Leonora Dugonjic-RodwinSenior lecturer
About me
As a sociologist, I study education because I am fundamentally interested in how privilege shapes people’s life chances.
My research interest has revolved around privileged migrants and social groups that present their particular interest as universal, monopolize the production of knowledge on their own existence, and orient our gaze towards what I like to call the tip of the social iceberg: "international education," "cultural diversity," "non-alignement" or even the "digital gap."
My recent book examines the social history of a private high school diploma, the International Baccalaureate. I ask what it means to be "international" today. In response, I combine local ethnographies in Geneva and in New York with a review of several archive collections, and a geometric data analysis of member schools on a global scale. I discover how the qualifier "international" — which referred to relations between nation-states since the mid-nineteenth century— came to designate a specific "mentality" in the interwar period, and the very interiority of individuals and groups that are in this way symbolically separated from all others. You can read about this in articles that I have published in English. Read more here on internationalism in education as a strategy of social distinction in the interwar period. More here about contemporary school rituals and the privilege of transgressing national identity and of being perceived as "international" rather than as an "immigrant." You can find a review of my book here.
Since the spring of 2022, I have been involved in a large collective project called European Inventory of Societal Values of Culture as a Basis for inclusive Cultural Policies (INVENT Culture) and hosted by the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay. Among other things, I worked on the impact of digital technology on people's cultural activities, financed by the European Research Council. You can read about this in popular science articles on the project's website.
I am currently researching the preparation for digital work that takes place in intensive "coding bootcamps" and the related process of socialization, school-to-work transition, and professional conversion.
Teaching
I teach mostly in the International and Comparative Education master's program.
Before joining Stockholm University in the fall of 2023, I lectured at Uppsala University, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne. The courses include General Sociology, Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, Writing for Social Scientists, Social Mobility, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Inequality, Transnational Educational Strategies, Socio-Economics of Culture.
I have supervised master's students theses in sociology of education and culture. Topics included: trajectories towards the lyrical profession in Sicily, internationalization in higher education (Swedish university-colleges) and the decolonization of education (the Philippines, 1932-1960).
I have also been a member of a PhD thesis jury in the history of education on the International Bureau of Education in the interwar period (link to thesis here), discussed PhD students' work at different stages (10%, 50%), and guided them in using mixed-methods and approaches, i.e. combining ethnographic fieldwork with secondary literature and document analysis, quantitative data, prosopography and reviews of archival collections in public institutions (state, municipality, associations), international organisations, schools, and individuals.
Research
My main research area is internationalism in education, as a strategy for social distinction and a site for reproducing inequality between countries, nationalities, languages and world literature. Using the International Baccalaureate program as a case in point, I show how power relations between countries and languages determine teacher's choices in the classroom. You can read more here.
My research interests engage with different forms of globalization, the related trends in international mobility/migration, and how they affect education and culture in society.
- As a CNRS research associate, I have participated in a European comparative and historical study of the obstacles to international cooperation in the humanities and social sciences (INTERCO-SSH).
- As a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, I led research on the migration of international students from the Global South to Yugoslavia during the Cold War.
Publications
You can find my latest English-language articles Open Access in ORCID and in Uppsala University's DIVA. For a complete list of publications in English and French, please see the attatched file on the right.