Radhika Gorur
Biographic Data
| ID | 758771 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Radhika Gorur |
| GIVEN NAMES | Radhika |
| FAMILY NAME | Gorur |
| SIGNATURE | GORUR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4528-0793 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
International Large-Scale Assessments (Ilsas): What have they done for education
For over two centuries, education scholars and policy communities have sought to measure and compare education. However, it is only in recent decades that comparative measurements of learning began rising to prominence above all other educational data. Comparative learning measures are now so established that gathering comparative learning data has become an educational purpose in itself. This Commentary Paper provides a timely critical reflectio…
A user-centric taxonomy of cyber harm in the metaverse
Algorithmic Performance Management in Higher Education: Viva! 365 Ways of Surveillance
This paper maps the emergence and consequences of automated Algorithmic Performance Management (APM) in the context of higher education. After reviewing the evolution of productivity management in academia, it argues that surveillance via APM shifts expectations not just about effectiveness at work but also about how work, and the good worker, come to be defined. In our paradigmatic case study of Office 365, we specify how the automated surveilla…
Generating views from Elsewhere: UIS and the global project of SDG4 indicators
The declaration of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 brought together 193 nations to commit to a common set of 17 critical, highly ambitious global goals. This paper analyses how the Technical Cooperation Group of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) develops consensus on measuring and monitoring SDG4. We empirically examine the processes of collecting, connecting and compounding various views through its meetings, cons…
The politics of tinkering: Developing the Pisa assessment of global competence
Speed, accuracy, and efficiency: The promises and practices of digitization in pathology
Digitization is often presented in policy discourse as a panacea to a multitude of contemporary problems, not least in healthcare. How can policy promises relating to digitization be assessed and potentially countered in particular local contexts? Based on a study in Denmark, we suggest scrutinizing the politics of digitization by comparing policy promises about the future with practitioners' experience in the present. While Denmark is one of the…
A caring transformation of international education: Possibilities, challenges and change
The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on all facets of international education. Not only has it highlighted the inadequacy of existing care arrangements but it has also created new care needs. There is increased recognition among policy makers and education providers that they need to understand and support the wellbeing of international students more effectively – and indeed with greater care. Drawing on sociomaterial theories of care, …
Dancing with Covid: Choreographing examinations in pandemic times
In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifications. We base our analysis of higher education examinations on cases from six countries around th…
Unsustainable measures? Assessing global competence in Pisa 2018
In the context of rising fundamentalism, urgent threats to the environment, and the persistence of poverty and deep inequities in the world, 193 nations have pledged to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crafted by UNESCO in 2015. Education is seen as key to attaining all the other SDGs. Within the ‘education goal’ (Goal #4), there is an explicit target, SDG 4.7, which focuses on ‘sustainable development and global citizenship’…
A new chapter for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
January 2021As the new editorial team of Discourse, we are very pleased to publish our first statement concerning the direction of the journal. We feel honoured that the previous Editors – Professo
Afterword: Embracing numbers
While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy scholars and social scientists, who have pointed to the reductionist nature of numbers and the dangerous …
Regulating private sector schooling in the global south: The case of India
In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India’s experience with the Right to Education Act to consider the challenges that nations face in attempting to regulate private sector participation in education.…
Translating Pisa, translating the world
The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science …
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19: An Epat Collective Project
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
Making the user friendly: The Ontological Politics of Digital Data Platforms
Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuad…
Discourse thanks referees, 2018-2020
The Discourse Editorial Team wishes to extend our sincere gratitude to the following academics who have refereed articles for the journal. All research articles undergo rigorous double-blind peer r
Politics by other means? STS and research in education
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh persp…
World Yearbook of Education 2019: Comparative Methodology in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks
Escaping Numbers
Numbers have long been associated with statecraft. In bureaucratic processes of accounting, regulation was effected by forming centres of calculation. This paper suggests that contemporary post-bureaucratic regimes are evolving new forms of accounting, in which the centre inserts itself into individual sites to exercise authority. This ‘intimate accounting’ involves technologies of transparency through which individual sites such as schools are r…
Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education
International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Wi…
Statistics and statecraft: Exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
Statistics and statecraft: exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
Seeing like Pisa: A cautionary tale about the performativity of international assessments
PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its ‘policy lessons’ are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that ‘seeing like PISA’ is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characterized by an intense focus on output measurement, a highly competitive environment heightened by nationa…
As "Descrições Finas" Das Análises Secundárias Do Pisa
Os métodos da OCDE e do PISA para influenciar a política por meio dos rankings e do aconselhamento político estão bem documentados. Este artigo é especulativo e explora as implicações mais sutis e talvez mais profundas da evolução da base de dados do PISA, e da análise secundária que é realizada utilizando-a. Com base em conceitos dos Science and Technology Studies , este artigo sugere que o PISA reduz "objetos ontologicamente luxuriantes" em "ob…
Interrogating Conceptions of “Vulnerable Youth” in Theory, Policy and Practice
Young people who are considered â vulnerableâ or â at riskâ are a particular target of various policies, schemes and interventions. But what does vulnerability mean? Interrogating Conceptions of â Vulnerable Youthâ explores this question in relation to various policy fields that are relevant to young people, as well for how this plays out in practice and how it is experienced by young people themselves. What makes this book unique is that most au…
Producing calculable worlds: Education at a Glance
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were add…
ANT on the Pisa Trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as bein…
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19: An Epat Collective Project
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
My School, My Market
Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of comparable metrics and the absence of an informed public, leading to a number of solutions such as the…
Leaning too far? Pisa, policy and Australia's 'top five' ambitions
Australia has declared its ambition to be within the ‘top five’ in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the Australian Education Act, 2013. Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a close look at Australia's performance in PISA, examining rankings by different geographical units, by…
Translating Pisa, translating the world
The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science …
Making the user friendly: The Ontological Politics of Digital Data Platforms
Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuad…
Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education
International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Wi…
Producing calculable worlds: Education at a Glance
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were add…
Equity and marketisation: Emerging policies and practices in Australian education
The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different co…
Regulating private sector schooling in the global south: The case of India
In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India’s experience with the Right to Education Act to consider the challenges that nations face in attempting to regulate private sector participation in education.…
Politics by other means? STS and research in education
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh persp…
Statistics and statecraft: Exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
Statistics and statecraft: exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
Generating views from Elsewhere: UIS and the global project of SDG4 indicators
The declaration of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 brought together 193 nations to commit to a common set of 17 critical, highly ambitious global goals. This paper analyses how the Technical Cooperation Group of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) develops consensus on measuring and monitoring SDG4. We empirically examine the processes of collecting, connecting and compounding various views through its meetings, cons…
The politics of tinkering: Developing the Pisa assessment of global competence
A new chapter for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
January 2021As the new editorial team of Discourse, we are very pleased to publish our first statement concerning the direction of the journal. We feel honoured that the previous Editors – Professo
Afterword: Embracing numbers
While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy scholars and social scientists, who have pointed to the reductionist nature of numbers and the dangerous …
As "Descrições Finas" Das Análises Secundárias Do Pisa
Os métodos da OCDE e do PISA para influenciar a política por meio dos rankings e do aconselhamento político estão bem documentados. Este artigo é especulativo e explora as implicações mais sutis e talvez mais profundas da evolução da base de dados do PISA, e da análise secundária que é realizada utilizando-a. Com base em conceitos dos Science and Technology Studies , este artigo sugere que o PISA reduz "objetos ontologicamente luxuriantes" em "ob…
The invisible infrastructure of standards
This is a 'review essay' of three books: (1) Standards: recipes for reality , by Lawrence Busch, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2011, 390 pp., $23.99 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-262-01638-4 ---(2) The gold standard: the challenge of evidence-based medicine and standardization in health care, by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003, 269 pp., $25.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-59213-188-4 ---(3) Standards and t…
ANT on the Pisa Trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as bein…
The invisible infrastructure of standards
This is a 'review essay' of three books: (1) Standards: recipes for reality , by Lawrence Busch, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2011, 390 pp., $23.99 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-262-01638-4 ---(2) The gold standard: the challenge of evidence-based medicine and standardization in health care, by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003, 269 pp., $25.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-59213-188-4 ---(3) Standards and t…
Equity and marketisation: Emerging policies and practices in Australian education
