Modern Europe has been in constant formation, and we have learned, or we like, to regard it as a space hospitable to strangers and as a representation and materialisation of significant values and beliefs, such as equality, social justice and social solidarity. Europe as the European Union, to be sure, has a powerful infrastructure for exercising very influential forms of governance. For instance, in the early twenty first century, it has adopted a “global approach to migration”, recognising the need for a common, global immigration policy and noting that “managing migration” requires dialogue and close cooperation (EU MEMO/07/549, December 5, 2007; and MEMO/07/188, May 14,2007, cited in Venturas, 2005, p. 2). This is at a time when, although multiple barriers impede the free movement of people, human mobility has been stimulated by wars in many parts of the globe, global inequalities and the economic and social integration processes of globalisation. The history of international regulation of human mobility and migration as well as refugee relief is long and relevant here, but the difficulties encountered by the EU bureaucracy, political bodies and policy actors in dealing with the current refugee issue – specifically the refugees’ trajectories and resettlement – and, furthermore, the polarised responses of both welcoming and refusal it has generated across European societies has raised crucial questions, above all, about the meaning of the European project.  

This Round Table is a response to calls from European education academics convening at ECER2015 to reflect on how education research and practice can responsively engage with these societal developments, often leading to extremities, powerfully captured by the term “expulsions” (Sassen, 2014). Starting from taking notice of “what has happened to the Greek people and to the refugees which are coming to ‘our’ Europe for safety” (https://refugeesecer2015.wordpress.com/the-moot-2/), it focuses on the European education policy space in the era of austerity. It addresses the question of whether its discourses, policies and practices are leading to a shared sense of Europe, cultivating the values of hospitality, solidarity, social justice and equality or whether, instead, they are driving European education, in all its forms and stages, towards hostility, disunity, injustice and inequality.

To address this question, the Round Table will be structured along three axes:

1. The politics and practices of austerity (Martin, 2015), with reference in particular to Southern parts of Europe;

2. The politics of crisis (Slater, 2015), which are integral to recurrent educational reforms across Europe and globally;

3. The possibilities and challenges in the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a more solidary, just and equitable public education in Europe (Gerrard, 2015).

Participants to the panel contribute from different angles to these questions, drawing on their current research and interventions in debates and political action (Cribb, Gewirtz and Horvath, in press; Grimaldi, Serpieri and Spanò, 2015; Gokay and Shain, 2015; Tsatsaroni, Sifakakis and Sarakinioti, 2015). Common to them all is an interest in inventing new forms of intervention of academics and scholars within the “Public Sphere”, in a social world going adrift, demoralised and disintegrated by the actions of global forces and by new forms of domination (Panagiotopoulos, Schultheis, Dimitrakopoulou, 2016). This, in order to challenge, more effectively, and work towards transforming dominant discourses on education and social/political practices within a democratic and inclusive Europe (Graham and Slee, 2008).   

Gerrard J. (2015) Public education in neoliberal times: memory and desire, Journal of Education Policy, 30:6, 855-868, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2015.1044568. Gokay, B. and Shain, F. (2015) Making sense of the protests in Turkey (and Brazil): contesting neo-liberal urbanism in ‘Rebel Cities’, Estudos Ibero-Americanos, 41:2, 242-261. Graham, L.J. & Slee, R. (2008) An illusionary interiority. Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40:2, 277-292, doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00331.x. Cribb, A., Gewirtz, S. and Horvath, A. (in press) Compliance and Contestation in the Neoliberal University. In R. Normand and J-L Derouet (eds) A European Politics of Education: Perspectives from Sociology, Policy Studies and Politics, Abingdon: Routledge. Grimaldi, E., Serpieri, R. and Spanò E. (2015) Positionality, symbolic violence and reflexivity: researching the educational strategies of marginalised groups. in K. Bhopal and R. Deuchar, Researching Marginalized Groups, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Martin, C. (2015) When the ideal of liberal egalitarianism meets the fact of austerity: reorienting philosophical perspectives on educational policy, Journal of Education Policy, 30:2, 201-219, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2014.943297. Panagiotopoulos, N., Schultheis, F. and Dimitrakopoulou, V. (2016) MIRRORS: Multi-voiced accounts on a social world in crisis. Athens: Alexandria (in Greek). Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Belknap Press. Slater, G.B (2015) Education as recovery: neoliberalism, school reform, and the politics of crisis, Journal of Education Policy, 30:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2014.904930. Tsatsaroni, A., Sifakakis, P. & Sarakinioti, A., (2015) Transformations in the field of symbolic control and their implications for the Greek educational administration, European Educational Research Journal, 14:6, 508–530. Venturas, L. (ed) (2015) International “Migration Management” in the early Cold War. The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. E-book, University of the Peloponnese, Greece.