Research

The DEEP Expertise Centre has three aims.

1. To promote historical and philosophical perspectives within the BSS Faculty;
2. To increase its visibility both at the UG across faculties and in the Netherlands more generally; and,
3. To unfold a productive interaction with a wider public from outside of the university, interested in questions about schooling, mental health, human types, neuro-enhancing, scientific practice, and the like. This aim will be achieved via 1) education, 2) research, 3) and specific strategies to enhance public outreach. Thus, DEEP stands out as an original, interdisciplinary and internationally interconnected centre, developing high quality research while acting as bridge between academy and citizens.

In doing so, the activities of the DEEP Expertise Centre take as its mission to stimulate historical and theoretical research on the history of educational systems and educational policy, and to encourage critical analyses of how psychological and educational expertise has shaped our understanding of what characterizes a human being or a child, as well as the way teaching activities, schooling policies, psychological labels and theories influence our live in contemporary society.

In terms of research, the DEEP Expertise Centre has three specific aims.

1. To exploit the historical sources to extract knowledge on urging social topics such as the resilience of young citizens in difficult times such as war, the role of education in social change, studies on mental illness, and teacher training reform. In general, our research enable us to examine, within a long-term perspective, when, how and why education and human behaviour has changed over time or under specific circumstance.
2. The Centre will contribute to the clarification and philosophical assessment of key concepts that are frequently used when describing and explaining human behaviour, social changes or/and educational processes. For example, when and why did certain concepts appear, and how concept denoting, e.g., learning disabilities, can be understood in different ways.
3. DEEP actively promotes the use of qualitative methods. Thus, the researchers connected to the Centre use and assess a great variety of historical, anthropological, sociological, and philosophical tools and methods, among them also quantitative (such as digital humanities). Furthermore, the Centre unites experts worldwide working in the field, guiding the development of new methods and standards at the service of the research done at the BSS faculty, but also, more generally, in the behavioural and social sciences in the Netherlands and abroad.