Conference Agenda

NW 15: Working Meeting, Research Partnerships in Education

Preparing a publication

Starting from its launch in China in 2016 as Douyin, the social media TikTok has become a worldwide success. According to a statistical report conducted in January 2022, TikTok is available in over 150 countries and 75 different languages and is the fastest growing social media application worldwide (Southern, 2021; TikTok Statistics, 2022).

Such a phenomenon, as expected, has given rise to a huge scientific literature, spanning from medical studies to sociology, from psychology to communication, from computer studies to anthropology. Within the boundaries of educational studies, scholarship has primarily focused on questions of TikTok usefulness—or lack thereof—to share specific learning contents (Escamilla-Fajardo, Alguagil, Lopéz-Carrill, 2021; Lee, 2022; Rach and Lounis, 2020), while the peculiar phenomenology of TikTok engagement remains, at least to my knowledge, still unaddressed. In this paper, I attempt to fill the gap by going deep in the phenomenology of engagement TikTok arouses, thus attempting to sketch out some educational remarks about experience, time, and attention in education. Specifically, I shall ask a) which kind of temporality and attention is constituted through this social media, b) which kind of experience girls and boys undergo when being-in-TikTok, and c) which the role of education may be when dealing with TikTok engagement. Central to my analysis is Stiegler’s insight that “technics, far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time.” (1998/1994, 27)

And here we come to TikTok specific temporality. The continuity between past, present and future which one is supposed to maintain when paying attention and dealing with others and things is, conversely, continuously disrupted when being-in-TikTok. The user, given the functioning of the platform, has no memory of videos being watched, nor expectations about videos to come are being formed. With its continuous change of fast-paced videos one has no time to feel and appreciate—let alone reflecting on—the emotions elicited by a video that the subsequent one has already started. While being-in-TikTok the subject has no need to act and think, while the relationship with one’s emotions and feelings is left aside, too, interrupted again and again by the flow of videos.

In this way TikTok, I argue, creates a peculiar temporality, one that momentarily erases both past and future—thus erasing, at the very same time, the weight of memory and the task and burden of future projecting. It is a kind of uniform, suspended time, with no pause, no hollow, no change in speed. When being-in-TikTok both one’s projecting and one’s “being-together-with things at hand” (Heidegger, 1996/1927, 374) are suspended, deferred to a time and space yet to come.

However, while, drawing from Stiegler’s analysis of new social media, it may be tempting to label TikTok as a threat to anything of value “the family, the school, the totality of teaching and cultural institutions” (2010a, 184) can produce, I believe something more is going on here. This is so not because TikTok—or others social media, for that matter—cannot be a threat—indeed, they can. Rather, this is so for a) we have to make sense of how TikTok works, in order to understand and deal with such a potential harmfulness and threat; and b) TikTok is not just harmful; being-in-TikTok also involves a rupture of temporality which is worth analysing educationally.

Covid-19 is an emergency that has changed people's behaviour, their way of life, and even political agendas, in almost all corners of the world. Listening to and capturing the experiences and perspectives of all citizens on the pandemic seems consistent with our sense of an inclusive, democratic society, but the voices of children are often left out. Research led by the University of Central Lancashire shows that, of the 95 professionals, from 16 sectors and 20 countries across Europe, surveyed in April 2020, there is little evidence of children’s views informing public decision-making (Larkins, 2020). Around seventy per cent of survey participants said that there is no attempt was made to take the child's perspective in making policy (local or national) relevant to children (Larkins, 2020).

In the UK, the Prime Minister announced to close schools to control the pandemic on 18th March 2020. Instead of giving priority to children's welfare and opinions, stopping schooling is to "make sure the critical parts of the economy keep functioning and public services keep functioning." (Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus (COVID-19), 2020) And also, schools open for key workers' children because "we need health workers who are also parents to continue to go to work. And we need other critical workers with children to keep doing their jobs too – from police officers who are keeping us safe to the supermarket delivery drivers, social care workers who look after the elderly and who are so vital".

In this way, children are not only unheard of in coronavirus political and ethical discussions but are often seen in a deficit manner - as the burdens that prevent parents from working for society, or as potential carriers of the virus and need to be protected and restricted to protect themselves and others. For instance, many policies, such as school closures, are developed based on the model's assumption that children's presence in school accelerates the spread of the virus (Panovska-Griffiths et al., 2020).

From children’s perspective, children may accept this kind of adult view, seeing political and ethical issues as irrelevant and distant, therefore, rarely thinking and saying about them. However, children are a part of society and a significant component of citizens. Although children do not have as many political responsibilities and obligations as adults, they share social welfare. Also, children are future voters and legal participants in politics. Thus children's political and ethical education is also a political issue. I suggest that, on the one hand, adults are supposed to pay attention to children's role in the community; on the other hand, it would be valuable for children to think about their position in the community, take responsibility and ask for rights.

The pandemic could be a valuable opportunity for children to realise the necessity of their engagement in political and ethical discussions. Many of these issues may seem to arise from the pandemic, but they are, in fact, issues that are rooted in our society. Before the pandemic, they already existed in society, but may be distant and vague to most children. The pandemic has made them more visible and more relevant to a wider range of children, so I discuss those issues in the context of the pandemic and post-pandemic era.

In this paper, I will introduce several political and ethical issues that might be related to children in terms of the pandemic: the distribution of social resources, the debate between individual freedom and collective responsibility, and the technology divide in education.

This methodological contribution offers a phenomenological approach to education research, specifically for understanding the various effects of education reform vis-à-vis the intricate conditions of schooling that such reforms encounter in specific socio-economic places with their particular histories and contexts. In reaching beyond narrow ideas of data as evidence, the approach captures the various ways in which reforms manifest in schooling through collecting the experiences of those involved and systematizing those experiences into a structure of experience of reform. Such work is markedly different from evaluation, implementation or best practice research that inevitably presuppose a degree of sameness of the experience of schooling (Salmen, 2021, S. 6), i.e. that schooling is the same for everyone who experiences it. Human experience, however, is unique: the same event is different events to different people, and renders contrary conclusions and actions. This position counters current research tendencies to "homogenize the heterogeneous reality of education through abstract and context-indifferent standards and outcome metrics" (Mayer et al., 2014, p. 2). The approach is a viable alternative to technocratic ideas of teaching and learning that narrow schooling and student achievement to test scores, grades, and meeting expectations (Hopmann, 2008). Instead, the phenomenologically oriented researcher affirms through their work that those involved in schooling act on what they understand to be good reasons. Their actions make sense against their horizons and in the context of their intentionality, and to elicit their mindsets and lines of reasoning in order to learn about their sense-making provides unique insights into the dynamics of schooling, a "complex entity with a character of its own" (Tröhler, 2008, p. 10). The aim is to understand school reform and schooling in the way it presents itself to those involved in schooling, and to let them assign meaning and relevance to their experiences. Such inquiry focuses on schooling as specific to its place and its people; it highlights the conditions of schooling and the way those involved in it construct their practice.

The approach understands a social structure through the elements that sustain and negotiate it (Labaree, 2020, p. 100) rather than assuming that individuals' trajectories are a mere result of their choices: “All roles appear more solid and defined than they really are. (…) Structures appear concrete but are actually emergent patterns that depend on people to keep the pattern going.” (Labaree, 2020, p. 102) Social structures include caveats of flexibility that rich descriptions may be able to carve out and use to understand "the causes that derive from social relations (as) more than personal traits" (Labaree, 2020, p. 102) and therefore leave the linear presumption of accountability. Schooling may then be approached not primarily as an instrument for social efficacy or social mobility but as a place shaped by democratic ways of living and learning. (Salmen, 2021, S. 59)

This approach embraces human diversity through accounting for diverse histories and contexts, perspectives and lifeworlds throughout the research design. Rather than seeking to identify schooling universals, the approach affirms multiple realities (Schütz, 1975) of experiencing schooling as equally relevant to ongoing discussions about the quality of public schooling. Multiple realities in the phenomenological understanding of the social world suggests that "objectively the same behavior may have (…) very different meanings or no meaning at all" (Schütz, 1945, p. 535) for the individual because "meaning (…) is not a quality inherent to certain experiences (…) but the result of an interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with a reflective attitude." (ibid.) Empirically, this interpretation is elicited through synthesizing Bevan’s (2014) structure of phenomenological interviewing and Kolbe’s (2016) existential communication.

Heidegger (1996) posits being in the world in relation to one’s thrownness, fallenness, and projection. We move through these with concern for the world and care for others, as shaped by the circumstances of our ready-to-hand and present-at-hand experiences. Heidegger claims that it is neither God nor some metaphysical sense of possibility that guides our inclinations for care; rather, he avers, it is the horizon of our inevitable deaths that gives shape to our encounters, choices, state-of-mind, and understanding. Our time is finite, and it is this finitude—as Dasein is thrown into a particular place at a particular time for a bounded horizon—that gives us both the primordial characteristic of Dasein (a being for whom the question of being is at stake) and the conditions for state of mind, understanding, and discourse. Heidegger also notes that “proximally and for the most part” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 210), the average everydayness of our encounters is what shapes most of our time in the world: we spend most days in conformity with the masses, engaged in the inauthentic and in idle talk.

Taking Heidegger’s existential analytic as a point of departure, in this paper, I seek to explore how the evolution of neoliberalism as a totalizing force of hegemony has implications for Dasein. I argue that the last fifty years of neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the possibilities and qualities that shape Dasein, the found conditions of thrownness, the average everydayness of our encounters, and thus, on the potentials of projection. Failures of interruption to the inauthentic, failures to have authentic moments, occur because, in the neoliberal era, the superficiality of idol talk is idealized; economic and consumerist ends are all that appear on the horizon to shape the conditions for care, concern, and mattering.

In a globalised world shaped by decades of neoliberal capitalism, the thereness in which we find ourselves is remarkably similar across the world. As Brown (2015, 2019) notes, neoliberalism’s greatest strength as an ideological force has been its ability to traverse boundaries, adapt and adopt customs and cultures, and inflect the central premise of individualism, competition, and capital creation into all manner of non-market spaces, including politics, healthcare, and education. The totality of neoliberalism increasingly furnishes a kind of taken-for-grantedness in these spaces and, over time, diminishes the possibilities for alternatives. In this paper, I argue that Heidegger’s existential analytic furnishes a useful framework for understanding the current conditions of our thrownness, the implications for fallenness, and—more pressingly—the limitations for projection.

