The publication of the blue marble photograph in 1972 offers an iconic image of the earth. Taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft at a distance of 45,000 kilometers, it portrayed the earth as a small blue and white planet in the vast darkness of space, and prompted novel self-understandings of humanity relative to the immensity of the universe. It extended people’s horizons, imaginaries and sense of stewardship in working towards planetary self-sustainability. But 45 years later it seems the spirit of that time has changed: the globalizing blue marble has become the divided worlds revealed through Brexit and Trump.

This shifting sensibility raises the question, how do globalizing space-times re-configure everyday life as knowable and actionable space-times? While many commentators were surprised by citizen responses to Brexit and the US election, we suggest novel practices of governing and space-time configurations disturb the narratives that once helped to make everyday life knowable and actionable. Evidence from voter intentions in Brexit and the US election bears out the findings of histories and sociologies of education, which indicate how different types of educational background affects emergent ways of knowing and acting within everyday life.

This symposium historicizes these re-spatialising phenomena to understand how changing contexts and uneven space-time relations affect ways of knowing and doing education. We are interested in how time, space and mobility become intertwined and have effects through processes that re-make space-times of education. These processes include the mediating effects of specific stories that contextualise meanings and materialities (Latour, 2004); how the ‘sum of the stories-so-far’ unfold through networks and temporarily fix space-time boundaries and make place (Massey, 2005); and the consequences of experiencing, seeing, and feeling space-times on identities, vocabularies, and the consequences, which frame subsequent interpretations, define units of reference and orient translation and action (Berger, 1972).

Methodologically, we begin with the proposition that historical sensibilities offer a valuable entry point for understanding the re-spatialisation of education currently underway. But we also recognize ‘the simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical and the spatial, their inseparability and interdependence’ (Soja, 1996, p. 3). We therefore engage a temporal register to historicise the educational present and to historically situate the theoretical and methodological repertoires with which this or that present has been and continues to be interpreted and made intelligible. The inquiry is organized around three themes – time and identity, space and work, and context and mobility –with the last two represented in the symposium.

The spatial and temporal turns are well acknowledged (e.g Jameson 2003). But our aim is to draw out the interplay between temporalities, spatialities and contextual narrativities. For example, temporalities manifest through historical memory and imagination that colours story-telling in the present and also over-writes identities, leaving traces and smudges that haunt and unsettle the present and move unevenly into the future (McLeod 2014) Complex temporalities also congeal through institutional spaces and processes of knowledge building. Contextual narratives intercross – crisscross and weave between – temporal spaces. The categories and concepts that objectify here and now also carry traces of there and then, and they are interrupted by things that move, travel, and live through particular patterns of mobility and fixity (Sobe & Kowalczyk, 2012). 

These papers are in preparation for the 2018 World Yearbook of Education.

References Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Jameson, F. (2003) ‘The End of Temporality’. Critical Inquiry 29, 695–718. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern, Critical Inquiry 30 (2), 225-248 Massey D (1994) Space, place and gender. Polity Press, Cambridge. McLeod, J. (2014) ‘Temporality and identity in youth research’, in A. Reid, P. Hart and M. Peters eds. A Companion to Research in Education, Springer, Dordrecht, pp.311-313. Sobe, N. W., & Kowalczyk, J. (2012). The Problem of Context in Comparative Education Research. Journal for Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies (Rome), 55-74. Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.