Theme - Knowing and Acting: The changing conditions and potentials of education research

The landscape of education research could be examined through the perspectives of continuities and changes in approaches, producers and users of knowing. The range of knowledge producing actors is widening. For instance, national governments delegate knowledge production and even parts of decision-making to non-governmental actors including international organisations, think tanks, commercial players or data-driven technologies. At the same time preference for big data and standardized numerical indicators elevates some approaches to knowing and overshadows others. Furthermore, with the advent of digital technologies ranging from Chat GPT to deep fakes, societies broadly, and academic communities specifically are confronted with new challenges. Questions arise such as are we in the process of entering an echo chamber where what exists in the online universe defines the scope of knowledge, creativity, imagination, and critique? And how in the era of fake news, predatory journals or pressures of performativity are we to secure the sincerity and authenticity of, as well as trust in academic knowledge? Understanding the conditions in which knowledge is produced and distributed is crucial. The current conditions are creating an ecosystem that includes both the wider contexts, such as political-ideological and economic circumstances, as well as academic cultures, methodologies and theories deployed. All of these are time and place bound, that is, how we know and how knowledge is taken up by its users is situated and contingent. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate catastrophe, and the war in Europe have generated new conditions intensifying the need for policy relevant knowledge, yet scientific knowledge is sometimes merely a tool to legitimise actions motivated otherwise. How can the academic community meaningfully bridge political or economic prerogatives while ensuring that scientific knowledge serves the broader public good without compromising academic autonomy?

Education is generally oriented towards the future – with matters such as change, serving future generations and most recently, the planetary crisis, preoccupying the attention of education researchers and practitioners. At the same time, knowing in and of education is always about understanding multiple times: education’s pasts, presents and futures, and their entanglements. “Poly-crisis” is a term coined by complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to claim that the world faces “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem" (p. 74). It is not a straightforward or apolitical matter which “vital problem” is elevated to the status of a “crisis” (whether to focus on the climate crisis or the crisis of democratic values or even the rising nationalism in Europe and beyond), and crises and their entanglements will have localized effects and require both macro and micro understanding and response. ECER 2026 seeks to motivate participants to ponder on the production and uses of education research in a contextually rich, creative, and caring manner. How is scholarly knowledge in and of education, its methodologies and the practices based thereon, fit to understand and address the poly-crisis in the context where the very conditions of scientific knowledge are in flux? Education researchers are well-equipped to examine both the ecosystems that shape knowledge production and its use, and the fact that the poly-crises will manifest in both globally shared and locally specific forms. In other words, researchers too are asking questions – and are asked to address - their societal roles and accountabilities beyond the academic realm. We see this conference as a productive and urgent opportunity to strengthen the position of authority of education research and as a forum for dialogues with decision-makers and practitioners as well as other forms of knowledge including interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, practitioner knowledge and indigenous knowledge.