The failure for Dasein to establish the clearing for authentic appearances in neoliberal ontologies is evident in three ways, discussed in detail below: First, I suggest that authentic moments are more difficult because of the impoverished conceptions of what it means to learn. Second, I contend that we have become preoccupied with a limited view of what it means to care or be concerned. Lastly, I argue that our existential anxiety has been heightened and redirected to wholly neoliberal ends of capital acquisition, provoking an unresolvable and lifelong tension as what we care about is always constructed as outside our reach. To conclude the paper, I outline the challenges of contemporary neoliberal Dasein through an educational lens, thinking about education as a system, curriculum as a mechanism of totality, and pedagogy as a tool of compliance.

Children have a right to express their views and to have them given due weight in all matters affecting them (Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). This provision has underpinned and informed much of the existing research and practice on student voice (Quennerstedt and Moody, 2020; Sargeant and Gillett-Swan, 2019). However, it has been suggested that it is one of the most commonly-used but widely misunderstood rights of children, with abbreviations such as the ‘right to participate’ potentially undermining implementation (Lundy, 2007) and that student participation has been characterised by ‘conceptual vagueness’ (Perry-Hazan & Somech, 2021). In spite of this, the term ‘participation’ continues to prevail in scholarship (in English) and European and national policy discourses, with little attention paid to how that is understood generally as well as in particular social and linguistic contexts.

The rationale for this panel arose in an online discussion of network 25 ECER in September 2021, when conversations about children’s right to participation in education turned to how the word ‘participation’ is understood and used in different languages. The focus of the panel discussion will be on how the word/ concept of ‘participation’ (or equivalent word) is used and understood in diverse languages, particularly in educational contexts. Three presenters who speak different languages (English (UK), French (Switzerland) and Hebrew (Israel)) will describe how the term/ concept participation is understood in their own languages and contexts. These are:

• Amy Hanna, University of Strathclyde, UK

• Lotem Perry Hazan and Idan Zak-Doron, University of Haifa, Israel

• Zoe Moody, University of Geneva, Switzerland

In particular, they will focus on the following common questions: the meaning of the word for ‘participation’ in their language/contexts; which word(s) or term(s) are used instead; what shapes understanding of this word in educational law and policy in their national context; and what consequences that understanding of the terms used has for practice and for implementation.

The presentations will be followed by an interactive, structured discussion facilitated by Jenna Gillett Swan (Queensland University of Technology, Australia). Session participants will be given time to research and reflect on the meaning and use of the term participation – or equivalents - in their own national context and language(s). This will be explored through reflection on the dictionary definitions, the colloquial use and the terms used in educational law/ policy (if at all). The discussion will be captured on posters.

We hope to be able to use the interactive discussions for further research into the topic. Session participants will be able to choose whether they give permission for us to use their input in continued exploration. Only information from participants that have consented will be captured and used as data.

This symposium focuses on historical and contemporary cases of diversity and boundary-making in regard to schooling and norms and standards, which can be understood through the centralizing frame of “making up” people (see Hacking, 2002, pp. 99–114) and the educationalization of social problems since the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries (e.g., Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008). In Europe during the Enlightenment and following the French Revolution, new understandings and concepts of the state developed to place a heavy emphasis on democratization and a belief that the state and its people actively legitimize and sustain each other. In its new democratic role, the modern state had to decide how its populations would be politically and socially defined, organized, and categorized as “the people.” The states’ new creations of the people, and their coinciding new categories and labels, also created “new ways for people to be” and new social realities became possible (Hacking, 2002, pp. 100, 103).

With this necessity for “making people,” modern states thus turned to education and institutionalized the making of people through the creation or revision of schooling laws and processes of mass, compulsory schooling (e.g., Westberg et al., 2019). These modern educational institutions were organized in ways that favored certain categorization practices of people, according to the state’s ideal social standards and norms at the time. These practices helped to create both those who fit the standards and norms and “others” who did not quite fit in. What we will focus on in our symposium are cases of how these “others” were created, categorized, labeled, and learned from an early age: notably beginning with children’s entrance into (or even exclusion from) modern state schooling.

We will show examples of how modern European states have been educationalizing the “making of people” and creating and preferring certain standards and norms over others through processes of categorizing and labeling their diverse populations. The “making up of people” via education involved the whole school experiences and lifeworlds of the students (e.g., Pinar, 2004). Therefore, we will be considering the modern state schooling within our cases as encompassing the teachers, students, parents, and their practices as well as the state apparatuses. In particular, we will discuss these modern practices as they were handled in three specific examples from Switzerland, Denmark, and Austria. We start with the case of how Swiss teachers categorized and labeled young children as intellectually “normal” or “abnormal” since the late 19^th century and what this meant for the different types of schooling and education made available to these children. We will then use our second case from Austria to show how a number of “abnormal” categories were merged together to encompass “atypical” children under the umbrella term of “neurodiverse” in the international world by the late 1990s, but how it has been up to individual Austrian teachers rather than official Austrian legislation to bring the inclusive “neurodiverse” label into the schools in an effort to make the “abnormal” children “normal” again. Finally, we will look at a case from today by showing how children (and their parents) in Denmark are standardized through specific notions of “time” regulations in their transition from kindergarten to primary school.

The general tendency towards more state-organized formal schooling in 19th-century Europe (Westberg et al., 2019) overlapped with a growing interest in “abnormal” children and the question of their educability (e.g., Van Drenth & Myers, 2011). After the mid-19th century, the conviction prevailed that compulsory education should also apply to intellectually and physically “abnormal” children. For this purpose, in various European countries special educational facilities were set up to complement conventional primary school (e.g., Borsay & Dale, 2012). Among the different groups of intellectually and physically “abnormal” children identified and categorized since the turn of the 19th century were the so-called “idiots.” In the German-speaking world, a uniform medical classification of “idiocy” (Idiotie) was established in the second half of the 19th century (Hofmann, 2017). Under this umbrella term, three degrees of intellectual impairment were identified: “feebleminded” (schwachbegabt), “imbecile” (schwachsinnig), and “stupid” (blödsinnig). The question of educability was central to this classification, as only individuals belonging to the first two categories were considered to be educable. The classification of “idiocy” provided the framework for the establishment of these different types of facilities. In so-called asylums, “stupid” children received food and care, but no formal education. “Imbecile” children were sheltered and educated in special institutions, and “feebleminded” children were assigned to special classes. In the proposed paper, I will present a Swiss case study on special classes for “feebleminded” children and the categorization of pupils as “abnormal” or “normal” in association with these classes. My analysis, which is based on sources produced in everyday school life, focuses on the allocation of young children to special classes and the role teachers and educational practices played in this process. After entering primary school, Swiss children were observed, and their performance was assessed by their teachers during the first grade. At the end of first grade, those pupils whose intellectual development was deemed “abnormal” were transferred to a special class. My premise is that the one-year-long trial period, during which thousands of children of the same age were observed in school, had shaped the notion of “normal” and “abnormal” intellectual child development. It was the everyday interaction of teachers with their pupils that was crucial when it came to “making up” intellectually “abnormal” people (Hacking, 2002, pp. 99–114) in Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century.

Borsay, A., & Dale, P. (Eds.). (2012). Disabled children: Contested caring, 1850–1979. Pickering & Chatto. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Hofmann, M. (2017). Schwachbegabt, schwachsinnig, blödsinnig – Kategorisierung geistig beeinträchtigter Kinder um 1900. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 7(2), 142–156. Van Drenth, A., & Myers, K. (2011). Normalising childhood: Policies and interventions concerning special children in the United States and Europe (1900–1960). Paedagogica Historica, 47(6), 719–727. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (Eds.). (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling: Education policy in the long nineteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan.

The categorizing and labeling of school-age children as “normal” or not has continued in Europe since the early mass schooling practices of the 19th century. Since that time (and even before), different countries have come to start diagnosing (and therefore labeling and thus creating) children with specific learning difficulties that fell outside standard expectations. It is especially since the beginning of the 20th century, and especially since the mid-20th century, that many different mental or physical learning or behavioral disabilities were emerging and evolving in Europe and the U.S. to describe school-age children and how they and their education should be handled in the classroom (e.g., Feinstein, 2010, Lange et al., 2010, Kalverboer, 1978, Clements & Peters, 1962). By the late 1990s, “neuro-” terms started to come into use to refer to the multiple neurological “disorders” that have not been considered “neurotypical” (e.g., autism, dyslexia, ADHD). In the more than two decades since then, public and private discourse has started turning to the umbrella terms of “neurodiversity” to describe how there are many different ways of “thinking, learning, and behaving” in the world (Baumer & Frueh, 2021), and those who are diagnosed as a “neurological minority” are “neurodiverse” (ND). In consideration of the historical development of defining, diagnosing, and labeling children as being learning disabled, this paper will focus on the Austrian educational discourse that has surrounded children who would be labeled as neurodiverse. The aim is to see if and how the more “socially accepted” new ND labels entered Austrian educational discourse. The relationship between the official Austrian educational discourse and the unofficial reality surrounding ND will be discusses according to an analysis of a variety of official and unofficial educational sources published since the 1990s (e.g., schooling laws, school board publications, world congress reports, teacher interviews, etc.). By looking into the different discourses, we should then see what roles and effects educational actors, such as the Austrian ministries on the one hand and teachers on the other, have in making people “abnormal” or in trying to re-make them as “normal.”

Baumer, N., & Frueh, J. (2021, November 23). What is neurodiversity? Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-is-neurodiversity-202111232645 Clements, S. D., & Peters, J. E. (1962). Minimal brain dysfunctions in the school-age child: Diagnosis and treatment. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 6(3), 185–197. Feinstein, A. (2010). A history of autism: Conversation with the pioneers. Wiley-Blackwell. Kalverboer, A. F. (1978). MBD: Discussion of the concept. In A. F. Kalverboer, H. M. van Praag, & J. Mendlewicz (Eds.), Minimal brain dysfunction: Fact or fiction (Adv. Biol. Psychiatry, Vol. 1; pp. 5–17). Karger. Lange, K. W., Reichl, S, Lange, K. M., Tucha, L., & Tucha, O. (2010). The history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 2(1), 2414–255.

