Our Publications

Data-driven classifications and categorisations have long-shaped public sector practices in welfare states. Yet in the context of digital platforms and algorithmic systems, it is crucial to examine how socio-technical judgements are not only made through data but also how data themselves are made, structured by platform values and institutional logics. Drawing on ethnographic research in Swedish compulsory schooling, we argue that data in welfare institutions participate in governing through both care and control, a dynamic particularly evident in education where mundane indicators like school attendance are used to classify students as at-risk categories such as ‘persistent absentees’. The article unpacks the social ordering involved in such classifications, highlighting the complexities of what appears to be straightforward, data-driven decisions. Building on Fourcade's work on classificatory judgements, we examine how persistent absenteeism is produced as a socio-technical category through which institutions act. We show how care can function as control, and control may be exercised in caring ways, raising questions about whose needs are rendered visible, who is made vulnerable, and who is left out. By examining everyday data practices, we foreground the importance of critically engaging with how categories are made actionable, and how such practices carry consequences for justice, inclusion and the meaning of welfare in datafied educational contexts.

This paper discusses data governance models for educational platforms that could better protect students’ and teachers’ privacy and reduce data management burdens for teachers and administrators. Within an ethnographic study involving four Swedish secondary schools and municipal- and national-level administrators working with educational technology, we conduct qualitative interviews informed by educational data-tracing activities done with the help of computational methods from infrastructure studies. We highlight the extractive nature of the current data governance model, and demonstrate the power imbalances inherent to it, the uncertainties surrounding big tech companies’ data management practices, the burdens placed on teachers and administrators, and the fragmentation of the data/platform ecosystem. This allows us to engage in conceptual analysis of the desirability and feasibility of three alternative data governance schemes as applied to education: personal information management systems (which enable individuals to make data-related decisions), data trusts (expert bodies handling data governance in a fiduciary way) and data cooperatives (which steward data in a decentralised fashion through participatory and democratic decision-making). We conclude that data trusts offer the best response to the concerns identified through our infrastructural and ethnographic study, while also being the most feasible to implement in a variety of school systems.

Set in the near future, this chapter takes an adversarial design fiction approach to examine how ‘intelligence as infrastructure’ reorganises education. A fiction of artificial intelligence (AI) empire explores the financialisation of schooling exposed by labour market upheaval, the fragmentation that follows as municipalities depend on opaque platform providers, and a state response that asserts algorithmic nationalism through a civic foundation model-based AI system. As the story progresses, decision-making moves away from classrooms into financial, technical, and security infrastructures, raising questions of accountability, auditability, and sovereignty. The method is speculative rather than predictive, exploring design fiction and adversarial design to stage value conflicts that remain largely invisible in routine practice. Conceptually, the chapter extends platform studies in education by treating AI foundation models as upstream infrastructures. Practically, it renders discussable which arrangements of policy, procurement, and pedagogy might protect public values when learning depends on privately owned, algorithmic systems. Although situated in Sweden, the analysis has broader relevance for education systems wrestling with digital sovereignty, corporate dependency, and interest in human-centred practices. It closes with provocations on ownership and obligation, education after delegation, and counter infrastructures that support plurality, accountability, and creative civic life in schools.

Digital platforms are widely promoted in Nordic welfare-state education as infrastructures for efficient, transparent, and equal home–school communication. In practice, platformised communication generates breakdowns and exclusions that require ongoing professional intervention. This article examines how teachers’ socio-technical repair practices sustain home–school communication when platforms prove insufficient, and what this reveals about inclusion and inequality in welfare education. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Nordic welfare research, we conceptualise these practices as shadow care infrastructures: forms of infrastructural care through which platformised communication is sustained. The study combines 11 semi-structured interviews with nine analytically selected free-text responses from a national survey of teachers and preschool teachers (N = 832). The findings show that practices such as translation, troubleshooting, switching communication channels, and proxy reporting are integral to platform functionality. These practices become stabilised as shadow care infrastructures that compensate for infrastructural gaps. The article advances a welfare-oriented analysis of platformisation by showing how inclusion is produced through continuous repair that redistributes responsibility and renders participation contingent on discretionary professional effort. In doing so, it highlights how welfare commitments are upheld while inequalities in participation risk being reproduced.

Persistent gendered inequities continue to shape participation and advancement within STEM research networks, disproportionately affecting early-career scholars. Guided by Bourdieu’s theory of social, cultural, and symbolic capital, and an intersectional perspective, this systematic review synthesises findings from 20 empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025 to examine how structural hierarchies, capital distribution, and intersecting social identities influence inclusion in STEM research networks. Results indicate that unequal access to social and symbolic capital, manifested through exclusionary collaborations, hierarchical dependencies, and informal prestige systems, limits women’s and other marginalised groups’ participation and recognition. These inequalities are compounded by emotional costs associated with belonging and legitimacy. Although mentoring programmes, institutional support initiatives, and policy reforms can enhance access and visibility, their effects are constrained when the organisational and cultural co itions governing recognition and influence remain unchanged. The review advances an understanding of inclusion as a stratified process in which network participation does not necessarily translate into recognition, legitimacy, or academic influence, highlighting the importance of examining how intersecting social positions shape these processes and how inclusion is enacted within different academic cultures.

