Jan Nespor
Biographic Data
| ID | 102773 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jan Nespor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jan |
| FAMILY NAME | Nespor |
| SIGNATURE | NESPOR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Virginia Tech |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7354-8937 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
It feels like someone is choking me, and I am sweating buckets: ” Teachers’ experiences of climate change and extreme heat in Punjab, Pakistan
Mundane technologies of educational policy consultancy: Presentations and interpretive control
This conceptual article examines how consultants use a mundane policy device, the powerpoint presentation, to manage education policy relations between international lenders and education ministries in the global South. The article theorizes presentations as socio-material assemblages that combine consultants, software, visualization conventions, presentation styles, and participant structures in ways that enable consultants to control public int…
Automating what? Scholastic products and instructional automation in virtual schooling
Schools produce multiple products and digitization articulates with them in different ways. In this paper we expand the frame for analyzing instructional automation by examining its implications for three scholastic products – embodied learning, grades and test scores, and the narratives that connect the two. We draw on data from interviews with 47 teachers in four full-time virtual elementary and secondary schools in the US to argue that at pres…
Markets and Violence: Qualitative Research and the Neoliberal Future
Neoliberal epistemologies are grounded in a temporal paradox. To prosper, you have to know how actions taken now will pay off in the future. But you can't know that-the future is uncertain and unknowable. In this context, qualitative inquiry becomes less a matter of explanation or interpretation than of feeding information into efforts to collapse the temporal horizon and format the future in a form that you can dominate. This article examines ma…
Discursive geographies: Politics and public narratives of immigration in a Midwestern US city
Immigration has become an object of political contention far from national borders. As migrants and immigrants move into interior cities, border discourses follow them, often propagated by conservative political factions seeking to extend their influence. This article examines one episode of contention around these processes – a struggle among officials, media organizations, and activists to shape the public narrative of a Midwestern U.S by discu…
Tangled Up in School: Politics, Space, Bodies, and Signs in the Educational Process
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the w…
Strangers and Professionals: Positioning Discourse in ESL Teachers’ Work
Finding Patterns with Field Notes
"The Afterlife of "Teachers' Beliefs: Qualitative Methodology and the Textline
How do articles get written in ways that lead them to keep getting cited decades later-even when they are bad or mediocre articles that do not merit re-reading? The question may seem trivial, but answering it requires us to rethink research practice and methods: Instead of particular projects and studies, or the work of individual researchers (how one conducts interviews, writes, etc.), methodology becomes a problem of assembling textlines, hooki…
Wizards and witches: Parent advocates and contention in special education in the USA
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid‐Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridg…
Devices and Educational Change
This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device‐mediated educational change, one involving a computer‐assisted interactive video module that provided a half‐hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre‐school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle‐level organizational workers can ramify into organ…
Time and exclusion
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with complex disabilities in several school systems in a US state, this paper examines how temporal units such as the school day and school year and practices organized around artifacts like clocks and calendars work as 'devices of temporal distanciation' to separate children with disabilities from other children and exclude their families from critical relations with schools. The paper focuses on tw…
Ethics, Problem Framing, and Training in Qualitative Inquiry
This article examines the ethical issues bound up in the ways research problems are initially framed: the questions asked, the temporal and spatial frames of the study, the ways participants are defined. It explores the consequences of thinking through ethical issues using recent reconceptualizations of agency and suggests extensions of the ways researchers define participants for ethical purposes. The article concludes by examining some of the r…
Curriculum charts and time in undergraduate education
This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a ‘chart’ that defines academic time in terms of units of before–after relationships. The paper shows how students ‘reuse’ these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic wo…
Morphologies of inquiry: The Uses and Spaces of Paradigm Proliferation 1
This paper examines paradigm proliferation in the context of ongoing efforts by the federal government in the US to regulate academic research. It argues that these efforts amount to an attempt to reposition and de‐center universities as sites of knowledge production, not just about education but across domains. The paper examines this politics as a struggle over the geographies of knowledge‐constitutive networks. It examines the morphology entai…
Networks and Contexts of Reform
Anonymity and Place in Qualitative Inquiry
This article examines assumptions embedded in the routine practice of trying to make the places represented in qualitative accounts anonymous. Anonymity is usually seen as an ethical issue, but like any representational strategy, it conceals assumptions about the nature of entities in the world and our relations with them. Focusing on place anonymization, the author argues that the use of pseudonyms and the omission of identifying historical and …
