Mary Hamilton is Professor of Adult Learning and Literacy in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University, UK. She is Associate Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre and a founding member of the Research and Practice in Adult Literacy group. Her work explores communication and interaction in the everyday textually-mediated social world and involves close analysis of how texts, both print and digital, are used within social encounters and circulate within institutional settings. She has a long-standing interest in informal, vernacular learning and how communicative and learning resources are built across the life span. She has become increasingly involved with historical and interpretative policy analysis exploring how international influences reach into local practice and the implications of this for tutor and student agency in literacy education. Her current research is in literacy policy and governance, socio-material theory, academic Literacies, digital technologies and change.
Mary Hamilton is interested in the reception and interpretation of findings from international surveys of literacy. She is currently involved in a comparative study of media coverage of the PIAAC survey findings. She has worked with Keiko Yasokawa (UTS, Sydney) and Jeff Evans (Middlesex University, UK) on the first round of the survey and co-authored an article comparing media coverage in three countries (Japan, The UK and France). More recently she has been collaborating with scholars in the nine additional countries participating in round 2 of the PIAAC survey to follow up on the earlier study. She is especially interested in the rise of data journalism and the use of multiple modes of communication to publicise the findings, including numbers and visualisations.
- Hamilton, M., Maddox, B., & Addey, C. (Eds.). (2015). Literacy as Numbers. Cambridge University Press.
- Hamilton, M. (2012). Literacy and the Politics of Representation. Routledge.
- Yasukawa, K., Hamilton, M., & Evans, J. (2016). A comparative analysis of national media responses to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills: policy making from the global to the local?. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-15.
- Hamilton, M. (2014). Survey literacies. In Duckworth, V., & Ade-Ojo, G. (Eds). Landscapes of Specific Literacies in Contemporary Society: Exploring a social model of literacy. Routledge. Pp 47-60.
Radhika Gorur is Associate Professor of Education (Pedagogy and Curriculum) at Deakin University, Australia. Her research explores how some ideas begin to cohere, stabilise, gain momentum and make their way in the world. In particular, she is interested in contemporary efforts to translate the world into numbers, and the mobilisation, stabilisation, circulation and contestation of numbers in the mutual productions of states and statistics. Using material-semiotic approaches, she studies national and international comparative assessments, contributing to the emerging field of sociology of numbers and measurement. A significant concern in her critique has been to avoid simply ‘debunking’ numbers and polarising people into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ number camps. Instead, she has sought to challenge the apparent neutrality and objectivity of numbers, and to explore their performative politics. She has sought to demonstrate, through empirical examples, that number work is not merely descriptive but productive, and that understanding the performative nature of numbers is key to raising important moral questions about their participation in contemporary social life.
Radhika is currently working on an ARC-funded project Accountability and global education policy networks in the Indo-Pacific, which aims to describe how contemporary education reforms are unfolding under the Sustainable Development Goals agenda in Bangladesh and Cambodia. By studying empirically how assessment and accountability assemblages are performed, she hopes to develop a set of principles for sustainable, participatory accountability practices. Prior to joining Deakin University, Radhika was a Senior Fellow at the Victoria Institute, and before that, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, where she worked closely with Prof Fazal Rizvi and focused on issues of transnationalism and globalisation and Indian higher education policies. Her interest in internationalism stems from her extensive experience internationally as an educator; Radhika has held a variety of senior positions in schools in Nigeria, Oman, India and Australia.
- Gorur, R. (forthcoming). “The ‘Thin Descriptions’ of Secondary Analysis of PISA.” Educação & Sociedade
- Gorur, R. (forthcoming). Towards sustainable, collective and participatory accountability in Education 2030 – A Think Piece for the Global Education Monitoring Report. Paris, GEMR, UNESCO.
- Gorur, R. (2016). “Seeing like PISA: A Cautionary Tale about the Performativity of International Assessments.” European Educational Research Journal. 15(5).
- Gorur, R. (2015). Assembling a Sociology of Numbers. Literacy as Numbers – Researching the Politics and Practices of International Literacy Assessment. M. Hamilton, B. Maddox and C. Addey. London, Cambridge University Press: 1-16.
- Gorur, R. (2015). The Performative Politics of NAPLAN and My School. National Testing and its Effects: Evidence from Australia. G. Thompson, S. Sellar and R. LIngard. London, Rutledge.
