News

Dr Josefine Wagner (post-doctoral researcher from the University of Innsbruck)

From January through June, the Department of Anthropology (Prof. Hana Cervinkova) and the Department of Education (Prof. Sharon Todd) are co-hosting Dr. Josefine Wagner, a post-doctoral researcher from the Department of Teacher Education and School Research of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Dr Wagner is an educational anthropologist and a former secondary school teacher. In her research she focuses on inclusive pedagogy, disability studies and the historiography of special needs education. As a past Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow of the European Doctorate in Teacher Education (grant agreement no. 676452), she is an alumni of the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland and the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her doctoral work, a multi-sited ethnography of inclusive policies and practices in Poland, Austria, and Germany, earned her the 2019 Concha Delgado Gaitan award of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Josefine is also a former fellow of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC where she worked on the project, “Sonderpädagogik: Eugenic continuities and ruptures in special needs education.”. Dr Wagner is currently completing final revisions on her book manuscript, titled “Schools for Whom? Global Governance, Disability and Education in Central Europe” which is planned for publication in the SUNY press’ special series, Education in Global Perspectives in 2025. While at Maynooth University, she will work on her book and pursue research for her new school ethnographic project, “Learning friendship: A cross-cultural study of social belonging in education.”