The theme of ECER 2019 is risk. This signifier connotes a constellation of concepts relating to social change and mutations which appear to have meaning by virtue of acting as counterparts to a discourse of education as ‘progress’. In other words, whereas education has historically been commonly understood as bringing forward something ‘new’, and usually good (a reason for optimism in the future, a faith in something better than the present), terms such as risk point to a more pessimistic, even defeatist perspective.

The starting point of our presentations is that a genealogical approach to this moment of melancholia affords a constructive perspective on the perceived risks in education. We argue that behind the newness of such risks, lasting continuities and logics remain, both within education, and also beyond it in the world of work and welfare. Our panel brings together academics in France, Germany and England, to examine how risk is made palpable, how alternatives are made insensible, and to what consequences, in each respective national context. Our research concerns are :

1. How are subjectivities produced through concepts of risk and crisis ?

Franck Chaumon (2010) rejects the conclusions drawn by some psychoanalysts according to which psychoanalysis today deals with a "new subject" and "new pathologies". He recruits the Lacanian figuring of subjectivity, which emphasises lack rather than substance, thereby rejecting the idea that subjectivity is known through « constitutive parameters [which] can be stated" (idem), as presupposed in much social science discourse. Drawing on Chaumon's argument, we consider that the discourse of risk and crisis, often derived from humanities and social sciences research, assumes a substantive model of subjectivity whose effects can be analyzed. Our clinical approach makes it possible to identify discursive conflicts provoked by this dominant model of subjectivity.

2. What is made traumatic and violent by concepts of risk and the prevention of risk ?

We draw on the work of Fassin (2017), who develops a genealogical approach to punishment, and Joan W. Scott (2017). Fassin allows us to think about the social responses given to the risk of violence, as well as the modes of subjectification that result from it. Scott encourages us to reflect on the fantasized risk of the fragmentation of society in French ideology. Both of these researchers apprehend the "novelties", the "changes" of an era, of our time, with a "broad" perspective, that is, one which tries to avoid the pitfalls of current media discourses in their spectacular dimension. The "panic" effects caused by these discourses are the consequences, they argue, of common categories and notions in the social sciences (especially education). These notions should therefore be examined critically.

3. How are affects mobilised in discourses about risk and crisis in education ?

Describing the education system as in crisis, or responsible for managing increasing levels of risk in a range of areas, has consequences for how the purpose of education is defined. If education is understood as a remedy for uncertainty, it follows that risk is experienced negatively : something to be foreclosed, a source of possible trauma. Such a strategy moves risk to other areas, not in knowledge and education itself, but, for instance, in the quality of teacher professional development, which is felt to be a source of contagion for poor quality in the education system. Possible alternative conceptions of education – including for instance, education as fostering risk – are made unthinkable, or experienced as backward. This has consequences for how education is judged, and notably professional education.

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