EdTalks 2025 Fall Term First Seminar

Dear All,

The first seminar of the Fall 2025 EdTalks series, organized by the Department of Educational Sciences, will take place on Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 3:30 p.m. The event will be hosted by the Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Education, METU, in Classroom EFD-204, Block D.

In this seminar, Dr. Krystian Szadkowski will deliver a talk titled “Discourse of Academic Excellence as an Instrument of ‘Shock Therapy’: History and the Present of Research Evaluation in Poland.” The event will be held in person. You can find the seminar poster and participation details attached to this email.

In his talk, Dr. Szadkowski will explore both the history and the present of the Polish science evaluation system, discussing how the discourse of “scientific excellence” emerged alongside the “shock therapy” policies implemented during Poland’s transition from socialism to capitalism in the 1990s. He will show, from a historical perspective, that this discourse has functioned not as a neutral concept but as a mechanism legitimizing policies of scarcity and competition—an understanding that continues to shape contemporary scientific systems.

Dr. Krystian Szadkowski is a researcher at the Scholarly Communication Research Group at Adam Mickiewicz University. His research interests include Marxist political economy, transformations of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe, and the concepts of the public and the common in higher education. He worked as a researcher for Education International (2010–2013, Brussels, Belgium) and as a consultant in policy projects funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Between 2018 and 2020, he was a visiting researcher at University College London, University of Oxford, and Aarhus University. His recent books include Capital in Higher Education (2023) and A Marxist Critique of the Ruined University (2025). He currently leads a multi-year research project titled The Origins and Development of Peripheral Academic Capitalism in Poland (1990–2021), funded by the National Science Centre, Poland.

We look forward to your participation.

EDS EdTalks Team