The Network 28 call for papers in 2018 addresses the relation between globalisation and Europeanisation and how this relation is shaping knowledge building that enables ‘liveable’, or ‘unliveable’ space-times of education. The question invites reflections on the way sociological knowledge building affects and is implicated in reconfiguring space-time boundaries and with what effects on education as a social institution.

The symposium addresses this question by offering three papers that reflect on large scale projects, which used globally distributed research networks to investigate the respatialisation of education. These projects were each positioned in between globalization research, the study of globalizing effects (eg. policies and their effects) on education, and europeanisation research, which focuses on the making of space-times (eg. supra-national ‘Europe’) where the space of education is both affected and implicated. And from this vantage point they offer different ways of understanding these changing contexts of education and how ‘space-times of education’ become knowable and actionable.

The conundrum at the heart of this symposium is methodological, what does it mean to know social formations that are also communicative contexts? It is a problem that becomes visible in any research that addresses knowledge building in ‘changing contexts’ - because change can be read as both adjective and verb (Seddon, 1990; McLeod, Sobe & Seddon, 2018). This grammatical dilemma troubles the relation between globalisation and Europeanisation in two ways. First, treating the space-time of education as an adjectival context, where one social formation displaces a prior formation, surfaces the problem of social embeddedness. This is because who sees what, from where, and for what purposes makes a difference to knowledge and social action. This leads into the second problem, when knowledge building is contextualised by a particular space-time of education, knowledge building has the effect of ‘changing’ (verb) the context moment by moment: what is being researched becomes mobile.

In designing this symposium, we acknowledge this methodological conundrum, where whose knowledge is tied to which effects. For this reason, we use a short paper, titled The autobiography of the problem to shift our presentations from a ‘research reporting’ mode to a more ‘reflective commentary’ that reveals the backstories of our global projects, where research and knowledge building unfolds at the nexus between studies of globalisation and europeanisation. As Cowan (2009) suggests, this contextualised approach is necessary if fields of knowledge (eg. sociology of education) is to cut through ethnocentric and egoist knowledge claims, and interrogate how 'our global' is universalised as an “international discourse which redefines knowledge, teachers, schools and universities in often simplistic ways”.

Each paper therefore explains how the project ‘reads the global’ and what that window for knowledge building, and its specific space-time boundaries, reveal about established and emergent sociologies of education. Each presentation offers a key message or provocation about the relation between globalisation and europeanisation and elaborates that claim by addressing three questions:

1. What was the problem that prompted your globally networked project?
2. How did your project understand ‘space-times of education’ and make them knowable and actionable? 
3. What does your project and subsequent research tell us about sociological knowledge building in-between globalisation and europeanisation, how it uses space-times boundaries, and with what effects on education as a social institution?

Cowan, R. (2009). Comparative Education: Xanadu - or the Grocer from Porlock? https://www.dur.ac.uk/education/research/seminars/event-details/?eventno=5950. McLeod, J. Sobe, N. & Seddon, T (2018). Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical sociologies of concepts, methods and practices, 2018 World Yearbook of Education, London, Routledge Miller, J. (1995). Trick or Treat? The autobiography of the problem, English Quarterly 23 (3): 23-26. Seddon, T. 1995 New contexts -- new debates: ALBE in the 1990s Open Letter, 5, 1, 3-16.