How Institutions Change: Looking Backward at Policing and Forward in Education
When
Join us on Zoom for a virtual presentation by Professor Jennifer Earl as she presents her work as a 2021-22 Udall Center Fellow, followed by a question-and-answer session. The Udall Center Fellows Program offers a semester off from normal teaching to allow for creative scholarship and pursuit of funds to further the Fellow’s research.
Learn more about the Udall Center Fellows Program
Prof. Earl will present on two related projects she has undertaken while a Udall Center Fellow. First, Earl will summarize the major claims of a co-authored monograph examining changes to best practice models for protest policing in the US from 1960 to 1980. In a new approach to explaining innovation and organizational field changes, Earl will outline her and her collaborator’s new “Institutions, Innovations, and Selection” model. This model makes sense of organizational innovation and field change by examining the heterogeneity of innovations prior to diffusion, the diversity in the construction of organizational and field-level problems, key opportunities to advance institutional field commitments, and differences in power and standing of various stakeholders. Second, Earl will discuss a new project proposal that she has worked on as a Udall Center Fellow that seeks to understand how social actors undermine the use of science in educational policymaking, focusing particularly on places where retrenchment in the deployment of science is evident. For instance, her proposed project would examine anti-critical race theory and anti-masking controversies to understand how actors try to demobilize science in policy-making.