Presentation – Karmijn van de Oudeweetering

[Karmijn Van De OudeweeteringParticipant]

Institutional affiliation
My name is Karmijn van de Oudeweetering and I will soon complete the first year of my 6-year PhD research at KU Leuven, for the Methodologies of Educational Sciences Research Group.

Training background
I have completed both my Bachelor’s and Master’s program in Educational Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.

Main themes of investigation
My PhD project focuses on Open Education (OE), particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and on the development of qualitative research methods to study these digital phenomena. Particularly, I aim to understand the arena of OE from a sociomaterial perspective. This also means that am interested in how policy actors are positioned and related to other actors, and how these relationships form practices with and behind digital screens.

Paper intended to write
Considering my research interests, my wish and aim for a joint paper is to focus on innovative methods for policy research. This is because, while understanding policy instrumentation as performing a specific reality, I aim to develop methods that also show how these instrumentations operate and what is specific about this operation. The (educational) policy instrumentation that is investigated within such a paper can be diverse: it can focus on particular devices like digital platforms, but also on wider discourses, standards or data practices materialized in diverse tools.

Starting knowledge base
My methodological understandings are grounded in sociomaterial and sociotopological thinking. This means that I am familiar with authors like Latour, Callon, Fenwick, Law and Mol. The methods that I am most familiar with are interviews and document analysis. Furthermore, I delved into literature about digital ethnographies, familiarizing myself with the work of Hine, Pink, and many others. Furthermore, I am interested in digital online tools for visualization (e.g., Gephi, ImagePlot).

Knowledge needed to complete the paper
To complete the intended paper, it will be relevant to integrate knowledge about different national education policies and reforms of EU countries. This knowledge will enable a comparative research approach, therewith enhancing the potential to understand and show how policies operate within and among different contexts and consequently to point out the specificities of policy instruments. Furthermore, it will be valuable to learn more about possible (combinations of) methods to apply sociomaterial methodologies. As policy instrumentation is often enacted in different forms (e.g., paper and digital reports, face-to-face and broadcasted meeting), the paper invites for a more elaborate inquiry in ‘traditional’ methods and how they can be combined or applied in diverse ways in order to remain sensitive to the diverse appearance and operation of policy instrumentation. Furthermore, the paper can be supported with knowledge about different visualizations. That is, while my interests in research focus on showing how particular instruments operate, it will be helpful to gain insights in different (software) tools to develop visualizations for maps, movements or sketches of configurations.

[Danilo TagliettiParticipant]

Very interesting!!! I think we would have a productive dialogue about policies and methodologies 🙂

[Karmijn Van De OudeweeteringParticipant]

Nice, I am looking forward to meeting you!

[Author]

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