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).

Ball, Stephen J. 2013. Foucault, Power, and Education. 1st ed. Routledge Key Ideas in Education Series. New York: Routledge. Dean, Mitchell. 2010a. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd ed. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE. ———. 2010b. “What Is Society? Social Thought and the Arts of Government: What Is Society?” The British Journal of Sociology 61 (4): 677–95. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01336.x. Favell, Adrian. 2005. “Integration Nations: The Nation-State and Research on Immigrants in Western Europe.” In International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and the Promises of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Michael Bommes and Ewa T. Morawska, 41–68. Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations Series. Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Foucault, Michel. 1991a. “Questions of Method.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 73–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991b. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Edited by Michel. Senellart. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, Christian Sandbjerg, and Trine Øland. 2014. “The Social Making of Educational Theory: Unraveling How to Understand the Content, Emergence, and Transformation of Educational Theory.” Nordic Journal of Educational History 1 (2): 3–26. Lawn, Martin, ed. 2013. The Rise of Data in Education Systems: Collection, Visualization and Uses. Oxford, United Kingdom: Symposium Books. Moldenhawer, Bolette, and Trine Øland. 2013. “Disturbed by ‘the Stranger’: State Crafting Remade through Educational Interventions and Moralisations.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 11 (3): 398–420. doi:10.1080/14767724.2013.789617. Nóvoa, António. 2010. “Governing without Governing. The Formation of a European Educational Space.” In The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, edited by Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball, and Luis Armando Gandin, 264–73. UK: Routledge. Simola, Hannu, Sakari Heikkinen, and Jussi Silvonen. 1998. “A Catalogue of Possibilities: Foucaultian History of Truth and Education Research.” In Foucault’s Challenge. Discourse, Knowledge and Power in Education, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan, 64–90. New York & London: Teachers College Press.