University of Groningen

Faculty Member, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences

Researcher/Lecturer in Clinical Education

Thesis Title: Ocularcentrism and Deaf people: A social photography project.

About

Ernst received his PhD in sociology and social policy at the University of Durham (UK) in 1996. He has long researched topics in deaf studies, including sign language lexicography and monitoring in deaf education. For three years (2006-2009) he was senior researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ernst nurtures a deep interest in the sociology of knowledge, and in particular the social construction of academic research. Whereas previous work addressed the emergent nature of deaf studies as fledgling academic field, now his interest is with clinical education—a field concerned with rehabilitative interventions in situations of teaching and learning that are taken to be special in some way.

A particular focus is the academic action through which clinical education expertise articulates as clinical, as educational, and as expertise; action that cannot be separated from the normative question what is and who are regarded as special in education.

In addition, Ernst is also interested in the sociotechnologies and new techniques of research and how these participate in the experts - teachers - learners chain of educational co-construction. An example of such a technique is evidence-based education or EBE, which transferred from the field of medicine as the latest episode in applying the apparently irresistable combination of practical reasoning and computational logic to education.

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