Professor David Bridges: MA (Oxon) MA PhD (London); Hon.D.Univ (Open University); Emeritus Professor, University of East Anglia; Emeritus Fellow, St Edmund’s and Homerton Colleges Cambridge; Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; Overseas Fellow of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences
David Bridges has been an enthusiastic supporter of EERA since its very early days. It was at a symposium at a joint EERA/BERA conference in Bath in 1995 that the idea of a Philosophy of Education Network for EERA was conceived. David came to the ECER conference the following year in Seville with a proposal for its establishment. As Dieter Lenzen did the same, they joined forces and became the first convenors of Network 13. Dieter almost immediately took on a position as Vice President of the Freie Universität in Berlin and his place as co-convenor was taken by Volker Kraft. These two remained co- convenors of an expanding and flourishing network with the early addition of Zdenko Kodelja from Slovenia, Eliane Ricard Fersing from France, Bob Dahlin from Sweden and Leena Kakkori from Finland. David continued as co-convenor for 10 years until 2006.
David was elected to BERA Council in 2006 and was immediately nominated to represent BERA on EERA Council, which he did for six years. Between 2008 and 2011 he was part of the EERA initiated project on European Education Research Quality Indicators (having previously served on the Education panel for the UK Research Assessment Exercise). In his last year on the Council he joined with Leijf Moos in drafting EERA’s response to the EU consultation on what was to become the Horizon 2020 Research Programme and representing EERA at a senior level meeting in Brussels. Working in Kazkahstan over the last five years, he has been an active supporter of the establishment of the Kazakhstan Educational Research Association and its successful application to join EERA
Though best known for his work in philosophy of education (and he is an Honorary Vice President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain), David has directed or co-directed some 27 empirically based research projects. A lot of his work has focussed on the relationship between philosophy and educational research and a collection of 26 of his papers has been published by Springer in 2017 under the title "Philosophy in Educational research: Epistemology, ethics, politics and quality".