Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 1 August 2014-31 July 2015
Office: Atalpa 224
Tel.: +358 (0)40 190 1548
Email: marjaana.rautalin@tuni.fi
Research interests
Marjaana’s research interests focus on the synchronization of national policies. She has approached this thematic bottom-up by analysing how different actors in domestic sites invoke global policy ideals when discussing the state of national systems. In her PhD dissertation titled Domestication of International Comparisons: The Role of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Finnish Education Policy, she examined the ways in which PISA was invoked by Finnish stakeholders when debating the status of national education system. The study departed from the idea that is due to the local actors and their creative uses of global policy ideas that national education policies become synchronized with the trajectories of global social change.
Her current research project at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, titled Synchronization of National Policies: Justification of New Legislation in Five Different Nation-states, continues the same line of research. However, instead of concentrating merely on the uses of international comparative data in one local context, the project examines the various ways in which global policy ideas are evoked in justifying new legislation concerning comprehensive schooling in Finland, Germany, Mexico, Japan, and the USA. Through this work Marjaana seeks to reveal the central values and ideas that are deemed politically appropriate in the area of national comprehensive school throughout nation-states. By disclosing these values, she contends, she can better capture the mechanisms through which the global synchronization of national education policies takes place.
Marjaana is a permanent member of TCuPS (Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology) here in Tampere. She has also close links to TaSTI (Tampere Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies) and HEPO (Helsinki Group for Political Sociology). With TCuPS Marjaana has several joint projects. One of these is a study on the global spread of the national independent children’s rights institutions (ICRIs). The other joint works relate to the frameworks on power and governance in contemporary societies.