical source et al.

Key literature:

• Beverly Skeggs: Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, Sage 1997 (excerpts).
• Ann Laura Stoler: Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press 2002 (excerpts).
• Maria Tamboukou ‘History and Ethnography: interfaces and juxtapositions.’ Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education, Northampton (MA) & Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar, 2012, 136-152.
• Karen Barad:.Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2003, 28(3), 801-831.
• Sophy Bergenheim:”From Survival Mode to Utopian Dreams: Conceptions of Society, Social Planning, and Historical Time in 1950s and 1960s Finland “.P. Haapala, M. Harjula, H. Kokko (eds.) Experiencing Society and the Lived Welfare State, Palgrave Macmillan 2023.
• Miriam Madsen (2021) The configurative agency of metrics in education: a research agenda involving a different engagement with data, Journal of Education Policy, 36:1, 64-83, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2019.1682679
• William Mazzarella ”Affect: What is it Good for?”, in S. Dube (ed.): Enchantments of Modernity Empire, Nation, Globalization, London: Routledge 2020.
• Manté Vertelyté (2023): ‘Have we lost our sense of humour?!’ Affective senses of racial joking in Danish schools, Social Identities, DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2023.2208067

Suggested literature: (more to come)

• Heikki Kokko & Minna Harjula: Social History of Experiences: A Theoretical-Methodological Approach”. P. Haapala, M. Harjula, H. Kokko (eds.) Experiencing Society and the Lived Welfare State, Palgrave Macmillan 2023
• Frevert, Ute. Emotions in History. Lost and Found, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011.

Organizer: 

Lecturers:

• Jin Hui Li, Centre for Education Policy Research (CfU), AAU
• Mette Buchardt, Centre for Education Policy Research (CfU), AAU
• Miriam Madsen, Policy Futures, DPU, Aarhus University
• Manté Vertelyté, Policy Futures, DPU, Aarhus University

ECTS: 1

Time: 29 October 2024

Place: Aalborg University, Department of Culture and Learning, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, Copenhagen, DK.

Zip code: 2450

City: Copenhagen

Number of seats: 25

Deadline: 8 October 2024

Important information concerning PhD courses: We have over some time experienced problems with no-shows for both project and general courses. It has now reached a point where we are forced to take action. Therefore, the Doctoral School has decided to introduce a no-show fee of DKK 2.000 for each course where the student does not show up. Cancellations are accepted no later than 2 weeks before the start of the course. Registered illness is of course an acceptable reason for not showing up on those days. Furthermore, all courses open for registration approximately four months before start. This can hopefully also provide new students a chance to register for courses during the year. We look forward to your registration.