The papers in this symposium provide windows into different forms of interruptive work that disrupts or reorients prevailing governmentalities. These governing logics exist as embedded  trajectories of state formation, which are relayed through governing practices and distribute privileged and privileging types of knowledge, ways of knowing, and emotional investments to different groups of educators and students. They become visible through ethnographies of local learning spaces and educational workplaces that document the material effects of governmentalities but also surfaces the way they disrupt the ordinary, everyday affects and emotional responses or investments made by people in and through practice.  We address two research questions in this symposium:

(1)    How are ‘knowledge-practice’ partnerships configured in national state education policies under neoliberal market govenmentalities?

(2)     How are these policies enacted in local sites to co-generate interruptive practices that disrupt patterns of educational inequality?

Increasingly, sociologists are calling for more nuanced analyses of the complex processes of neo-liberal policy interpretation and enactment, suggesting that critical policy research is ‘big brush stroke stuff’,  ‘unmitigatingly bleak’, and fails to engage in the specificities of local practices. These sociologists suggest that critiques of market neo-liberalism are in themselves performative, in that they pre-empt negative outcomes, and in so doing potentially undercut political action.  Affect is defined here as the emotional experiences associated with particular forms of governmentalities, such as fear, loss, desire, hope.    Given that affects are relations to social institutions that structure social life, it is crucial to collectively rework these discourses that materialise market mechanisms and neoliberal policies to interrupt inequality. These issues have particular significance for understanding and intervening in denationalising processes such as Europeanisation and globalisation. Rather than  ‘wishing away’  the complexities and contradictions of everyday social relations, under new governmental regimes, the papers in this symposium deal with issues of ambiguity, knowledge flows, ‘ways of knowing’, and affect across boundaries as teachers and researchers work together ‘to make a difference’ to educational disadvantage.

By discussing the work of partnerships and networks engaged in working across the ‘knowledge-practice’ gap we aim to move beyond ‘big brush stroke’ critique of neoliberal educational policy and governmentalities and clarify ways in which educators are making a difference in education and seemingly entrenched issues, such as educational inequality, across different nation states. In so doing, we aim to reveal the localised ways in which neoliberal governmentalities, including policy discourses which define partnership work in market competitive terms, are taken up within specific nation state educational policies, and in turn, how researchers and practitioners engage/enact these policies in and through everyday partnership practices to interrupt social injustices.