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Education Departmental Seminar Series

We host speakers from academia and professional practice doing interesting, exciting and significant research or work in the field of education.

This page contains information about our upcoming seminars and seminars we have held in the past (many of which were recorded and available to watch).

The research presented in each aligns with the work the University of Bath's Department of Education is doing. They cover topics such as, research in the fields of educational leadership, management and governance, internationalisation and globalisation, language and educational practices, and learning, pedagogy and diversity.

Attend a seminar

All of our seminars are free to attend and take place on the University of Bath campus or online. If you have any questions about our seminars, please contact Dr Nicola Savvides

Upcoming seminars

Find out more about our upcoming seminars. Please note: dates, times and locations of seminars may change, so check this page regularly.

Exploring educational leadership and policy through Actor-Network Theory

  • Date: 8 May 2024
  • Time: 1pm - 2.30pm
  • Location: Online (via Zoom)

In this symposium, Dr Denise Mifsud will host three researchers to discuss how they apply Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore matters related to educational leadership and policy enactment and performance. ANT sensibilities call for particular kinds of descriptions – the assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of associations. ANT sensibilities empower all actors with a voice to speak their sociologies, being especially concerned with the discursively and materially heterogeneous ‘world-making’ activity of actors.

  • In Ecological Materialism: Redescribing Educational Leadership through Actor-Network Theory, Paolo Landri shows how regardless of the professed agnosticism of its basic principle of symmetry, ANT is not epistemologically and educationally innocent.
  • In A new mode of control: An Actor-Network Theory account of effects of power and agency in establishing education policy, Ruth Unsworth argues that power promised to England’s teachers by the 2010 ‘Importance of Teaching’ white paper has rather played out as a reformulation of methods of policymaking to more indirect modes of government control.
  • In Enacting the Key Skills Framework – Materializations, Negotiations and Resistance in Junior Cycle, Ida Martinez Lunde provides insights into how behaviour monitoring (as part of a curriculum reform) is enacted in an interplay with school leaders in Ireland.

Join this seminar online

This seminar will take place online via Zoom. You can join here

  • Meeting ID: 916 7419 6144
  • Passcode: 339794

Please note: you must have a Zoom account to join. We advise that you set one up ahead of the seminar to ensure that you can attend.

Participative Action Research: Learning from transnational digital communities

  • Date: 19 June 2024
  • Time: 4.15pm - 5.15pm
  • Location: 1 West 3.103, and online (via Zoom)

In this seminar, Dr Juan Carlos Barrón Pastor (CISAN-UNAM, Mexico) will discuss Participative Action Research. He'll look at how it is used when investigating education practice; and how it works when used to systematise and learn from the interdisciplinary activities of a transnational research team aiming to study cultural products emerging from digital communities (transnational as well).

This talk will explore some work in progress about a team of researchers from Canada, Mexico and the United States experiencing first-hand how digital communities living and working in different countries create knowledge and develop skills by using digital apps and Artificial Intelligence software.

The contents will display, first, the theoretical and practical backgrounds of the project to contextualise the growing importance of cultural industries involving people in two or three countries of North America; second, some of the findings about how specific digital communities learn and create cultural products in collaborative digital environments; third, some methods used to study digital communities; and fourth, how the team has performed and tackled some of the challenges presented along the research process.

Join this seminar online

This seminar will take place online via Zoom. You can join here

  • Meeting ID: 924 7295 0387
  • Passcode: 663864

Please note: you must have a Zoom account to join. We advise that you set one up ahead of the seminar to ensure that you can attend.

Previous seminars

Watch recordings of our previous seminars.

Contact us

If you have any questions about our seminars, please contact us.