Education aims at generating skills and abilities and simultaneously consolidates particular ideals and norms. The symposium interrogates dominant ways of making sense of education and focuses on normalizing aspects of education. However, to trouble educational cultures means also that we acknowledge the unexpected nature of education. The symposium seeks paths to critical thinking and more progressive pedagogical practices.

In particular, the aim is to examine and trouble the Nordic educational ideals. The symposium focuses on the cultural practices, which emerge from the Nordic educational landscapes. Equality, social justice and democracy have traditionally been ideas through which Nordic countries have imagined themselves as Nations. Schooling was seen as crucial in the development of Nordic Welfare State, where everyone was supposed to have equal opportunities regardless of social background, abilities, gender or region of living.

The symposium investigates questions such as: What kind of subjectivities emerge from the educational cultures of the Nordic countries? How do bodies both manifest and resist cultural norms? Moreover, how does education both secure particular educational ideals and generate practices, vocabularies and resistances that create communities for those who fail to meet social norms?

The symposium develops a methodology that troubles educational cultures and theory. Thus, the symposium takes ”troubling” as a methodology that aims to question ideas that are typically accepted or considered as self-evident: research that both disturbs and upsets the reader and opens up the new and surprising interpretations of everyday practices. Troubling as a methodology also aims to question the distinction troubled/normal.

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