Keynote speakers
ECER 2010 will welcome four keynote speakers: Floya Anthias, Fazal Rizvi, Lisbeth Lundahl and Marie Verhoeven. Keynote addresses will be given on 25 August and 27 August.
Floya Anthias
Floya Anthias is Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Roehampton University, London.
Her primary research interests are in the areas of social divisions and identities and her life long work has been devoted to trying to understand and theorise these in terms of social boundaries and hierarchies. This has also entailed a concern with social exclusion and inequality and migration, ethnicity, gender and multiculturalism. Her main academic writings reflect these interests. These have been devoted to exploring the connections between different forms of social hierarchy and inequality with a particular concern with the links between gender, race and class (often referred to as intersectionality) as forms of social identity and difference and forms of social stratification. In addition, issues of migration, particularly as they linked to labour market disadvantages and class position have been central to her work.
Her work has also been characterised by an interest in the Southern Mediterranean and she has undertaken a range of research on Cyprus and Cypriot migration and settlement. Recent articles have engaged with narratives of identity, the integration practices of women migrants and with ethnic ties and social capital.
Her books include Woman, Nation, State (co-edited with Nira Yuval Davis, Macmillan, 1989), Racialised Boundaries: race, nation, colour, class and the anti racist struggle (co-authored with Nira Yuval Davis, Routledge 1993), Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Migration: Greek Cypriots in Britain (Avebury Press, 1992), Thinking about the Social and Thinking about Social Divisions (edited, Greenwich University Press 1997), Into the Margins: Migration and Exclusion in Southern Europe, (co-edited, Ashgate 1999), Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: women on the move, (co-edited, Berg, 2000) and Rethinking Antiracism: fromTheory to Practice (co-edited, Routledge 2002).
Fazal Rizvi
Fazal Rizvi is Professor at the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US. He has worked in a number of countries, and has held several key university research and administrative posts in Melbourne, Australia. In 1996, he was the President of Australian Association of Research in Education. From 2006-2008, he was the international expert for education on UK’s Research Assessment Exercise 2008.
He trained as a philosopher of education at Kings College University of London, and his research interests, related to the ECER 2010 theme, include: globalization and education policy, postcolonial theories of education, and issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts. He has recently published a book, ‘Globalizing Education Policy (Routledge 2009), and several papers including, ‘Cosmopolitan Learning', ‘Imagination and the Globalization of Educational Policy Research’ and ‘Representations of Islam and Education for Justice’. At the University of Illinois he directs its program in Global Studies in Education.
At the ECER 2010 conference in Helsinki, he will discuss issues of diversity in education, and how the various transnational processes require them to be conceptualized in radically new ways.
The title of his talk will be: ‘Re-thinking Issues of Diversity within the Context of an Emergent Transnationalism’
Lisbeth Lundahl
Lisbeth Lundahl is Professor at the department of Child and Youth Education, Special Education and Counselling at Umeå University. She was the Secretary General of EERA in 2005-2008, and she is an active member in Network 23 on Policy Studies and Politics of Education.
In the last decade her research has focused on new forms of education governance introduced in contemporary Sweden - in particular decentralisation, deregulation and the introduction of a market ideology - in particular against a European context. Local youth policies, new patterns of school-to-work transitions and life-careers are other, closely related research fields. She is also part of the Swedish team in EERQI, a large FP 7 project, aiming at the development of new quality indicators in European educational research. She has participated in comparative research projects in Nordic and European level, she is active in several research networks and has published widely.
Lundahl’s contribution to the theme of the conference will be in contextualising the themes of cultural change in local educational contexts into European educational politics and policies.
Homepage: www.busv.umu.se/personal/lisbeth_lundahl_eng.html
Marie Verhoeven
Marie Verhoeven is Professor in Sociology, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, and senior researcher at GIRSEF (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Socialisation, Education and Training), University of Louvain, Belgium.
Throughout the last decade, her central research activity has focused on the understanding of cultural and normative changes within the educational field in post-industrial societies. Her PhD was devoted to the analysis of new modes of building norms and school order within contrasted schools.
She then turned to the global issue of cultural diversity in education, through a threefold question:
- How do different educational systems respond to ethno-cultural diversity introduced by the presence of pupils from migrant backgrounds, in terms of integration philosophies as well as in terms of policies?
- How do single schools deal with socio-cultural and ‘ethnic’ diversity (through their curricular policy, through the way they negotiate collective order, through their use or their denial of ethnic or cultural categories within the school space, etc.)?
- The analysis of the connection between school careers and identity building process of adolescents from migrant backgrounds (beyond the classical opposition between “ethnicisation” and “assimilation” strategies).
In recent years, she has also examined how recent equal opportunity policies in Belgium and in Europe are underpinned by new conceptions of justice and new globalized normative discourses. With colleagues Dupriez & Orianne, she has been trying to examine how Sen’s capability approach can be used as a theoretical and normative framework in order to enlarge the criteria of a “fair” educational system.
At the ECER 2010 conference, she will analyse how cultural domination through schooling process has to be rethought, in a context which combines cultural and normative pluralism, globalized international policies and normative discourses, and “post-massification” equality of opportunity policies (often articulated with educational “quasi-market” mechanisms). The consequences of this new context on pupils’ identities and equal opportunity perception will possibly be also examined.
