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Noah W. Sobe
Professor, History Department

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Current Research

I work on the history of education and on futures of education.  My current scholarship looks at ways we might be able to transform education so that knowledge and learning can help us build sustainable futures for humanity and the living planet earth.  Recent work includes:

  • N. W. Sobe, (2022) “The Future and the Past are Unevenly Distributed: COVID’s Educational Disruptions and UNESCO’s Global Reports on Education," Paedagogica Historica, Vol. 58, No. 5 https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.2112244 

Over the past two decades my research has looked at the global circulation of educational policies and practices with a particular interest in the ways that schools function as contested sites of cultural production for the making up of people, peoples, societies and worlds.   This has taken me in a number of directions, ranging from research methodologies in the field of comparative education, to post-Socialist education, to the importance that affect and emotion play in schooling (complete CV downloadable here).

Selected publications on "context", data governance and history of education and comparative education research methods include.

  • N.W. Sobe, “The slowing global order: boredom and affect in criss-crossing comparative education research” in S. Carney & E. Klerides (Editors) Identities and Education: Comparative Perspectives in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 163-177. [PDF available here]
  • N.W. Sobe & J. Kowalczyk, “Context, Entanglement and Assemblage as Matters of Concern in Comparative Education Research.” in T. Seddon, J. Ozga & N. W. Sobe  (Editors) World Yearbook of Education 2018: Time-Space and Mobility (Routledge, 2018), p. 197-204. [PDF available here]
  • I. Silova, N. W. Sobe, A. Korzh, & S. Kovalchuk (Editors) Reimagining Utopias: Theory and Method for Educational Research in Post-Socialist Contexts (Boston and Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017)
  • N.W. Sobe, "Entanglement and Transnationalism in the History of American Education" in Thomas Popkewitz (Ed.) (Re)visioning The History of Education: An Intercontinental Perspective On the Questions, Methods and Knowledge of Schools (New York: Palgrave, 2013), p. 93-107. [PDF available here]

My work on the history of affect, emotion, and particularly the history of boredom in school includes: 

  • N. W. Sobe, “Affect, Embodiment and Pedagogic Practice in Early-Twentieth-Century American Progressive Education: The School of Organic Education and John Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow,” in K. Berdelmann, B. Fristzsche, K. Rabenstein & J. Scholz (Eds.) Transformation von Schule, Unterricht und Profession: Erträge praxistheoretischer Forschung (Berlin: Schöningh, 2018), p. 167-184 [PDF available here]
  • N. W. Sobe, “Boredom and Classroom Design: the Affective Economies of School Engagement.” in I. Grosvenor & L. Rasmussen (Eds.) Making Education: Governance by Design. (New York Springer, 2018), p. 157-182. [PDF available here]
  • N. W . Sobe, "Attention and Boredom in the 19th-Century American School: The ‘Drudgery’ of Learning and Teaching and the Common School Reform Movement" in Sabine Reh, Kathrin Berdelmann, and Jörg Dinkelaker, (Editors), Aufmerksamkeit Zur Geschichte, Theorie und Empirie eines pädagogischen Phänomens (Springer, 2015), p. 55-70. [PDF available here]
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