ONLINE: Following European Experts as an Embedded Researcher: Multiple Commitments, Contingencies, and Asymmetries Shaping the Academic Self

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Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and the School of Education’s Global Education Committee and Global Engagement Office. Introduced and organized by Thomas Popkewitz, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction.

Abstract: Inspired by studies in the Sociology of Science and Technologies, this chapter aims to describe my experience as an embedded researcher in different European expert networks and programs in education. It focuses on the practical dimensions of expertise, in the appropriation of some categories and modes of reasoning, but also on some required social skills to be include and recognized in an epistemic community with its norms and expectations. It also highlights the framing of social encounters and negotiations, in procedures, devices, and a division of labour that control the production of knowledge as “deliverology” before it is publicised. The expert’s multiple commitments correspond also to different ways of legitimizing expertise in a collective enterprise and a translation process that disseminates knowledge well beyond its original production space. This politicization and politicking are sequential steps to export expertise into a visible, readable, and accessible policy agenda and discourse of truth for lay people and the public

Romuald Normand is Professor of Sociology at the  University of Strasbourg, France. He is Fulbright fellow and convener of the network “Sociologies of European Education” (ECER) as well as a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. His research interests are on European education, Leadership and Management, Higher Education policies. He is currently involved in European ERASMUS , ANR and Marie-Curie projects on Higher Education.