With schools across Europe (and beyond) being at a pivotal point, facing challenges that affect key resources of education (e.g., detrimental effects of national/international standardised testing, issues of staff/student health and wellbeing), there is a need to continue the re/imaginings of school beyond national, disciplinary and time boundaries. Indeed, an apparent exclusion from debates surrounding such challenges pertains to the matter of time and its relation to space/place and (other) non-/humans in education.

This two-part interdisciplinary symposium aims to facilitate re/imaginings allowing one to better appreciate conditions of schooling in relation to time, space/place, material, and people. The key question it will address from various angles, using different theoretical and methodological approaches, is that of how in the context of education time can be understood as bound up with non-/humans past_present_future. Indeed, the event will also explore in this context how past, present and future can be re/configured. It will thereby consider the nature of inclusions and exclusions and the extent to which these matter.

The apparent exclusion of time, as an analytical lens, in the human and social sciences has long been noted (Lauer 1981; Fraser 1988). Particularly in comparative studies time has often been a blind spot (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Cohen 2011). That said, as a topic of study, time has been included in studies of school ethnography/archaeology (Varela 2001) in which it has been viewed as co-constitutive of school culture alongside space, and language and communication (Compère and Rodríguez 1997; Viñao 2001). Yet, even in the history of education, where the question of how education and time relate to one another is key, attention has been focused on various silences (cf. Grosvenor, Lawn and Rousmaniere 1999) other than those concerning time. While the spatial and material dimensions of schooling over time (Burke, Cunningham and Grosvenor 2010) have thus received due consideration, conspicuously underdeveloped is time-inflected reflection on time itself in relation to schooling (Pruneri, forthcoming; McLeod 2017; Seddon, McLeod and Sobe 2018).

Laudable efforts have been made across national and disciplinary boundaries to trouble taken for granted notions of time, whether or not related to school. Historicizing various inscriptions of cosmopolitanism related to schooling, the curriculum theorist Thomas Popkewitz (2012) has thus drawn attention to the Modern secular making of singular and linear-progressive time. His use of the notion of “abjection” as “a way to think about (…) complex (…) relations of inclusion and exclusion”, a lens through which to understand “systems of reason (…) that simultaneously produce what is inside and outside” (p. 6), helps to complicate the very “idea of progress [which] sets up a particular relationship between past, present and future” (Seixas 2012, 859). Inclusions and exclusions related to conceptions of time have further ignited debates in philosophy, with Henri Bergson (1999), for instance, expounding the notion of lived time as pure duration through which experiences of a qualitative-intuitive kind are woven together, whereas Gaston Bachelard (2000) imagined such time rather as fractured, multiple and discrete. More recently, educational researchers have explored conceptions of time as not just “polyrhythmic” but also “entangled” with material and space/place (e.g., Goodman, 2017). Thus, the quantum physicist Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of space, time and matter “mutually constituted” and “iteratively (re)configured” as “manifold” through “intra-activity” (p. 178), has been read through the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view of time as “the very movement of creative becoming” involving other non-/human becomings (2011, 9, 142) whereby “the” present is a gathering of “the” past and “the” future into itself (Ingold 1993).

Such re/configurings of time, space/place and (other) non-/humans involving school will inform this interdisciplinary event.

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