The family and children are historically subject to many norms. Since the late 18th century, the child, family, and community have been subjects of standardizing the ideal of citizenry as a means of regulating populations for the welfare-state (Popkewitz, 2003). The child and family are vital sites of the social welfare system’s modern politics. This paper highlights and discusses how “being a good school parent” and “being a good student” is something that is part of the Danish school and preschool institutions’ contemporary time norms (Lidén, 2001; Schmidt, 2017). This is studied by analyzing parents’ and kindergarten children’s encounters with school’s time norms in various social situations, which are part of cultural rites of passage that help to regulate norms (Westerling et al., 2020; Olsen, 2015). This theoretical paper about how to grasp “time norms” in pedagogical transition practices is part of a project that analyzes which time norms parents and children encounter in concrete practices when they are welcomed at school and how they act in the situated contexts (Ehn & Lofgren, 2001). By getting close to the micro-social processes in transitions in children’s lives, we analyze how parents and children are to be socialized through time norms. Inspired by May and Thrift (2003), who argue that time is inextricably tied to the spatial composition of society, this paper investigates which norms parents and children must display in the contemporary Danish public school as the composition of a specific space with a specific time and how they do this. The parents’ and children’s encounters with school is understood through May and Thrift’s notion of “timespace” (May & Thrift 2003). Timespace refers to the sense of time produced through practices of social discipline, whereby sense of time is structured by the spatial organizations evident within those locations (Lingard &Thompson, 2017). Hence, this paper argues that the parents’ and children’s encounters with school is an interactive process where standards of sense of time norms and understandings of relationships are pieced together as a central part of the practice of social discipline (Bartholdsson, 2009), in which a particular person is created (Hacking, 2002). By analyzing the school’s time norms in transitional practices, the obvious practices through which the school tries to regulate and promote certain standards of behavior among parents and children is made visible. With this, the paper opens up new ways for professionals to rethink time and space.

Bartholdsson, Å. (2009). Den venlige magtudøvelse. Normalitet og magt i skolen. København: Akademisk Forlag. Ehn, B. & Löfgren, O. (2001). Kulturanalyser. Gleerup Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Lidén, H. (2001). Barn- tid – rom – skiftende positjoner. Trondheim: Fakultet for samfundsvitenskap og teknologiledelse, Socialantropologisk institut Lingard, B., & Thompson, G. (2017). Doing time in the sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1260854 May, J., & Thrift, N. (2001). Introduction. In Critical Geographies ; 13. Timespace: Geographies of temporality (pp. 1–45). London: Routledge. Olsen, B. (2015). Foregribelsens dialektik: ”Skolens” nærvær i børnehavens pædagogiske værdiunivers. Tidsskrift for Nordisk Barnehageforskning. Vol. 11 (3), 1-15. Popkewitz, T. S. (2003). Governing the Child and Pedagogicalization of the Parent - Governing Children, Families, and Education: Restructuring the Welfare State (M. N. Bloch, K. Holmlund, I. Moqvist, & T. S. Popkewitz, eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Schmidt, L. S. K. (2017). Pædagogers samfundsmæssige roller i forældresamarbejde. Professionshøjskolen Absalon. Westerling, A., Bach, D. Dannesboe, K. I., Ellegaard, T., Kjær, B. & Kryger (2020). Parate børn- forestillinger og praksis i mødet mellem familie og daginstitution. Frydenlund Academic.

In Ukraine, the policy of Russification also known as de-Ukrainization, denationalization, started in the late 17th century in the period of Moskov tzarism and continued to be carried out by Russian empire and was succeeded by Soviet Union. For almost 300 years, the Russian regimes targeted their efforts to impose Russian national and political superiority with the subsequent assimilation of non-Russian nationalities residing in the Ukrainian territory through implanting the Russian language and culture.

The policy of Russification got its extreme reveletaion during Soviet occupational regime in 50s – 80s of the 20th century. At that time, it was dramatically growing and was implemented in all spheres of social life, education in particular. This process became obvious after the law 'On intensifying the connection between school and life and on the further development of the system of public education in the Ukrainian SSR' (1959) was passed, which de jure provided students with the right to study in their native language, and enabled parents to choose the language of education for their children, however, de facto, it became a powerful tool of purposeful Russification of school education. Since that time, there were evident processes of a considerable increase in the number of schools with the Russian language of instruction, alocating more studying time for learning Russian in the curriculum, the Russification of the content of education. Thus, school curricular emphasized that learning Russian 'has a great educational value, contributes to intensifying Ukrainian - Russian friendship, and involves students into the rich culture of the great Russian people’.

The Russification of school education took on an overt character after the adoption of the resolution 'On measures for further improvement of studying and teaching of the Russian language in the Ukrainian SSR' (1978), which focused on the introduction of the compulsory learning Russian from the 1st grade in schools with the Ukrainian language of instruction from 1980/81; on the introduction of class grouping for learning Russian; on the improvement of programs, textbooks and teaching materials for teaching Russian aiming at solving educational tasks, in particular, 'implanting students’ love" for the Russian language.

Another attack on the Ukrainian as a language of instruction and as a subject was carried out by the resolution 'On additional measures to improve learning Russian in secondary schools and other educational institutions of the Union Republics' (1983). Adopting the document resulted in expanding the network of schools and classes with in-depth learning Russian; increased publication of educational, methodological and children's literature in Russian; offering additional payments and benefits to all Russian teachers etc.

The policy of Russification reached its peak in the mid-80s. The analysis of archive materials revealed that initially hidden and later overt Russification led to a significant shift in correlation between schools with Ukrainian and Russian languages of instruction. Therefore, while in 1954/55, 86.4% schools had Ukrainian language of instruction and 13.6% - Russian, in 1983/84 this correlation looked respectively - 28.8% and 71.2%. By the mid-80s of the 20th century the number of schools with the Ukrainian language of instruction significantly decreased in Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions whereas there was none left in the Crimean region. The result of a long-term purposeful policy of Russification was a considerable reduction not only of schools, but also of the contingent of learnes with Ukrainian as a language of their studies. In addition, the vast majority of them were students of rural schools. In cities and industrial areas, school education was almost totally russified.

Consequently, systematic and purposeful Russification imposed for decades led to development of young generation’s contempt to a mother tongue, culture, traditions.

There is an argument that higher education is in its essence international, however the current focus and prevalence of higher education internationalisation (if not in action, then at least in rhetoric) is a comparatively novel phenomenon (de Wit, 2020). Taking into account the development of the field over the past 30 years, internationalisation research remains Western European driven, in content as well as in disseminating a certain understanding of internationalisation (Bedenlier, Kondakci, & Zawacki-Richter, 2018). It stands to reason that an open higher education system that Western Europe enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century influenced the development of that understanding of internationalisation as well as its prominence in international research.

Before 1990, in the other side of the iron curtain, in Soviet-occupied Central and Eastern Europe, however, there was a different internationalisation. The Soviet regime used the term ‘friendship of nations’ to refer to a somewhat superficial cultural exchange focused on non-threatening ethnic customs that was loosely linked to education. The word ‘internationalisation’, on the other hand, was used to denote policies that purportedly intended to bring the entire Soviet Union together by embracing the common way, while in actuality it was used to further the russification agenda (Grybkauskas, 2013). Actual exchange in higher education or education research was limited even among the member countries of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union (Zelvys, 2015).

The vastly different experiences and understandings of internationalisation came into contact after 1990 when the Central European countries left the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states regained their statehood and independence. While their precise education reforms may have been different, all these countries were led by a common desire to ‘catch-up to Europe’ (Dakowska & Harmsen, 2015). Internationalisation (in the Western understanding), thus, was embraced and universities in Central and Eastern Europe become active participants in the early 2000s. As current research shows, the notion of internationalisation is rarely defined or re-defined in the scholarly publications of Central and Eastern Europe (Orechova, 2021). When implementation is concerned, a certain reluctance emerges in the shape of what Leisyte et al. (2015) aptly named ‘symbolic compliance’: formal conformity with the new regulations is maintained, yet, the measures are re-contextualised in different ways depending on the experiences and everyday practices of the academic staff, the type of institution and the discipline they represent. That is, the system does not undergo any change, just a slight recalibration and whatever internationalisation means is somewhat hidden in the translation.

This proposal, therefore, endeavours to investigate the construction of the concept of internationalisation in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990 by analysing the internationally published scholarly works on Central and Eastern European education from 1990 to 2000. Central to the analysis is the notion of concept as “a concentrate of several substantial meanings” (Kosseleck, 2004, p. 85) from the study of Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte). This analysis is primarily concerned with a particular academic discourse in a relatively non-distant past. This brings forth the importance of discourse. We maintain that discourse is organised around concepts (Ifversen, 2003) and acknowledge the increasingly conceptual nature of discourse (Krzyżanowski, 2016). Thus, we assert that both discourses and concepts are not just representations of social reality but also its constituents. The proposed research aims to critically interrogate the usage of ‘internationalisation’ in scholarly work to elucidate upon the various layers of meaning of the concept as it was being introduced into the scholarship of Central and Eastern Europe after 1990.

The Secondary Teacher Training Institution was established in Budapest in 1870 to enhance the professional theoretical knowledge and practice of secondary teacher candidates. In the early phase of its operation, its membership was not compulsoryfor teacher candites, however, this changed after 1924 as the result of the 27^th Act of the Parliament in 1924.

The 6^th § of the act declared that teacher candidates had to spend their one-year pedagogical practice in a public secondary school, preferably in the practising secondary school designed for the preparation of secondary teacher candidates in 1872. This part of the act also prescribed indirectly that the candidates had to stay for their practice in the same municipality as the teacher training institution was located to ensure the methodological preparation of the candidates parallelly run by the institution during the practising year. The reason for the intention of tightening the criteria of the one-year-long practice was twofold.

First, the secondary teacher training institute wanted to comply with its primary aim of elevating the professionalism of secondary teachers by requiring a standardized pedagogical practice that could strengthen the professionality of individual candidates. Second, before 1924, the practice year was not standardized and thus candidates exploited the shortcomings of the previous legal regulations, which affected the preparedness of the teachers for their duties. The new law and its implementation regulations theoretically ensured that all candidates had to comply with the same standards related to the pedagogical practice.

