Education, Quantification and Utopia: Numbers as Chameleons and Chimeras

Global education governance is rapidly changing.  ‘Super-wicked’ problems (Levin et al., 2012), diverse actors and overlapping agendas have led to increasing complexity and uncertainty about global responses to the multiple crises that behold education and its institutions. This keynote lecture will attempt to address this growing complexity through a focus on the politics of the knowledge that these diverse actors produce to coordinate and ignite action.

Indeed, despite the multiplicity of actors, crises and fields, global education governance over the last 30 years has known one constant: the ubiquity of statistical information in attempts to produce knowledge to steer and tame it. Comparative international assessments and other monitoring instruments have become proxies for countries’ progress, and they have become the means by which different entities – multilateral and bilateral funding organisations, non-governmental and philanthropic organisations, and the countries themselves – make priorities about investments and policy decisions both internationally and domestically.

The lecture will focus on this prominence of numbers as ‘technologies of government’ (Miller, 2001) in education governance, with the aim to explore not only their expansion into new policy spaces but also focus on the types of political effects they achieve. As numbers frame issues, link policy instruments and connect actors, quantification emerges, in fact, not only as the central venue for education ‘policy work’ (Colebatch, 2006) but also as the prime instrument for the production of utopian imaginaries of education futures to come.

About Sotiria Grek

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She has received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, as well as from the Swedish Research Council. In 2017 she was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, entitled “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO, 2017-2022). She is also the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant, which focuses on ‘Art and Policy in the Global Contemporary: Examining the Role of the Arts in the Production of Public Policy’ (POLART, 2024-2029). She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021). Her most recent books (with Justyna Bandola-Gill and Marlee Tichenor) are Governing the Sustainable Development Goals: Quantification in Global Public Policy (Springer, 2022) and The New Production of Expert Knowledge: Education, Quantification and Utopia (Palgrave, 2024).