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Project description:
There are very few human experiences that are shared by everyone on the globe, but education is affecting everyone. About 30 per cent of the world’s population are children. Children are not only the most important people for their parents, but also the future of our societies. Providing them with the best possible education is of inestimable importance. Which education is best, however, is a question that is continually being negotiated. For a long time, this question was answered primarily by national governments. For some years, however, ongoing processes of globalisation are significantly shaping education, leading to what scholars term the global turn in education. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become core actors in this global turnaround.
They are increasingly joining forces in education-related transnational networks that express an obvious claim to influence schools and education systems worldwide. Hence, questions arise about the associated risks and benefits for schools, particularly with regard to education’s role in promoting educational achievement and equal opportunity among students from different backgrounds. However, despite this increasing relevance scholars have neglected to investigate transnational networks of NGOs in the field of education.
EmergEd aims to drastically improve scientific knowledge on NGOs in education by analyzing the emergence of global non-governmental spaces in education and how they influence education systems and schools – a contribution from which a far-reaching scientific – and in the long run societal – impact is to be expected. It will do so by developing an inter-disciplinary methodology integrating (inferential) Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to contribute to further theory building. This methodology is highly innovative as it draws theories and methods from different disciplines together in novel ways and thus follows an approach at and beyond the frontiers of disciplines.
Ethics:
In line with the research ethics principles of the University of Potsdam, Emerged is scrutinized by the University’s Ethics Committee (Ethikkommission), chaired by Prof. Dr. Dr. Michael Rapp.
In addition, EmergEd follows the requirements of the European Research Council (ERC) and its research activities are overseen by an independent Ethics Advisor, Dr. Joschka Haltaufderheide:
The Ethics Advisor oversees the ethical dimension of the project and acts as an independent ethics expert, monitoring whether the ethics issues raised are satisfactorily dealt with during project implementation, and, if needed, advise the Principal Investigator and the research team on how to handle them.
The independent Advisor performs this role in accordance with the highest ethical standards and best practice as specified in the EC guidance document Ethics Advisors and Ethics Advisory Boards: Roles and Function in EU-funded Projects (EC, 2023) and related documents; including maintaining independence, integrity and confidentiality.
