Keynote speakers

NERA 2026 - Courage and Agency in Education for the Present.

Courage and Agency in Education for the Present

With this theme, the conference highlights the crucial role of education in fostering meaningful engagement with the world. In this regard, education becomes an arena where people, both individually and collectively, can explore and expand their opportunities to create meaning, actively participate, and take responsibility in and for the world.

Hartmut Rosa

Profile

Hartmut Rosa is a Full Professor of Sociology at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt.

Hartmut Rosa's profile

Geared towards Parametric Optimization – or Resilient Along the Four Axes of Resonance? Two conceptions of ‘Bildung’ for the 21st century

Rosa holds honorary Doctorates from Aarhus University and from the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. In 2023, he received the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz award. As a patron of the UNESCO Chair for Philosophy with Children (University of Nantes) and as a director of the annual Summerschool for talented German Highschool students (Deutsche SchülerAkademie) for three decades, he has been involved in the development of a Pedagogy of Resonance for a long time.

Rosa's two major publications are Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity (Columbia University Press 2013) and Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity 2019). It is from these two books that his keynote will develop. It will present two alternative, sociologically grounded conceptions of Education and strongly argue that what is needed today is indeed a new conception of agency: Agency requires judgment, experience and ‘a good eye’; it is based on the capacity to apprehend a social (and material) situation in its complexity. Such agency today is more and more replaced by technologies and techniques of ‘constellative optimization’. Schools and teachers need agency and courage themselves to stem this trend.

Manja Klemenčič

Profile

After ten years teaching on sociology and politics of higher education at Harvard, Manja Klemenčič returned to Slovenia as senior researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana.

Manja Klemenčič's profile

Student Agency

Klemenčič's major research contribution is in the study of student governments and student representation in higher education which is part of a broader research agenda on student agency and the effects of students on higher education.

Klemenčič's present research is on understanding student agency in higher education which is culminating into a monograph on this topic.

Student agency is becoming a central concept in educational policy and practice. It is widely conceived as a policy objective and as a condition for student success and essential for students’ functioning in life and work after higher education.

OECD (2019, 2) uses the concept of student agency as a foundational concept to the OECD Learning Compass 2030 ‘rooted in the principle that students have the ability and the will to positively influence their own lives and the world around them’ and defines student agency as ‘the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change’.

Yet, despite the higher education policies embracing the concept of student agency, student agency is poorly understood, under-theorized and empirically under-researched.

Klemenčič's keynote at NERA will include insights from her ongoing research on student agency, including her empirical research on student agency in the context of European Universities Alliances.

In addition, Klemenčič will address the question of how agency and courage can be nurtured already in schools and high schools, so both those going into higher education and those going into work are prepared to ‘positively influence their own lives and the world around them’.

Solveig Østrem

Profile

Professor of pedagogy at the Department of Early Childhood Education at Oslo Metropolitan University.

Solveig Østrem's profile

Chains of Empowerment or Chains of Disempowerment? Critique, Courage, Agency, and Freedom of Expression as Dimensions of Educator Professionalism

Solveig Østrem is a professor of pedagogy at the Department of Early Childhood Education at Oslo Metropolitan University.

For two decades, her research and teaching have focused on the tensions between politics, professional practice, pedagogy, and ethics.

Østrem’s main interest lies in questions related to children’s citizenship and how conceptions of the child influence pedagogical practice. These questions are central to her first book, Barnet som subjekt. Etikk, demokrati og pedagogisk ansvar [The Child as Subject: Ethics, Democracy and Pedagogical Responsibility] (2012), and continue to be a recurring theme throughout her research publications.

Several of Østrem’s studies explore how early childhood teachers’ knowledge—understood as situated, context-dependent, and complex—may come into conflict with political expectations of standardization and simplification. Her keynote at NERA 2026 will include insights from a research project about early childhood teachers who challenge requirements that contradict their professional and ethical judgment. The teachers’ narratives describe what they said no to, why and how they voiced their criticism, and the consequences they faced. The project resulted in a book co-authored with Mari Pettersvold, titled Profesjonell uro. Barnehagelæreres ansvar, integritet og motstand [Professional Disquiet: Early Childhood Teachers’ Responsibility, Integrity and Resistance] (2018).