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jg.janmaat@hotmail.com / g.janmaat@ioe.ac.uk
Tel: +44-20-76126631
Department of Lifelong and Comparative Education
Faculty of Policy and Society
Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Who am I?
During the final years of my Human Geography studies at the University of Amsterdam I developed an interest in nationalism and ethnic conflicts in the post-communist states of Eastern Europe. This interest led me to focus on the relations between the ethnic Ukrainian majority and the Russian minority in Ukraine for my doctoral research. More particularly, I examined the response of the Russian minority to state-led nation-building policies in education. I found that these policies promoted a cultural understanding of the Ukrainian nation, concentrating as they did on language and history as markers distinguishing Ukrainian national identity from that of Russia. The response of the Russian minority was found to depend heavily on the relative strength of their numbers in the different regions of the country: opposition in places where they made up a near majority; integration in regions where their numbers were small.
After my graduation I wanted to do something completely different and started to work at the Province of North Holland as a civic servant in charge of projects aimed at the reduction of CO2 emission. This experience of working for a regional state made me realize fairly quickly however that I was made for academia.
I therefore resumed my academic career at the Institute of Education, where in December 2003 I started as a post-doc with an independent research agenda. Publishing from my doctoral research on language policies, history textbooks and understandings of national identity in Ukraine and beyond, I gradually shifted my research interests to such themes as civic values, political socialization and the relation with inequality and social cohesion, inspired by the research of Andy Green and other colleagues at the Institute. I began to examine these issues in a cross-national comparative manner, using the databases of well-known international surveys such as the WVS, EVS, Eurobarometer, ISSP and the IEA Civic Education Study.
Currently, I am engaged in exploring contextual determinants of civic values among adolescents as part of the research agenda of the LLAKES Research Center.
