Dr Radhika Gorur joined the Victoria Institute at VU as a Research Fellow in 2012 and was promoted to Senior Research Fellow in 2014. She was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research and Research Training (Early Career) in 2014. Following the completion of her post-doctoral award, Radhika continues her association with the Victoria Institute as an Adjunct Fellow. She is currently working on a monograph 'Seeing like PISA'.
Radhika's research is in four distinct areas:
- The sociology of knowledge, focussing on production, validation, circulation and use of social knowledge (the sociology of statistics, comparison, measurement and secondary analysis)
- Contemporary education policy, focussing on the sociology of education measurement, the influence of the OECD on national policy systems, and performances of equity and inequity in education systems
- Collaborative knowledge production; international institutional collaborations; scientific and research collaborations, science policies and innovation
- Youth policies and their implications for institutions and for youth, particularly 'vulnerability' and 'risk.'
More broadly, Radhika's research seeks to understand how some ideas begin to cohere, stabilise, gain momentum and make their way in the world. In researching these phenomena, her approach is to study the socio-material practices through which particular patterns of relations are mobilised and challenged. She uses assemblage and other concepts from science and technology studies as the main analytical and methodological approach.
Prior to joining the Institute, Radhika was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, where she worked closely with Prof Fazal Rizvi and focused on issues of transnationalism and globalisation. Her interest in internationalism comes from her extensive experience internationally as an educator; Radhika has held a variety of senior positions in schools in Nigeria, Oman, India and Australia.
Publications
Gorur, R. (2013) MySchool, My Market. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (Special Issue: Equity and marketisation: Emerging policies and practices in Australian education) 34(2): 214-230.
Sellar, S., Savage, G., Sellar, S., & Gorur, R. (2013): Equity and marketisation: Emerging policies and practices in Australian education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (Special Issue: Equity and marketisation: Emerging policies and practices in Australian education) 34(2): 161-169
Gorur, R. (2012) The Invisible Infrastructure of Standards [Review Essay] Critical Studies in Education, online. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2012.736871
Gorur, R. (2011) Policy as Assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611-622.
Gorur, R. (2010) ANT on the PISA Trail: Following the Statistical Pursuit of Certainty. Educational Philosophy and Theory (published online 27 JUL 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00612.x)
