Global Histories of Education

This book documents an informal system of education that emerged in Ireland between the late 1750s and the end of the century, a system that operated largely without funding or direction by church or state. In a society as divided as eighteenth-century Ireland, it is remarkable that such a system could succeed, paving the way for the more formal reforms of Irish education that followed in the nineteenth century. Based on detailed evidence from newspaper advertisements, directories, educational prospectuses, textbooks, and other print documents from the period as well as previously unexamined manuscript resources, the author describes this system and how it functioned, emphasizing the transnational dimensions of print culture, English literature, and education reform.

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.