Abstract
This introduction to the special issue questions the idea of ‘Brexit shock’. It uses this discursive theme to focus on the way policy discourse that unfolds through the space of governing Europe has become disconnected from everyday discourses that unfold through the space of experiencing Europe. This dilemma identifies the point of departure for this special issue, which focuses on experiencing Europe.
European Educational Research Journal special issue: Experiencing Europe
After the Brexit shock
On a rainy Thursday in 2016, 52% of British voters opted for Britain to leave the European Union (EU). The participation rate in that vote on 23 July was 70%, which represents 36% of all British voters supporting the ‘leave’ campaign. Did the leave campaign really win? How could that vote happen when the stakes were so high? The result was hard to believe, but was it unpredictable? Brexit seemed to come unexpectedly. This big surprise prompted a helpless and hectic search for explanations.
Yet it is not so surprising that people express their concerns and fears when offered the chance of a referendum; anti-Europe voices always had a certain prominence in the English-speaking islands. But there are surprises in the reactions or, rather, the lack of reactions that followed the vote: the inability to cope with an unexpected political decision and the evident helplessness when consequences cannot be foreseen in that moment of change. It is surprising that the loudest protagonists of the Brexit campaign became quiet so soon after their success. It is surprising how little was known about the political procedure to exit the EU and that there were no obvious plans to put the result of the referendum into practice. It is also surprising how European neighbours shrugged, turning away, turning back to their own business – no words of regret or goodbyes; no gestures of support or trust.
We don’t offer answers to these surprising effects of Brexit in this special issue of the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ), but we do take the surprise that followed 23 July 2016 seriously. We find it surprising that, behind all the helpless and hapless reasoning around the referendum, the dominant question was: how could Brexit happen? But we find it unsurprising that, despite this vote, subsequent negotiations have found no easy route out of a co-existing community of nation states, for there is no way out of a globalised economy. We treat surprise as an indicator of social disease, an indication that people are experiencing a break in the picture ‘we’ had of ‘our’ world. We take the fact of surprise seriously, because asking ‘how could Brexit happen?’ expresses a wish to understand something that was previously unimaginable and unimagined. We use surprise to problematise and explain a rupture in an established normality.
The articles in this special issue were being written long before that rainy British Thursday that produced Brexit. But the gap that became evident with the Brexit vote is not new. It became visible at the beginning, when those who constructed the European community were miles away from the life worlds of those contextualised by Europe. That gap became visible again as those contextualised by Europe had their say. Those citizens who voted for or against Brexit – like those who now concentrate around nationalist parties, or protect the European labour market at the expense of African and Syrian refugees – demonstrate that (their) experience matters. Those citizen actions show us that politicians and people follow differing logics. The surprise of Brexit and the surprising divergence in views about European welfare – who is entitled to what – reveal the deep gulf between governing and experiencing Europe.
How does all this relate to education?
This gap between governing Europe and experiencing Europe is relevant to education because it hinges on people’s ways of learning. The roots of this gap are explained through the repeated critique of neo-liberal politics. The continuous de-commodification of welfare and education has produced, but not legitimised, growing social inequality. The distributional map of Brexit ‘leave’ or ‘stay’ votes showed a clear social division – between young and old, country and city, poor and rich, privileged and disadvantaged groups of population. Privatised schools, exposed to market mechanisms and committed to performance benchmarks, fail one of their implicit tasks: to legitimise social stratification in democratic societies, by providing insights and arguments that help citizens accept the idea that social difference makes sense.
A second explanation turns away from Britain and looks at the project of Europe and the ongoing process of Europeanisation. Arguably, these processes of re-making European education by adjusting laws and regulations, and harmonising qualification systems, rest on a logic that has not been adequately communicated. Commitments made without visible evidence and decisions that were insufficiently transparent mean people experience their outcomes as alienated bureaucratic nonsense. What was and still is missing from Europeanisation is a pro-active approach that addresses tensions between the general European framework and specificities of citizens’ experience, which necessarily stretch out unevenly across differentiated social contexts (see Hummrich in this volume). This kind of responsiveness calls for knowledge about the EU and the art of constructing social coherence; it is about building feelings of belonging instead of fears of becoming marginalised. Interviews with leave voters revealed their strong sense of social inequality and deep fears of foreign influences and foreign people. In their view, the EU is associated with their personal feeling of being socially excluded. The lesson is that successful politics need socially inclusive societies: the European project depends on people’s lived experience of belonging, engaging and actively participating in a democratic community.
