The History of Education Quarterly is celebrating its sixtieth year of publication in 2020. During that time, it has published over 1,500 articles and extended reviews. An examination of these articles reveals several enduring themes that have shaped the field and that will likely continue to do so as HEQ moves into its seventh decade. Given this, the editors have asked scholars to envision that future. Using select articles from the past as starting points, Volume 60 features a series of forums in which historians of education consider future avenues of research related to designated themes.
Contributors to this second forum on “The Politics of Knowledge” used three articles as springboards for examining how material, institutional, and social structures have shaped the production of knowledge historically. They are: Mary Ann Dzuback's “Gender and the Politics of Knowledge” (2003); James Anderson's, “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy” (1993); and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann's “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy” (1987).Footnote 1 Jessica Blatt, Christopher Loss, Linda Perkins, and Nidia Bañuelos each take a different perspective on the subject, exploring how the content of social science research, the focus of federal research funding, the careers of individual scholars, and the status hierarchy of institutions, all embody the politics of knowledge.
