The World as a Laboratory: Torsten Husén and the Rise of Transnational Research in Education 1950s–1990s

This book covers the construction of international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, and the growth of its ‘disembedded’ laboratory i.e. networks, spaces, materiality, travelling, translations. The book follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to examine the research-archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009). The archive reveals the shifting and heterogenous transnational networks that contribute to the development of social science research beyond fixed time and space dimensions, and that extends social science beyond individual ideas, researchers, environments, institutions and universities. These are practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities. In other words, the archive represents the socio-material manifestation not only of the intellectual trajectory of a key education actor but the growing organisation of a whole scientific field at the time. Prologue The Content of the Book Preface and Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Tables Chapter 1: Organising the Future of Educational Research in Post-war Europe and Beyond Networking Disembedded Governing International Actors, Networks, and the Modernisation of Education Chapter 2: Forming Transnational Networks: The Early 1950s in Europe A First Major Education Conference A Post-war Borderless Research Area in Europe The First Education Expert Conferences in the 1950s The First International Conference on Educational Research 1956 New Research Institutes and Their Networking School Evaluation 1957/1958 Husén at the End of the 1950s A New Form of Comparative Research A Transnational Connector of Research Chapter 3: Collecting International Data: Husén and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Statistics: National and International Data Introducing IEA Relocating the Headquarters Data Processing Electing a Chairman Recruiting Countries The Dream of Global Knowledge Chapter 4: The Rise of a Global Expert Network: The International Institute for Educational Planning, 1963–1973 A Brief History of the IIEP The Husén Archive on the IIEP The IIEP Governing Board Meetings: Research and Internationalisation The IIEP Internship Scheme: Educating the Educators The Epistemic Power of Socialisation Chapter 5: Education Futuramas: Torsten Husén and Futurological Thinking in Education The Politics of Prediction Torsten Husén’s ‘Future Think’: The Aspen/Berlin Seminars and The School in Question (1979) Aspen/Berlin Seminars: A Timeline Torsten Husén’s The School in Question: A Comparative Study of the School and Its Future in Western Societies (1979) Futures Thinking and Utopia as a New Mode of Political Imagination in Education Chapter 6: Editing the International Encyclopedia of Education, 1980–1994 What Constitutes an Encyclopaedia? The International Encyclopaedia of Education Takes Form Producing and Indexing the Content Deciding upon Section Editors A World of Educational Knowledge and Knowledge of the Educational World World ‘Facts’: The Country System Reports Unwrapping International Encyclopaedic Knowledge Chapter 7: Words for the World: Writing and Publishing Strategies for an International Book Market Making Use of International and International Experiences: Three Major Phases From Germany to Sweden World-wide Expert on Sweden Overview of the World Writing Practices Breaking the Language Barrier An Atlantic Crossing: Bringing the Typewriter to the US Time and Space for Writing Dissemination Finding Publishers and Making Translations Reprints and Other Ways of Spreading Publications Knowledge Strategies and Publications in Times of Change Epilogue: The Disembedded Laboratory Afterword Appendix A: Torsten Husén and His Archive as a Disembedded Laboratory A Brief Biography 1.1 The Husén Archive 1.2 Archive Studies as the Textual Ethnography of a Social Science Laboratory Appendix B Source Material Archives Unprinted Meeting Notes and Memoranda Letters Reports, Presentations, and Drafts Other Printed Bibliography Index