The fabrication of ‘Europe’ has developed through novel practices of governing and everyday experiences of these governing practices and their effects. The fabrication of supranational ‘Europe’ was not a work of top-down policy processes and governments. Rather, Europe unfolded through governing practices: formal procedures and decision-making, and also meeting up, having conversations, networking, making new links, involving people, circulating and exchanging ideas, crossing boundaries, and imagining futures. Europeanisation was neither hierarchical nor flat, neither formal nor strictly informal, and not simply multilevel (Novoa and Lawn, 2002)

This narrative suggests there is something distinctive about Europeanisation. ECER has located research building knowledge about ‘Europe’, the supranational identity-entity, alongside and also through educational research that is nationally-focused. These supranational and national knowledge-building trajectories frame up discussions about transnational knowledge building through the knowledge space of ‘Europe’. Yet the nature of this knowledge building is not always explicit.

This symposium addresses three concepts to clarify their significance in research on europeanisation, and address three issues in emerging transnational educational research. The issues are conceptual-methodological concerns that currently complicate educational knowledge building. Specifically: the intellectual lineage of concepts is not always clear or predictable; the empirical unit of reference and its implications in framing evidence is not always explained; and how concepts and evidence interplay through the process of europeanisation requires explicit investigation and theory building.

Each paper addresses these three issues by interrogating the concepts of ‘governing’, ‘experience’ and ‘space’. These concepts have all been significant in research on europeanisation, although policy studies has prioritised ‘governing’ and ‘space’. The relation to ‘experience’ becomes problematic in research on global transformations and their effects on professionals and their work, which shows that ‘contexts of uncertainty’ constitute ‘disturbing work’ and drive ‘transforming politics’ (Seddon, Niemeyer, Henriksson, 2010). At ECER 2014, two interlinked symposia interrogated these conceptual interconnections. The aim of this symposium is to consolidate these discussions as a platform for research on europeanisation.

The three papers in this symposium each address one concept and address these conceptual-methodological issues. Paper1 addresses ‘governing’ and its relation to  ‘governance’, ‘policy’, ‘politics’, ‘government’ and ‘globalisation’ that are used to understand europeanisation. He suggests europeanisation is a process of ‘governance’ that emerges when one realizes that government is an impossibility: that this or that phenomena is ‘organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator’, and where governance mutual adjustments, learning, local interactions, (continuously) re-emerging order. Governance is where governing has no top and no center.

Paper2 elaborates the concept of ‘experience’ and its relation to the (political) practice of building Europe as an education space. This analysis considers ‘governmentality’ as different actors who are engaged in the re-making of social relations in different ways and different fields (eg. research, teaching, curriculum planning, learning mobility programs) experience europeanisation. She asks how does ‘Europe’ turn into a personal project and/or how are we as education researchers and colleagues in professional teaching and training forced or inspired to europeanise ways of thinking and acting?

Paper3 interrogates ‘space’: how it is actively made and how spatialities are textured by particular places with effects on identities, experience and action. She uses ‘context’ and ‘contextualisation’ as the analytical lens to unpack the layering of space that resources relation between governing and experience. She suggests governance and experience interplay through distinct spatial formations, and also how they are networked, resourced and re-make spaces for learning. 

Novoa, Antonio, & Lawn, Martin (Eds.). (2002). Fabricating Europe: The formation of an education space. Dordrecht: Kluewer. Seddon, T. Henriksson, L. and Niemeyer, B. (2010) Learning and Work and the Politics of Working Life: Global transformations and collective identities in teaching, nursing and social work, London, Routledge