Presentation

Malin Ideland is pro-vice-chancellor for research and doctoral education at Malmö University. She works as professor in Educational sciences and is docent in Ethnology.

Malin Ideland's main research interest is marketization and commercialization of education. How come that commercial companies have gained such an important role in Swedish education? What consequences does that have for the understanding of education, knowledge, teachers and students? An important result from the research project Education inc. is that a discourse on school in crisis and in need of change makes room for commercial actors.

Malin Ideland’s work can also be positioned in science studies. She studies what is considered as useful – and useless – educational research in the making of evidence-based education. One important result is that the market logics of education are contributing to the cultural construction of useful educational research.

Environmental issues is a third theme in Ideland's work. Among other things, she has analyzed how the cultural understanding of who lives an environmentally friendly life is embedded in discourses of Swedishness, whiteness and middle-classness. She has also investigated transformations of food waste and wastewater into biogas and biofertilizer, and how waste is assigned economic and cultural value.

Ideland is the scientific leader of the doctoral school Education, Learning and Globalization and supervises doctoral students.