Jenny Ozga
Jenny Ozga is Professor of the Sociology of Education at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in Autumn 2010, she was Professor of Educational Research and Director of the Centre for Educational Sociology (CES) at the University of Edinburgh, Professor of Education Policy and Dean of Social Sciences at Keele University, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Bristol Polytechnic/University of the West of England, and she has previously worked for many years for the Open University.
Jenny Ozga is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, and has been a visiting Professor at the University of Umeå, Sweden, a visiting scholar at Helsinki University, Finland and holds an honorary doctorate from Turku University, Finland. She is a member of ESRC’s peer review college.
Professor Ozga’s main research areas are education policy in international comparative contexts, with a focus on governance. Research topics include education and social policy; policy elites and policy communities, policy networks and policy for the teaching profession, within and across the UK and increasingly in the context of Europeanisation of education. Research also includes work on teachers’ work as a labour process, and in schooling and social capital and gender and educational management. The focus on governance is developing through work on the resources that are mobilized by new governance forms and policy technologies, for example data, knowledge and networks of social relations/social capital.
During her visit, Professor Ozga will speak at the Strasbourg Summer School in Sociologies of Education and Higher Education (see brochure), and she will give a public lecture on Monday 21 September at 18:00 at the European Doctoral College (see below). She will be hosted by the research lab SAGE. For more information please contact professor Romuald Normand or professor Niilo Kauppi (USIAS Fellow 2014).
Lecture: Governing Education: the rise of data
September 21, 2015 | 18:00
Jenny Ozga, Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Oxford
Salle de Conférence, MISHA
5, allée du Général Rouvillois, Strasbourg
Data have become the lifeblood of education governance. At the international level, organisations like the OECD steer education systems through their programmes of assessment and the European Commission’s project of creating the most successful knowledge economy in the world is driven by data collection, analysis and comparison. At the national level, policy-makers increasingly depend on data to show them where they are positioned, in relation to their competitors, and draw on data to justify policy directions. Within systems, schools and teachers have become proficient in data use, and interpret their priorities with reference to data.
In this lecture, Professor Jenny Ozga will consider the processes surrounding the encoding of evidence in interaction between performance data and other (embodied, enacted) sources of professional judgement and to highlight the role and influence of commercial companies in data provision in governing education. In exploring these issues, the concern is with the interaction between people (e.g. inspectors, school headteachers) and data in the forming of judgements. Among other things, this leads to changes in the authority claims of personnel, who traditionally operated through elite social networks and knowledges, and it leads to the rise of data, especially in their new interactive forms. Professor Ozga will illustrate how the demands and logics of data production and use influence the performance of authority in education.
Poster
Lecture slides
Programme
18:00 Introduction, by Romuald Normand (SAGE) and Rifka Weehuizen (USIAS), University of Strasbourg
18:15 Lecture Governing Education: the rise of data, by Jenny Ozga University of Oxford
19:00 Questions and discussion, with Jay Rowell, SAGE, University of Strasbourg
19:15 Drinks
For more information, please contact professor Romuald Normand.
Organised together with SAGE
