This paper problematizes the territorialization of academic knowledge in education, by reflectively commenting on whose knowledge, and which networks, make adult education and learning knowable and actionable in Europe and globally. It does so with the ultimate scope of unveiling how positionality and the politics of publication contribute to the un/making of ‘Europe’ as a cultural counter/hegemonic project. Drawing on human geography, and the way it frames a territory and issues of territoriality (Delaney 2005, Storey 2012), this paper conceptualises ‘academic territories’ as the result of a mix of power, ideology and authority. Accordingly, social practices and processes that blend space, power and meaning entrench the territoriality of academic knowledge. Moreover, this paper builds on Gramsci’s (1971) concept of cultural hegemony, an unavoidable artery of political hegemony that captures the ability (by those in power) to direct the mind and the symbolic elaboration of citizenry’s language and lifestyle. Accordingly, consensus-based power builds on academics’ adhesion to a cultural project as much as to a corresponding political one. By combining these perspectives, academic knowledge constitutes a territorialized world, in which the production of diverse territories implies the production of different spaces for the creation, dissemination and accumulation of consensus-based academic knowledge. Such double-loop of production generates cultural hegemony within academic territories. For instance, by restricting attention on terms like adult education, adult learning, lifelong education, and lifelong learning, one notes that they represent entangled social phenomena that are differently signified and researched within and beyond Europe. At the same time, any bounding of stable allocations between such terms and concepts is the resultant of territorialisation processes that occur at the micro-scale, where each stable allocation is produced as a bounded space claimed by some academics, and around which they build consensus. In Europe (and globally), different knowledge networks produce several such bounded spaces or academic territories through the politics of publication (e.g. publishers’ policies, journal listing and ranking practices, editorial work and projects). Drawing on the project that led to the Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Learning project (Milana, Webb, Holford, Waller and Jarvis, 2018), this paper will tease out the relation between globalisation and Europeanisation, and how it conditions opportunities for cultural counter/hegemonic projects.

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