The primary aim of the paper is to provide an insight into the background of the legal changes and their consequences on teacher candidates from the less affluent social strata in the early 1930s. Since the social background of the secondary teacher candidates slightly changed, those social groups were affected seriously whose family background just made it possible to pursue higher education studies in the Hungarian capital but for a limited period. By extending the length of the staying in the capital, particularly during the period of the Great Depression (between 1929 and 1933) led to an increase in the rate of resining declarations from students with lower social status.

This paper stems out of a broader PhD research project that considers the role teachers could play in Libya’s efforts to stabilise a society in flux after the 2011 uprising against the 42-year old Col Gaddafi regime. It highlights that public school teachers are part of the public – be it hidden or unformed – and that teaching is a “relational practice” (Orchard et al., 2016, p. 42). Here, we will draw upon the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s conception of ‘the public’ in his book The Public and its Problems (1927) to help draw a path towards teachers’ agency in activating themselves, and other communities, to become conscious publics interacting to make up the public on the road to a fledging and floundering democratic Libya. To elucidate what Dewey means by ‘a/the public’ in a democracy to better see how, in practice, Libyan teachers could become one, it will be necessary to take a closer look at his notions of ‘individual’ and ‘community’ and how they too develop through relational ‘transaction’ – interactive experience and consequence.

Published in 1927, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems describes what democracies are now, but also how they came about, to suggest a better way to conceptualise democracies. In this historical approach, he re-conceptualises the individual not as a separate entity or being that can be studied and known, or that can grow and act in isolation, free and sovereign. Rather, Dewey argues, an individual forms in relation to a social group; individuals develop by observing the direct consequences of their interactions with others. Then they decide which thoughts and behaviours bring about the best connections and consequences, the best potentialities; these desired consequences are then called our ‘interests.’

Once these interests are formed in an individual, through transaction with the immediate group of family, friends, classmates etc, the individual joins a community of common interests as it is here where these interests, in communitarian solidarity and communication, are best developed and cared for. However, a community is not yet a public. A public, in the Deweyan sense, emerges out of a community that has perceived “an indirect consequence” between other interacting entities (be they individuals or communities), one that needs to be regulated and controlled; a consequence that affects communities’ interests who are not directly involved in the original interaction. A public, if you will, is an organised and politicised community – one that has clear aims, methods and activities to take care of its interests. For Dewey, a public, although beginning on the outside of established state structures, does not merely attempt to influence from the outside, like an Interest Group or a Lobby. Rather, a public elects officials or representatives out of the community who will dedicate time and effort to inquire into and communicate on the issue affecting the community’s interests.

How can teachers become such an agentic public, such “supreme artists” (Lowery & Jenlink, 2019, p. 249) when there is a need for public thinking and associated living? Koopman (2009) highlights pragmatism’s most fruitful concepts, temporarlity and historicity, when he posits that transaction between all things (i.e teachers and students and curriculum etc) is always happening; to know how to proceed towards something better, the actors’ temporality and historicity must play a part. Biesta et al. consider teachers’ agency an “ecological” concept and argue that teacher communication, the vocabulary they use to make sense of their experiences and to shape potential progressive ideas and action (Biesta et al., 2017) matters. In Dewey’s words, teachers need to inquire into and communicate on the interests that need to be pursued.

The focus of the paper is on the relation between education and solidarity and the possible futures that this might entail. Schools are often pitched as tools of social justice from all sides of the political and social spectrum – governments as well as international organisations have been all too eager in the 21st century to position formal schooling in particular as a miracle cure for societal problems, such as low social mobility, poverty, various inequalities as well as physical and mental health issues. This opportunistic but also very visible rebranding of education constitutes a new politics of educational governance, one that offers a ‘quick fix for the ills of a post-welfare state’ (Murphy, 2022: 4). While this rebranding is morally dubious at best it represents part of a more general conflation of educational and justice aims.

The discourse over education and justice is instructive as regards what it omits – this equation is presented as natural and unarguable, as if ‘justice’ operated as the only important element of democratic society. When it comes to Enlightenment aims, solidarity has arguably been a poor relation to both freedom (liberté) and justice (égalité) as these values have embedded themselves in educational systems in Western democracies. While freedom (individualised pathways, growth of academies and free schools) and justice (comprehensivisation, more recently school improvement agendas) have tussled for top billing in educational systems, a focus on solidarity had been demoted, rearing its head if at all in the guise of civics, citizenship education or other curricular options.

I argue in the paper that this is a mistake, for two reasons. First a concern over solidarity has been a constant in different forms over the history of European education systems - these forms have encompassed a focus on socialisation and cultural reproduction, a desire to alleviate supposed moral decay, through to a more recent sense that education should do more to tackle social division, the rise of demagoguery and post-truth agendas. A long and steady relationship has been established between solidarity and education, but it has suffered in the glare of other, possibly more pressing, imperatives.

The second reason relates to the growing sets of pressures on school systems emanating from civil society, in the guise of organised advocacy and activist groups that together question the values and even existence of formalised school systems. While these encompass a wide range of ideological positions (home schooling movements, decolonising curriculum), together they constitute a formidable challenge to whatever is left of the education/solidarity relationship.

These two issues form the backdrop to this paper, which offers a ‘rethinking’ of the solidaristic nature of education. In order to expand on this topic, I draw on a number of intellectual resources, including the work of Hegel (bildung, socialised conceptions of freedom), and the 20^th century debate between Richard Rorty and Nancy Fraser over the possibilities of creating and maintaining social solidarity in an increasingly fragmented world. I conclude that a rethinking of educational aims along solidaristic grounds requires both a moral and a practical assessment of the issues at work in educational solidarity, especially in the context of 21^st century governance agendas seemingly intent on dismantling the democratic foundations of education.

Two decades ago, Starrat (2001) claimed that a qualified form of democratic leadership in schools (DSL) is not only possible, but also necessary. The sense of urgency that Starratt voiced at the time alluded to the ethical discrepancies of formal schooling that DSL is able to counter by promoting equity, active citizenship and empowerment, self-actualization, and the creation of a democratic culture in which free and equal individuals share and construct knowledge for the betterment of the school and even society as a whole. Yet, there are also those who assert that DSL is not only morally advantageous, but also enhances organizational effectiveness especially in a reality characterized by increasing complexity, wicked problems, cultural diversity and in a world radically transformed by the effects of technology and the forces of globalization (e.g., Begley & Zaretsky, 2004; Harber & Trafford, 1999; Woods, 2004); not to mention the disruptiveness caused by a global pandemic and an environmental crisis, which necessitate more distributive, collaborative and responsive forms of leadership and governance (Harris & Jones, 2020). More specifically, DSL, it is argued, has the ability to alleviate contradictions and tensions by making participation and collaboration (as well as other brokering strategies) central to the effective functioning of educational organizations (Gale & Densmore, 2003).

Alongside this dual (functionalist-ethical) argument for applying DSL, which originates from Dewey’s understanding of democratic governance’s highly developed ethical problem-solving capacities (Dewey, 1922; Wergin, 2020), there is also acknowledgment of the complexities, tensions and paradoxes involved in both the conceptualization and application of DSL (Guttman, 1999; Marsh, 2007; Reitzug & O’Hair, 2002). Corresponding to the growing attention to dilemmas of educational leadership (Author, 2021; Arar & Saiti, 2022; Bogotch & Kervin, 2019; DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014; Goldring & Greenfield, 2002; Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016), DSL discourse is problematized from two different and interrelated directions. The first is the competition between different philosophical views of democratic governance in DSL discourse. Consequently, each competing view proposes different responses to the tensions and complication inherent to democratic governance. Second, given the above intricacies of DSL, it is possible to argue that its application compounds the dilemmas involved in leading educational organizations rather than alleviates them (Author, 2021).

The aim of this paper is to further the exploration of democratic leadership and governance by elaborating its inherently dilemmatic nature. Rather than viewing dilemmas and inner tensions as debilitating democratic governance and thus as demanding reconciliation or resolution, a dilemmatic approach views tensions between core values as one of its defining features and as central to its sustained implementation. The presentation will position a dilemmatic approach in relation to two generic approaches to DSL in the literature: the modernist and postmodernist. After identifying tensions and complications that unfold in each generic approach, a dilemmatic approach to DSL will be presented based on a discussion of both Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) agonistic-pluralist model, and Jurgen Habermas’ deliberative democratic model (1996). A dilemmatic approach goes beyond the above two opposing views by regarding DSL as a variable mode of democratic governance, characterized by a dynamic movement across different democratic models.

There can be a significant disconnect between how we teach History and what we understand as good historical practice as evident in the work of historians. We often teach History in the tertiary classroom as a collection of facts, or perhaps historical stories, or maybe even a series of arguments, issues and interconnected events. This approach suggests history is easily periodised, knowable, and singularly interpreted. Yet we know that History is what historians write. It is highly individualised, drawn from embodied experience and intuitive and imaginative interpretation. It is not the same as the past nor is it necessarily the same for any given two people. What we hope to emphasise more consciously is how to help history students to recognise and engage with their own ontological positioning.

Teaching positioning and knowledge-making processes in tertiary History classrooms promises to raise awareness not only of the role of diversity in the understanding and reading of History, but perhaps more importantly, in the construction and communication of innovative and ground-breaking History as well. As a dynamic discipline, History relies on different perspectives and new approaches to move it forward and to push its boundaries.

This paper examines how the teaching of good History as a challenging, constantly re-worked and revitalised exercise relies on teachers understanding the importance of recognising the impact of diversity in the History discipline. We ask: How might the introduction of post-qualitative approaches and new materialism to the teaching of History provide a diversification of the contemporary tertiary History classroom? Moreover, we explore a number of ways in which diversity can be accessed by students who may struggle with recognising their own ontological positioning and how that might influence, and should influence, how they write History. By considering how to employ a number of post-qualitative and new materialist strategies in the classroom, we argue that teachers can help students to identify themselves within the History-making process and understand what impact that self-knowledge has on the subjects they explore, the sources they access, the methods they employ, the questions they ask and the conclusions they draw.

