As well as the Institute of Education, the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures hosts five academic Departments: Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, History, Irish Studies, Languages, Cultures and Film, and Politics. It also hosts the Confucius Institute and several Research Centres, including the Centre for the Study of International Slavery.
On the face of it, this might seem an eclectic grouping. It's certainly a global and multilingual community: we have staff and students from all over the world who use a broad range of methodologies taken from the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities to study all kinds of topics, from the traces of ancient civilisations to contemporary politics.
Unlike some of the other Schools and Faculties in the University, people tend to be at the heart of our concerns: how people live or lived in the past, how societies are or were organised, how people communicate and understand their identities, how they use culture and creativity to make sense of the world, and how they can tackle social issues and inequalities.
People are also, of course, at the heart of Education Studies. Interrogating the different ways in which education systems have developed across the world, how they work (or don't work) in their current forms, and how education institutions, including universities, can support the production and dissemination of knowledge in a rapidly changing world are questions that concern not only Departmental staff and students but many other Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences researchers.
We need education studies researchers to help us understand how digital technologies and generative AI systems can be both harnessed and interrogated as education tools, and Liverpool Institute of Education colleagues are engaged in worldwide networks of researchers specialising in these topics.