Space-times of education in Europe and all over the world are being transformed in complex and unexpected ways. The changes concern, in particular, the institutional boundaries, that is the material, cognitive and social infrastructures sheltering education spaces from and filtering the risks of dealing with the contingencies of the social and economic worlds (Masschelein and Simons 2015). By relating these transformations only to the current trends of neo-liberal agenda could be to some extent simplistic and underestimates the complex dynamics of change. To improve our understanding of these transformations, and keep a critical edge, I will argue that we need to develop forms of investigation able to display the unintended consequences of the dominant dispositifs, the multiple enactments of the modifications of the space-times of education, and the related effects. A promising area of reflection and empirical research in that sense is being developed in the interference among sociomaterial approaches and education studies (ANT, STS, Feminist Studies) (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuck 2011; Fenwick and Landri 2012). This chapter is interested in comprehending how this interference may expand the sociology of education. The sociomaterial turn represents an invitation for the sociology of education to move beyond itself. By considering some examples from a Special Issue I coedited (Landri and Neumann 2014), I will discuss three implications of the ‘moving beyond: a) from the human-centered approach in the conceptualization of social interaction to the co-implication of humans and nonhumans in social ties; b) from the dominant methodological nationalism in most of the investigations in education policy to consider the increasing post-national scenarios in education; c) from the attention to policy to a more complex accounts of practice in education fields.

Fenwick, Tara, and Richard Edwards. 2010. Actor-Network Theory and Education. London: Routledge. Fenwick, Tara, Richard Edwards, and Peter Sawchuck. 2011. Emerging Approaches to Educational Research Tracing the Socio-Material. London: Routledge. Fenwick, Tara, and Paolo Landri. 2012. “Materialities, Textures and Pedagogies: Socio-Material Assemblages in Education. Intro.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society. Landri, P., and E. Neumann. 2014. “Mobile Sociologies of Education.” European Educational Research Journal 13 (1): 1–8. doi:10.2304/eerj.2014.13.1.1. Masschelein, Jan, and Maarten Simons. 2015. “Education in Times of Fast Learning : The Future of the School,” no. January: 37–41. doi:10.1080/17449642.2014.998027.