Our work is theoretically informed by post-qualitative theories of affect (Taylor & Fullegar, 2022), and new materialism (Barad, 2012, Fox & Aldred, 2017). Post-qualitative theory offers us ways for thinking differently about data and the traditional conventions of research. It offers a new degree of flexibility and responsiveness to doing research (Adams St Pierre, 2014, p3). Infusing questions of affect and matter into history allows for new questions of historical imagination, locatedness and knowledge making.

Affect and affective entanglements offer an entry point into historical thinking, how historical knowledge can be constructed and can evolve. Affect can be thought of as a type of sensation, or relational and transpersonal becoming (Taylor & Fullegar, 2022, p.8-9). Affect might be spotted out of the corner of an eye, through a hunch, an uneasy feeling or realisation. It is intensely personal and embodied and may emanate between the corporeal and the material. Using a pedagogical focus on affective flows and entanglements between body and material, we argue there is a wealth of opportunity for new approaches to teaching History.

New materialism provides alternative theoretical insights for thinking about history and matter. It speaks to the liveliness of matter. Bennett reminds us that matter has intrinsic vitality, it can be disruptive, affective, effervescent (2010, p. 112). It can be encountered in assemblages or be boundered or isolated. New materialism supports a relational ontology; one that questions how students of history encounter matter, consider the human and nonhuman relations, think about locatedness and the ethics of knowledge making.

‘Why is Socialism necessary? Socialism is necessary because the present system enables a few to enrich themselves out of the labour of the People.’

• Socialist Sunday School Federation (in Gallagher, 2021)

Looking to Glasgow's past, a small committee of organisers are working to revive a lost tradition of providing radical learning spaces in Scotland’s most densely populated city. Founded in the 1890’s, the Socialist Sunday School Federation once provided a radical alternative to traditional schooling, offering ‘a widespread feeling as to the inadequacy of the orthodox Sunday Schools as a training ground for the children of Socialists’ (W.C.N.L., 2016). As chronicled of the modern incarnation by Gallagher (2021), ‘one of the main objectives was to develop the next generation of socialist leaders’ - something that has arguably ceased within the contemporary Scottish party-political scene, yet, seemingly thrives within social activist and, arguably, the trade union movements (McAlevey, 2016, 2020). Indeed, several former students went on to hold prominent positions within Scottish politics, with anti-fascist Patrick Dollan elected for the Independent Labour Party and serving as Lord Provost (Gallagher, 2010; Carrigan, 2014), and Janet ‘Jennie’ Lee going on to found the Open University after serving as an M.P. for the Labour Party (Dorey, 2015). A revived version, however, was established in January 2020 (Bhadani, 2022) it’s the rationale and possibilities of this current incarnation that this submission explored.

Through the support of a public fundraiser, the organisers raised circa £2,000 to cover essential costs involved in running the initiative, as well as a reserve to ensure compliance with child protection, and for providing food for learners as a means of providing a comfortable learning environment (Callaghan, 2021). As summarised by Callaghan (2021), the Red Sunday School affords children opportunities to develop ‘the tools to explore nature, culture and society from a radical perspective and get involved with modern day struggles such as anti-racism, feminism and the climate crisis’ (see also Bhadani, 2022). The space operates only once-per-month, resulting in circa ten to eleven sessions per year given the break over the Christmas and New Year period. With the Kinning Park Complex selected as the venue (itself a site of a one-time occupation by community members [Akilade, 2022]), the facilities were already in-place to prepare meals (the centre already runs a weekly community meal, demonstrating the appropriateness of venue choice), whilst the informal learning environment of the community-owned building (Bhadani, 2022) helps distinguish it further from traditional schooling spaces. The programme itself is not constrained by state-produced programmes, rather it is generated by the learners and families (the focus of the Glasgow Red Sunday School being children and young people), and, as such, is able to include arts, physical activities, alongside more traditional input style learning (O'Neill, 2022). One of the co-founders Mackinnon advises that the programme was specifically 'tailor-made for engaging children'.

One of the most important functions of the education system in the 19th century was to promote nation-building by developing and disseminating national culture and identity (Westberg et al., 2019). This tendency also applied to teacher education and the textbooks used in it.

The development of educational history writing gained momentum in the first half of the 19th century. Its development was closely linked to the development of teacher training, and textbooks for use at different levels of education played an important role in the formation of the discipline. Research (Tröhler, 2004, 2006) points out that the content and narrative of these textbooks are strongly linked to national (and imperial) frameworks.

Hungary was in a unique position in terms of both its educational system and nation-building. The development of its culture and educational system was strongly influenced by transnational trends (Mayer, 2019). In this regard, the role of German culture should be emphasized. One of the main goals of Hungarian textbooks on the history of education was to place the history of Hungarian education in a European framework.

At the end of the 19th century, Hungary was a multinational, multi-religious, socially fragmented, agrarian-industrial country (Romsics, 2010). When writing a national history of education, the authors should (have) taken into account not only the European framework, but also this diversity.

In my research, I investigated whether, and if so, to what extent, the above-mentioned diversity is reflected in Hungarian history of education textbooks published in the second half of the 19th century. I understood diversity from different perspectives (gender, religion, sex, special needs).

My research questions were:

How is the diversity of European culture represented and what is the role of Hungarian culture in it?

Does the textbook include nationalities other than the majority nationality?

Is the religious diversity of the country represented?

Does it reflect the ethnic and religious tensions that existed at the time?

How is women's education represented in the textbooks?

Are children with special educational needs represented in the textbooks?

This paper draws on the seminal research by the Building Performance Research Unit (BPRU), implemented on 48 comprehensive schools in central Scotland, opened between 1958 and 1966. Headed by Thomas Markus, this unit from the University of Strathclyde, brought an innovative modus operandi to school building appraisal. This research project provided the framework to pre post-occupancy studies in schools, later widely taken as mandatory.

The work of Thomas Markus is well-known for the book Buildings & Power from 1993. Its contents reveal a critical synthesis of several methods of interpretation, but it also underlies a blend of references, of which some are strictly analytical (e.g.: graph methods), while others are almost philosophical and Foucaultian. Hence, the theoretical stance of Markus will be traced, concerning an early approach on the research programme on ‘building performance’, launched at the University of Strathclyde and early sponsored by the MPBW and RIBA.

The Building Performance Research Unit was founded in 1967 and led by Markus, along with his team of researchers: P. Whyman (architect), D. Canter (psychologist), T. Maver (operational research scientist), J. Morgan (physicist), D. Whitton (quantity surveyor) and J. Flemming (systems analyst). The theoretical models and outputs of this research team, applied to the comprehensive schools Scotland, were then published profusely – at the same time encouraged and criticised –, as the title of an article on the Architects’ Journal in 1970 unravels: ‘Tom Markus is alive and well…’ (p.538).

Additionally, this paper also brings previous and parallel research efforts on this environmental paradigm, as Peter Manning’s studies at the Pilkington Research Unit. Hence, the research path and interests of Markus, right from the second half of the 1960s reveal how different ontologies of architectural research were evolving, in-between the two cultures announced by C. P. Snow (1961). On the one hand, Markus was close to the Glasgow arts centres, where music and drama for children was produced, and where he played the cello. On the other hand, he was a critic of building research, which still missed evidence and logic in its methods and outputs. The environmental research was, in fact, an output of those interrelating experiments, attempting “bridges with other faculties” (March, 1976), while architecture became a recognised discipline within University.

Finally, this paper argues that the contemporary interest on environmental issues, as proven by the subject matter of many interdisciplinary research projects at the present – known to be highly fundable –, is actually a restating of some pioneer proposals around catch words as ‘environment’ that triggered some funded research programmes, like the one from Markus and his Building Performance Research Unit.

It is expected that today’s knowledge, might help to critical (re)situate the values of BPRU’s research agenda, but also its irresolvable shortcomings for the time. This seminal background, we claim, might bring added value for the current plethora of educational studies on learning environments and the relationship between pedagogy and space, increasingly ubiquitous and diverse.

Recent years have seen a surge in research on student mobilization and protest (Pickard 2019). To a large extent this is a response to the renewed engagement by youth in climate politics – sparked by Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future – but also due to the prominent role of students in movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Hong Kong protests. Analyzing how and why students protest, as well as conditions for doing so, is central for understanding and responding to recent student activism. As noted by Bessant, Messinas and Pickard (2021, p. 5) especially political action by secondary and high school student has tended to be neglected both in current and historical studies. The paper addresses this lacunae. Apart from the general lack of systematically studied historical cases of school student protests in different national contexts there is a specific shortage of studies on students engaging in issues of school politics (but see Cunningham & Lavalette 2016). Also, scholars have not considered the role of organizations in student politics to a satisfactory degree. The paper can thus contribute with knowledge about students protesting against more concrete issues, not only regarding social and climate justice, as well as how student politics comes in different forms depending on context, not only sporadic and temporary but also highly organized.

The paper studies the massive student-led protest campaign to abolish school-grades in Sweden during the 1970s and 80s. At one point, in 1978, this campaign mobilized tens of thousands students in demonstrations all over Sweden (Landahl, forthcoming). The purpose of the paper is to learn more about how and why this issue emerged and became so important for Swedish students, how student addressed this issue through different forms of collective action, and the role of student organizations in facilitating the campaign. Sweden, with its institutional heritage of popular mass movements centered around large, hierarchical yet democratic, formal organizations (Henriksen, Stromsnes & Svedberg 2019), constitutes a critical example for studying organizational aspects of student mobilization. In accordance with this heritage Swedish students in secondary and high school education have been organized in national mass associations since the late 1930s (Johansson, forthcoming). In the post-war period, especially in regards to the grading-issue, there is reason to talk about a Swedish school student movement.

Theoretically the paper will utilize two concepts from research on social movements: political opportunity structures and contentious performances (McAdam, McCarthy & Zald 1996; Tilly 2008) in order to analyze how the campaign emerged, it’s relation to the broader political environment, and the forms of collective action used throughout the campaign. Furthermore the paper will draw on insights from organization theories, especially theories on interest and movement organizations, to analyze the interactions of the associations within, between and in relation to the state (Micheletti 1994; Zald & Ash 1966; Ahrne 1994). Finally the concept of framing, familiar to scholars of protest, will be employed to analyze what ideas of schooling sparked the campaign and how the associations framed the issue (Benford & Snow 2000).

