Professor Michael Young
Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy, Institute of Education, University of London

This lecture will trace changes from the ‘social construction of knowledge’ thesis which became very popular in educational studies in the 1970s and early 1980s to the emerging ‘social realist’ approach to knowledge that has been developed since about 2000. The lecture will discuss some of the pitfalls of the earlier thesis which led to its partial collapse and some of the problems posed by the new social realist approach. The lecture will also comment on possible parallels with other fields such as the sociology of science.