Dr Camilla Addey is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Automomous University, Barcelona. Her research focuses on international large-scale assessments, global educational policy, and education privatisations. Her current research project, ILSAINC, is a study of the private sector’s involvement in international large-scale assessments. Formerly, Camilla was lecturer in Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University (USA), and a researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany). Dr Addey has been following the development of International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) developed specifically for lower and middle income contexts and their orientation towards policy. Before obtaining her PhD at the University of East Anglia (UK), she worked at UNESCO (Paris, France) in the Literacy and Non-Formal Education section. She is author of Readers and Non-Readers and co-editor of Literacy as Numbers.
The ‘PISA for Development for Policy – PISA4D4Pol’ research project: The ‘PISA for Development for Policy – PISA4D4Pol’ research project focuses on the OECD as a global education policy actor moving into newly reached contexts, the negotiation of the OECD’s global policy tools with the private sector contracted to develop the instruments, and the meanings of ILSAs as global education policy tools in Ecuador and Paraguay. The PISA4D4Pol research project draws on document analysis of PISA for Development working materials, participant observations of PISA for Development activities, and interviews with OECD staff, private company staff developing PISA for Development, and high level policy actors in Ecuador and Paraguay. Drawing on the theoretical tools of Actor-Network Theory, but also on global educational governance research, the projects follows the PISA for Development actors as they reframe their identities, negotiate policy artefacts and knowledge, and decontextualize and recontextualise global education policy tools. This research is supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
- Addey, Camilla and Nelli Piattoeva (Eds). 2022. Intimate accounts of education policy research: The practice of methods. Oxon: Routledge.
- Addey, Camilla. 2022. Invisible struggles, encoded fantasies and ritualized incantations. The “doings” of PISA as infrastructure. In A. Teodoro (Ed.). Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance. Risks, Limitations and Humanistic Alternatives(pp. 11-24). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003255215-2
- Addey, Camilla and Nelli Piattoeva (Eds). 2022. What a mess: Intimacies, metaphysics, multiple senses and matters of concern in education policy research. In Intimate accounts of education policy research: The practice of methods. Oxon: Routledge. Pp. 1 – 15.
- Addey, Camilla. 2021. Passports to the Global South, UN flags, favourite experts: understanding the interplay between UNESCO and the OECD within the SDG4 context, Globalisation, Societies and Education, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2020.1862643
- Addey, Camilla. 2021. Literacy Assembled as Global in ILSAs. Zeitschrift für PädagogikBeiheft (ISSN 0514-2717), Ausgabe 1, Pages 153 – 165
- Addey, Camilla, Bryan Maddox and Bruno D. Zumbo. 2020. Assembled validity: rethinking Kane’s argument-based approach in the context of International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs).Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2020.1843136
- Camilla Addey & Radhika Gorur. 2020. Translating PISA, translating the world. Comparative Education, DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2020.1771873
- Addey, Camilla. 2019. The appeal of PISA for Development in Ecuador and Paraguay: Theorising and applying the global ritual of belonging. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2019.1623653
- Addey, Camilla, and Sellar Sam. 2019. Is it worth it? Rationales for (Non)participation in international large-scale learning assessments. Education Research and Foresight Working Papers Series, No. 24. Paris, UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/node/268820
- Addey, Camilla (2017): Golden relics & historical standards: how the OECD is expanding global education governance through PISA for Development, Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2017.1352006
- Addey, Camilla, Sam Sellar, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Bob Lingard & Antoni Verger (2017): The rise of international large-scale assessments and rationales for participation, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2017.1301399
- Addey, C. and Sellar, S. Forthcoming. Why do countries participate in PISA? Understanding the role of international large-scale assessments in global education policy. In, Global Education Policy and International Development. Edited by A. Verger, M. Novelli and H. K. Altinyelken. Bloomsbury.
- Addey, C. Forthcoming. The assessment culture of international organizations: from philosophical doubt to statistical certainty through the appearance and growth of international education assessments. In, Pupil Assessment Cultures in historical perspective. Editted by C. Alarcón and M. Lawn.
- Addey, C. 2016. PISA for Development and the sacrifice of policy-relevant data. Educação & Sociedade. v. 37, no. 136, p.685-706. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/es0101-73302016166001
- Addey, C. 2015. International literacy assessments in Lao PDR and Mongolia: a global ritual of belonging, in Hamilton M., Maddox B., Addey, C. (Eds). 2015. Literacy as Numbers: Researching the Politics and Practices of International Literacy Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dr Sam Sellar is Dean of Research, Education Futures and Professor of Education Policy at the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia. He was previously Reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Postdoctoral Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Sam’s research focuses on intersections between education policy, governance and data. Sam has worked closely with teacher associations around the world to develop understanding about the politics of educational accountability and the commercialization of public education through the provision of data-focused products and services. He is currently an associate editor of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and was formerly an editor of Critical Studies in Education. Sam is co-author of Globalizing Educational Accountabilities (2016, Routledge) and co-editor of National testing in schools: An Australian assessment (2016, Routledge).
