Nelli Piattoeva holds a doctoral degree in education sciences from the University of Tampere, Finland. Having just finished a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Social Research (University of Tampere), she now works as a university lecturer in education sciences at the School of Education, University of Tampere. Her research has previously focused on citizenship education policies in Russia, Finland and a number of large international organizations, and has recently shifted to performance measurement and the politics of educational evaluation in various national and supranational contexts. She has published articles in Comparative Education, Journal of Curriculum Studies, International Journal of Educational Development and Journal of Education Policy. In 2014-2017, her research work will contribute to the Academy of Finland funded research project “Transnational Dynamics in Quality Assurance and Evaluation Politics of Basic Education in Brazil, China and Russia (BCR)”.
The article describes and critically analyzes how Russian education researchers approached the to... more The article describes and critically analyzes how Russian education researchers approached the topic of quality evaluation in education between 1990 and 2014. Evaluation and quality have grown into major policy issues in education across the world, simultaneously acting as powerful steering mechanisms on national and transnational levels. Russia is no exception to this global phenomenon, but little is known about how Russian education researchers discuss the topic in national academic journals. This article discusses four major periods, each characterized by a shift in the focus of discussion and/or the introduction of a completely new agenda. These periods capture the dominant themes, titled “effective management and customization of education,” “the rise of broad-scale assessments,” “systemic approach to quality evaluation,” and “toward a more nuanced usage of evaluation data.” We interpret the findings within two intertwined conceptual frameworks: governance at a distance and New Public Management. How these frames help us understand the academic discussion on quality evaluation in Russian school education is also discussed.
This article discusses the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of education policy in ... more This article discusses the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of education policy in the context of the Russian Federation. It taps into the policies and practices invented as a result of rising audit cultures and the scientisation and datafication of education governance. These processes turn sites of public examinations into sites of numerical data production on education, and make school systems accountable to data production. The article draws on the notions of power and the non-human object, as developed by Actor-Network-Theory scholars, in order to make sense of the recent introduction of obligatory video surveillance equipment during public examinations. The article argues that demands for accountability and data objectivity have led to a complex surveillance regime – a surveillance assemblage – that leads to intensifying observation through various technical means and new data, i.e. data on data production. Video surveillance is called upon to act as a mediator that translates and holds parts of the fragile assessment-network together by coercing each participant into the role of docile data producer. The introduction of video surveillance manifests and endorses a deep mistrust of the human being, translates data objectivity into a procedural matter and opens up new business opportunities for commercial surveillance and security sectors.
Globalisation, Societies and Education, Nov 20, 2014
This article analyses the role of Russia in development assistance to education in light of the c... more This article analyses the role of Russia in development assistance to education in light of the changing architecture of development assistance – the variety of positions identified with both ‘new’ and ‘old’ donor countries. We shed light on Russia's aims and agenda in the field of development assistance in general and specifically within the Russia Education Aid for Development programme, initiated in 2008 by agreement between the World Bank and the Russian Federation. Our analysis is based on existing research, policy documents on development assistance and READ documents, as well as interview data with relevant experts and staff. It yields a distinction between four different roles played by Russia as a donor.
Shaping of European Education Interdisciplinary Approaches
This paper questions the capacity of the resource conception of power, commonly utilised in the s... more This paper questions the capacity of the resource conception of power, commonly utilised in the studies of transnational governance and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), to explore the mundane means through which IGOs construct and exercise power in national settings. It then introduces the relational approach to power and emphasises that IGOs are dependent on the consent of national actors, making the relationship between IGOs and states, and the mechanisms that construct this relationship, a focal object of study. The chapter applies the sociology of translation methodology to an OECD country report on Russian education in order to illustrate how this central player has attempted to translate the interests and identities of national actors, and the meaning of the educational reform, in order to build itself as an authority.
