{"id":106,"date":"2026-01-22T11:21:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T11:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/polart\/?p=106"},"modified":"2026-01-27T12:11:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T12:11:39","slug":"introducing-professor-sotiria-grek-principal-investigator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/polart\/introducing-professor-sotiria-grek-principal-investigator\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Professor Sotiria Grek, Principal Investigator"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A research journey towards <\/strong>POLART<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

POLART is shaped by a research path that began far from formal policy studies, in the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Greece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up in a densely populated neighbourhood, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201c…everyday life unfolded through amix of gritty poverty, violence and social struggle,alongside vibrant celebrations, deep friendships, and strong family bonds. Amidst these vivid contradictions and sensory overload, my father instilled the love ofartin me\u2013 theatre, in particular\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Sotiria remembers vividly her first visit, age 4 or 5, when the huge dragon prop in the homonymous play by Evgeny Schwartz, fell in front of her as she sat in the first row; a terrifying but ultimately decisive experience that conveyed the thin, invisible line between art and reality. At school, art was not part of the curriculum, but was everywhere on the walls: it\u2019s unlikely one might find a more graffitied school in Greece. Although Sotiria did not particularly like school and all its institutionalised rituals, she was desperate to study at university, believing the latter would be a way out of a world she felt she belonged to, but also wished to escape from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This early immersion in the material, embodied and often unruly presence of art shaped Sotiria\u2019s academic path. Studying History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, working closely with Professor Giorgos Hourmouziadis proved formative. His Marxist archaeology, focused on everyday objects (from tools, to bones, seeds, figurines and small personal ornaments) led to the material engagement with the soil. Working in neolithic sites and producing knowledge about everyday life through digging with one\u2019s own hands, challenged dominant hierarchies of \u2018high art\u2019 and classical antiquity, and left a lasting imprint on thinking about how knowledge, culture and value are produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following her undergraduate studies, Sotiria pursued an MPhil in Art History and worked closely with artists as a curator, exhibition-maker and education officer at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOMus). There, she engaged deeply with Russian avant-garde and constructivist art, inspired by its fusion of art and life, its material experimentation and its utopian ambitions. Perhaps more than working with the artworks themselves, she enjoyed organising the educational programmes for adults and young people at the museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cSeeing how young people received the materiality and abstraction of constructivist art, not as a contradiction but as <\/em>complementarity<\/em>,<\/em> was fascinating.<\/em> It was <\/em>ultimately the<\/em> young people\u2019s imagination and optimism that persuaded me to leave my country to improve my museum and gallery education skills<\/em>\u201d<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In September 2002, Sotiria arrived in Scotland, first to the University of St Andrews for an MLitt in Museum and Gallery Studies, and then to a PhD in Edinburgh. Her doctoral research examined museum education in Dundee, revealing the extent to which a metric culture had been inserted in almost every aspect of cultural life in the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, Sotiria joined the Centre for Educational Sociology (CES) at the University of Edinburgh, where she worked with Professors Jenny Ozga and Martin Lawn on European education policy and the politics of numbers. This marked a shift towards public policy and governance, while deepening her interest in quantification as a cultural, political and material practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI was captured by the lure of quantification, by both its playful and serious expressions and by the multiple ways that increasingly we have tocome to consider what counts asonlythat which can be counted. Above all, atthe time, CES was a thriving research community, where I learnt how to think and how to write; the place I became a researcher.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As a lecturer in Social Policy, and later through her first ERC-funded project on quantification in global governance, Sotiria\u2019s research increasingly focused on the \u2018art and craft\u2019 of producing evidence: the narratives, visuals, aesthetics and embodied practices that underpin numbers in policy-making. These insights, shaped by work on the Sustainable Development Goals, post-truth politics and global expertise, became the foundations of POLART.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relationship of quantification with qualification is central to the POLART examination as the destination of a research journey through art and numbers that involved multiple twists and turns. POLART explores how art and aesthetics create the material, embodied and narrative conditions that give rise to new collective values and qualities that may often translate into new expert numbers for public policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cLike with the work of policy makers and artists, research necessitates storytelling: the story of my research journey, with POLART as its destination, was often a search for jobs, a new home, a disciplinary base \u2013 but it was also a search for an understanding of how knowledge produces social change. I have always been fascinatedby the ways that the making of knowledge, through its multiple forms, requires creativity and imagination, optimismand camaraderie, and ultimately therecognition of the social, culturaland material dimensions as itskey constitutive elements\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read Sotiria\u2019s staff profile (link to bio)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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