Cultureintalk · Culture in talk: neoliberalism, welfare and school education in Sweden, the UK and Russia
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-08-16 → 2023-08-15
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Culture in talk: neoliberalism, welfare and school education in Sweden, the UK and Russia
The research project addressed an important social policy puzzle: why some policy cultures readily embrace neoliberal educational developments, while others resist and reject them. Building on a comparison of three contrasting cases: the UK, Sweden and Russia, the research examined grassroots interpretations of key neoliberal ideas in education, including, for example, ‘education as a commercial service’ and ‘standardisation in education’, explaining the crucial role of bottom-up policy reception in neoliberal policy. The research action contributed to facilitating a dialogue between different-level policy actors - teachers, parents, school administrators and policy makers at the local, national and international levels - by re-framing a long-standing social policy dilemma: ‘social change is hampered by public resistance’, in a new light: ‘public resistance is an organic part of social change’. The main contribution of the research action is in explaining, theorising and popularising the idea of social policy being ‘owned’ in equal measure by policy actors, as well as in promoting a feedback culture and a culture of policy negotiation among various policy actors. Another key contribution of the action lies in the re-shaping of the production of knowledge and expertise, both within the academic and public sectors, through promoting ergonomic research designs that utilise publicly available and secondary data, as opposed to generating new data, as well as in popularising digital data collection and the preservation and re-use of specifically qualitative data.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The study is the first to apply a cultural prism to comparatively examine the diverse and contradictory enactments of neoliberal education reforms in three welfare states - Sweden, the UK and Russia. In contrast to other studies that examine neoliberal expansion in education from the perspective of official policy narratives and numbers this study embraces a bottom-up approach by studying grassroots societal voices. Building bridges between cultural sociology, public policy and comparative education, the study will help redefine the relationship between culture and policy as a continuous feedback loop that enables grassroots policy interpretations to trickle up to policy discourse and inform policy action. Empirically, the study will map contemporary meanings of education in the three case countries, highlight ongoing sources of tension between neoliberal and welfare educational values, and unpack similar and divergent cultural logics of resistance. Theoretically, the study will enrich our understanding of the widely recognised but under-explored cultural dimension of policy. The study will contribute to enabling more effective dialogue between grassroots and nation-level education actors by advancing the view of social policy as co-produced and co-owned by grassroots actors.This ambitious multi-language project will bring the researcher to the forefront of the global conversation about the role of grassroots resistance in public policy-making. It will solidify the researcher’s transnational expertise that spans Russia, the UK, the US, Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and catalyse her independence in comparative public policy research. It will also sharpen her unique methodological expertise in the interrogation of social meanings through computational and digital research. Finally, it will enhance the researcher’s profile and visibility in international policy consultancy, with a view to her going on to lead her own consulting practice.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KING'S COLLEGE LONDON · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union