The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different co…
My School, My Market
Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of comparable metrics and the absence of an informed public, leading to a number of solutions such as the…
The politics of disagreement in critical education policy studies: A response to Morsy, Gulson and Clarke
This paper engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue of Discourse (Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the attention they draw to elisions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity and whiteness in contemporary framings of…
Interrogating Conceptions of “Vulnerable Youth” in Theory, Policy and Practice
Young people who are considered â vulnerableâ or â at riskâ are a particular target of various policies, schemes and interventions. But what does vulnerability mean? Interrogating Conceptions of â Vulnerable Youthâ explores this question in relation to various policy fields that are relevant to young people, as well for how this plays out in practice and how it is experienced by young people themselves. What makes this book unique is that most au…
Producing calculable worlds: Education at a Glance
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were add…
Leaning too far? Pisa, policy and Australia's 'top five' ambitions
Australia has declared its ambition to be within the ‘top five’ in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the Australian Education Act, 2013. Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a close look at Australia's performance in PISA, examining rankings by different geographical units, by…
Seeing like Pisa: A cautionary tale about the performativity of international assessments
PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its ‘policy lessons’ are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that ‘seeing like PISA’ is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characterized by an intense focus on output measurement, a highly competitive environment heightened by nationa…
As "Descrições Finas" Das Análises Secundárias Do Pisa
Os métodos da OCDE e do PISA para influenciar a política por meio dos rankings e do aconselhamento político estão bem documentados. Este artigo é especulativo e explora as implicações mais sutis e talvez mais profundas da evolução da base de dados do PISA, e da análise secundária que é realizada utilizando-a. Com base em conceitos dos Science and Technology Studies , este artigo sugere que o PISA reduz "objetos ontologicamente luxuriantes" em "ob…
Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education
International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Wi…
Statistics and statecraft: Exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
Statistics and statecraft: exploring the potentials, politics and practices of international educational assessment
World Yearbook of Education 2019: Comparative Methodology in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks
Escaping Numbers
Numbers have long been associated with statecraft. In bureaucratic processes of accounting, regulation was effected by forming centres of calculation. This paper suggests that contemporary post-bureaucratic regimes are evolving new forms of accounting, in which the centre inserts itself into individual sites to exercise authority. This ‘intimate accounting’ involves technologies of transparency through which individual sites such as schools are r…
Politics by other means? STS and research in education
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh persp…
Afterword: Embracing numbers
While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy scholars and social scientists, who have pointed to the reductionist nature of numbers and the dangerous …
Regulating private sector schooling in the global south: The case of India
In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India’s experience with the Right to Education Act to consider the challenges that nations face in attempting to regulate private sector participation in education.…
Translating Pisa, translating the world
The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science …
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19: An Epat Collective Project
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
Making the user friendly: The Ontological Politics of Digital Data Platforms
Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuad…
Discourse thanks referees, 2018-2020
The Discourse Editorial Team wishes to extend our sincere gratitude to the following academics who have refereed articles for the journal. All research articles undergo rigorous double-blind peer r
Dancing with Covid: Choreographing examinations in pandemic times
In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifications. We base our analysis of higher education examinations on cases from six countries around th…
Unsustainable measures? Assessing global competence in Pisa 2018
In the context of rising fundamentalism, urgent threats to the environment, and the persistence of poverty and deep inequities in the world, 193 nations have pledged to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crafted by UNESCO in 2015. Education is seen as key to attaining all the other SDGs. Within the ‘education goal’ (Goal #4), there is an explicit target, SDG 4.7, which focuses on ‘sustainable development and global citizenship’…
A new chapter for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
January 2021As the new editorial team of Discourse, we are very pleased to publish our first statement concerning the direction of the journal. We feel honoured that the previous Editors – Professo
A caring transformation of international education: Possibilities, challenges and change
The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on all facets of international education. Not only has it highlighted the inadequacy of existing care arrangements but it has also created new care needs. There is increased recognition among policy makers and education providers that they need to understand and support the wellbeing of international students more effectively – and indeed with greater care. Drawing on sociomaterial theories of care, …
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)