A third way to look at Brexit is through the eyes of education, reading the reactions to Europeanisation as symptoms of a collective learning process. Learning starts when the normal, taken-for-granted ideas of self and world are interrupted (see Niemeyer, this volume). Trying to understand Brexit shock and subsequent European fragmentation by asking ‘how this could happen?’ marks the beginning of learning processes: often unintended, mostly informal, yet having effects in everyday life. Today nobody can be sure about the future of the European project. But the rise of EU-critical voices disturbs the trajectory of Europeanisation, creating uncertain futures that open up chances for learning. Those learning opportunities may close the gap between experience and governing; they may also accentuate it.
Education plays a core role in the process of constructing Europe – this has been repeatedly stated in official political documents of the EU and affirmed by the design of complementary research funding policies. Networks of researchers in and beyond Europe have contributed to the project of making Europe, sometimes critical, sometimes affirmatively.
But the challenge for research is about contributing to Europeanisation critically: where critique neither negates nor affirms, but enables reconstructive knowledge building. National education reforms, transformations of politics and practice in the wide field of education, are induced by European agreements and reflect supra-national rationales. But what do we actually know about the everyday complexities of these double-ended governing processes that tie policy and practice at the European and national level together? How is education conceptualised in the ‘learning society’ of Europe and how is it lived? Who is writing the curricula and what is taught? What are the lessons learned in the actual process of making Europe and how do they relate to the policy learnings associated with Europeanisation?
This issue of the EERJ enters these uncertain territories that are expanding between layers of education policy and educational practice. We investigate these ‘analytic borderlands’ between governing and experience by making two intellectual moves. First, we build on research that documents how practices of governing are changing with the fabrication of ‘Europe’, and also draw on studies of globalisation that show how experiencing global transitions disturbs established cultures and troubles individuals’ orientations, norms and values.
Second, we hold these intersections between governing and experience open to understand processes of Europeanisation in the field of education from the angle of ‘experiencing Europe’. This methodological shift means we focus on the experience of different social actors and we document their mindsets, the space of orientation that frames, forms and filters their particular experience of Europeanisation and how it affects what they know and do as they visualise Europe and its relation to the supra-national space of ‘Europe’ through their socially embedded and temporally disturbed memories and imaginings.
These two intellectual moves shift the focus of analysis from knowledge networks and their governing effects towards ways of seeing Europe – ‘Europe’. They surface the conscious and unconscious choices embedded in visualisation and how the look, visual reasoning and effects of seeing affect people’s learning to be and become human. In this special issue, we capture this focus question by asking:
How does Europeanisation affect knowledge-building projects that materialise cultures and identities, and with what effects on educational, social and political action?
Understanding Europeanisation
The making of Europe as a process of ‘Europeanisation’ is the core object of study in the EERJ. In the first issue, editor Martin Lawn indicated the journal ‘will be a journal about educational research in Europe, a Europe in the process of becoming, and a work in progress’ (Lawn, 2002: 2). This agenda was centred by the idea of knowledge building and its effects that would
… clarify the past and at the same time unlock ‘national’ traditions into a common discourse on educational research. This process of Europeanisation, a recognition of a fresh stage in ‘Europeanness’, will require intellectuals to defend the particularity of intellectual traditions and institutions as a basis for working creatively with difference to strengthen a common project and to resist current homogenising imperatives. (Lawn, 2002: 2)
Over the last 13 years, the question of governance has run like a red line through the topics of the EERJ. Using the ‘possibility of a European public space for education/public spaces interweaved with education’ (Nóvoa and Lawn, 2002: 1) as a point of departure, researchers opened up a field of research related to the creation of a ‘European educational space’ through European policy making and policy-research networks. This novel approach showed how instruments and procedures, actors and networks, and explicit and implicit effects of governance of education contributed to the fabrication of ‘Europe’. As a project, this was a study of governing that sat outside the usual
… normative approach in which the examination of education as a system is strongly bounded by the traditions, laws and practices of the nation-state boundaries in which it is seen as existing. National and professional identity, political organisation, policy formation and public/private networks are all viewed as contained within the borders of the state. (Nóvoa and Lawn, 2002: 1)
Yet this project that sees Europeanisation through concepts, methods and practices of governing Europe has come to frame the very idea of ‘Europeanisation’. It is a methodological effect that sometimes obscures the lived experience of making Europe. It is the impulse to broaden this field of critical educational studies that motivates this special issue. We investigate Europeanisation in order to surface ‘new possibilities to be imagined and discerned in the European public and institutional spaces’ (Nóvoa and Lawn, 2002: 1). We map out educational theory and practice that grapples with the idea of ‘active construction’ of ‘educational space’, when the space of education is no longer governed through national institutional regimes but also through governmentalities that, increasingly, reference supra-national and sub-national spaces and transnational trajectories.
