Historical Sociologies of Knowledge, Science, and Modernity, Volume 1

This edited collection offers an exploration and critical reassessment of the sciences in educational research, foregrounding its agential and material qualities rather than treating it as a neutral instrument of knowledge. Addressing the enduring allure of research as expertise and of science as an elixir for enabling the good life, it examines a distinctive form of activism within modernity and challenges the ahistorical assumptions that often frame the practices of the human sciences.

The book comprises original historical and sociological studies by international scholars who examine the infrastructures of ideas, theories, methods, and technologies through which scientific knowledge is produced. Across a wide range of educational contexts, the authors interrogate how science operates performatively, shaping norms, subjectivities, and modes of governance. Part of a two-volume series, Volume One, Infrastructures, Differences and Space of Action in Education explores how science produces new phenomena as comparative logics in kinds of people.

It will appeal to scholars and researchers across interdisciplinary fields including sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, historical sociology, political philosophy, educational policy, comparative and international education, and transnational studies.

Thomas S. Popkewitz is Professor at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His research concerns the political and cultural politics of education knowledge, viewing schooling and research as practices that create kinds of people and that distribute differences.

Elin Sundström Sjödin is a senior lecturer in Swedish at Mälardalen University, Sweden. In her research, she examines the constructions of reading as a public and educational problem within research, public discourse, policy, and educational practice and the inclusions and exclusions they enact.

Ji Hyun Hwang is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA. Her research concerns the production of difference and diversity in curriculum, educational knowledge, and schooling, with particular attention to multicultural education, visual culture, and racialization.

Chushan Wu is a researcher and writer based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a particular focus on “post-” theories, affect theory, and visual culture studies. Her works critically reexamine the systems of knowledge and reasoning in education through which difference and exclusion are produced.