New honorary doctorates in educational sciences

Lia Karsten is a reader at the University of Amsterdam and has studied children as actors and children’s living conditions for several decades. She is an internationally prominent researcher who should be seen as a pioneer in the study of children’s and adolescents’ mobility and use of space. This field has become more and more important in research on childhood and youth, not least in the educational sciences.

In her research Lia Karsten has shown how school and housing segregation are intimately interrelated. She has also shown what consequences altered family conditions have for how children move in time and space and what challenges this presents for preschools and schools. In a major historical study, she has investigated how children’s social capital has changed over time and the special vulnerability this entails for certain groups of children.

Lia Karsten coined the expression “backseat generation” for children who are driven to school and home again in the backseat of the family car. Outside of academia, she also collaborates with organizations and companies and has participated in the public debate about social planning. One highly topical area involves her studies of increasing urban density, where the need for preschools and schools has been neglected, school commuting has increased, and children’s mobility, freedom of movement, and spontaneous activities in the immediate environment have been forgotten in the planning process. In the spring of 2011 she was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at Uppsala University.

Brigitte Le Roux, a mathematician and researcher at the Laboratoire des mathématiques appliquées, Université René Descartes, Paris and at the Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po, Paris, has been chosen to receive an honorary doctorate for her pioneering work in the field of geometric data analysis and for her contributions to the development of educational sociology.

Geometric data analysis is a family of methods for the quantitative analysis of qualitative data. Brigitte Le Roux is the world leader in the field today. Alongside important contributions to basic research in mathematics, she has also devoted more and more of her time to social scientific applications. She developed “specific correspondence analysis”, which came to be used in Pierre Bourdieu’s studies in the late 1990s. She has subsequently participated in a series of other significant studies, in France and other countries.

Previously, correspondence analyses had been limited to identifying midpoints, for example, one midpoint for representing male students and one for female students. Working with clouds of individuals, in analyses of recruitment to school or university programmes, for example, enables us to visualize and analyse the individual trajectories through and positions in the educational system for boys and girls, children of physicians and children of librarians, or urban or rural people. Each point represents an individual: Kalle Andersson, Eva Pettersson, etc. Concentration ellipses are a way to deal with the range of the cloud of individuals. Such an approach allows a degree of analytical precision that was previously out of the question.

Brigitte Le Roux is well known for having developed a unique sensitivity to the issues that social scientists face. She has seen it as her duty as a mathematician to create and elaborate methods that can truly be used in fruitful ways in studies in social sciences – political science, sociology, and economics.