In the aftermath of South-North and East-West labour migration to Denmark in the late 1960s and subsequent family reunifications, non-Western immigrant children appeared on the Danish school scene. The presence of immigrant children in public education constituted a new object of research on education. In the years to follow, research by sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political and economic scientists, educational researchers, psychologists, professional educators and many more was produced, disseminated and targeted at educators of immigrant schoolchildren.
This paper engages with the moving epistemic horizon made available to educators of immigrant schoolchildren in Danish primary and secondary schooling 1970-2013. The paper sketches out the emerging and mutating contours of the epistemic horizon and investigates how the epistemic horizon marks out what knowledge forms were vested in shaping the conduct and mentality of educators of immigrant schoolchildren.
Deploying an analytics of governmentality, education, on the one hand, is understood as a practice of governing (shaping the conduct of others). On the other hand, educational practice is vested with knowledge (episteme) shaping the mentalities of the governing. In this study, the focus is on the epistemic shaping of the mentalities and conduct of educators of immigrant schoolchildren. In this sense, the metaphor of a horizon works to visualize the episteme as a moving configuration which defines and conditions what is possible to think and know about immigrant schoolchildren (Ball 2013; Dean 2010b, 682). Accordingly, the disseminated knowledge regarding the education of immigrant schoolchildren is analysed as regimes of truth and as programmes of professional conduct of conduct.
Mitchell Dean (2010a) argues that governing is inherently an utopian enterprise. Accordingly, the identification of imaginaries of the good student/citizen and the good society as the end of pedagogical-didactical programmes for the instruction of immigrant schoolchildren work as a point of departure for further analysis of how pedagogical programmes of professional conduct "have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of 'jurisdiction'), and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of 'veridiction')" (Foucault 1991a, 75).
This study identifies the expert knowledge vested and made practical in shaping the mentality and conduct of educators of immigrant schoolchildren. Moreover, the study illuminates how the epistemic horizon made available to educators of immigrant schoolchildren emerges, transforms and moves with new categories of immigrant schoolchildren, with new expert knowledge forms, and with the globalization of the welfare nation-state.
The paper acknowledges the historical rootedness of the concept of governmentality in Michel Foucault's (Foucault 2008; Foucault 1991b) observation of the governmentalization of the emerging modern nation state. The analysis refers to the historical observation of the development of the modern state, where professional population management becomes a focal issue of state-crafting through dispersed practices of governing, i.e. through the production of knowledge about and for education (Ball 2013).
Hence, this study works as a privileged prism through which to look for the (re)crafting of the Danish welfare nation-state in an era of globalization, in which much significance is attributed to the intersections of knowledge production, education and immigration management. Along one axis, globalization is manifested in intensified South-North and East-West migration and hence, in the welfare nation-states' re-casted population management (Dean 2010b; Favell 2005; Moldenhawer and Øland 2013). Along another axis, globalization is identified with the intensified international monitoring and comparing of national education systems in order to promote competiveness (Lawn 2013). On both scales of globalization, expert knowledge becomes increasingly a means of governing (Nóvoa 2010).
