Potentials of Collaborative Educational Welfare Research - Theorizing Voice Plurality and Social Empowerment

Childhood marginalization is the result of complicated processes that appears difficult to address for policymakers worldwide. Neo-institutional theory enables studies of the complexity of educational organizations, showing how they evolve in responses to their contradictory surroundings and generate unintended social inequality. Three Nordic municipalities are currently participating in a project that focuses on the increasing polarization between exposed and privileged schools in urban areas and on the significance of institutional and organizational factors in their local welfare models in ensuring childhood equity. The project we report on combines data in contrasting urban school areas. After showing some examples of voices in the project, the authors discuss how municipal actors are informed about social problems in school organizations yet lack research-based tools to counteract social inequality in education. They theorize how collaboration between researchers and welfare providers can contribute to counteract social inequality. Lessons from the project indicate a need for further collaboration between different stakeholders that includes different voices to ensure that research on childhood inequality is relevant and has an impact.