Network
NW 28. Sociologies of Education
Title
Beyond Chains of Reason: Epistemological Perspectives on Socio-Technical Infrastructures, Value Production, and Ordering of Difference in Education
Abstract
The Network 28 Sociologies of Education’s call invites critical reflection on contemporary education amid rising nationalism, digitalization, and fragile democratic governance. It addresses key tensions, such as individual versus communal and competition versus cooperation. The call highlights how diverse actors project value-laden imaginaries that shape educational practices alongside socio-technical transformations. We invite research that explores the infrastructural nature, rationalities, and implications of these futures, focusing on three areas: reconfiguring educational spaces and temporalities, historicizing these shifts, and understanding how norms produce value and comparison. The call seeks to challenge limiting logic to foster collective visions, welcoming theoretical and empirical contributions.
The Call
The ECER 2027 General Theme invites educational researchers to a critical engagement with how education and learning are understood, governed, and valued in contemporary societies, across which educational debates are increasingly shaped by rising nationalism, renewed appeals to authority and traditional values, intensified digitalization, democratic fragility, and growing tensions surrounding elites and public trust. The Call also stimulates a critical reflection on how discourses on learning and education unfold within an epistemic space articulated around distinctive lines of tension: the individual vs the communal; humanism vs post- or more-than humanist ontologies; cognition vs embodiment; learning vs education; competition vs cooperation; hierarchy vs network and hybrid forms of coordination, to mention a few.
The Special Call of Network 28 Sociologies of Education fully embraces this critical challenge, addressing it through the lenses of a critical sociology of education. Rehearsing the recent agenda of NW28, the Call recognises that:
we are in a time where a variety of actors are particularly active in producing and promoting imaginaries on the future of education and learning. Such a work of imagination is not just a speculation, but it is value-laden, moved from specific interests and competing political projects and visions of society, and is effectively shaping present education and learning practices.
such an effervescence in the production of imaginaries is coupled with a significant set of transformations in the socio-technical infrastructures of education and learning, which are reconfiguring power relationships and are producing major changes in the ways of thinking and speaking about education and learning.
Any critical, scientifically-grounded engagement with the imagination of common futures in education needs, then, to deal with an in-depth exploration of:
socio-technical nature of those imaginaries and infrastructural changes,
how they are built and supported,
their underlying rationalities,
how they produce specific fields of visibility,
social and educational implications of all of that.
This means to pay attention to three interrelated foci of analysis:
How educational and learning spaces and temporalities are imagined and re-configured, including what are the rules and standards of reason through which education and learning, and their subjects, are continually "made" and “enclosed” through the formation of those spaces and temporalities and what are the techniques/technologies which enforce those rules and standards.
The historicization of those enacted educational and learning spaces and temporalities, which attempts to locate and identify breaks and continuities as relational and conditional.
How, within those enclosures, we can recognize distinctive ways to produce value and difference, moving from the establishment of norms which make education, learning and their subjects to become parts of systems of equivalence, comparison and (e)valuation.
Asking these questions provides intellectual tools to break the “chains” of reason that bind and limit alternatives for action, creating the conditions for a collective vision of a shared future in education amidst current challenges to democratic governance.
We invite contributions adopting this socio-epistemological grid to strengthen the critical sociological perspective and interrogate different aspects of contemporary education and learning imaginaries and infrastructures, and their political, societal, and governance implications. Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome.
Contact Person(s)
Emiliano Grimaldi emilianogrimaldi(at)gmail.com
Jitka Wirthová jitka.wirthova(at)fsv.cuni.cz
References
Ball, S., & Collet-Sabé, J. (2022). Against school: an epistemological critique. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 43(6), 985-999.
Gorur, R., Landri, P., & Normand, R. (2024). Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education: Reflexive Dialogue and Prospective Inquiry. In Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003279457
Gourlay, L., Alarcón-Lopez, C., Gorur, R., Komljenovic, J., Landri, P., Lundahl, C., Piattoeva, N., Saari, A., Viteritti, A., & Williamson, B. (2026). The Palgrave Handbook of Science and Technology Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Normand, R., Moos, L., & Carvalho, L. M. (2025). National and Transnational Elite Influences on Education: A Comparative Perspective on Shaping and Justifying Reforms. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-91675-5
Popkewitz, T. (2014). Social Epistemology, the Reason of “Reason” and the Curriculum Studies. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22, 22. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n22.2014
Ungureanu, E., Safta-zecheria, L., & Borș, O. (2025). Disregarded epistemologies in education ? Critical approaches to Sociologies and Histories of Education in Central and Eastern Europe : Introduction to the Special Issue 1. Journal of Educational Sciences, XXVI(2), 5–17. doi.org/10.35923/JES.2025.2.01