This symposium examines how parents navigate three European education systems — in Austria, Germany and Switzerland — that are profoundly shaped by entrenched and intersecting inequalities. Although the concept of crisis is frequently invoked in public and educational discourse in these contexts (Sturm et al., 2025), it is rarely used to address structural inequalities within these education systems. Instead, crisis is often framed as an exceptional rupture, thereby obscuring historical continuities, or selectively attached to migration-related phenomena through terms such as 'refugee crisis' or 'migration crisis'. These crisis narratives construct situations of risk and threat that are predominantly projected onto racialised and migrant subjects, thereby individualising social problems and pre-emptively legitimising interventions aimed at safeguarding the status quo of national and educational orders (Cohen & Fogelman, 2025). 

Against this backdrop, the symposium examines how crisis narratives are currently being mobilised within education systems in Europe, focusing the aforementioned national contexts, and how this relates to the categorisation and marginalisation of particular groups of parents in schools. These analyses draw on extensive qualitative empirical research on the relationship between parents, schools, and broader societal discourses conducted in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The studies comprise qualitative interviews with parents, teachers, and parent organisations, as well as document analysis and participant observation. 

After providing insight into how parents are addressed in crisis-driven educational discourses across the three national contexts, the papers focus on parents' practices and responses to contemporary crisis narratives and related discursive interpellations, as well as on the strategies parents employ to navigate educational institutions within societies characterised by intersectional inequalities. By foregrounding parental agency, the symposium asks: How do parents respond to and challenge deficit-oriented and crisis-driven narratives? How do they manoeuvre within the complex field of subjectifying interpellations and contestation? What forms of counter-knowledge, critique and solidarity emerge within and between parent groups and organizations? And how, in these processes, do parents reproduce, negotiate and/or redefine dominant narratives concerning intersecting inequalities in education systems? 

These questions are addressed in complementary ways across three contributions: 

The first paper analyzes parental self-organization against intra-school segregation at a Viennese primary school. It combines discourse analysis of Der Standard articles and reader comments on urban school segregation to trace hegemonic narratives, and qualitative interviews with members of the “Anti-Segregation Working Group” to examine resistance practices and contested forms of collective subjectivation. 

The second paper examines how 'migrant parent organisations' in Germany navigate ambivalent discourses of recognition within German migration society and develop strategies to address structural inequalities in the education system. Using document analysis and qualitative interviews, it analyses how these organisations respond to current crisis narratives about migration and the welfare state. 

The third paper looks at parents who are active in parental education programs of migrant organizations and how “good” parenthood and “successful” integration are entangled here. Utilizing a subjectivation-theoretically informed reconstruction of a biographical interview the paper explores how migrantised engagement, shaped by experiences of non-belonging, becomes visible as a struggle for integrity, appearing fragile and at risk and opening only narrow spaces of agency within the integration dispositif.  

From a comparative perspective, the symposium concludes with an analysis of the challenges and prerequisites for critiquing institutional and structural inequalities and exclusions within education systems. Drawing on our experiences of engaging with parents and parent organisations, we reflect on the roles assigned to (educational) researchers and academia in critiquing the ongoing marginalisation and exclusion of certain parents. In doing so, we consider questions of positionality and responsibility of educational research as well as the tensions that arise in this context, and explore possibilities for critique and transformation beyond crisis-driven narratives.

Cohen, N., & Fogelman, T. (2025). Crisisology no more? (Comparative) Migration Studies beyond the Crisis. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(1), 38. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00462-y Sturm, T., Tervooren, A., Schmidt, M., Bärmig, S., Grunau, T., Thaler, I., Grunau, S., Ritter, M., & Wrana, D. (Eds). (2025). Krisen und Transformationen: Anschlüsse an den 29. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft. Verlag Barbara Budrich.