Yet, we suggest, the rationality that underpins the concept of governance studies is troubled by transnationalism. This means historic, socially embedded knowledge-building projects are disturbed by encounters with novel concepts, methods and practices. It means all ‘knowers’ must grapple with novelty that appears as degrees of change across a multiplicity of scales. These experiences of transnationalism arise with mobility: being in dilemmatic spaces and being subject to things from elsewhere. Transnationalism is a way of knowing through spaces and places that fall outside, but remain inflected by, historical forms of Eurocentrism (Rizvi, 2011). The effects of transnationalism become apparent in everyday life, when familiar points of reference – once embedded, normalised and therefore taken for granted within national cultures – are disturbed by unfamiliar discourses, practices and circuits of knowledge and authority. As critics of embedded knowledge and authority elaborated through feminist, post-colonial and mobility epistemologies explain, these disturbing experiences and practical consequences are more than ‘policy effects’.
The project of Europeanisation acknowledges education as one of its core pillars, but does not always seem to recognise the re-making of national education infrastructure as an educational exercise in itself. Re-making Europe as supra-national ‘Europe’ serves to respatialise knowledge-building practices, which affects how they unfold as projects and become institutionalised and legitimated through certain practices of learning and working. The construction of a European knowledge society and learning economy (Lundvall, 1997) as well as the education of European citizens demands complex processes of learning and unlearning. These processes of re-making educated and educating individuals unfold in a constant evolution of building, rebuilding and unbuilding educational knowledge and authority. The ongoing reconfigurations of national, international, transnational, sub-national and supra-national interdependencies can be read as a project of governance that is induced through programmes and initiatives that aim to increase mobility, transparency, efficiency, quality and employability of knowledge and qualifications, goods and individuals.
But the concept of ‘governance’ is also subject to Europeanisation as meaning is negotiated between European member states and supra-national ‘Europe’. The strength of the EERJ’s focus on Europeanisation lies in its concerns with network epistemologies that offer new ways of looking at European governance as neither hierarchical nor flat, neither formal nor strictly informal, and not simply multilevel either. For Nóvoa and Lawn (2002), governing ‘Europe’ as a supra-national educational space means navigating novel social worlds through meeting, having conversations, networking, making new links, involving people, circulating and exchanging ideas, crossing boundaries, imagining the future. While Nóvoa and Lawn were interested in understanding how Europe is being fabricated and governed, their perspective was much more subtle and elaborated than the so-called ‘top-down’ perspective.
This means that governing is not just about policy networks; it is about the experience of networks and their knowledge building practices as they are being Europeanised. These experiences may mean being included, but also being excluded from, or marginalised within (included-as-excluded) processes of Europeanisation. For example, when being engaged in or affected by European education politics, when designing curricula, organising Erasmus activities, filling in a Europass template or applying for a Horizon 2020 project.
These ways of experiencing Europe are always located, by different positions and places across Europe, and they are always inflected by ways of seeing Europe, visualised through the Eurocentrism of European knowledge-building projects. These experiences of being the nexus between embedded socialities and governing practices have long been mediated by educational spaces. And educational work is a key ingredient: it mediates these ways of being human with effects that depend on the way educational work and learning practices are located and negotiated. The challenge is to grasp the significance of this educational work as educational spaces, ways of knowing and art of politics melt into and morph with Europeanisation.
What is at stake in these spaces in between governing and experiencing is particular forms of knowledge-authority work – how knowledge and forms of reasoning are mobilised through knowledge-building projects, and have effects as the space of education is coded, authorised and used powerfully by networks. While governing logics frame, form and filter experiences of education, speaking back to governing logics can also persuade people in everyday life towards different choices and actions. And this is where educators have a complex multipositionality – as objects of management, means of citizen formation, and conduits to reasoning and forms of knowledge work, to learning how to learn, and to processes of normalising the conduct of conduct.
Troubling knowledge and authority
This special issue of EERJ on ‘Experiencing Europe’ took on a sharp focus at the 2015 European Conference on Educational Research in Budapest. This annual meeting coincided with the arrival of thousands of refugees in Budapest. That moment prompted the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to question Muslim immigration into ‘Christian Europe’, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered asylum to refugees who could reach her country. This refugee crisis pointed to the limits of ‘Europe’ as a collective project of nations. In subsequent months other European nations took national positions on immigration that, like Brexit, highlighted different voices within the European space. These events are salutary reminders that the project of Europeanisation unfolds through historical moments shaped by paradoxes, contradictions, tensions and unpredictable uncertainties. Subsequent developments – the rise of neo-fascism, the Trump presidency and turns to strongman autocratic leadership – just confirm this trajectory worldwide.
Research on governing Europe offers a critical perspective on the making of Europe, but research on ‘Europe from below’, ‘Europeanisation outside of Brussels’ and beyond Europe is also necessary. Our search for a theoretical frame for these understandings started with cross-national case studies that examined differences in the disturbing interdependencies that unfolded in between globalised labour markets and lifelong learning (Newman et al., 2014; Seddon et al., 2010). At Porto 2014 the symposium ‘Europeanization and educational knowledge/practice’ aimed to ‘name and claim an academic field’ by surfacing ‘paradoxes and contradictions in the politics of education through Europe’. At the 2015 Budapest conference we identified explicit theoretical lenses on ‘governing’, ‘experience’ and ‘space’ that offered intersectional perspectives with potential to grasp and understand the construction of Europe from both ends – from below and above. We attempted to draw out an explicit educational perspective by pointing out the coding of power, where inequality and exclusion were mediated through knowledge building.
In these discussions, we recognised intersectionalities as a way of grasping diverse spaces of Europeanisation: pinpointing the nexus revealed a researchable ‘analytic borderland’. This intellectual move holds the process of Europeanisation open for purposes of analysis by revealing ‘place’ as an intersection that is not essentialised relative to a particular system of representation but, rather, as an analytic moment tensioned between two or more systems of representation (Sassen, 2003). Rather than letting the national–supra-national policy space, or the relation between governing and experience, collapse into itself as a single dividing line, it becomes possible to study Europeanisation through its governance arrangements and also through its multiple localisations, where visualisation and the thickness of place anchors old and also locates new claims and practices, and how they are coded into educational work. As Sassen (2003: 169) argues, these
… analytic moments when two systems of representation intersect … are easily experienced as spaces of silence, of absence. One challenge is to see what happens in those spaces, what operations (analytic, of power, of meaning) take place there … these spaces of intersection [are] what I have called analytic borderlands. Why borderlands? Because they are spaces that are constituted in terms of discontinuities; in them discontinuities are given a terrain rather than reduced to a dividing line.
This methodological frame reveals educational places as locales of knowledge building that have implications for social, political and educational action. Each localisation constitutes a relational space that is perceived and conceived through different forms of governing knowledge, and lived experientially and affectively (Lefebvre, 1991). Each locale produces new circuits of labour: work practices and identity formations that distribute, install and Europeanise particular economic, political and educational operations. That place locates the ‘sum of the stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005: 9). It resources visualisations, the look and visual reasoning that orients a see’r and their learning. That place therefore provides platforms for action and infrastructures for imagining. In this way, analytic borderlands are where different identities and frames of ref- erence are used to struggle over established and novel entitlements, rights to place and citizen- ship practices (Sassen, 2012).
In this special issue, we offer windows into Europeanisation where governance arrangements and multiple localisations fabricate spaces of education. We interrogate experiences of analytic borderlands to show the effects of knowledge-building projects and and to reconstruct how experience is mediated through ways of knowing and doing with effects on education that also unfold through visualities and learning. We argue that this experience-based approach adds to the project of building knowledge in and about education in Europe and also opens up the possibility of using historical and comparative research to theorise educational respatialisation in global transitions by looking beyond the specific case of Europeanisation. Far from neglecting the importance of critical analysis of European governance, we treat experience-based interactions, actions and reactions to shifting patterns of educational governance as a way of understanding the politics that are re-making Europe and the rest of the world.
