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• Sotiria Grek

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In This Section

• Full Staff Listing
• ACADEMIC STAFF:
• Jochen Clasen
• Andy Aitchison
• Daniel Clegg
• Jeff Collin
• Alexander Goerne
• Sotiria Grek
• Elke Heins
• Mark Hellowell
• Sarah Hill
• Anuj Kapilashrami
• Stephan Köppe
• Alison Koslowski
• Ingela Naumann
• Paul Norris
• Richard Parry
• Petra Sevcikova
• Katherine Smith
• Kay Tisdall
• ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF:
• Louise Angus
• Ewen Miller
• HONORARY FELLOWS:
• Michael Adler
• Frank Castles
• Paul Crompton
• Ian Dey
• Neil Fraser
• Alex Robertson
• Adrian Sinfield
• Nathaniel Wander
• Fran Wasoff

Sotiria Grek

Qualifications

PhD (University of Edinburgh), MLitt (University of St Andrews), MPhil (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), BA Hons (equivalent) History (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Biographical statement

Prior to joining Social Policy (August 2011), Sotiria worked at the Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh, as a Research Fellow in the project Fabricating Quality in European Education/Governing by Numbers: data and education governance in England and Scotland (FabQ)  (2006-2009), an ESF/ESRC grant (RES-000-23-1385), with co-ordinator/PI Professor Ozga and research teams from Helsinki, Turku, Odense, and Umea universities. Through FabQ and with colleagues, she researched the role of education/learning as a policy sphere that actively contributes to Europeanization, thus counteracting some of the neglect of education in the dominant disciplines that study EU integration. Since then she has been interested in data and comparison as a form of education governance, through which the ‘project’ of Europeanization is pursued – thus placing numbers and comparison in the foreground of enquiry into policy, rather than secondary features. Her research focuses on an analysis of global education policy convergence through an examination of the mediating effects of national/local policies and practices. Finally, she researches policy learning in transnational education governance, and especially the relationship between the European Commission and the OECD in the field of skills and competencies. She is currently working in the following research projects:

• 2007-2011 Knowledge and Policy: The role of Knowledge in the construction and regulation of Health and Education policy in Europe: convergences and specificities among nations and sectors (Know&Pol). European Commission 6th Framework Integrated Project, Priority 7. Research Fellow, with Professors Ozga, Lawn, Dr Richard Freeman (Politics), Dr Steve Sturdy (Genomics Forum), Dr Jen Smith (Politics) and teams from 8 European countries.

• 2010-2012 Transnational Policy Learning: A comparative study of OECD and EU education policy in constructing the skills and competencies agenda (TransPol) . Principal investigator  (PI) (Small Grant ESRC RES-000-22-3429)

• 2010-2013 Governing by Inspection: School Inspection and Education Governance in Scotland, England and Sweden (SIEG). ESRC (RES-062-23-2241) bilateral project with the Swedish Research Council. Co-investigator with PI Prof Ozga and other Co-Is Profs Lawn and Clarke (Open University).

Sotiria has been using a political sociology approach to analyze matters of Europeanization of education policy.

She is an expert in comparative methodology in education governance in Europe by applying detailed individual multi-level country studies with a common design. She is also an expert in critical discourse analysis and has used it in education policy analysis in Europe and as a framework for the analysis of museum exhibitions and narratives. She has also systematically used mixed methods approaches, through a combination of descriptive statistics with discourse analysis and qualitative interviewing, while currently developing her expertise in social network analysis for the examination and mapping of education actors in Europe. As part of the SNA work, and together with PhD student Heide Weishaar (UoE), Sotiria launched the ‘Social Network Analysis in Scotland’ research group (funded by the Roberts Fund).

Teaching  

Before joining Social Policy, Sotiria was a Teaching Fellow for the Doctorate in Education at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. Currently she is teaching for the first year undergraduate course ‘Social Policy and Society’ (SCPL08004) and she is also the convenor of the cross-school postgraduate course ‘Research Design’ (PGSP11208). She will become the Programme Director of the MSc in Social Research from Semester 2, in the academic year 2011/12.

 

Office hours (semester time only): Mondays 2-4pm or by appointment (Sotiria.Grek@ed.ac.uk).

Supervision

Natalie Papanastasiou, Knowledge as Governance and the Governance of Knowledge: exploring the knowledge-policy dynamics of England’s National Curriculum reforms

Dina Zhaketova (deferred to Sep 2012) Higher Education Policy in Kazakhstan

Other Roles

Sotiria is an Executive Editor of the European Educational Research Journal  (EERJ). EERJ is a peer-reviewed international journal  which welcomes articles in topics relating to Europeanisation in education. 

She is also a mum! All going well, she is going to be on maternity leave between the 10th of May to 31^st of December 2012. Any questions or other matters that may arise during this time, please direct them to Louise Angus, subject area secretary (l.angus@ed.ac.uk).

Publications

Here you can download Sotiria’s publications –you can always email her for a copy. Feedback and discussion welcome.

Topics interested in supervising

Sotiria offers supervision on a wide range of topics in social and public policy, particularly in transnational education governance, education policy and governance in the UK, as well as in the field of museum and gallery education. She especially welcomes enquiries about supervision of research on Europeanisation in education or the role of international comparisons in the shaping of the global / European education policy field.

If you are interested in being supervised by Sotiria Grek, please see the links below for more information:

This page was published on 7 May 2012