DATE CHANGE: Monday, February 15 @ 4pm
Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and the School of Education’s Global Education Committee and Global Engagement Office. Introduced and organized by Thomas Popkewitz, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction as part of the Center for European Studies Spring 2021 Virtual Lecture Series and as part of the Internationalizing Educational Knowledge Virtual Public Lecture Series.
To register, contact Chris Kruger: kruger@education.wisc.edu.
In Education We Trust: On Handling the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Swedish Welfare State
Abstract: In this talk, we describe and analyze the actions and reactions in Sweden to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus is on education as a part of the welfare state and its state apparatuses in interaction with other agents. We ask how the education apparatus has responded to the COVID-19 crisis and why it has responded in such a way. We have neither the goal to assess this topic in terms of success or failure nor to defend the way the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled in Sweden. We are instead interested in analyzing the responses to the crisis in order to understand why they were carried out under the preconditions that were at hand, assuming that agents in other contexts also did the best they could but perhaps differently. The basic idea is that the COVID-19 pandemic hit Swedish society, turning it out of normalcy, and, by this action, made the practices and agendas for agents, institutions, and their interactions visible for analysis.
Sverker Lindblad is Professor in the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research crosses the fields of curriculum theory, education policy, and professionalization. He was the President of European Educational Research Association (EERA) and is the current President of the Swedish Educational Research Association (SWERA).