This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced... more This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced by national examinations in the practices of control and steering. It examines how data generated in the compulsory school graduation examination in the Russian Federation connect together different actors within the education system and beyond, and the nature of the relationships so formed. These questions take as their unit of analysis the relations and relationships created and/or re-ordered through numbers, and they unmask who utilizes the numerical data, and for what purpose. The article brings together two major arguments in the existing literature on quantification, and develops them further into a coherent research framework which is then applied to capture and interpret the circulation and application of the examinations data. The first argument suggests that governance by numbers, characteristic of contemporary regulation practices, relies on and promotes the parallel existence of soft and hard regimes of regulation. The second addresses the increasingly public nature of social statistics, that is, its circulation on both official and popular levels. The article illustrates that it is by means of analysing the overlappings and interdependencies between the soft and hard regimes, and the two levels of data entry, that we can best understand how numbers exercise power and how they become rooted and gain more power in the process.
H.B. Holmarsdottir & M. O’Dowd (Eds.) Nordic Voices. Teaching and Researching Comparative and International Education in the Nordic Countries. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 59-74
... Party EI Education Index EMI English-Medium Instruction EPA Economics and Public ... and Huma... more ... Party EI Education Index EMI English-Medium Instruction EPA Economics and Public ... and Humanities Education ROC Republic of China TIMSS Third International Mathematics and Science ... authors from these different societies to consider two fundamental questions in this ...
This article explores the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) as a governance technique in education... more This article explores the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) as a governance technique in education policies. The exam constitutes one of the most recent and significant reforms in the Russian education system. It combines into a single procedure high school graduation examination with entrance exams to tertiary education. Within the Foucault-inspired governmentality framework, the article tackles two questions. First, how does the USE function as a governance technique that regulates and makes policies at a distance? Second, what changes in the subjectivities does the exam seek to accomplish? These questions are explored in the context of the neoliberal turn, which has introduced the notions of accountability, market and customership into public policies and education. The article argues that the USE is much more than a mere pedagogical practice that measures learning achievements. It has turned into a flexible and widely utilised governance technique that seeks to restructure state-societal relations and mould subjectivities. It exposes a new approach to governing which, through the initiation of standards and performance steering, strengthens the control of the state over the education system and beyond.
Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Free download here: http://www.tandfonli... more Introduction to the special issue in European Education
This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and abo... more This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the " emancipatory project " of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of " different worlds, " thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
This presentation explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in an... more This presentation explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the “emancipatory project” of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of “different worlds,” thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
This paper was presented at a CIES 2017 Presidential Highlighted Session titled "Contesting coloniality: Re-thinking knowledge production and circulation in the field of Comparative and International Education." The session was moderated by Keita Takayama (University of New England, Australia) and is based off papers that will be included in the special number of Comparative Education Review (slated for publication in May 2017). It aims to initiate dialogue about the active colonial legacies within the field of Comparative and International Education, and to show ways of working beyond them.
The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an e... more The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an embodiment of a new social order. However, living socialism often meant something quite different compared to its official interpretations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We discuss the importance of exploring personal memories to gain a more complex understanding of childhood and the (post)socialist lived experience. Following the critique of the dominant narratives about childhood, we invite an epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking of assumptions about how we approach research. We highlight the diversity of the region’s histories, individual lived experiences, and the multiple ways of being a (post)socialist child. We close with an overview of the book and afterwords that connect the contributions to different disciplinary fields.
This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolo... more This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolonizing knowledge production in and about (post)socialist societies. We develop three decolonial strategies to disrupt and complicate accounts of childhood, schooling, and subjectivities framed by and embedded in the epistemologies of modernity, socialist ideologies, and post-socialist “Westernization” projects. First, we highlight how memories of children’s lived experiences—situated in local and personal histories—enable us to multiply cultural imaginaries about childhood. Second, we trace relationalities between seemingly disparate spaces and times of childhoods, disrupting the linearity and singularity of time/space. Finally, we discuss how coloniality of knowledge and being affects the various subjectivities we present about ourselves as children and researchers, and how memory research (re)shapes us in return.
The article describes and critically analyzes how Russian education researchers approached the to... more The article describes and critically analyzes how Russian education researchers approached the topic of quality evaluation in education between 1990 and 2014. Evaluation and quality have grown into major policy issues in education across the world, simultaneously acting as powerful steering mechanisms on national and transnational levels. Russia is no exception to this global phenomenon, but little is known about how Russian education researchers discuss the topic in national academic journals. This article discusses four major periods, each characterized by a shift in the focus of discussion and/or the introduction of a completely new agenda. These periods capture the dominant themes, titled “effective management and customization of education,” “the rise of broad-scale assessments,” “systemic approach to quality evaluation,” and “toward a more nuanced usage of evaluation data.” We interpret the findings within two intertwined conceptual frameworks: governance at a distance and New Public Management. How these frames help us understand the academic discussion on quality evaluation in Russian school education is also discussed.