Together with Bob Lingard, Sam has investigated how PISA has shaped the role of the Directorate for Education and Skills within the OECD and the role of the OECD in global education policy. Sam has also studied the impact of PISA on national and sub-national education policy contexts in Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK, and sought to theorise how the transformation of data into narrative and visual representations can generate affective responses that are described as ‘PISA shocks’. With a team of colleagues (B. Lingard, K. Gulson, K. Takayama, C. Lubienski and P.T. Webb), Sam is currently working on an international comparative study of data infrastructure in schools and school systems in Australia, the USA, Canada and Japan (Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 150102098). In this project, the team is investigating how schools and school systems produce, share, store, analyse and use data of various kinds, including data from international assessments. In 2017, they will be tracking the impact of PISA 2015 in each of the countries in this study. This study is also spurring an interest in new forms of data analytics, computer-based assessments and the education technology market. Another strand of Sam’s research programme focuses on the use of assessment data in educational accountabilities and explores possibilities for increasing data literacy and opportunities for teachers, parents and other stakeholders to participate in data-driven educational governance.
- Lewis, S. Sellar, S. & Lingard, B. (2016). PISA Test for Schools: Topological rationality and new spaces of the OECD’s educational governance. Comparative Education Review, 60(1), 27-57.
- Sellar, S. (2014). A feel for numbers: Affect, data and education policy. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 131-146.
- Sellar, S. & Lingard B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New modes of global governance in education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 917-936.
- Sellar, S. & Lingard, B. (2013). Looking East: Shanghai, PISA 2009 and the reconstitution of reference societies in the global policy field. Comparative Education, 49(4), 464-485.
Nelli Piattoeva is an Associate Professor at Tampere University, Finland. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at Tampere University and a visiting scholar at Humboldt University, Berlin. Piattoeva was appointed Associate Professor of education (tenure track) in 2018 and is based at the New Social Research programme – an interdisciplinary social science research unit funded by the Academy of Finland at Tampere University. Her research agenda on the entanglements between education, societal context and governance is roughly split between three main domains. First, she examines school as an institution partaking in the governance of societies, for example, by zooming in on the role of formal education in nation-building. Second, she analyses the means of governing formal education such as the introduction of performance targets and standardized numerical assessments. Third, she is interested in the politics and practices of knowledge production on education and the linkage between these practices, governance and (geo)politics, such as the protracted impact of Cold War ideologies and stereotypes on knowledge-making. In 2014-1017, as a member of a large international research team, Piattoeva undertook a qualitative comparative study of Brazil, China, and Russia to understand how the global spread of ideas about education quality and their operationalization into various types of numerical assessments and standardized tools of evaluation have been translated in national policies of the three countries, and with what impact for regional and municipal governance of education as well as the work of teachers in schools.
Nelli’s primary geographical focus of research is Russia and the post-Soviet space. She has co-edited three journal special issues and an edited volume for Palgrave, and has published empirical and theoretical work in education, including two handbook entries. Her latest publications have appeared in the Handbook of Digital Russia (Palgrave), Journal of Education Policy, Critical Studies in Education, World Yearbook of Education 2019 (Routledge) and Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study on Brazil, China, and Russia (Routledge). The latter volume for which Nelli co-authored three chapters won the book award of the Special Interest Group in Globalization and Education of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES).
- Hartong, Sigrid & Piattoeva, Nelli (2021) Contextualizing the datafication of schooling – a comparative discussion of Germany and Russia, Critical Studies in Education, 62(2), 227-242
- Piattoeva, Nelli & Saari, Antti (2020). Rubbing against data infrastructure(s): Methodological explorations on working with(in) the impossibility of exteriority. Journal of Education Policy (online first).
- Piattoeva, Nelli & Gurova, Galina (2018) Domesticating international assessments in Russia: historical grievances, national values, scientific rationality and education modernization. In C. Alarcón & M. Lawn (Eds.) Assessment Cultures: Historical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 87-110.
- Piattoeva, Nelli, Centeno Vera. G., Suominen, Olli & Rinne, Risto (2018) Governance by data circulation? The production, availability, and use of national large-scale assessments data. In Kauko, J., Rinne R. & Takala. T (Eds.) Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study on Brazil, China, and Russia. Routledge, 115-136.
