The European Conference of Educational Research was developed as an association of national research associations as they confronted the formation of ‘Europe’ and its emerging supra-national educational space. The idea of ‘Europeanization’ was coined to capture the processes and effects of this educational re-spatialisation and re-scaling that positioned European nation-states and transformed their claims to sovereignty as ‘member states’ that participated in a transnational governance arrangement. Research and its contributions to knowledge have been shared, discussed and consolidated through ECER and its journal EERJ, and also via some other publications, particularly Globalisation, Societies and Education, and the Routledge World Yearbook of Education, volumes 2005-2016 (in preparation). But in what sense do these developments constitute an academic field? And how might this academic field be named and claimed?

This question has surfaced because it is clear that the political project of Europeanization is doing particular work in educational research. In one sense, Europeanization (and parallel supra-national regionalizations elsewhere) steers the way researchers materialize educational knowledge through research, and wider educational applications (eg. Curriculum design). Yet problematizing the political effects of Europeanization also prompts critical educational knowledge building. Such work highlights the flexibilizing effects of supra-national knowledge steering and interrogates how, and with what effects, these flexibilized governmental logics anchored at the supra-national scale serve to de-bound national knowledge/research cultures, and also re-order educational knowledge/practice.

This symposium presents four papers that reflect on the way researchers have opened up these cross-scale processes of de-bounding and re-ordering of educational knowledge/practice. They each grasp the nature and effects of emerging supra-national governmental logics on educational knowledge/practice through studies of space, networks and forms of reason/discourse (Lawn&Novoa, 2002) but report on the processes of de-bounding and re-ordering educational knowledge/practice from different locations in Europe, member states, and beyond Europe.

The symposium suggests that the study of Europeanization is part of a larger historical-comparative academic field that is emerging as sociology of education globalizes its historic national unit of reference. In this respect, Europeanization is one case of supra-national governmental projects, including cross-national initiatives like PISA, which have effects on national educational knowledge/practice, the scaling of educational politics, and the consequent capabilities in forming citizens. Building critical knowledge about these issues is significant because the practical boundary politics that shift the bounding of educational knowledge and practice is linked to the social ordering work of education as a social institution. It has practical effects, now and in the longterm, through unfolding trajectories and scaling of ‘social orders, social relations and social identities’ (Robertson, 2011: 281).