Re-making educational spaces
This special issue is bookended by the papers on ‘Space’ and ‘Experience’ that were presented at the 2015 European Conference on Educational Research in Budapest. Both these papers have been substantially refined since then. Joanna Barbousas and Terri Seddon offer a three-step commentary on Europeanisation. They begin by troubling the idea of ‘space’ in research on Europeanisation and trace how the study of governing has shifted away from a historicising methodology focused on a particular space-time towards a political sociology of governing. Reclaiming historicisation as a basis for comparative historical sociologies of education, they outline three concepts –‘analytic borderland’, ‘transnational topology’ and ‘space of orientation’– that offer ways of understanding melting and morphing space-times of education, like those we encounter today. They apply these concepts to understanding a particular moment of Europeanisation and show how the re-making of education mediated transnational visual education in the 1920s. They argue that the art of politics unfolded on three scales: through the borderland between industry and education, through concepts, methods and practices of ‘the visual’ in education, and through embedded values, beliefs and preoccupations with accountabilities that looked to the past rather than the future.
Merle Hummrich draws on the theoretical writings of Max Weber to tease out the dilemmas that play through Europeanisation. She draws attention to Germanic knowledge-building projects that continue to endorse universal principles of democracy and humanity. She emphasises that historically education was understood to be an institution that offered forms of learning to secure freedom and democracy. She notes that saying ‘I am a European’ marked a breadth of mind, a move beyond the narrow horizons of specific nation states. But the discourse of internationalisation became an economic project and saying ‘I am a European’ now means subjection to economic logics. ‘Europeanisation’ came to mean the valuing of economic goods as the discourse shifted towards neo-liberal endorsement of competition and comparison. This contradiction troubles the idea of education and also the work of educators, who must navigate between neo-liberal demands and universalised ideas, such as freedom and humanity. It means that educators are doubly conflicted as they work, tensioned between governmental demands and normative responsibilities to educate their students. These contradictions intensify other contradictions because, ultimately, education is entangled between policy and politics.
Mien Cheng notes that the re-making of education is producing a European and a South East Asian space of education. She asks: are these emergent educational spaces being re-made through an internationalisation or transnationalisation of education? Drawing on a detailed empirical study of dual degree programmes materialised by Malaysian private institutions working with British universities, she shows how curriculum writers, embedded in both Malaysian and Anglophone higher education histories, build relationships that produce a dual degree programme. She acknowledges the borderline between the British and Malaysian universities and its colonial overlay, but also shows how these curriculum writers negotiate their differences through the writing process. Cheng finds that the Anglo-Malaysian borderline is transcended in the dual degree programmes not just by two nation states’ ways of governing but by peoples’ ways of working and experiencing education transnationally, across national borders.
Carmen Carmona, Nerea Hernaiz Agreda, Fernando Marhuenda Fluixa and Almudena A. Navas Saurin consider the way policy and research discourses talk up the benefits of mobility but generally do not consider the experience of migrating as a young professional in pursuit of work. This observation leads them to question what is meant by ‘educating for mobility’. Focusing on the experience of young Spanish professionals who migrate by force of circumstances (limited employment options) rather than by choice, Carmona and colleagues show how education does not address the challenges of migration and this means that the young professionals tend to educate themselves as they navigate the demands of language, workplaces and work conventions, and coping with living without established social networks and supports. The effect of this education for migration is delegated to the individuals who find themselves as migrants in countries and tends to prioritise coping strategies. The European education space therefore endorses learning oriented towards employability but also delegates that learning to the individuals who migrate, rather than securing relevant forms of self-formation through schools, universities and vocational education and training (VET) provision.
Beatrix Niemeyer asks how the creation of Europe as an education space plays out on the individual level of experience. Her perspective is on the interference between the macro level of supra-national European education politics and the micro level of individual action in the field of non-school education. After outlining the emergence of the European education space and summing up the basic construction elements and milestones of the process, two selected examples of individual experiences with instruments of European governance of education are analysed and discussed. She has chosen the Erasmus student and the educational entrepreneur as two models of European subjects, which are both situated in fluid transitory zones of the European education space. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of subjectivation and governmentality, she develops a subject-oriented approach for the ongoing project of building knowledge on the European education space.