- Piattoeva, Nelli (2016) The imperative to protect data and the rise of surveillance cameras in administering national testing in Russia. European Educational Research Journal 15(1), 82-98.
Joyeeta Dey is currently enrolled as a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies. She works in the field of sociology of education with special interest in the themes of globalisation, privatisation, datafication, digitalisation and automation. She has co-published on some of these themes with Critical Studies in Education, European Education Research Journal, Discourse and Routledge. She was recently employed on a project on ‘Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous Language Education’ with University College London. Her previous experience includes working as a research associate for the University of Melbourne on a Right to Education Act funded project titled Researching Accountability in School Education (RAISE), with Deakin University on a research project on an Education-MIS in India, and with Pratichi Institute (now Amartya Sen Research Centre). She has Masters degrees in Sociology of Education (University College London) and Education Policies for Global Development (Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree).
Rizwana Shahzad
Íris Santos is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Administration and Business, at Tampere University, Finland. Her current work focuses on the international dynamics of development cooperation for education, more specifically, her project analysis the influence of Finnish education experts in international organisations. She recently (March 2022) defended her PhD dissertation titled Externalisations in the Portuguese Parliament and print media: A complexity approach to education policymaking processes, which presents an analysis of the complex dynamics emerging from the interactions between global, national, and local actors in policymaking processes in Portugal. Her research interests are diverse, focusing on education policymaking, the dynamics of global-national-local networks of actors involved in education governance and policy, global citizenship education and sustainable development from a critical post-colonialist point of view. In her research she uses complexity thinking as her onto-epistemic point of departure to aggregate diversified theories, which offer complementary angles to the analysis of the societal phenomena related with power struggles, knowledge production and expertise influence, and Politics of education.
Before she started working in academia at Tampere University, she worked for 13 years as a kindergarten teacher and a special education teacher in both, Portugal and Finland.
Santos, Í. (2022). Externalisations in the Portuguese parliament and print media: A complexity approach to education policymaking processes [doctoral dissertation]. Tampere University (open access: https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/137570/978-952-03-2326-4.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y)
Volmari, S., Kauko, J., Juho, A. & Santos, Í. (2022). Evidence and expert power in Finnish education policy making: The national core curriculum reform. In B. Karseth, K. Sivesind & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.) Evidence and Expertise in Nordic education policy: A comparative network analysis (pp. 115-148). Palgrave Macmillan (Open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91959-7)
Chanwoong, B., Tiplic, D., Santos, Í. (2022). Evidence-based policymaking in Nordic countries: Different settings, different practices? In B. Karseth, K. Sivesind & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.) Evidence and Expertise in Nordic education policy: A comparative network analysis (pp. 253-279). Palgrave Macmillan (Open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91959-7)
Santos, Í., Carvalho, L. M., Melo, B. P. (2022). The media’s role in shaping the public opinion on education: A thematic and frame analysis of externalisation to world situations in the Portuguese media. Research in Comparative & International Education, 17(1), 29–50 (open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17454999211057753)
Santos, Í. & Centeno, V. G. (2021). Inspirations from abroad: the impact of PISA on countries’ choice of reference societies in education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. (open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057925.2021.1906206?src=)
Santos, Í. (2021). Epistemic work in Portuguese parliamentary education debates: Externalisation to world situations as a source of epistemic capital. European Educational Research Journal, 21(3) 520–540 (open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474904121990474)
Santos, Í. & Kauko, J. (2020) Externalisations in the Portuguese parliament: analysing power struggles and (de-)legitimation with Multiple Streams Approach. Journal of Education policy, 37(3), 399-418. (open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680939.2020.1784465)
Kauko, J., Centeno, V. G., Piattoeva, N., Candido, H., Gurova, G., Medvedeva, A., Santos, Í., Suominen, O., & Xingguo, Z. (2018). Layers of reflectivity in comparative research. In J. Kauko, R. Rinne & T. Takala. (Eds.), Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study on Brazil, China, and Russia (pp. 18-43). Routledge. (open access: https://www.routledge.com/Politics-of-Quality-in-Education-A-Comparative-Study-of-Brazil-China/Kauko-Rinne-Takala/p/book/9781138559738)
Rinne, R., Xingguo, Z., Kauko, J., Normand, R., Medvedeva, A. & Santos, Í. (2018). Changing expertise and the state. In J. Kauko, R. Rinne & T. Takala (Eds.), Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study on Brazil, China, and Russia (pp. 91-114). Routledge. (open access: https://www.routledge.com/Politics-of-Quality-in-Education-A-Comparative-Study-of-Brazil-China/Kauko-Rinne-Takala/p/book/9781138559738)