As part of the EduTrack project, the MPIWG team examines how human migration, social mobility, and digital access are reshaping knowledge exchange between Asia and Europe today, as they have throughout history. Organized around two key areas, this research will bring historical perspectives to bear upon ways of understanding practices that are predominantly regarded as contemporary developments, from grassroots knowledge-sharing to national digitization strategies. These research areas will enable fresh insights that can strengthen collaboration in higher education and academic research.
The first research area, “Migratory Expertise and Practices of Knowledge Transmission,” is dedicated to exploring the individual and group educational experiences that form as sociocultural responses to migration trajectories. Research in this area inquires into how such experiences affect community health practices that involve learning protocols of caring for future generations and ancestors, and similar knowledge practices. An intersectional approach ensures that economic mobility and gender are understood when reconstructing the educational experiences of Asian immigrants within East and Southeast Asia over the longue durée, and when comparing them with subsequent and more contemporary experiences of community-building and knowledge transmission among Asian peoples in Europe. These demographic histories will particularly be addressed through attention to the population loss and displacement instigated by acute (fast) disasters and catastrophes, slow disasters, as well as chronic political, social, and economic situations that prolong their effects.
The second research area, “Tackling the Digital Gap between Asia and Europe,” is dedicated to comparing how European and Asian countries possessing vast cultural heritage collections approach the digitization and accessibility of historical materials. Research in this area engages in the examination of national policies with regard to the implementation of different open access and open science schemes, the economic structures that provide access (including private-sector business models), and how these factors influence current and future higher education and research—particularly in traditional and digital historical studies. The research methods involve conducting oral interviews for different stakeholders, as well as collecting data to examine the amount and accessibility of such materials in Europe and Asia.
Together, these key research areas contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how political and economic contexts across different regions of Asia, and at different historical moments, shape the ways educational and migratory experiences matter to how science and knowledge are produced, valued, and used in diverse sociocultural contexts.
About the Edutrack Project
How can knowledge transfer and education meet the challenges of rapid technological and demographic change? This is the focus of “EduTrack: Tracking Education Pathways and Social Policies,” a six-year, interdisciplinary collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), and the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science (MPIPS, until March 2026 as Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity). The project is funded by the Max Planck Society and led by Population Europe, a Europe-wide science-for-policy network.
