Historical Sociologies of Knowledge, Science, and Modernity, Volume 1

This edited collection offers an exploration and critical reassessment of the sciences in educational research, foregrounding its agential and material qualities rather than treating it as a neutral instrument of knowledge. Addressing the enduring allure of research as expertise and of science as an elixir for enabling the good life, it examines a distinctive form of activism within modernity and challenges the ahistorical assumptions that often frame the practices of the human sciences.

The book comprises original historical and sociological studies by international scholars who examine the infrastructures of ideas, theories, methods, and technologies through which scientific knowledge is produced. Across a wide range of educational contexts, the authors interrogate how science operates performatively, shaping norms, subjectivities, and modes of governance. Part of a two-volume series, Volume 1, Infrastructures, Differences and Space of Action in Education, explores how science produces new phenomena as comparative logics in kinds of people.

It will appeal to scholars and researchers across interdisciplinary fields, including sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, historical sociology, political philosophy, educational policy, comparative and international education, and transnational studies.