UW–Madison’s Thomas Popkewitz will be delivering a keynote speech at a symposium hosted by the Swedish Royal Academy in May.
Popkewitz, a professor with the School of Education’s No. 1-ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is scheduled to open the event on May 8 with his presentation, “The Activism of Science: Knowledge as Projections of the Future in the Present.”
Popkewitz is an internationally recognized scholar who holds six honorary doctorates and was elected as a fellow to the American Educational Research Association (AERA). His work centers on the cultural politics of education knowledge and its comparative reason. This past summer, he was listed as one of 11 of “the most famous experts in the world” on the Chinese Ministry of Education database.
Popkewitz has been a faculty member at UW–Madison since 1970 and says he enjoys doing research with international colleagues and learning from others. He adds that this global work is something that happened accidentally — but it has brought him continual intellectual joy.
“It’s wonderful meeting people who are intellectually very interesting,” he says. “These are people who help make me think about the world and what I study in ways that I appreciate. The places I visit all have different cultural and social histories that enable me to think about my own existence in ways I wouldn’t if I just stayed at home.”
As for his upcoming visit to Sweden, Popkewitz explains that his talk will focus on “turn of the 20th century American progressive education sciences and contemporary international student assessments and teacher education research.” His interest is in studying the human sciences as an actor in society.
Popkewitz’s presentation is part of a symposium at the Wenner-Gren Center in Stockholm titled, “The future of truth?” The event is being put on by the program committee within the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Education Committee.
While this upcoming visit to Sweden will be his most recent trip outside of the United States, over the past year alone, Popkewitz has traveled to several locations overseas to lecture and work on projects including:
• In November, he delivered a guest lecture at the Chinese Academy of Education, a Ministry of Education Institute. The theme of his lecture was titled, “Is Global Knowledge Really Global?” This talk centered on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) infrastructure and architecture.
Chen Ruping, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Education, was at the meeting to guide the conversation. Popkewitz also presented in front of other Chinese education officials, researchers, and teachers and students from Peking University, Beijing Normal University, South China Normal University, Hebei Normal University, and Guangzhou University.
• In December, he gave an invited lecture at the University of Lisboa, which is Portugal’s largest university. The event was designed to bestow emeritus status on Professor Antonio Novoa. Popkewitz was representing the international academic community at the event, which was attended by the current and past president of Portugal, the current prime minister, and the director of The University of Lisboa. Also present was the Director of UNESCO (the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization).
• In 2024 he was named as a co-convenor to establish an International Research Network for research on doctoral education for the World Education Research Association (WERA). WERA is an association of 101 national, regional, and international research associations aimed at advancing education research as a scientific and scholarly field. The purpose of this network — composed by experienced and emerging scholars from different regions — is to map, analyze, and discuss the programmatic and intellectual organization of doctoral education in the educational sciences in different national and regional contexts.
• He also recently received a four-year research grant for work titled, “The Making of Teachers: Dynamics of Teacher Education in Theory and Practice.” He is a co-principal investigator for the work that is being backed by the Swedish Research Council. Popkewitz says his “focus is the study of the systems of knowledge and styles of reasoning generated in international research in teacher education.”
• Popkewitz is also currently co-editing with a colleague in Sweden an international, two-volume “Historical Sociologies of Knowledge and Modernity”; and “The Handbook of Global Social Studies in Education” with colleagues from China, Brazil, and France.