NW 17: Longing for Past Futures, Hoping for Futures Past: The Potential of Histories of Ed-ucation for Educational Research

Network
NW 17 Histories of Education

Title
Longing for Past Futures, Hoping for Future Pasts: The Potential of Histories of Education for Educational Research

Abstract
The emphasis on history and reflection in the general call for ECER 2024 clearly indicates histories of education have much to offer to educational research generally in terms of understanding current developments and conditions for possible futures as related to such phenomena as memory, remembrance, longing and hope. Network 17 therefore invites proposals that tease out the potential of history of education scholarship for addressing contemporary issues in education involving work around memory, remembrance, longing, and hope and productively complicating how past, present and future intra-/interrelate. Proposals can take the form of papers, (discussion) panels, roundtables, workshops, and posters.

The Call
Network 17 welcomes contributions that address one (or more) of the following subthemes.

1. ‘Past futures’ and ‘future pasts’
Histories of education have a firm focus on the complex intra-/interplay of ideas, technologies, materials, and human actors in processes of schooling, upbringing, socialisation, and (self-)formation. They are thus uniquely placed to contextualise and problematise contemporary debates about education. These debates and the educational solutions they offer are often presented in a-historical, universalising ways that hide their transient and contingent nature, as if our present(s) could not develop otherwise and our future(s) were set in stone. As all educational pasts are the futures of preceding periods, examining these past 'futures’ can serve as a fruitful laboratory to analyse the emerging, sustaining, and disappearing of educational ideas, technologies, materials, and legacies of human actors, and to tease out ‘futures past’ that ‘might yet have been’ (e.g., indigenous, subaltern, colonised, disabled, patriarchically or heteronormatively suppressed futures past). Network 17 invites proposals to explore how changing configurations of past, present, and future can be harnessed to situate educational research and praxis while doing justice to their contingent nature.

2. Emotional histories of education
Related in different ways to aspirations and outcomes of education, hope and longing (past and present) are reliant on, and entangled with, emotions. Network 17 welcomes contributions that explore histories of education through the lens of emotions, considering both the embodiment of emotions in education theories, systems, methods, and practices and the conception and utilisation of emotions by those involved in shaping these. What kind of emotional responses have educators helped trigger in the educated and vice versa and what moving and morphing has occurred here through time? How have policy makers and knowledge brokers used emotions to advance education agendas? How have emotions been conceived by educationalists differentially across time and space?

3. Memory, remembrance, longing, and hope
Hope, longing, and attendant emotions are not given. Their configuration derives from the ways experiences are ‘re-membered’, colouring interpretations of the present, and rendering some futures possible and desirable while foreclosing others. Both hope and longing refer to singular embodied experiences. They also emerge collectively through ‘multidirectional’ narratives helping to remember educational pasts. Given the general call’s emphasis on memory, Network 17 welcomes contributions employing oral history interviews and other approaches to help grasp memory and remembrance processes. Contributions may thus examine critically the ways memories are configured and reconfigured and intra-/interrelations of re-membered pasts, lived presents, and imagined futures.

4. Positionality
Network 17 welcomes contributions addressing the positionality of history of education scholars. Inspired by new cultural and materialist approaches to the history of education and their many twists and turns, history of education scholars have critiqued implicit assumptions informing educational projects. However, their scholarship too is shaped by norms and values engaging past(s), present(s) and future(s). We invite scholars to historically examine this and tease out historiographical potential this foments. Our hope is this will contribute to awareness and responsibility in the field and facilitate dialogue with other disciplines to improve educational research.

Contact Person(s)
Geert Thyssen (geert.thyssen(at)hvl.no), Pieter Verstraete (pieter.verstraete(at)kuleuven.be) and Tamar Groves (tamargroves(at)unex.es)

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