Network Representatives:
The Education, Knowledge Production, and Science Studies Network focuses on scholarship in education and knowledge production, broadly construed. Education, we see it, includes education in institutions as well as education in non-formal settings, education as process, and education as a social, political, policy-related, cultural, intellectual, and economic activity. Knowledge Production includes a broad range of activities, processes, and institutions related to the creation, organization, and transmission of knowledge. Science Studies encompass the interactions among science, culture, and society, particularly with respect to the production and transmission of knowledge. For this reason, scholarship concerning education and knowledge production appears in almost all of the Social Science History Association networks, much as it emerges from a variety of areas of academic scholarship. And scholarship in sciences studies ranges from the history of science and medicine to the relationship between science and media, sociology of science, and philosophies of knowledge. Although our primary focus continues to be on education, we believe that understanding education also requires understanding knowledge production and the connections between kinds of knowledge production and their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
If you look at the SSHA 2009 program and programs from earlier years, you will find a full range of scholarship in education and scholars from multiple and diverse disciplines, including history, sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, communications studies, gender studies, working on education-, knowledge production-, and science studies-related problems.
In keeping with the theme of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago, November 18-20, 2010, we invite proposals in all of the above areas. Submission deadline: February 15, 2010. We especially welcome proposals for papers incorporating the focus of the meeting: Power and Politics, broadly defined.
At the last meeting we discussed a range of possible paper and session topics, including:
-Power, politics, and educational reform under the new federal administration
-Education politics and policy, both local and national
-Education research and the "new" politics
-Chicago as a catalyst for change and reform
-The History of the Book: A Critical Assessment (re: the politics of knowledge)
-The Teaching American History Project: An Assessment (power, politics, traditional history, and funding are all relevant here)
-The Chicago Teen Project
-Play as an aspect of education (power could be a theme here)
--education as normalization (discipline, punishment, control)
We welcome proposals for papers and presentations in a variety of formats:
- Paper sessions: chair, three or four papers, and one or two discussants
- Roundtable discussions: chair and three to five discussants
- Book sessions: chair, book author, and three discussants