This paper investigates how senior and novice students in nautical higher education negotiate epistemic stances during student-led post-simulation debriefings while collaboratively reviewing novice students’ earlier simulation practice. It focuses on supplementary pre-exam training involving navigation simulation activities led by senior students serving as Simulator Student Assistants (SSAs). Through interactional analysis of video-recorded debriefings, the study examines a) how senior and novice maritime students use linguistic and multimodal resources to negotiate epistemic stances, and b) what the students’ negotiations demonstrate about the roles and responsibilities of SSAs. The findings demonstrate that, although participants make different epistemic contributions, the review is jointly accomplished through their interaction. Playbacks of earlier simulation activities function as shared interactional resources for establishing a common focus and collaboratively examining navigation practice. Within this process, SSAs display particular epistemic rights and assume responsibilities for organising the review by assessing, instructing, and validating novice students’ navigation practice and reasoning. Novice students, however, actively contribute by elaborating on and accounting for their earlier actions and reasoning. The study contributes to understanding how assessment and collaborative review are interactionally organised among students who share a similar institutional identity but occupy asymmetrical epistemic positions in a supplementary training context.

This article examines the role of sensorial practice, particularly olfaction, in professional learning for biomedical laboratory sciences. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) and video recordings from a three-day microbiology laboratory exercise focused on the culture and identification of urinary tract infection samples, we analyse how students collaboratively make sensory engagement consequential for their learning. Our analysis demonstrates a spectrum of practices through which smelling is professionalized: exploring correct procedures, aligning affective responses, and stabilizing fleeting sensory experiences in written records. A key resource in this process is the use of everyday cultural references, which anchor elusive odours in a shared repertoire and facilitate intersubjective alignment. These references move from candidate descriptors to ratified categories, documented in institutional records. By scrutinising the ways olfactory sensing is transformed from embodied impressions into stable, communicable, and accountable judgments, we extend prior work on tasting sessions and other artisanal practices to the biomedical laboratory, a site where objectivity is often assumed to rest on instruments rather than senses. In this setting, smelling is a multimodal, socially organized achievement, fundamental to the development of professional judgment in laboratory science.

Contemporary efforts to innovate simulation-based maritime education increasingly involve the development of multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) systems that use large language models (LLMs) to generate automated feedback on student performance. These systems are often presented as solutions to challenges such as limited instructor capacity, inconsistent assessment practices, and demands for greater standardization and accountability in competence evaluation. While such developments create new possibilities for personalized feedback and enhanced instructor support, they also raise important questions concerning transparency, responsibility, professional judgment, and regulatory compliance in maritime education. This study examines how MMLA can be introduced within a policy landscape shaped by the Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW), European higher education policies, and the European Union AI Act. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we analyze how maritime simulator instructors and policy experts ( n = 12) position MMLA within the broader activity system of maritime education and training (MET), with particular attention to the relationships between new technologies, division of labor, and regulations. The analysis focuses on how MMLA reshapes instructor roles and feedback practices, as well as the contradictions and tensions that emerge between technological innovation, regulatory compliance, and the embodied, situated nature of professional judgment in simulator-based training. Our findings reveal tensions and contradictions between three fundamental aspects: innovation vs. regulation, automation vs. autonomy, and engineering design vs. pedagogical intent. The study concludes with implication for responsible implementation of MMLA in simulation-based maritime training.

Det akademiska publiceringslandskapet förändras snabbt genom digitalisering, ökade publiceringsvolymer och affärsmodeller baserade på artikelavgifter, vilket suddar ut gränser mellan etablerade och ifrågasatta publiceringspraktiker. I denna fördjupade diskussion analyseras hur två ofta omdebatterade gråzonsförlag, MDPI och Frontiers, successivt har etablerat sig inom svensk utbildningsvetenskaplig forskning om högre utbildning. Med utgångspunkt i en bibliometrisk kartläggning av 1 091 artiklar publicerade mellan 2015 och 2025 diskuteras förlagens genomslag, tematiska positioner, samarbetsmönster och citeringspraktiker. Resultaten visar att MDPI och Frontiers står för drygt fem procent av publiceringen och att en försiktigt ökande publicering sammanfaller med former av institutionell legitimering, såsom inkludering i nationella kanalregister och publiceringsavtal. Analyser av samförfattarskap och tematiska kopplingar visar på fragmenterade nätverk och tematiska öar, vilket speglar publiceringsmönster i forskningsfältet mer generellt. Samtidigt uppvisar artiklarna ett måttligt men tydligt citeringsgenomslag, vilket indikerar att forskare skiljer mellan förlagsstatus och enskilda bidrags vetenskapliga relevans. Den fördjupade diskussionen belyser hur gråzonsförlagens normalisering sker i skärningspunkten mellan kommersiella incitament, institutionella strukturer och vetenskapliga normer i ett publiceringslandskap under omvandling. ENGLISH ABSTRACT Grey-zone publishers in Swedish higher education research: Emergence, expansion, and legitimation in a changing publishing landscape The academic publishing landscape is undergoing rapid transformation through digitalisation, increasing publication volumes, and business models based on article processing charges, blurring the boundaries between established and contested publishing practices. This in-depth discussion examines how two frequently debated grey-zone publishers, MDPI and Frontiers, have gradually established a presence within Swedish research on higher education. Drawing on a bibliometric mapping of 1,091 articles published between 2015 and 2025, the discussion addresses the publishers’ reach, thematic positioning, collaboration patterns, and citation practices. The findings indicate that MDPI and Frontiers account for just over five per cent of publications, and that a cautiously increasing publication volume coincides with forms of institutional legitimisation, such as inclusion in national channel registers and publishing agreements. Analyses of co-authorship and thematic linkages point to fragmented networks and thematic islands, in line with the research field’s general publication patterns. At the same time, the articles exhibit a moderate but discernible citation impact, suggesting that researchers distinguish between publisher status and the scholarly relevance of individual contributions. The discussion highlights how the normalisation of grey-zone publishers emerges at the intersection of commercial incentives, institutional structures, and evolving norms of scientific quality in a changing publishing landscape.