In Sweden and the other European countries, intensive reforms began after 1945, where the goal was to democratize the school, which in many countries led to a compulsory secondary school (högstadiet). A central idea was multiple access to education for everyone no matter where you lived and what social class you belonged to. Another important idea was related to teaching and pedagogy, more specifically that the already established student-centered perspectives became increasingly important. These aspects are well investigated (Tisdall, 2020; Depaepe, 2000; Ward, 2015; Oftedal Telhaug et al, 2006; Englund, 2006) But, a central aspect was access to school buildings. The construction of schoolhouse that could accommodate new groups of pupils and were adapted to new modern teaching principles was therefore important. When the implementation of secondary school intensified in the 1960s, it was emphasized that access to modern school buildings was central to the implementation of the reforms (Cf. Rasmussen, 2021; Clark, 2010; SOU: 1948:27). Previous research on, for example, the period 1840-1900 points out that schoolhouse construction often was a local complex process with many actors involved. The advent of schoolhouses should be understood in relation to economic, social and cultural processes claimed by some scholars (Westberg, 2017).

When it comes to postwar school reforms, the premise has often been that it was a national project run by leading national politicians and bureaucrats. (Cf. Sass, 2022; Krupinska, 2022). There is also previous research that emphasizes national pedagogical associations, teacher-training programs and national teacher pressure when explaining the emergence of compulsory secondary school (Cunningham, 1988). However, in line with the research that emphasized local, social and economic processes for understanding school development during the 1800s, I would also like to look at the local aspects of the introduction of compolsury secondary school (Westberg, 2017). By focusing on the processes that led to new schoolhouses at the local level, our knowledge of postwar school reforms can be broadened.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the school building process of secondary school buildings 1950-1970 in Denmark and Sweden. This is done through two case studies of the planning and construction of schools in two medium-sized cities.

Theoretical inspiration has been taken from institutionalism and the idea of path dependence regarding the municipality's actions (cf. March & Olsen, 1989). I assume that the school buildings process was influenced by local history, such as how the municipality planned, built and financed schools in the past. However, I also see that formal rules, national institution and national guidelines influence construction. Examples of such institutions are the authorities' model schools.

The universal is not a foreign outsider but an intimate point at which each particular finds itself lacking. Through this lack, the universal holds the series of particulars together even when they themselves do not register the connection (McGowan, 2020, p. 58).

In this presentation, teacher education researchers from Australia, Denmark, Wales and Northern Ireland critically analyse the place of positive forms of universalism in our work. We aim to engage teacher educators with the cruel optimism that exists within this field – one which often promises redemption, order and completeness (Berlant 2011), but can lead to frustration and anxiety. We identify analytically two positive views of universalism. An abstract form of universalism that claims to be ‘neutral’, and “indifferent to particulars, ’disinterestedly’ deploying an assumed or self-evident truth to all” (Kapoor and Zalloua, 2022, p. 14), and a commonality form of universalism that claims to unify - that is “a series of particulars deemed to share common content” (p. 15). We argue that by adopting these positive views of universalism, there is a risk of creating an illusion or fiction where the abstract form of universalism takes a privileged, specific position that “ends up dominating (other) particulars”(p. 14), whilst the commonality universalism ‘ends up excluding particulars ‘(p.14), that is, despite its claim of inclusivity, there are many exceptions that simply do not fit the universal.

As an alternative perspective, and taking inspiration from Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua (2022) and Todd McGowan (2020), we offer a theoretical frame that engages with the concept of negative universality – the idea that the actual universal sits at the points of social structure failure, absence or exclusion and not in the false claim of unity and inclusion (pp. 59-60). Through this lens of negative universality, we interrogate the OECD (2019) document, A Flying Start: Improving initial teacher education, which examines the question of ‘How can initial teacher preparation equip teachers with updated knowledge and competences?’ that present the universal in terms of professional knowledge and competence, ongoing updating of initial teacher education curriculum and alignment with school contexts all of which frame, structure and regulate teacher education in different ways and with various consequences.

Our justification for focusing on updated knowledge and competences, is that they aim to fix the positive in universal ways for educators, that is, what they must desire and live up to, how they must do it, and what defines them as a professional teacher. This has led to an almost technicist approach to education (Clarke and Phelan, 2017), creating an absence of critical thinking where the language associated with teaching aligns closely with what we could call an ‘apprenticeship’ model that supports a belief that practice makes perfect. Furthermore, it has been shown how this competence view coupled with universal endeavours can create anxiety, frustration and exclusion as well as reinforce the problems that they are supposed to (dis)solve (Dunn, 2005; Popkewitz, 2011).

Using the lens of negative universality, provided us with an opportunity to problematise the ways in which (particular) views of teacher knowledge and competences in a ‘universal sense’ dominate and/or exclude certain particulars (Kapoor and Zalloua, 2022, p. 185) in abstract or common ways. This can lead to the absence, marginalisation, and disavowal of matters that cannot be formulated or translated into standards and standardised in more or less universal ways, for example, ethical-political matters. Put differently; the universal can often be seductive in arresting such matters “in unequivocal or transparent definitions” (Ruti, 2007, p. 492) but, we would like to suggest, that this seduction is not without educational consequences.

This paper aims to provoke critical thinking about current developments in the field of inclusion argued on the level of the theory of education. Hence, the paper's main objective is to ask why the realization and the discourse about inclusion remain 'fuzzy' and often seem doomed to fail. The article approaches this objective by proposing the evaluation and consideration of inclusion as a multi-layered concept and reality, opening the discussion and reflection on whether inclusion as a concept, apart from a practice, is dead, has never been alive, or is yet to be brought to life. As a theoretical framework, the paper discusses the role of inclusion as an ideology that collides with various social and cultural conditions and occurrences based on their contingency (ct. Holzinger, 2015; Flügel-Martinsen, 2021). Similarly, inclusion collides with human nature, e.g., the ability to classify.

Even though education is the primary discipline that examines inclusion, the participation of other subjects in the discussion is now growing, especially in domains from sociology to health sciences going through cultural studies and anthropology. We could raise the question regarding how different disciplines interfere with each other by giving various ideas of inclusion and how to characterize this obstruction. But the fact is that they do not interfere with or recognize each other at all. Consequentially, there isn’t an interdisciplinary discourse close to the topic of discussion. This paper analyses sources from a critical standpoint and looks into possible sources from the named different and various academic fields that may interfere with the main corpus. With an interdisciplinary strategy, this paper studies the possible contradictions or merges between sources from the periphery and the nucleus.

There is a tendency to associate inclusion and diversity without question. Although inclusion deems more complicated than initially thought, the term is broadly used in different and various social discourses, e.g., in institutional, educational, and political ones. It is a word that carries a powerful meaning, holding its ground in the Human Rights Convention as the highest ethical standard of westernized societies. At the same time, it’s a term with a critical fragility regarding its connotation and general understanding. Amongst the definitions existing all over the globe, one can, for example, observe that inclusion is either nationally and culturally located or used as a decontextualized and uniformized standard. Also, the understandings are either based on empirical evidence or an ethical demand. It is related to school and education but also social issues and society. Subsequently, it refers to differing ideas in the “special needs” and disability realm of diversity and difference. Inclusion focuses on the discursive and theoretical level but also on the practices and realization. Based on all these different references and frameworks for understanding inclusion, the succeeding definitions differ considerably (cf. Katzenbach, 2017; Lindmeier & Lindmeier, 2015; Hinz, 2010; Allan, 2008; Ainscow, 1999; Wolley 2017). This observation is used as a common ground and starting point for unfolding the reasons for this fuzziness by contextualizing it, reflecting its interdisciplinarity, and looking at this from an ideologically critical, multilayered perspective. The gathered knowledge, therefore, offers crucial impulses for talking about the value of diversity in its close connection to inclusion as an ethical standard.

The paper looks at the topic of how "participating in democracy" is conceptualized in the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) and how the results of the 2016 study can be interpreted in light of the conflicting tendencies between aiming for implementing inclusive practices implied by policies for an education for all while at the same time confronting problems with access, increasing segregation, inequality and differentiation within the Swedish educational system. In an international perspective, and in contrast to some of the other large-scale comparative tests such as PISA, Sweden shows outstanding results regarding democracy education and scored in the top group of ICCS together with other Nordic countries and Taiwan (Skolverket 2017). The survey shows also some shortcomings regarding schools’ inability to compensate for inequalities in socio-economic background because there are significant differences between how children from different social backgrounds understand their possibilities for democratic participation and trust in democracy. Significant differences could also be shown in relation to gender. The stark differences in the perception of possibilities for democratic participation and influence seem to contrast with the high level of knowledge about democracy displayed by Swedish students according to the 2016 survey. The gap between students learning about democracy and feeling trust and possibilities for participating in democracy can be related to the growing educational segregation and hierarchical division between schools in Sweden since the 1990’s. It becomes harder for schools to “compensate for society”, as Basil Bernstein said. This contrasts with parallel demand for educational spaces where all students have the opportunity to explore and practice democracy in an inclusive (and differentiated) educational system, which is required by law and stressed in the curriculum (LGR22).

One of the issues the report points towards is that in the current climate of neoliberal individualization and increasing segregation in the educational sector in Sweden (and other countries), legally binding demands for inclusion and an education for all seem to be paradoxically countered by the developments produced on the ground. In order to understand these results better, the paper will first explore the meaning attached to and the conceptual framing of “democracy”, “democratic practices in education” and “democratic participation” which can be distilled from the study design of the ICCS. Which philosophical notions can be used to work through the mixture of Deweyan, Habermasian and Mouffian strands of understanding democratic education in the survey? What are the implications of these conceptual underpinnings for an interpretation of the results of the ICCS, in particular for the Swedish context, but also in a wider European perspective? How can we understand the philosophical and theoretical tensions between the framing of “learning about democracy” and “democratic participation” in relation to the strife for an education for all? And last, but not least, which kind of conceptual framing of inclusive education or an “education for all” is implicit in the ICCS? One consequence of exploring the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of the way in which the study interprets democracy is that we can arrive at a better understanding at how the demand for differentiation in the name of inclusion might need to be complemented with more outspoken efforts at creating preconditions for solidary relationships between students (be that from similar and different backgrounds). Furthermore, it highlights how the focus might need to shift from primarily epistemic aims of education to reactivate concern with the social aims of education in order to keep democratic education and education for democracy and the fostering of democratic citizens alive in a meaningful sense.

