Contemporary Educational Legitimation Ecology: positions, knowledge, and critique

This dissertation focuses on the current Czech space of legitimation practices in education as a variable sphere of justification and critique of educational goals rooted in global transformations of educational institutions, autonomies of the nation states and transnational comparative data. Since the debate on educational reform (2004), the Czech legitimation educational ecology has been diversified by different types of knowledge and actors (state, non- profit, private sector). In this work, I argue that legitimation as a critical action is today, in various ways and processes (knowledge regimes, patterns of actorship) derived from traditional jurisdictions (state and professional structures) and moves to more flexible structures, which I call topologies. In jurisdictions, mostly passive audiences remain. New legitimation topologies connect values and data and, in many ways, replace dysfunctional state structures, using specific disconnections, but also question the public nature of negotiating educational goals. Based on relational ontology and sociological topological studies and through a qualitative relational analysis of legitimation practices in three fields (published normative documents, public debates and semi-structured interviews with state and non-state actors) I show in the period..