Utopia

The second panel event in the series brought together a group of high-profile academics, activists and creatives to debate what kind of alternative education futures are desirable.

Visions for fair, inclusive and democratic education futures have long been expanded through the work of UNESCO and others. However global education policy is still powered by visions of economic growth and operates through the day-to-day machinery of measurement and performance management.

What do we need to unlearn in education, as we work toward more just and sustainable futures? How might we re-think measurement and standardisation? What is the role of education for democracy in an increasingly polarized world? Can education become a living utopia, and what waystations are available to us as we build it?

The event also included the launch of a newly commissioned work from the award-winning poet Joelle Taylor.

Event video

The Future of Education: Utopia

Our conversationalists

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She has received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, as well as from the Swedish Research Council.

In 2017 she was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, entitled “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO, 2017-2022). She is also the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant, which focuses on ‘Art and Policy in the Global Contemporary: Examining the Role of the Arts in the Production of Public Policy’ (POLART, 2024-2029).

She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021).

Her most recent books (with Justyna Bandola-Gill and Marlee Tichenor) are Governing the Sustainable Development Goals: Quantification in Global Public Policy (Springer, 2022) and The New Production of Expert Knowledge: Education, Quantification and Utopia (Palgrave, 2024).


Radhika Gorur is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Deakin University. Her research spans education policy and reform; global aid and development in education; data infrastructures and data cultures; accountability and governance; large-scale comparisons; and the sociology of knowledge. She is interested in the social and political lives of data and in how policies get mobilised, stabilised, circulated and challenged.

Radhika is a founding director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies, convenor of the Deakin Science and Society Network, and a founding member of the international STudieS network. She is an editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.


Dr. Koumbou Boly Barry is the adviser to the Director General of ICESCO Dr. Salim M. AlMalik. She is a United Nation Former Special Rapporteur on the right to education. Dr. Boly Barry holds a PhD in Economic History from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. She is the former Minister of Education and Literacy of Burkina Faso and has consulted widely for various governments and international institutions on the right to education. She was also appointed Ambassador of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

Dr. Boly Barry has been an advocate on gender issues in education. She also has ample knowledge and experience in training and research, as a visiting professor at University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, University of Louvain La Neuve, Belgium, and as a lecturer at Ouagadougou University, Burkina Faso, Vitoria University, Brazil, Georgetown University in United States and Fribourg University, Switzerland.


Joelle Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023.

She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published recently and was followed by a UK tour of a staged version of the novel, directed by Neil Bartlett. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. In 2024 she was honoured by DIVA magazine for her work and was added to the Guardian’s Pride Power List.


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