Parallel to the global development towards inclusive education in the last two decades, autism as a phenomenon has reached increased attention in educational research. The diversity and individuality of students on the spectrum has an impact on all spheres of life as is reflected in the increase of research literature on the topic (Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019; Happé & Frith, 2020).

While some European countries, such as the UK, have a relatively long tradition of educational research on autism, others, such as Germany, have only begun to look at the subject more closely in recent years. They are inspired by and can benefit from the previous work conducted in the anglophone regions. The existing research literature as well as the proposed symposium show, that the European countries face similar challenges regarding inclusive education in the context of autism and deal with similar questions despite the differences in the respective national school systems.

The proposed symposium consists of three presentations from three different countries on three different questions concerning autistic children and teenagers. It aims to show a variety of complex situations that autistic students, their families, their teachers and other involved persons face in educational contexts and how research responds to it. The three research projects were conducted independently from each other. However, this symposium aims to bring them together to discuss them as they show the cross-sectional character of autism spectrum research.

Autistic students face a disproportionately high risk of being partially or completely excluded from school and this has been reported in different countries (Brede et al., 2017; Guldberg et al., 2021; Lilley, 2015). Karen Guldberg will present an investigation on the causes and impacts of school exclusion in England.

The high rate of school exclusion despite obligatory school attendance in Germany (Grummt et al., 2021) has led to the second symposium contribution on flexible education of autistic students. Mechthild Richter will present a literature review on flexi-schooling and discuss the extent to which flexible education provision could be a solution to meeting the needs of autistic students and as a way of preventing school exclusion.

One of the main reasons for the exclusion of autistic students is distress behaviour. A long school day with academic, social and emotional demands can be exhausting for any young person, but especially for autistic students who may to deal with an overwhelming sensory environment, decoding social interactions and following learning strategies that are not adapted to their own thinking and learning (Goodall, 2015). Paola Molteni presents research on an Italian social-skill-training including autistic and non-autistic teenagers in order to enable peer-to-peer-coaching.

Raised awareness of autism, neurodiversity and inclusion in schools may lead to better understanding of good educational practice for autistic children and teenagers in schools. This could reduce distress behaviour and lead to more flexibility in schools, and in turn prevent school exclusion.

These three research objectives and perspectives are intertwined and may enrich one another. They also provide important pointers for future research.

Background Official data for from the Department for Education (DfE, 21-22) in England show a figure of 2.2% of pupils classified as autistic in English schools. Educational exclusion is a growing problem that is affecting these pupils disproportionately. DfE data highlights that autistic pupils are approximately twice as likely as other pupils without special educational needs to receive a fixed-term exclusion (suspension) from school. One of the striking issues, which is hidden from DfE figures, is the use of unofficial or unlawful exclusion practices in English schools. Methods Our research investigated the causes and impacts of excluding autistic children and young people in England. We conducted a literature review; examined DfE data; asked autistic adults (n=22), parents (n=203) and educational leaders (n=91) to complete a questionnaire; ran four focus groups with the Autism Education Trust Young Person’s Panel (n=10) and interviewed members of the Communication and Autism Team from Birmingham City Council (n=8) on challenges and best practice related to exclusions. Findings The reasons schools give for permanently excluding an autistic pupil often centre on the behaviour of the pupil. However, parents and autistic adults in our research emphasised that the exclusion of autistic pupils is the result of a failure of staff to make reasonable adjustments, inadequate systems and policies, or budgets being cut in the areas of pastoral and mental health support. There was tension between the perspectives of educators on the one side and autistic pupils and their families on the other. The impact of exclusion on autistic CYP is profound and lifelong, leaving a sense of injustice, anger and feeling let down by the education system. Exclusion places additional demands on families as managing reduced timetables is complex. Many families need to give up work, leading to financial pressures. Exclusion also leads to isolation and stigma for the whole family. This in turn impacts on family relationships and dynamics, including siblings. Conclusions The implementation of appropriate educational support for these pupils is vital to reduce school exclusions and ensure positive educational experiences. There is urgent need for: • More support for the pupil and their family during exclusion. • Training for education staff. • Better funding to make required environmental changes. • Improved resources to provide safe spaces. • Systemic changes, including policies on reasonable adjustments and individualised behaviour policies in schools.

Guldberg, K., Wallace, S., Bradley, R., Perepa, P., Ellis, L., and MacLeod, A. (2021) Investigation of the causes and implications of exclusion for autistic children and young people, University of Birmingham. House of Commons Education Committee. (2018). Forgotten children: Alternative provision and the scandal of ever-increasing exclusions. London: House of Commons. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmeduc/342/342.pdf Justice (2019). Challenging School Exclusions. https://justice.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2019/12/Challenging-School-Exclusions.pdf Office of the Children’s Commissioner (2013). Report on illegal exclusions. Always Someone Else’s Problem. https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp- content/uploads/2017/07/Always_Someone_Elses_Problem.pdf Paget, A., Parker, C., Heron, J., Logan, S., Henley, W., Emond, A., & Ford, T. (2018). Which children and young people are excluded from school? Findings from a large British birth cohort study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Child: care, health and development, 44 (2), 285-296. Pirrie, A., Macleod, G., Cullen, M. A., & McCluskey, G. (2011). What happens to pupils permanently excluded from special schools and pupil referral units in England? British Educational Research Journal, 37(3), 519-538. Timpson Review of School Exclusion (2019). Dandy Booksellers Limited. Trotman, D., Tucker, S., & Martyn, M. (2015). Understanding problematic pupil behaviour: perceptions of pupils and behaviour coordinators on secondary school exclusion in an English city. Educational Research, 57(3), 237-253.

Background Germany’s obligatory school attendance means that homeschooling is no legal option for families. During the Covid-19-pandemic, however, schools had to close during lockdown-periods and instruction had to be provided at home. While there seemed to be a common agreement in media and society that the return to classroom education should be enabled as soon as possible, some students, among them autistic students, seem to benefit from learning at home (Bozkus-Genc & Sani-Bozkurt, 2022; Hornstra et al., 2022). Furthermore, school exclusion of autistic students is a widespread phenomenon, not only, but also in Germany – despite obligatory school attendance (Guldberg, 2021; Lilley, 2015, Grummt et al., 2021). A systematic international literature review was conducted in order to identify advantages and disadvantages of flexi-schooling, to understand why families or schools decide to flexi-school autistic students and how this can be implemented. Method 855 studies were screened, of which 8 finally met the search criteria and were included in the analysis. A thick description of the data set could be reached through thematic analysis. Results Flexi-schooling is rarely a first choice, but is often seen as a positive solution to a challenging and constantly changing situation (Kendall & Taylor, 2014; Lawrence, 2017; Parsons & Lewis, 2010; Smith et al., 2020). It may be a way to provide autistic students with an education that is constructed to meet their individual needs and is flexible enough to address changes in them. Nevertheless, it can also be a challenging process that requires commitment, tolerance and additional efforts from parents and teachers and may face legal, attitudinal, and financial barriers. Conclusions Flexi-schooling is an idea that has not yet been widely implemented in practice, and there is little information available about how it is put into action. The success of flexi-schooling depends on the needs and preferences of the individual student and the parental and school engagement. From a German perspective, flexi-schooling as it is presented in this review is no option to prevent school exclusions while fulfilling compulsory education requirements. However, a need for flexible education options is evident. Solutions like cyber schools or any other measure to establish parts of school at home (organized and monitored by the school) would be interesting to keep autistic students in school and at the same time offering them a space to learn in their own way.

Bozkus-Genc, G., & Sani-Bozkurt, S. (2022). How parents of children with autism spectrum disorder experience the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives and insights on the new normal. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 124, 104200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2022.104200 Grummt, M., Lindmeier, C., & Semmler, R. (2021). Die Beschulungssituation autistischer SchülerInnen vor der Pandemie. Autismus, 92, 5–17. Guldberg, K., Wallace, S., Bradley, R., Perepa, P., Ellis, L., & MacLeod, A. (2021). Investigation of the causes and implications of exclusion for autistic children and young people. The Autism Education Trust. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-social-sciences/education/reports/causes-and-implications-of-exclusion-for-autistic-children-and-young-people.pdf Kendall, L., & Taylor, E. (2016). ‘We can’t make him fit into the system’: Parental reflections on the reasons why home education is the only option for their child who has special educational needs. Education 3-13, 44(3), 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2014.974647 Lawrence, C. (2017). Can sharing education between home and school benefit the child with autism? [PhD, Sheffield Hallam University]. https://doi.org/10.7190/shu-thesis-00030 Smith, D. K., Dickerson, D. C., & Smith, J. (2020). Exploring the reasons why people home educate in Hertfordshire: Full Report (pp. 1–88) [Full Report]. University of Hertfordshire.

Background Recent research (Atwood, 2019; Fisher Bullivant, 2020; Travaglione, 2021) has highlighted the importance of involving non-autistic peers in social groups to develop peer-to-peer coaching experiences to practice the skills the pupil has developed in therapy sessions. Since 2008 the Autism Centre “Cascina San Vincenzo” NGO has supported individuals on the autism spectrum and their families in improving quality of life through therapy, consultancy, and social groups. In 2022 the Centre team developed a partnership with the Scholastic District involving high school students in conducting their PCTO (Training for Transversal Skills and Orientation a mandatory activity for high school students) through participating in social groups with peers on the Spectrum. CeDisMa Research Centre at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore has observed and measured the impact of this experience, and the findings are presented in this symposium. Methods Our research investigated the impacts of conducting three mixed social groups with teenage peers both on the autism spectrum and neurotypical. We undertook a literature review; conducted interviews with non-autistic students from high school involved in the PCTO training experience (n=6) and their professors (n=3); and asked parents (n=20), individuals on the spectrum (n=15) and professionals (n=8) to complete a questionnaire. The impact on social ability and cooperation was measured through the use of the Cooperation and Communication Observation Schedule (CCOS, Travaglione et al., 2021) in all three groups, with pre-assessment and follow-up after 9 months. Findings The strategy of involving neurotypical peers had a profound impact on the pupils supported at the centre and through this group experience. Findings highlighted that the students’ social skills and understanding improved in daily life experiences; the students strengthened their self-confidence and self-esteem in social capability and cooperation with others and other high school students raised their awareness about autism, neurodiversity and inclusion. Conclusions The implementation of social coaching groups mediated by specialists and educators can support the inclusion of teenagers on the autism spectrum and can enable the development of work and life skills. We recommend: • More group coaching support for students on the autism spectrum to help them develop social understanding and skills in daily life. • Training for education staff on social coaching and peer-to-peer group mediation. • Better links between rehabilitation/therapy centres and schools. • Improved resources to provide safe spaces.

