Learning the Welfare State (WELFARELEARN)
The research team explores how the welfare state creates citizens and populations through education and how education programs and reforms create welfare states.
The research team explores how the welfare state creates citizens and populations through education and how education programs and reforms create welfare states.
Disciplinarily situated between education policy studies, history of education, welfare state history and educational sociology, we study educational and social reforms, international and transnational education transfer, migration and migrant education, racialization, racism and antiracism in education, social cohesion and inclusion strategies, crafting of the nation through education, and religion, state and secularization reforms.
We draw on methods and approaches such as comparative, historical, and sociological policy analysis, oral history, implementation studies focused on street-level actors, global history, social history, history of mentality and knowledge, historical religion studies, and sociology of knowledge.
Led by Mette Buchardt and Jin Hui Li, the team draws on the expertise of internal as well as international external members. We participate in national and international research environments, such as the annual The Vienna-Wisconsin Madison-Chapel Hill-Stanford-Aalborg Doctoral Colloquium for the History and Politics of Education and hosting public seminars with external affiliates.
Current projects
Educating newcomers to the welfare state. Organizational responses to migration 1960s-2010s and their influence on Danish central policy
Professor Mette Buchardt, leads a new 3 1/2 year project alongside Politics and Society's associate professor Karen N. Breidahl on frontline organizations' impact on Danish policy.
EUROCULT - building the nation through cultural christianity across Europe, 1870s-1930s historical foundations of contemporary challenges
The project explores how cultural Christian modernist movements influenced the crafting of the modern European states and their education- and social politics and contributed to the crafting of citizens (Mette Buchardt, Sara Fredfelt Stadager et al)
The child and curriculum. Existential question and educational responses
A research project concerning the role of so-called “life questions” in the Swedish school curriculum historically and at present and the experimental education projects that made them part of Swedish curriculum policies. Mette Buchardt conduct the historical part 1970s-1990s that focuses on how developmental projects concerning life question impacted Swedish curricular reforms. The project compares the Swedish case with the policy development in Denmark, Norway and Germany.
Social Sciences and Humanities - Past, Present and (possible) Futures
This bubble project, funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, will be circled around activities to substantiate, qualify, and underpin a research grant proposal in 2023. We are working towards an in-depth analysis of the envisioned role of social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the higher education systems of three Nordic countries under a history and policy of education-perspective.
Organizational practices for inclusion of newly arrived migrant pupils (PhD project, Nanna Ramsing Enemark)
School professionals' effects on the process of exclusion (PhD project, Ida Spangsberg Hansen)
International research network: reforms in education (financed by the Swedish Research Council)
A network co-directed by Mette Buchardt together with Johannes Westberg of Örebro University, Jane Gingrich of University of Oxford and Magdalen College and Michael Geiss from University of Zürich. From methodologically and theoretically interdisciplinary reflections, the network aims to answer questions such as:
- What should be considered an educational reform?
- How do reforms work at the local school level and what role can be ascribed to the regional administrative and national policy level?
- How can transnational corporate actors, the transfer of knowledge or policies and networks be examined when investigating reforms in education?
After the crisis. Migration, education and work-life in interdisciplinary light (research network funded by forte - the Swedish Research council for health, working life and welfare)