The Meanings of Research: Kids as Subjects and Kids as Inquirers
This article helps problematize the category of childhood as well as our habits of making summary statements about children as research participants. Drawing on data from a 2-year ethnographic study of an urban elementary school that combined conventional interview and observation research on kids with efforts to enlist kids as researchers, the article suggests that even relatively young people have experiences with "research" in the course of th…
Audience and the politics of narrative
This paper explores how definitions of audience shape and are shaped by the politics of writing, in particular how the use of narrative in collaboratively constructed texts situates the texts politically. The paper describes the writing of a book of “resistance narratives,” jointly co‐authored by university‐based writers and parents of children with disabilities. The paper is not about the parents’ struggles per se, but it is about how those stru…
Learning as Movement in Networks of Knowledge and Power
"Constructing "Relevance: "A Comment on Miller and Fredericks's "Postpositivistic Assumptions and Educational Research
Research news and Comments: Constructing “Relevance”
Narrative Discourse and Teacher Knowledge
This article looks at teacher knowledge as a joint construction of teachers and researchers. It focuses on narrative discourse as a representational medium for formulating knowledge in the specific setting of the research interview. The article analyzes the contrasting narrative practices of two teachers in terms of how they formulate versions of self. These practices are seen as differentially situating the two teachers in terms of the large-sca…
The jackhammer: A case study of undergraduate physics problem solving in its social setting
When certain curricular structures pertain, academic problem solving becomes embedded in social relations. In such situations, students “work” more than textbook problems; they construct their selves, status, and gender identities. The way in which group problem solving comes to be the standard work format for physics majors at a large university is described and then one problem‐solving event is examined in detail, showing how the solution of th…
Strategies of Discourse and Knowledge Use in the Practice of Bureaucratic Research
In certain settings, social research becomes embedded in a form of bureaucratic politics that revolves around contests for status, power, and autonomy among participants in the research process. Written and verbal discourse are key resources in such contests. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing their uses and employs this framework in a case study analysis of bureaucratic politics on a large federally funded educational resea…
Anonymity and Place in Qualitative Inquiry
This article examines assumptions embedded in the routine practice of trying to make the places represented in qualitative accounts anonymous. Anonymity is usually seen as an ethical issue, but like any representational strategy, it conceals assumptions about the nature of entities in the world and our relations with them. Focusing on place anonymization, the author argues that the use of pseudonyms and the omission of identifying historical and …
The Meanings of Research: Kids as Subjects and Kids as Inquirers
This article helps problematize the category of childhood as well as our habits of making summary statements about children as research participants. Drawing on data from a 2-year ethnographic study of an urban elementary school that combined conventional interview and observation research on kids with efforts to enlist kids as researchers, the article suggests that even relatively young people have experiences with "research" in the course of th…
Morphologies of inquiry: The Uses and Spaces of Paradigm Proliferation 1
This paper examines paradigm proliferation in the context of ongoing efforts by the federal government in the US to regulate academic research. It argues that these efforts amount to an attempt to reposition and de‐center universities as sites of knowledge production, not just about education but across domains. The paper examines this politics as a struggle over the geographies of knowledge‐constitutive networks. It examines the morphology entai…
Audience and the politics of narrative
This paper explores how definitions of audience shape and are shaped by the politics of writing, in particular how the use of narrative in collaboratively constructed texts situates the texts politically. The paper describes the writing of a book of “resistance narratives,” jointly co‐authored by university‐based writers and parents of children with disabilities. The paper is not about the parents’ struggles per se, but it is about how those stru…
Narrative Discourse and Teacher Knowledge
This article looks at teacher knowledge as a joint construction of teachers and researchers. It focuses on narrative discourse as a representational medium for formulating knowledge in the specific setting of the research interview. The article analyzes the contrasting narrative practices of two teachers in terms of how they formulate versions of self. These practices are seen as differentially situating the two teachers in terms of the large-sca…
Devices and Educational Change
This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device‐mediated educational change, one involving a computer‐assisted interactive video module that provided a half‐hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre‐school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle‐level organizational workers can ramify into organ…
Trouble at School: A Case Study of the Economy of Blame
When conditions in a school deteriorate and teachers and administrators cannot escape or effectively protest, they use several ways of shifting blame
Automating what? Scholastic products and instructional automation in virtual schooling
Schools produce multiple products and digitization articulates with them in different ways. In this paper we expand the frame for analyzing instructional automation by examining its implications for three scholastic products – embodied learning, grades and test scores, and the narratives that connect the two. We draw on data from interviews with 47 teachers in four full-time virtual elementary and secondary schools in the US to argue that at pres…
