Session Information
23 SES 05 D, Changing Conditions for Educational Research Governance in Europe. Transnational and National Perspectives on Content, Shape and Directions of Educational Research
Symposium
Contribution
Recent structural transformations in European research policy can be characterized by a paradigmatic cultural shift from the European Union’s focus on “transnational cooperation” of scientific institutions towards promoting knowledge of “excellence” by individual researchers (Edler et al. 2003; Jansen 2007). While the former cultural goal has been implemented in the multi-annual Research Framework Programs, the latter has gained in importance through the founding of the European Research Council (ERC) as the key supranational funding institution at European level (Nedeva and Stampfer 2012). This paper analyses the structural opportunities of educational research given by the proposed European initiatives of funding for “excellence” in relation to other disciplines from the domain of the social sciences and humanities. Educational sciences are uniquely located in that field since they bridge the social sciences and humanities as a multidisciplinary field of study and scholarship. Our research takes the ERC’s focus on inter-disciplinarity into account, while simultaneously scrutinizing its potential impact on problem choice and cognitive knowledge production that are typically mediated by disciplinary-specific concerns and intellectual traditions (Whitley and Gläser 2007). Our thesis is that European research funding of “excellence” is relatively unresponsive to any locally or nationally specific concerns, while impacting on the creation of knowledge of European and global scope. This may well have significant consequences for knowledge production for the social sciences and humanities in general, and for educational research in particular, since traditionally their knowledge production is embedded in and bound to respective national and local contexts. Methodologically, we conduct a content analysis of research project abstracts in educational research and three adjacent disciplines (sociology, history, economics) that were funded by the ERC (2007–2015) in twelve countries of the European Research Area. We generate new knowledge in the foci of interest of European research funding of “excellence” and its potential impact on knowledge production in the field of educational research. In addition, findings are important for the assessment of the relative strength of educational research when competing for European research funding within the “chaos of disciplines” (Abbott 2001) and also its potential opportunities to ally with neighbouring disciplines in research practice. Further research could compare our results with those of related studies on educational research funding to provide new insights into what counts as knowledge of “excellence” in European educational research.
References
Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edler, J., Kuhlmann, S., Behrens, M., eds. 2003. Changing Governance of Research and Technology Policy: The European Research Area, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jansen, D., ed. 2007. New Forms of Governance in Research Organisations: Disciplinary Approaches, Interfaces and Integration, Dordrecht: Springer. Nedeva, M., Stampfer, M. 2012. From ‘Science in Europe’ to ‘European Science’. Science 336 (May 25, 2012): 982-983. Whitley, R., Gläser, J. eds. 2007. The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems. Dordrecht: Springer.
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