Spousal care in facilitating “international and comparative education” 1950s–1990s

This article rethinks knowledge production in International and Comparative Education by foregrounding spousal labour and care as part of the field’s infrastructure. Centring Ingrid Husén (1917–1991) and her five-decade partnership with the renowned scholar of International and Comparative Education Torsten Husén (1916–2009), it mobilises a relational perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies and Actor–Network Theory, and especially the concept “matters of care”, to challenge historiographies built around solitary intellectual achievement. The study combines Husén’s four autobiographical books and an unpublished memoir, with approximately one thousand references to Ingrid in his professional correspondence from the 1950s to the 1990s, supplemented by an interview with their daughter and one of the sons. Reading the archive as textual ethnography of transnational research, the article traces three phases: (1) early network formation, where greetings, hosting and domestic coordination embed spouses into scholarly relations; (2) peak internationalisation in the 1970s–1980s, when Ingrid’s travel companionship, hospitality, scheduling, and domestic coordination sustained the material conditions of mobility, reputation and collaboration; and (3) a late web of care during Ingrid’s illness and death, when condolence letters show how affect and obligation circulate across the field. During this entire time Ingrid also served with domestic, intellectual and emotional support enabling the husband’s career. The article argues that care is not merely supportive but epistemically and relationally constitutive of international knowledge production. By making historically undervalued care work analytically visible, it offers a method for writing more equitable histories of educational science and its global networks.