Discursive geographies: Politics and public narratives of immigration in a Midwestern US city
Immigration has become an object of political contention far from national borders. As migrants and immigrants move into interior cities, border discourses follow them, often propagated by conservative political factions seeking to extend their influence. This article examines one episode of contention around these processes – a struggle among officials, media organizations, and activists to shape the public narrative of a Midwestern U.S by discu…
Wizards and witches: Parent advocates and contention in special education in the USA
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid‐Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridg…
Time and exclusion
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with complex disabilities in several school systems in a US state, this paper examines how temporal units such as the school day and school year and practices organized around artifacts like clocks and calendars work as 'devices of temporal distanciation' to separate children with disabilities from other children and exclude their families from critical relations with schools. The paper focuses on tw…
Curriculum charts and time in undergraduate education
This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a ‘chart’ that defines academic time in terms of units of before–after relationships. The paper shows how students ‘reuse’ these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic wo…
Strategies of Discourse and Knowledge Use in the Practice of Bureaucratic Research
In certain settings, social research becomes embedded in a form of bureaucratic politics that revolves around contests for status, power, and autonomy among participants in the research process. Written and verbal discourse are key resources in such contests. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing their uses and employs this framework in a case study analysis of bureaucratic politics on a large federally funded educational resea…
Markets and Violence: Qualitative Research and the Neoliberal Future
Neoliberal epistemologies are grounded in a temporal paradox. To prosper, you have to know how actions taken now will pay off in the future. But you can't know that-the future is uncertain and unknowable. In this context, qualitative inquiry becomes less a matter of explanation or interpretation than of feeding information into efforts to collapse the temporal horizon and format the future in a form that you can dominate. This article examines ma…
Strangers and Professionals: Positioning Discourse in ESL Teachers’ Work
"The Afterlife of "Teachers' Beliefs: Qualitative Methodology and the Textline
How do articles get written in ways that lead them to keep getting cited decades later-even when they are bad or mediocre articles that do not merit re-reading? The question may seem trivial, but answering it requires us to rethink research practice and methods: Instead of particular projects and studies, or the work of individual researchers (how one conducts interviews, writes, etc.), methodology becomes a problem of assembling textlines, hooki…
Research news and Comments: Constructing “Relevance”
Academic Tasks in a High School English Class
A framework for analyzing academic tasks is presented, based on task conceptions formulated in cognitive psychology and in research on classroom interaction, which distinguishes between teachers' and students' version of a task, and takes into account possible reinterpretations of tasks following evaluation. Using this framework, a detailed analysis of a single task in a high school English class is presented. The teacher's goals for the task, an…
The Fate of the Files
It is suggested that the raw data of educational research have important uses that are not presently being exploited. Reasons for preserving raw data and opening them to general scrutiny are presented. These include the avoidance of misrepresentation and error, the value of data for secondary analysis, and the potential uses of data as teaching tools. Difficulties with the idea of archiving are also examined: the social problems within the resear…
Trouble at School: A Case Study of the Economy of Blame
When conditions in a school deteriorate and teachers and administrators cannot escape or effectively protest, they use several ways of shifting blame
Theoretical Note: On Students' Experiences Across the Grade Levels
This article explores several issues related to the study of students' "academic" careers and the cumulative impact of their learning experiences across grade levels. Building upon recent work in cognitive psychology, the paper develops a conception of academic "tasks" for the study of inter-grade connections. Areas for future research are identified
The role of beliefs in the practice of teaching
(1987). The role of beliefs in the practice of teaching. Journal of Curriculum Studies: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 317-328
Academic Tasks in a High School English Class
A framework for analyzing academic tasks is presented, based on task conceptions formulated in cognitive psychology and in research on classroom interaction, which distinguishes between teachers' and students' version of a task, and takes into account possible reinterpretations of tasks following evaluation. Using this framework, a detailed analysis of a single task in a high school English class is presented. The teacher's goals for the task, an…
The Fate of the Files
It is suggested that the raw data of educational research have important uses that are not presently being exploited. Reasons for preserving raw data and opening them to general scrutiny are presented. These include the avoidance of misrepresentation and error, the value of data for secondary analysis, and the potential uses of data as teaching tools. Difficulties with the idea of archiving are also examined: the social problems within the resear…
Strategies of Discourse and Knowledge Use in the Practice of Bureaucratic Research
In certain settings, social research becomes embedded in a form of bureaucratic politics that revolves around contests for status, power, and autonomy among participants in the research process. Written and verbal discourse are key resources in such contests. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing their uses and employs this framework in a case study analysis of bureaucratic politics on a large federally funded educational resea…
