Europeanization and the more generalized trajectory towards a liquid modern world troubles knowledge building about education. As historically territorialized education is de-bounded, institutions ooze, relationships slither, and truths trickle and transform. Educational researchers address these developments by taking different positions on the relationship between contextualization and conceptualization. Some opt to continuing to build knowledge at the conventional national scale; others problematize scale and researcher positioning. This trend re-orders educational knowledge/practice along divergent lines, and also drives emergent politics of knowledge and institutional re-boundarying. In this paper, I reflect on Australia as a national case study of liquefaction to track the effects of sliding knowledge/practice boundaries and consequent knowledge politics on sociology of education. I use the concept of ‘knowledge space’ to clarify the significance of boundary making in research and report on the methodological strategies that I have found useful to move between national and supra-national educational discourses. I argue that it is possible to take scalar shifts in educational knowledge/practice seriously and bridge the discursive divide between national-supra-national educational research by being explicit about the unit of reference in knowledge building and also by combining historical and comparative analysis of specific space-times - ie. hot-spots of change.