This article discusses the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of education policy in ... more This article discusses the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of education policy in the context of the Russian Federation. It taps into the policies and practices invented as a result of rising audit cultures and the scientisation and datafication of education governance. These processes turn sites of public examinations into sites of numerical data production on education, and make school systems accountable to data production. The article draws on the notions of power and the non-human object, as developed by Actor-Network-Theory scholars, in order to make sense of the recent introduction of obligatory video surveillance equipment during public examinations. The article argues that demands for accountability and data objectivity have led to a complex surveillance regime – a surveillance assemblage – that leads to intensifying observation through various technical means and new data, i.e. data on data production. Video surveillance is called upon to act as a mediator that translates and holds parts of the fragile assessment-network together by coercing each participant into the role of docile data producer. The introduction of video surveillance manifests and endorses a deep mistrust of the human being, translates data objectivity into a procedural matter and opens up new business opportunities for commercial surveillance and security sectors.
Globalisation, Societies and Education, Nov 20, 2014
This article analyses the role of Russia in development assistance to education in light of the c... more This article analyses the role of Russia in development assistance to education in light of the changing architecture of development assistance – the variety of positions identified with both ‘new’ and ‘old’ donor countries. We shed light on Russia's aims and agenda in the field of development assistance in general and specifically within the Russia Education Aid for Development programme, initiated in 2008 by agreement between the World Bank and the Russian Federation. Our analysis is based on existing research, policy documents on development assistance and READ documents, as well as interview data with relevant experts and staff. It yields a distinction between four different roles played by Russia as a donor.
Shaping of European Education Interdisciplinary Approaches
This paper questions the capacity of the resource conception of power, commonly utilised in the s... more This paper questions the capacity of the resource conception of power, commonly utilised in the studies of transnational governance and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), to explore the mundane means through which IGOs construct and exercise power in national settings. It then introduces the relational approach to power and emphasises that IGOs are dependent on the consent of national actors, making the relationship between IGOs and states, and the mechanisms that construct this relationship, a focal object of study. The chapter applies the sociology of translation methodology to an OECD country report on Russian education in order to illustrate how this central player has attempted to translate the interests and identities of national actors, and the meaning of the educational reform, in order to build itself as an authority.
This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced... more This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced by national examinations in the practices of control and steering. It examines how data generated in the compulsory school graduation examination in the Russian Federation connect together different actors within the education system and beyond, and the nature of the relationships so formed. These questions take as their unit of analysis the relations and relationships created and/or re-ordered through numbers, and they unmask who utilizes the numerical data, and for what purpose. The article brings together two major arguments in the existing literature on quantification, and develops them further into a coherent research framework which is then applied to capture and interpret the circulation and application of the examinations data. The first argument suggests that governance by numbers, characteristic of contemporary regulation practices, relies on and promotes the parallel existence of soft and hard regimes of regulation. The second addresses the increasingly public nature of social statistics, that is, its circulation on both official and popular levels. The article illustrates that it is by means of analysing the overlappings and interdependencies between the soft and hard regimes, and the two levels of data entry, that we can best understand how numbers exercise power and how they become rooted and gain more power in the process.
H.B. Holmarsdottir & M. O’Dowd (Eds.) Nordic Voices. Teaching and Researching Comparative and International Education in the Nordic Countries. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 59-74
... Party EI Education Index EMI English-Medium Instruction EPA Economics and Public ... and Huma... more ... Party EI Education Index EMI English-Medium Instruction EPA Economics and Public ... and Humanities Education ROC Republic of China TIMSS Third International Mathematics and Science ... authors from these different societies to consider two fundamental questions in this ...
