Collegium for Politics in Education (PoP)

The Research Collegium Pedagogy and Politics (POP) aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how differences are created – between individuals, between different categories of people, and between people and the world around them. Our interest lies in analysing how these differences are produced – for example, through the design of education systems, classroom interaction, or lifelong learning.

• We examine how educational systems are created and transformed, and what this means for society and its citizens.
• We seek to understand the governance and control of educational processes and what this means for, for example, actors and institutions. Of particular interest is the development of educational technologies and the arguments used to justify them.
• We are interested in the tools, processes and categorisations through which education systems create differences, and in how these generate new differences.

Educational settings offer people different opportunities for knowledge and learning, while also shaping and prescribing different ways of living in and understanding the world. This is possible because the objects studied in education – such as education itself, learning, and processes of influence – are inherently social and cultural, with both generative and constitutive characteristics; that is, they have the capacity both to reproduce and to create.