The Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller reminds us that humans are not just in the world but are crucially born somewhere in the world. We learn a language and acquire cultural habits, and the places we grow up are therefore extremely significant for our becoming as human beings (Heller, 2019, p. 11). The German philosopher J.G. Herder (2004[1774], p. 26) was concerned with the significance of place for human perfection, arguing that place should play a significant role in educational theory. However, theories of Bildung, addressing the process of becoming a subject in the encounter with a material, social and cultural world, have rarely dealt with the significance of place explicitly. Although places situate our experiences with the world, they are seldom at the center of our intellectual scrutiny.

With this background, the double symposium will explore the possibilities of a relationship between Bildung and place. The participants of the symposium are from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and the educational tradition of NordicBildung will therefore be a point of departure for us. Accordingly, the symposium addresses educational features that are unique to the Nordic countries considering our similar languages, educational structures and culture, and shared pedagogical heritage (Solberg, 2021; Bostad & Solberg, 2022). We want to explore Nordic Bildung as an example of the inherent relationship between Bildung and place, not just in the formation of individuals, but also in the formation of theories.

While there are forces in the educational field that pushes towards globalization and standards decontextualized from time and place, we need educational thinking that enables us to reconsider the significance of place for Bildung-processes, without falling back into nationalistic nostalgia (Heller, 2019). Martha Nussbaum (2012) has pointed out how different constructs ofplace, such as common culture (history and values), blood ties, ethnicity, earth-boundedness, linguistic belonging, and religion, have all been central elements in building national sentiments in Europe. This way of manifesting national belonging has led to the fact that newcomers, regardless of their time of residence, are seldom considered as belonging to the nation. Place thus appears to be a concept presenting possibilities as well as dangers for educational thinking, and the symposium therefore intends to investigate the relationship between place and Bildung as essentially conflicted and paradoxical. We have organized the symposium in two parts, each addressing a particular tension in the relationship between Bildung and place:

1)      Bildung: betweenthe familiar and the unknown: Theories of Bildung often refer to the classical Bildung-journey as an image of the Bildung process. Starting off in the familiar landscape of the place she grows up, the young person travels out into the world to meet and deal with the unknown, before returning home more enlightened than before (e.g. Gustavsson 2003). This archetypical image thus implies that both familiarity with what is known as well as openness to the unknown are crucial elements of the Bildung-process. The symposium will elaborate on the dilemma of familiarity and openness in the context of Nordic countries. What does it mean to be familiar with Nordic culture and/or belong to Nordic countries as places, and what does it entail for education to be open towards the world? Central perspectives in this part of the symposium will be the relationship between educating for national and/or local identity versus educating citizens of the world, as well as dilemmas concerning the significance of place for Bildung and sustainability.

Part 2 "Nostalgia:possibilities and dangers" is sent as a symposium application of its own.

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