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Culture in talk: neoliberalism, welfare and school education in Sweden, the UK and Russia

Project description

Uncovering the role of grassroots resistance in public policymaking

When it comes to the study of neoliberal expansion in education, many studies focus on perspectives deriving from official policy narratives and numbers. Moving away from this, the EU-funded Cultureintalk project will investigate neoliberal education reforms in Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom using a bottom-up approach by examining the grassroots voices in society. The project's work will bring together cultural sociology, public policy and comparative education and redefine the relationship between culture and policy as a continuous feedback loop whereby grassroots policy interpretations make their way to policy discourse. The work of the project will pave the way for more effective dialogue between grassroots and nation-level educational actors.

Objective

The study is the first to apply a cultural prism to comparatively examine the diverse and contradictory enactments of neoliberal education reforms in three welfare states - Sweden, the UK and Russia. In contrast to other studies that examine neoliberal expansion in education from the perspective of official policy narratives and numbers this study embraces a bottom-up approach by studying grassroots societal voices. Building bridges between cultural sociology, public policy and comparative education, the study will help redefine the relationship between culture and policy as a continuous feedback loop that enables grassroots policy interpretations to trickle up to policy discourse and inform policy action.

Empirically, the study will map contemporary meanings of education in the three case countries, highlight ongoing sources of tension between neoliberal and welfare educational values, and unpack similar and divergent cultural logics of resistance. Theoretically, the study will enrich our understanding of the widely recognised but under-explored cultural dimension of policy. The study will contribute to enabling more effective dialogue between grassroots and nation-level education actors by advancing the view of social policy as co-produced and co-owned by grassroots actors.

This ambitious multi-language project will bring the researcher to the forefront of the global conversation about the role of grassroots resistance in public policy-making. It will solidify the researcher’s transnational expertise that spans Russia, the UK, the US, Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and catalyse her independence in comparative public policy research. It will also sharpen her unique methodological expertise in the interrogation of social meanings through computational and digital research. Finally, it will enhance the researcher’s profile and visibility in international policy consultancy, with a view to her going on to lead her own consulting practice.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Coordinator

KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
Net EU contribution
€ 224 933,76
Address
STRAND
WC2R 2LS London
United Kingdom

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Region
London Inner London — West Westminster
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 224 933,76