Thomas S. Popkewitz (born August 16, 1940) is an professor in the department of curriculum and instruction, University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, US. His studies explore historically and contemporary education as practices of making different kinds of people (e.g., the citizen, the learner, the child left behind) that distribute differences (e.g., the achievement gap). He has written or edited approximately 40 books and 300 articles in journals and book chapters translated into 17 languages. Recent studies focus on the comparative reason of educational research as cartographies and architectures that produce phantasmagrams of societies, population and differences. The studies entail theoretical, discursive, ethnography, and historical studies that explore school, professional identities, and the relation to conceptions of differences inscribed childhood, learning and cultural differences.
Biography
Popkewitz earned a B.A. at Hunter College, City University of New York (1962), a M.A. at Teachers College, Columbia University (1964) and an Ed.D. from New York University (1970). The American Educational Research Association awarded Popkewitz the Division B (Curriculum Studies) Lifetime Achievement Award (2008) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education gave him its Distinguished Faculty Award (2008). Popkewitz was elected as Fellow to the American Educational Research Association (2014). He has also been awarded a fellowship as guest researcher professor at the French Ministère de L’Éducation Nationale, De L’Ensigeignement Supérieur et De La Recherche, Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique (2010), distinguished overseas professor at East China Normal University (2014–2016), guest professor at Luxembourg (2012–2014), Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universidad de Granada in Spain (2014), and lifetime honorary professor at the Nanjing Normal University. He was elected to the Laureate Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society in Education in 2016.
Popkewitz began his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, where he holds the position of professor. In 1978 Popkewitz was selected by the US State Department to organize an American delegation on teaching and learning for joint Soviet/American seminar at USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences Presidium, marking the beginning of a career that has been particularly defined by its international focus. In 1981, he was named a Fulbright Fellow, allowing him to spend the year at the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences as a senior researcher. In the fall of 1988 he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala and from 1994 to 1999 acted as a visiting professor at Umeå University in Sweden. His international work has also included an award (1988) as W. F. Wilson Fellow from the Oppenheimer Foundation 1999–2000, in 1999–2000 a Senior Fulbright Fellow award at the University of Helsinki, and in 2004 a Finnish Academy of Science Fellow award.