Educational institutions are pivotal in the dissemination of categories, of standards of individualisation that underpin the development of knowledge. These predominantly catch-all schemas of individuality are complicit in producing risk of educational marginalisation, which can and do impact the work of practitioners and researchers across diverse disciplines and national contexts. This symposium, which is aimed at the network specific call for 2019, investigates the affordances of disorientation—the conditions for openness to observing and working with what we encounter, in research and practice from Australia and the United Kingdom, which transgress theoretical, national, and sectoral boundaries. We recognise that existing international systems that emphasise improving literacy, numeracy and learning achievements on one hand, while infringing on equitable ways of being and knowing on the other, are insufficient to stem the flow of educational inequities. We are motivated to put into question Western notions of the independent, autonomous Subject, by dissolving hierarchical understandings of vulnerabilities among specific student groups in education. Four papers comprise this symposium that examine how risks of being marginalised can impact members of different communities in different contexts, and how research and practice that pays attention to relationalities produce new conditions of possibility.

Each of the papers concentrates on the onto-epistemological preferences that emphasise relationality, in a ‘move from what needs to be opposed to what can be imagined out of what is already happening, embedded in an immanence of doing’ (Lather, 2016, p. 129). Taking the lead from Lather and colleagues of her ilk who seek to trouble dominant knowledges through new empiricist inquiries, the papers in this symposium acknowledge "the incalculable, the messy, and the responsibilities of not knowing" (ibid), to learn what possibilities emerge in the interconnectedness of persons, technologies and the environment in which we find ourselves. In the first paper, Dr Whitburn develops a discussion of the inherent risks to inclusive participation when inclusion in education is understood in terms of universal human rights. Dr Whitburn advances theoretical work in teacher education that seeks to prepare them to locate alternatives in collective action. In the second presentation Dr Levy argues that it is important to understand how families develop their own shared reading practices with young children and use this knowledge to ensure that these valuable practices are not eroded by narrow, yet dominant, schooled constructions of reading. In the third presentation, Dr Hyatt proposes a troubling of the traditional power dynamics of doctoral supervision, constructing more collaborative relations through embracing decentred and decolonizing pedagogies designed for the critical inclusion of students into academic/professional discourse communities. In the final presentation, Dr Corcoran invokes paradox as a prospect of relationality created in Australian educational practice between the family of a 10-year old student and the National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN). Each of the papers considers risk from diverse perspectives, and innovative ways of responding to its ubiquity.

Lather, P. (2016). Top Ten+ List: (Re)Thinking Ontology in (Post)Qualitative Research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 125–131.