This article explores the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) as a governance technique in education... more This article explores the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) as a governance technique in education policies. The exam constitutes one of the most recent and significant reforms in the Russian education system. It combines into a single procedure high school graduation examination with entrance exams to tertiary education. Within the Foucault-inspired governmentality framework, the article tackles two questions. First, how does the USE function as a governance technique that regulates and makes policies at a distance? Second, what changes in the subjectivities does the exam seek to accomplish? These questions are explored in the context of the neoliberal turn, which has introduced the notions of accountability, market and customership into public policies and education. The article argues that the USE is much more than a mere pedagogical practice that measures learning achievements. It has turned into a flexible and widely utilised governance technique that seeks to restructure state-societal relations and mould subjectivities. It exposes a new approach to governing which, through the initiation of standards and performance steering, strengthens the control of the state over the education system and beyond.
Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Free download here: http://www.tandfonli... more Introduction to the special issue in European Education
This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and abo... more This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the " emancipatory project " of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of " different worlds, " thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
This presentation explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in an... more This presentation explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the “emancipatory project” of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of “different worlds,” thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
This paper was presented at a CIES 2017 Presidential Highlighted Session titled "Contesting coloniality: Re-thinking knowledge production and circulation in the field of Comparative and International Education." The session was moderated by Keita Takayama (University of New England, Australia) and is based off papers that will be included in the special number of Comparative Education Review (slated for publication in May 2017). It aims to initiate dialogue about the active colonial legacies within the field of Comparative and International Education, and to show ways of working beyond them.
The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an e... more The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an embodiment of a new social order. However, living socialism often meant something quite different compared to its official interpretations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We discuss the importance of exploring personal memories to gain a more complex understanding of childhood and the (post)socialist lived experience. Following the critique of the dominant narratives about childhood, we invite an epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking of assumptions about how we approach research. We highlight the diversity of the region’s histories, individual lived experiences, and the multiple ways of being a (post)socialist child. We close with an overview of the book and afterwords that connect the contributions to different disciplinary fields.
This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolo... more This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolonizing knowledge production in and about (post)socialist societies. We develop three decolonial strategies to disrupt and complicate accounts of childhood, schooling, and subjectivities framed by and embedded in the epistemologies of modernity, socialist ideologies, and post-socialist “Westernization” projects. First, we highlight how memories of children’s lived experiences—situated in local and personal histories—enable us to multiply cultural imaginaries about childhood. Second, we trace relationalities between seemingly disparate spaces and times of childhoods, disrupting the linearity and singularity of time/space. Finally, we discuss how coloniality of knowledge and being affects the various subjectivities we present about ourselves as children and researchers, and how memory research (re)shapes us in return.
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue ... more This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody “model socialist citizens” and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in “building” socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies. ‘
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA No recommendations yet
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called upon to act as a mediator that translates and holds parts of the fragile assessment-network together by coercing each participant into the role of docile data producer. The introduction of video surveillance manifests and endorses a deep mistrust of the human being, translates data objectivity into a procedural matter and opens up new business opportunities for commercial surveillance and security sectors.
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
This paper was presented at a CIES 2017 Presidential Highlighted Session titled "Contesting coloniality: Re-thinking knowledge production and circulation in the field of Comparative and International Education." The session was moderated by Keita Takayama (University of New England, Australia) and is based off papers that will be included in the special number of Comparative Education Review (slated for publication in May 2017). It aims to initiate dialogue about the active colonial legacies within the field of Comparative and International Education, and to show ways of working beyond them.
called upon to act as a mediator that translates and holds parts of the fragile assessment-network together by coercing each participant into the role of docile data producer. The introduction of video surveillance manifests and endorses a deep mistrust of the human being, translates data objectivity into a procedural matter and opens up new business opportunities for commercial surveillance and security sectors.
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
This paper was presented at a CIES 2017 Presidential Highlighted Session titled "Contesting coloniality: Re-thinking knowledge production and circulation in the field of Comparative and International Education." The session was moderated by Keita Takayama (University of New England, Australia) and is based off papers that will be included in the special number of Comparative Education Review (slated for publication in May 2017). It aims to initiate dialogue about the active colonial legacies within the field of Comparative and International Education, and to show ways of working beyond them.
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
No recommendations yet