Professor Sotiria Grek

Sabbatical Fellow
Prof. Sotiria Grek

Professor Sotiria Grek

Sabbatical Fellow, January - April 2023

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO). She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021). Her most recent book (with Justyna Bandola-Gill and Marlee Tichenor) is Governing the Sustainable Development Goals: Quantification in Global Public Policy (Springer, 2022).

Project Title: The New Production of Governing Knowledge: Global Public Policy and the Quest for Data-driven Governance

During her time in IASH, Sotiria will be focusing on her book manuscript ‘The New Production of Governing Knowledge: Global Public Policy and the Quest for Data-driven Governance’, based on the findings of the European Research Council funded project ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (METRO, 2017-2022).

The quantification of global governance has led to new relationships, new interdependencies and new practices that require an innovative analytical lens. This monograph will explore the increasing complexity of the production of numbers for policy by offering a theorisation of these processes in terms of exploring the production of new governing knowledge, or, what will be termed as ‘Mode 3’. This new concept builds on the evolution of policy knowledge production from ‘Mode 1’ to ‘Mode 2’: both of these concepts originated in STS literature and denoted the move away from disciplinary to interdisciplinary knowledge and the shift from academic to knowledge produced at dispersed sites and by a variety of actors. ‘Mode 3’ knowledge represents the further development of shifts in knowledge production: taking into account current historical and political phenomena, as well as new discourses, agendas and actors, the book will describe and explain the ways that knowledge is produced in the current context of the transnational governance of education, global poverty and sustainability.

As such, the goal of this book is two-fold: i) to propose a theorisation of Mode 3 as a new ‘epistemic infrastructure’; and ii) based on the METRO case study findings, to offer a rich empirical exploration of the ways in which these infrastructures shape global public policy and governance. In the introduction to the book, the importance of examining forms of expertise, bureaucratic management, practices and materialities that constitute the epistemic infrastructures of global governance will be highlighted. By mobilising the notion of Mode 3 as an ‘epistemic infrastructure’, the book will present critical analyses of the effects of practices, institutions, relations, material artefacts and debates that produce and constitute the transnational policy field– a field that is simultaneously global and local.