The fabrication of the European Union is a fragile accomplishment that is developing by a complex assemblage of institutions, policies and practices. It is an assemblage at risk where a difficult balance among collective and transnational and national interests is to be found in the current institutional field, and where the efforts of finding a coordination are mostly oriented to a regime of commensurability that tends to privilege the economic competitiveness of the area, by paying the price of considering cultural and political issues in the bottom of the list of the agenda of the European priorities. Far from being a technical and neutral solution, the contemporary regime of commensurability follows the idea of the expansionary austerity, a hypothesis that predicts the increase of the economic growth in some circumstances with the reduction or the control of the government spending. In practice, the idea translated in a period of economic austerity and was maintained as a good solution even confronting with financial crisis, and with the clear difficulty of its efficacy with the respect to the economic indicators, still lagging behind the most optimist estimations of the growth of the EU area. At the same time the European Union is confronted with a massive wave of migration, mostly refugees from poor or conflict-stricken areas in Arica and the Middle East, and experiences great difficulties in handling this challenge through the trans-national political structures. Together, the idea of expansionary austerity and the refugee challenge are having an impact on the Europeanization of education as well as well as the educational policies of European states that is still underexplored and that need to be estimated.
This symposium is intended then to invite scholars to present contributions, and discuss the impact of economic austerity and the refugee crisis on adult education policy in Europe. It is an initiative linked to the IRC-GloCoPoS (International Research Centre for Global and Comparative Policy Studies on the Education and Learning of Adults, based at the University of Verona). We are interested in developing a panel that can respond theoretically and empirically to the following issues:
(a) What is the impact of economic austerity in adult education policy at European level? To what extent is the fabrication of a space of commensurability affecting the national policies of adult education? Are we seeing the emergence of a new priority on adult education or not? To what extent is the new regime of accountability influencing adult education policy and practice? How have the new benchmarks on adult education in the Horizon 2020 strategy been developed and how they are modifying the current national adult education strategies?
(b) The regime of commensurability in European education is aimed also to make comparable the many European worlds of education and to permit the mobility of people and competences in the EU space. But how does the actual regime of commensurability interact with migration policies and react to the refugee crisis? Does adult education policy at European and at the national level contribute to making the European space a liveable world, or does it contribute to the development of segregated spaces where educational and other inequalities and immobilities are accumulating?
