This proposal for a panel discussion offers our perspectives as sociologists of education whose nation states have ambivalent relationships with Europe. In England, Europe is politically elided with the EU and, even post-Brexit, is vilified through national populism, largely to its scholars’ dismay (Taylor, 2016). American educational scholars tend to view Europe either as an isomorphic follower of the expanding U.S. educational system and its norms or the epicentre of the global testing culture through organisations like the OECD (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Smith, 2014). Australia is positioned ‘on the edge’ of the European ‘empire of knowledge’ (Fahey & Kenway, 2010a, p. 573), holding consequences for academic identity and mobility. Theories from Europe are ‘assumed to have more intellectual weight’ than theories from the edges (Fahey & Kenway, 2010b, p. 629).  In Turkey, sociologists of education experience an epistemological and ontological crisis in the field regarding  their theoretical and methodological orientations at the binary of local vs. Western (Esgin, 2013). These broad positions produce echoes and refutations in our sociologies of education: generally, European theorists and thinkers are taken up, even privileged, in each of our nations save the US, whose scholars tend to look inwards. To use, for instance, Bourdieu’s thinking tools across these contexts may variously represent elitism or conformity. Ways of thinking and working in the modern sociology of education are drawn from European traditions, thus marginalising Indigenous and other ways of thinking and being around the globe. Calls persist to reimagine the sociology of education to recognise contributions from beyond the dominant approaches (e.g., Connell, 2017; Hogarth, 2021; Takayama, 2016).     

Our panel’s focus is on these ambivalent relationships and our objective is to explore how they are reflected and operationalised through the epistemological positionings that we each adopt in our sociology. Our research questions are as follows. How do we locate our sociological epistemologies in relation to Europe? How does Europe, as a sociological and spatial imaginary, help us construct our practices and identities as educational sociologists? To what extent are we epistemologically European? Are certain of our nations’ epistemological stances constructed in abjection of an ostensibly European one? In other words, are they conceptually established and rendered coherent through repudiation of a European-inflected epistemology that they are not, and against which they are defined (see Kristeva, 1982)?

Our conceptual framework is informed by Watkins’ (2015) notion of the ‘spatial imaginary’, which comprises ‘socially held stories’ (p. 509) that represent, reproduce and construct places and the practices, emotions and identities that they enable. Watkins identifies three forms; spatial imaginaries of places, idealised spaces and spatial transformations. Brooks (2021) takes up this framing in an empirical HE-focused project to argue that Europe may represent a mutually constructing dialogue between distinct place and idealised space. In adopting this framework ourselves as a heuristic, we draw on our shared epistemological commitment to a critical research tradition. By this, we follow Gunter (2018) and Apple (2012) in privileging a focus on power structures and relations in education, and on their differential effects on differently capitalised (Bourdieu, 1990) groups of people. The positionality of the intellectual who is on the geographical and intellectual margins is exilic and necessarily critical (Fahey & Kenway, 2010b, p. 631). We intend interrogating the concept and chronology of exile in each of our cases, interplaying it with spatial imaginaries. To each of us, exile may invoke Brexit or the basis of our nation’s founding myth/s. In our discussion, we will interplay the exilic with the epistemological to locate our sociologies of education in spatial imaginaries of Europe, where what is spatial is storied and historical.

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