The jackhammer: A case study of undergraduate physics problem solving in its social setting
When certain curricular structures pertain, academic problem solving becomes embedded in social relations. In such situations, students “work” more than textbook problems; they construct their selves, status, and gender identities. The way in which group problem solving comes to be the standard work format for physics majors at a large university is described and then one problem‐solving event is examined in detail, showing how the solution of th…
Narrative Discourse and Teacher Knowledge
This article looks at teacher knowledge as a joint construction of teachers and researchers. It focuses on narrative discourse as a representational medium for formulating knowledge in the specific setting of the research interview. The article analyzes the contrasting narrative practices of two teachers in terms of how they formulate versions of self. These practices are seen as differentially situating the two teachers in terms of the large-sca…
"Constructing "Relevance: "A Comment on Miller and Fredericks's "Postpositivistic Assumptions and Educational Research
Research news and Comments: Constructing “Relevance”
Audience and the politics of narrative
This paper explores how definitions of audience shape and are shaped by the politics of writing, in particular how the use of narrative in collaboratively constructed texts situates the texts politically. The paper describes the writing of a book of “resistance narratives,” jointly co‐authored by university‐based writers and parents of children with disabilities. The paper is not about the parents’ struggles per se, but it is about how those stru…
Learning as Movement in Networks of Knowledge and Power
The Meanings of Research: Kids as Subjects and Kids as Inquirers
This article helps problematize the category of childhood as well as our habits of making summary statements about children as research participants. Drawing on data from a 2-year ethnographic study of an urban elementary school that combined conventional interview and observation research on kids with efforts to enlist kids as researchers, the article suggests that even relatively young people have experiences with "research" in the course of th…
Anonymity and Place in Qualitative Inquiry
This article examines assumptions embedded in the routine practice of trying to make the places represented in qualitative accounts anonymous. Anonymity is usually seen as an ethical issue, but like any representational strategy, it conceals assumptions about the nature of entities in the world and our relations with them. Focusing on place anonymization, the author argues that the use of pseudonyms and the omission of identifying historical and …
Networks and Contexts of Reform
Morphologies of inquiry: The Uses and Spaces of Paradigm Proliferation 1
This paper examines paradigm proliferation in the context of ongoing efforts by the federal government in the US to regulate academic research. It argues that these efforts amount to an attempt to reposition and de‐center universities as sites of knowledge production, not just about education but across domains. The paper examines this politics as a struggle over the geographies of knowledge‐constitutive networks. It examines the morphology entai…
Curriculum charts and time in undergraduate education
This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a ‘chart’ that defines academic time in terms of units of before–after relationships. The paper shows how students ‘reuse’ these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic wo…
Time and exclusion
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with complex disabilities in several school systems in a US state, this paper examines how temporal units such as the school day and school year and practices organized around artifacts like clocks and calendars work as 'devices of temporal distanciation' to separate children with disabilities from other children and exclude their families from critical relations with schools. The paper focuses on tw…
Ethics, Problem Framing, and Training in Qualitative Inquiry
This article examines the ethical issues bound up in the ways research problems are initially framed: the questions asked, the temporal and spatial frames of the study, the ways participants are defined. It explores the consequences of thinking through ethical issues using recent reconceptualizations of agency and suggests extensions of the ways researchers define participants for ethical purposes. The article concludes by examining some of the r…
Wizards and witches: Parent advocates and contention in special education in the USA
Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid‐Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridg…
Devices and Educational Change
This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device‐mediated educational change, one involving a computer‐assisted interactive video module that provided a half‐hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre‐school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle‐level organizational workers can ramify into organ…
Finding Patterns with Field Notes
"The Afterlife of "Teachers' Beliefs: Qualitative Methodology and the Textline
How do articles get written in ways that lead them to keep getting cited decades later-even when they are bad or mediocre articles that do not merit re-reading? The question may seem trivial, but answering it requires us to rethink research practice and methods: Instead of particular projects and studies, or the work of individual researchers (how one conducts interviews, writes, etc.), methodology becomes a problem of assembling textlines, hooki…
Tangled Up in School: Politics, Space, Bodies, and Signs in the Educational Process
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the w…
Strangers and Professionals: Positioning Discourse in ESL Teachers’ Work
Sociology (24 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Pedagogy (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Mathematics education (12 works) · Social science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (8 works) · Law (7 works)