Over the last three decades, Network 7 has made a significant contribution to the interrogation of practice in different contexts and the development of new ideas, given the particular challenges of the respective times. Currently, new challenges are arising, leading to new questions and a new need to investigate, create ideas and respond. What is the larger context of these challenges, how can they be approached, what theories do we choose and how can we keep listening into those areas that are typically under-addressed, forgotten, neglected, ignored or even silenced?

It is typical for Network 7 that the attention goes to those unseen, unheard, marginalised or even violently excluded or hurt. The pain, it seems, is where the attention is directed towards, asking about what has caused the pain, how it can be contextualised and what could lead out of it. The latter, however, is not always easily found, and many studies only lead into various forms of critique, and understandably so, as critique is necessary and ideas for a path forward are not readily developed. Or in other words: It seems so much easier to say what we do not want than to create suggestions about what we actually do want.

However, as we live in a time of unrest and turbulence, new ideas could be highly helpful. While there might be feelings of powerlessness and frustration, such times always offer particularly high potential for change, and they can lay bare what is important to us or what we hope for, facilitating a language of forward-looking ideas that include a responsibility beyond personal interests (Hoppe 2024).

While concerns about the normalisation of right-extremist ideologies and the continuity or even reinforcement of neo-colonial and neo-liberal structures are at the thematic core of network 7, they are to be seen in the wider context of the breathtakingly fast rise of AI which increases the volume of dominant voices while reproducing bias in an exponential dynamic, and making it very easy for propaganda and fake information to be spread. Additionally, climate change and the loss of biodiversity as well as wars and mental health crises are shaping our time, to mention only a few of our huge challenges and the need to make suggestions for new ways of thinking.

Maybe it’s not surprising that one of the suggestions to ‘think out of the box’ comes from somebody who knows marginalisation from her own (family) experience. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2021), dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, points out that our current times need healing in many regards: healing the ways we think, feel, relate, exchange and face cycles of life and death. Her approach goes to the depth of the wound, and accordingly she suggests a concept for ‘depth education’ that is guided by questions such as ‘How can we learn to choose sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility in a culture (of late modernity) that often promotes and rewards the opposite’? Her suggestions have grown out of a cooperation with indigenous communities and offer perspectives that seem inspiring and truly ‘beyond the box’.

The aim of this paper is to step back a little bit and to think about different ideas and perspectives – such as the one developed by Andreotti  – that could be promising for our research and our processes of ‘imagineering’ which hopefully contribute to meeting the challenges of our time.

Given the special call with its invitation to reflect on the development of the discourses on social justice and intercultural education as well as on perspectives for the future, the methodology of this paper is based on literature and theory as well as on personal observations of the different strands and orientations of research as they have evolved over the past twenty years.

Apart from the mentioned approach by Andreotti, some more perspectives shall be outlined, one of them being the resonance theory by Hartmut Rosa (2019). Rosa tries to understand thoroughly what the societal structures of postmodern (‘western’) societies are shaped by. He describes a societal diagnosis that encompasses socio-cultural as well as economic structures. Our time, he says, is bound by a logic of acceleration, progress and competition which has an underlying search for something that cannot be found or achieved and ultimately leads to experiences of alienation, an experience of a muted world that ‘does not speak to me’. The counter-concept would be a relationship of mutual response, an experience of resonance, in which ‘I am heard and seen, and the other person, the place or activity speaks to me’. So here again, the attention goes to the moment of pain, which is described as alienation. There is much to suggest that a new focus on resonance has great potential as an orientation in education, facilitating the capacity to ‘sit with the pain’ (as Andreotti puts it), our own pain, as well as the pain of others (West, 2025) and therefore to grow up, mature, hold ambivalence, take responsibility and contribute to inclusive communities. However, investigation is yet to be done. Using this moment of creative reflection, different kinds of research desiderata shall be formulated. Apart from the ones already mentioned, there are also questions related to epistemological foundations (O’Brien, 2021) or hyper-individualism and singularisation (Reckwitz, 2021) that seem to have great explanatory power and are to be further explored.

Andreotti, V. d. O. (2021). Depth education and the possibility of GCE otherwise. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 19(4), 496–509. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2021.1904214 Hoppe, K. (2024). Das „Prinzip Antworten“: Eine postapokalyptische Theorie der Verantwortung für das Anthropozän. Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 34(2), 249–273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11609-024-00527-2 Reckwitz, A. (2021). Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Suhrkamp. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity. West, L. (2025). Illuminating the Fine Line Between Radicalization and Transformative Learning: Case Studies From Auto/Biographical Narrative Inquiry. Journal of Transformative Education, 23(3), 378–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/15413446251352380