Martin Andreas Andersen

I’ve worked in the special education and social work field since I was 18, primarily with the cognitively disabled. I care deeply about the empowerment of those in need of care. I also am very interested in how the workers in the welfare state are positioned.

A selection of the assignments and research I’ve conducted as I’ve pursued a MA in Educational Sociology. The reports are all in Danish.

Essay Collection in Comparative Studies in Education, Institutions and Policy

In this essay collection, I critique various aspects of disability policies in Denmark. I touch on:

  • The prevalence of neuropedagogy (and similar “citizen-first” approaches) in the special needs field. Are theay really as empirically valid as is posited? Or is this merely professional hubris?
  • The vast amount of data generated on an about citizens “in the system”. Part bureaucratic accountability, part CYA; all digitized in electronic journaling systems. But who is really being documented? The citizen? Or the professional opinion of them?
  • The (at best) semi-successful attempt to redefine “special education” and the students who receive it.
  • A meta-level look at the dis/ability discourse in Denmark. I use James Scheurich’s policy archaeology approach to look behind and beyond the given-ness of the issues at hand, and discuss how and why these are constituted as issues.

Download PDF

Exam paper in Socialization and Everyday Life

I took a look at positions concerning masculinity in the days immediately after Gillette launched the #thebestmencanbe ad campaign in January 2019. I scraped Instagram for hashtags surrounding this topic, and performed naive frequency analysis in R to discern topic clusters. Based on these clusters, I analyzed the positioning and performative aspects with a basis in Goffman’s theater metaphor, as well as borrowing positioning theory from social psychology.

Download PDF View data and code on Github

Exam paper for Contemporary Themes in Educational Sociology

Through a group interview I researched how social care workers view themselves as professionals. Through a discussion with Foucault’s gouvernementalité and Baumann’s concept of the liquid modernity I propose that much of the “professional” tools available to social workers, in the form of pedagogical dogmas and guidelines, are less about managing the output of the social worker and more about ensuring cohesiveness in a constantly emergent and, well, fluid, worker base.

Download PDF

Masters Thesis

in progress

I text-mined speeches from the floor of the Danish parliament, ranging from 1978 to 2019. My focus was to investigate and describe trends in the political discourse on and around education. In addition; I wanted to try and drill down into the tension between the vocational and academic tracks in Danish lower secondary education.

The data set is too large to store on GitHub, but is available upon request.

Download PDF View code on GitHub Interactive topic model exploration

Updated: