IOE Welcomes Dr. Adam Gemar

Adam Gemar (U.S.) has recently begun his 12-month sojourn with the IOE Laboratory for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education as part of the HSE International Postdoc Fellowship Program 2019. Coming from Fargo, North Dakota, Adam boasts premier credentials in socio-economic and cultural studies that he has earned from leading U.S. and UK institutions, including Yale University, London School of Economics and Durham University. He completed his doctoral degree earlier this year. One of the key areas of Adam’s research is educational inequality.     

Studies of educational inequality and how policy upgrades across the domains of education and beyond could help mitigate it so that various stakeholders would benefit from more equitable learning & development environments have been one of IOE’s central strands of R&D in recent years.

The scholarly agenda at the IOE Laboratory for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education specifically aims to explore how various aspects of inequality, including regional differences in the quality and availability of education, a divide by social status and income level, socio-cultural heterogeneity, disparities in family background and baseline academic capital, etc., have affected educational opportunities, learning paths and career choices.       

Stark socio-economic segregation is the principal factor that has significantly impaired the capacity of Russian education to serve as a conduit and facilitator of social mobility while also hampering its competitiveness on the international arena and harming the quality of national human capital. Anchored in a comprehensive approach that seeks to foreground examples of best policy action to promote educational equity that are drawn from both individual national cases and massive cross-country comparisons, IOE’s outputs in the dimension of inequality research provide conclusive evidence-based groundwork that strategists at different levels can rely on in implementing sustainable educational transformations so that everyone could benefit from positive change.       

Throughout his career, Adam Gemar has been involved in a vast range of expertise-intensive flagship research projects in social sciences whose findings have been featured in the world’s most reputable Q1 publications and to which he would unwaveringly contribute on par with his more distinguished senior peers, Adam’s academic supervisor at Durham University, Prof. Vikky Boliver comments.

The extensive exposures that Adam has had to varied frameworks and dimensions of socio-cultural scholarship, including inequality in STEM education, Asian religious studies, etc., have enabled him to develop a strong capacity for multifaceted research involving advanced methods of complex data analysis, which certainly makes Dr. Gemar a most valuable addition to the IOE team.