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Introduction
Radhika Gorur currently works at the School of Education, Deakin University. Radhika's research examines how the world is translated into numbers, and how quantification transforms the world, with an empirical focus on education sites. Her current projects are 'Global Policy Networks and Accountability in Education in the Indo-Pacific', and 'The Techniques and Politics of Standardisation and Contextualisation: PISA for Development.'
Current institution
Additional affiliations
February 2012 - February 2015
March 2011 - February 2012
Publications
Publications (86)
PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its ‘policy lessons’ are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that ‘seeing like PISA’ is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characteriz...
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes...
Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of co...
The declaration of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 brought together 193 nations to commit to a common set of 17 critical, highly ambitious global goals. This paper analyses how the Technical Cooperation Group of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) develops consensus on measuring and monitoring SDG4. We empirically exam...
CfP for a special issue in Educational Philosophy and Theory
Abstract deadline
1 November 2023
Manuscript deadline
1 April 2024
Contemporary geopolitics point to a posthuman society in which power is mobilized and circulated in novel ways. Two key developments characterize the posthuman society—technologies and their widespread influence on our lives as individuals and societies, and the imminent existential threat posed by climate change in the Anthropocene. This article e...
PISA in India
Drawing on a post-foundational approach to Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal work on assemblage theory, this book explores the scholarly field of comparative and international education (CIE). Written by a diverse collection of international scholars from Australia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, the c...
In the context of rising fundamentalism, urgent threats to the environment, and the persistence of poverty and deep inequities in the world, 193 nations have pledged to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crafted by UNESCO in 2015. Education is seen as key to attaining all the other SDGs. Within the ‘education goal’ (Goal #4), the...
In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifi...
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...
The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance t...
In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India’s experience with the Right to Education Act to consider t...
Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified Dist...
While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy schol...
Despite mixed results in research on student learning from drawing in science, there is growing interest in the potential for this visual mode, in tandem with other modes, to enact and enable student reasoning in this subject. Building on current research in this field, and using a micro‐ethnographic approach informed by socio‐semiotic perspectives...
International large-scale comparisons struggle with the difficulty of maintaining standardisation in order to facilitate comparison, and at the same time being relevant and meaningful locally across diverse contexts. This study inquires into the practices involved in accomplishing these apparently contradictory tasks through an empirical case study...
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and instit...
Digital methodologies, new forms of data visualization and computer- based
learning and assessment are creating new challenges as well as opportunities for
scholars in educational research. The World Yearbook of Education 2019 explores
this highly relevant topic, opening a new discussion about the various conceptual
and methodological challenges an...
Recent decades have seen a significant rise in the use of numeric evidence in education policy and governance. Using the case of the Education Revolution in Australia, this paper explores the processes by which both 'distant accounting' and 'intimate accounting' were made possible by new national assessments and a public website which published com...
Numbers have long been associated with statecraft. In bureaucratic processes of accounting, regulation was effected by forming centres of calculation. This paper suggests that contemporary post-bureaucratic regimes are evolving new forms of accounting, in which the centre inserts itself into individual sites to exercise authority. This ‘intimate ac...
This chapter follows the development of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), from the early desire for comparative information on school systems in the 1930s, through the many attempts at creating international comparative statistical tables, to the creation and adoption of ISCED by UNESCO in 1978 and its subsequent estab...
International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke
passionate arguments at special...
The heavy hammer methods of OECD and PISA in influencing policy through the rankings and through its policy advice are well documented. This speculative paper explores the more subtle and perhaps deeper implications of the development of the PISA database, and of the secondary analysis that is performed using this database. Speculating with concept...
Podcast - Radhika Gorur in a FreshEd conversation with Will Brehm on 'Seeing like PISA'
http://www.freshedpodcast.com/radhikagorur/
ILSAs epitomise the more general phenomenon of the proliferation of international standardisation, quantification and comparison in social policy, which is arguably one of the most significant social, cultural and political phenomena of our times. At stake are epistemological concerns about methodologies and the accuracy and validity of data; polit...
https://theconversation.com/policymakers-should-use-caution-when-drawing-lessons-from-oecds-education-report-51201
From the moment Australia’s newly elected Labor government announced in 2008 its intention to introduce a national assessment scheme for Australian schools, and to publish the results of these assessments on a public website, it courted controversy. The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the MySchool website were intro...
In this chapter, we discuss some of the ways in which Indian policy authorities have at last begun to address the multiple challenges faced by the Indian system of higher education. They have instituted a range of reforms in an attempt to meet the growing demands of students for higher education and promote greater equality of educational access an...
The term ‘vulnerable’ is now very widely used to describe individuals and groups in a range of academic disciplines and policy fields, such as economics, disaster management, health, education, social welfare, justice and environmental science (Alwang, Siegel, & Jørgensen, 2001).
Young people who are considered ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’ are a particular target of various policies, schemes and interventions. But what does vulnerability mean? Interrogating Conceptions of “Vulnerable Youth” explores this question in relation to various policy fields that are relevant to young people, as well for how this plays out in practice...
Australia has declared its ambition to be within the ‘top five’ in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the Australian Education Act, 2013. Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a c...
Education policies around the world are responding to increased perceptions of risk by attempting to reduce uncertainty. They are attempting to gain clear information and identify ‘guaranteed’ solutions by finding out ‘what works’ to develop policy accordingly. They are setting up clear measures of accountability and transparency. In order to under...
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, tr...
This paper engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue of Discourse (Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the atten...
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the base...
In contemporary education policy, simplified technical accounts of policy problems and solutions are being produced with the use of numeric calculations. These calculations are seen as clear and unbiased, capable of revealing “what works” and identifying “best practices.” In this piece, the authors use resources from the material-semiotic approach...
This report presents the findings and recommendations arising from a study of the challenges and
opportunities for successful and sustained scientific research collaboration between India and Australia.
The study was initiated and funded by the Australia India Education Council and was steered by the
Working Group focused on Research, headed by Pro...
The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of ma...
Review essay of Standards: recipes for reality, by Lawrence Busch, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-262-01638-4; The gold standard: the challenge of evidence-based medicine and standardization in health care, by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-1-59213-188-4;Standards and th...
In this article, the author tells the story of her search for appropriate tools to conceptualise policy work. She had set out to explore the relationship between the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Australia's education policy, but early interview data fo...
Evidence based policy making (EBP) has become the dominant practice in education policy globally. How do certain policy ideas and practices become pervasive? How is knowledge produced, validated and rendered authoritative? What are the institutional practices and routines through which ‘policy doings’ occur? How do policy actors gain the capacity t...
Evidence based policy making (EBP) has become the dominant practice in education policy globally. How do certain policy ideas and practices become pervasive? How is knowledge produced, validated and rendered authoritative? What are the institutional practices and routines through which ‘policy doings’ occur? How do policy actors gain the capacity t...
In this chapter we discuss the importance of ‘internationalising’ the experience of education research students. First, we look at some features of the increasingly globalised landscape of education and education research and consider three main reasons for urging students to join international networks during their period of study. We then take tw...
The 2006 round of the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), included 57 countries -nearly 90 per cent of the world's economy. How has PISA managed to gain such reach? How has it made itself relevant to such a large and diverse set of nations? The growing populari...
