This symposium is divided into two parts. Both offer ways of understanding the interplay between reregulatory policy logics and the work of educators as they navigate change in ways that disruptively and sometimes innovatively affirm their professionalising projects. We address two research questions:

1. What re-regulatory trajectories are evident in national education spaces and how do they affect educators?
2. What processes of renegotiation do educators construct and enact in their workplaces and working lives as they mediate between globally mobile ideas and practices and national institutional trajectories and professional projects?

Each paper reveals the agency of innovative educators as they work in the emerging discursive boundary zones that accompany global transitions. In these shifting education spaces, educators’ work, identities, and professional projects are disturbed and transformed, while they also encounter and actively renegotiate ideas and practices that travel globally.

This double symposium presents research that was completed and compiled in the recently published, 2013 World Yearbook of Education. This volume extends the body of work on globalisation, comparative education policy, and the cultural politics of educational transformation, which has been produced through this book series since 2005. The first symposium foregrounds the shifting structures and cultures that locate contemporary educational work and its politics of professionalisation. The second symposium surfaces the educators and how they navigate change to find dignity in their work and professional commitments.

Our methodology uses the opportunity provided by a World Yearbook to examine global transitions that are both diffracting and are diffracted by education and by educators’ social and symbolic professional practice. Papers use explicit disciplinary frames drawn from sociology, politics, anthropology and history to investigate ‘hotspots of change’ empirically in order to show how innovative educators are remaking education but not in conditions of their own choosing. We draw on Saskia Sassen’s (2007; 2013) sociology of globalisation to grasp each hotspot as a locality where globalizing processes and flows ‘touchdown’, intersect with, established national education trajectories and where educators’ professional projects are historically anchored by the spatialisation of national education systems, workplace organisation, and professional identities and commitments.

With the book’s contributors drawn from around the world, this methodology provides windows on the boundary work that is mobilised in processes of educational globalisation. This epistemological frame acknowledges the significance of Europeanisation but also locates the fabrication of Europe and transitions in other parts of the world in the transnational medium of global education policy discourses. It recognises that while educators are affected by global policy discourses, they are also enabled to ‘reach-out’ and mobilise ideas and practices through their established networks in civil societies, in transnational organisations (e. g., professional associations and unions, NGOs, conferences, and projects), and through the social web. These processes reconstitute educational spaces as discursive boundary zones, where it becomes possible to transgress the conventions that are affirmed in established national education systems and in global policy trajectories. It is these rule-breaking practices that both prompt and reveal innovation and other ungovernable practices.