Research
Current Research Projects
Database on Intergovernmental Cooperation in Education (DICED)
The DICED project aims to create a global resource for scholars, students, citizens and stakeholders engaged with intergovernmental cooperation in education. The growing number of international actors, legal instruments, and cooperative instances has made it increasingly difficult to form a comprehensive understanding of international education resolutions and recommendations. SDG 4, central to the Sustainable Development Goals, underscores the importance of advancing global education and fostering participatory, transparent dialogue. Global governance of education is influenced by diverse actors and mechanisms, often extending beyond state-centered perspectives. Nevertheless, international resolutions, agreements, and declarations remain pivotal as they provide key reference points for global education governance. Examples include the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UNESCO's International Conference on Education (until 2008), and the Council of Europe's Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education (since 1959). However, significant barriers hinder systematic exploration of intergovernmental cooperation in education. Resolutions are often dispersed across organizational websites or archives, with limited institutional memory of the debates preceding their adoption. Accessibility issues further complicate understanding the perspectives, ideas, and legal frameworks shaping global education values. DICED leverages digital humanities and computational approaches to address these challenges. By utilizing standards like the Text Encoding Initiative and UNESCOOECD-Eurostat Data Structure Definitions, the project will create a structured, accessible database and accompanying standards and tools for querying, reading and processing data. This resource will enable the global education community to systematically and diachronically explore international resolutions and recommendations, enhancing replicability, verifiability, and understanding of global education governance studies.
Responsible team member: Patrick Montjourides,patrick.montjourides@uzh.ch
The Early History of Psychology: Ideological Traditions and Forgotten Disciplinary Struggles
This project adopts a historical-deconstructive perspective to revisit forgotten debates on the soul, epistemological controversies, and the early formation of psychology in Germany, France, and Switzerland between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. It pays particular attention, first, to the religious heritage of psychology as a science of the soul, and second, to the disciplinary processes of differentiation and negotiation that, within diverse institutional and national contexts, assumed distinct forms and gave rise to different, and often competing, psychologies.
Responsible team member : Sophie Pia Stieger, sophie.stieger@ife.uzh.ch
Global-regional governance of education
The project examines the role of regional organisations in the global governance of education, focusing on the interactions between global and regional actors. It analyses the historical development of regional organisations’ spheres of authority and contributes to theoretical debates on education governance at the intersection of globalisation and regionalisation. The study employs a case study of the Council of Europe and its relations with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Responsible team member : Elizaveta Ebner, elizaveta.ebner@ife.uzh.ch