c:o/re Fellow 04/26 – 09/26
Radhika Gorur is Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her research spans education policy and reform; global aid and development in education; data infrastructures and data cultures; accountability and governance; large-scale comparisons; and the sociology of knowledge. She is interested in the social and political lives of data and in how policies get mobilised, stabilised, circulated and challenged. Radhika is a founding director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies, a founding member and former Convenor of the Deakin Science and Society Network, and a founding member of the international STudieS network. She has previously been Associate Editor or the Australian Educational Researcher and Editor of Discourse – Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. She is on the Editorial Advisory of Journal of Education Policy and International Journal of Inclusive Education.
From ‘evidence-based’ to ‘data-driven’? Exploring the shifting cultures of knowledge production, policymaking, and governance in education
Governments and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) such as the OECD are increasingly advocating and embracing new cultures of data and digital innovation in education policy and governance. This ‘digital turn,’ characterised by real-time data flows, predictive analytics, algorithmic modelling, dashboards and artificial intelligence (AI), is enabling new forms of ‘data-driven decision-making’ (DDDM) that appears distinct in significant ways from the ‘evidence-based policymaking’ (EBP) that has been the hallmark of neoliberal policymaking over the last four decades. Whereas EBP relied on cyclical, aggregated and retrospective forms of statistical reasoning, DDDM is oriented toward continuous, predictive, behavioural and individualised data, operating through automated, correlational and often privately managed data infrastructures.
This shift from EBP to DDDM raises profound questions regarding the epistemological and ontological politics of these new practices, because data are not merely representational tools; they make their way into administrative and policy logics, reconfiguring how education is understood, what futures become imaginable, which forms of expertise gain authority, and how policies are enacted. This project empirically explores these emerging shifts, focusing on three key IGOs: the EU, UNESCO and the OECD. Drawing on STS, critical data studies and the sociology of measurement, it seeks to generate critical insights into the emerging data-policy-technology cultures and how they are redefining the purposes, priorities and values of education. The EU, OCED and UNESCO are uniquely suited to this study as they explicitly advocate the shift to DDDM and to influence education policymaking globally.
Publications (selection)
Gorur, R. (with Landri, P., & Normand, R.). (2023). Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education: Reflexive Dialogue and Prospective Inquiry (1st ed). Taylor & Francis Group.
Gorur, R., & Dey, J. (2021). Making the user friendly: The ontological politics of digital data platforms. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1727544
Gorur, R., & Arnold, B. (2021). Governing by Dashboard. In C. Wyatt-Smith, B. Lingard, & E. Heck, Digital Disruption In Teaching And Testing (1st ed., pp. 166–181). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003045793-10
Addey, C., & Gorur, R. (2020). Translating PISA, translating the world. Comparative Education, 56(4), 547–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2020.1771873
Gorur, R. (2018). Escaping numbers? Intimate accounting, informed publics and productions of authority and non-authority. 31(4).