Attwood, T. (2000). Strategies for improving the social integration of children with Asperger syndrome. Autism, 4(1), 85-100. Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704-1712. Laugeson, E. A., & Park, M. N. (2014). Using a CBT approach to teach social skills to adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and other social challenges: The PEERS® method. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 32, 84-97. Laugeson, E. A., Frankel, F., Gantman, A., Dillon, A. R., & Mogil, C. (2012). Evidence-based social skills training for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders: The UCLA PEERS program. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 42, 1025-1036. Molteni, P. (2015). Autismo a scuola. Dimensioni educative del lavoro di rete. Pensa Multimedia Editore Srl. Scarpa, A., White, S. W., & Attwood, T. (Eds.). (2013). CBT for children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Guilford Press. Travaglione S., Cavalli L., Vagni D. (2021). Uniche come me. Terapia cognitivo -comportamentale per ragazze nello spettro autistico. Edra Edizioni.

Autism is a frequently articulated category in the current debate on inclusive education, in inclusion research as in school practice. Not only did it rise to become a buzz-word in the discourse around difference, it also hints at fundamental mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in educational contexts. For example, it reveals a tension between identification, diagnosis and needs-based support on the one hand – and a marketized autism regime on the other, which requires a deficit-based production of difference first to then introduce the marker 'autism' as a legitimacy figure to initiate intervention programs (Broderick & Roscigno, 2022; Runswick-Cole, 2014). However, the extent to which the category ‘autism spectrum’ and its contextualizing practices are involved in processes of inclusion and exclusion is an empirical question. Surprisingly, there is limited discourse on methodological issues in the context of inclusion-oriented autism research so far. In light of the fact that autism is defined differently and consequently captured differently in empirical studies, we see the need to discuss methodological issues related to autism studies.

To do so, we draw on perspectives from the Critical Autism Studies (e.g., Davidson & Orsini, 2013), which move away from essentialist conceptions of autism (Begon & Billington, 2019). Against this backdrop, we ask how methodological approaches should be constituted that can empirically capture the production and processing of autism spectrum on the one hand, and the (marginalized) voices on the other. Hence, the focus is on methodological questions such as how to deal with categories, who the relevant actors are, and how contextual (and cultural) settings can be taken into account in the research.

The symposium intends to initiate an international and at the same time methodological discussion on autism and autism research. For this purpose, the symposium is organized and structured in such a way that first, in an introductory paper, basic and traditional methodological questions of autism studies will be challenged and discussed. Based on this, in the second and third paper alternative forms of analyzing autism and their practice will be presented along exemplary methods. Three different country contexts are dealt with: While the first paper focuses on UK-based Anglo-American discourses, the following papers will present empirical examples from the German-speaking context and from the Ukraine.

The overall aim of the symposium is to challenge existing notions and approaches to autism research and to point out potential academic injustice. In doing so, we will distance ourselves from understandings that conceptualize autism as a purely person-related characteristic - and accordingly research it in this simplicity or assume that a direct comparison is possible. Rather, we see autism as a situationally embedded and complex phenomenon, which requires complex methodological approaches. These will be presented in this symposium as examples to create first approaches to necessary international comparisons and to stimulate discussions. Furthermore, the methodological reflections on empirical research on autism suggest that inclusion and exclusion in educational settings cannot be considered without an analytical view of the powerful (national, cultural, organizational) context and their impact on the students' subjectivity process (Pluquailec, 2018).

In recent years, there has been growing criticism of the way in which much autism research has been conducted and, of its epistemological integrity. Knowledge about autism is usually generat-ed from an external position; “expertise and knowledge production are situated in the hands of the, usually, neurotypical professional, clinician and researcher, with autistic subjectivity being marginalised or dismissed.” (Moore, 2020: 42). Contemporary orthodoxy of theorising autism is predicated on notions of deficit and lack. In both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) and International Classifications of Diseases (ICD-11) autism is characterised as a condition typified by persistent deficits in reciprocal interac-tion and communicative behaviours. This construction of autism as a deficit of language and in-teraction leads to the delegitimization of autistic knowledge. Once positioned as incapable with regards to social communication and interaction, all autistic utterances become “suspect on the basis of… [their] very being” (Yergeau, 2016: 89) and autistic knowledge production based on subjective experience is dismissed as uncredible. Positioned as unknowing, autistic people are denied epistemic agency. Meanwhile, the dominant autism narrative of lack and deficit continues to perpetuate its epistemic violence, “whereby our [autistic people’s] status as knowers, interpret-ers, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent's agency and dignity” (Chapman & Carel, 2021: 1) Epistemic injustice is compounded when the category of autism intersects with the category of childhood. Developmentalism positions children as ontologically different from adults and, in edu-cation, they are observed, assessed, and evaluated against pre-determined ‘Ages and Stages’ standards of development (Burman, 1994, 2017; Walkerdine, 1988). In much the same way that neurotypicals claim the authority to construct knowledge about autistic people, so too do adults claim the authority to speak about and for children. This paper will consider the claims much autism research in the area of education perpetuates epistemic violence against autistic children and it will suggest ways in which we can make an epistemological shift towards acknowledging autistic children as epistemologically agentic, with the “capacity for an individual to produce, transmit and use knowledge” (Catala, Faucher & Poirer, 2021: 9015) It will argue that, in order for autism research to have epistemological integrity it must include autistic voices and lived experiences and move to a collaborative way of doing research with, rather than on autistics.

Burman E (1994) Development phallacies: Psychology, gender and childhood. Agenda 22: 11–17. Burman E (2017) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. 3rd ed. London: Routledge Catala, A., Faucher, L & Poirer, P. (2021) Autism, epistemic injustice, and epistemic disablement: a relational account of epistemic agency Synthese (2021) 199:9013–9039 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03192-7 Walkerdine V (1988) The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Ra-tionality. London: Routledge Yergeau, M. (2016) Occupying Autism: Rhetoric, Involuntarity, and the Meaning of Autistic Lives, In: Block P., Kasnitz D., Nishida A., Pollard N. (eds) Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9984-3_6 83-95

Focusing developments on a macro-level Maynard and Turowetz (2019: 90) emphasize “social, political, and cultural forces that have shaped and transformed autism, especially in the last thirty years, when its prevalence has risen dramatically”. Similarly, outlining an “Autism Industrial Complex” Broderick and Roscigno (2022: 85) expose “interlocking strands of social policy, busi-ness, education, and medicine”. However, these ‘interlocking strands’ resp. the structural cou-plings seem to be the missing link as even in (educational) science and pedagogy there is a strong concentration on the (inner life of) autistic persons – while its surroundings are rarely re-garded. Considering the observations on complexity and linkage cited above, isolated considerations of autism are challenged – and for empirical research designs the question of how this complexity can be engaged arises. The paper presents and discusses the Situational Analysis (SA) following Clarke (2018) as a possibility to pursue this target. Bringing a postmodern turn into the Grounded Theory Methodology, Clarke argues that post-modernity itself is no consistent system of convic-tions and assumptions, but rather a continuous linking of possibilities. Consequently, she re-nounces to methodological developments which focus on the ‘voice of the individual’ – employing for example autoethnography or biographical studies. Clarke (2018) instead devotes to the ‘situat-ing of interpretations’ and orients her methodical approach to Strauss (1978) conceptualization of Social Worlds: These find themselves in constant negotiations which take place in so-called Are-nas. The Situational Analysis therefore aims to draw an ideally complete picture of these Arenas by using mapping techniques. Mapping an ‘Autism Arena’ in its details – and in a second step undertake cross-cultural compari-sons – seems to be of special importance, since in the field of educational practice there e.g., is a loud call for medical and psychological knowledge and biographical views play a huge role in pedagogical advice literature (Köpfer, Papke & Zobel, 2021). These dominant interpretations im-pede a view on the complexity of the situation – its negotiations and structural couplings. The paper therefore shows the first results of a situational analysis conducted in the southwest of Germany within which interviews are carried not only with diagnosed pupils and parents of these but also with representatives of the education authority, of the medical resp. psychiatric services as well as the social services providing school assistance.

Broderick, A. A. & Roscigno, R. (2021). Autism, Inc.: The Autism Industrial Complex. Journal of Disability Studies in Education, 2(1), 77-101. Clarke, A. E. (2018). Situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn (2. ed.). London: Sage. Köpfer, A., Papke, K. & Zobel, Y. (2021). Situationsanalyse Autismus – empirische Perspektivierungen zwischen Ratgeberliteratur und pädagogischem Handeln [Situation Analysis Autism - empirical perspectives between advice literature and pedagogical practice]. Inklusion online, 15(1), https://www.inklusion-online.net/index.php/inklusion-online/article/view/592 Maynard, D. W. & Turowetz, J. (2019). Doing Abstraction: Autism, Diagnosis, and Social Theory. Sociological theory, 37(1), 89-116. Strauss, A. L. (1978). A Social World Perspective. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1, 119-128.

This paper will present reflections upon the use of photo-elicitation as a method for capturing the day-to-day lives of families of disabled children in Ukraine at a time of conflict. In recent years, the Ukrainian government has committed to transforming the national care system for children as outlined in The National Strategy of Reforming the System of Institutional Care and Upbringing of Children (2017-2026). However, due to uncertainty in times of war, responses to this strategy have changed and the absence of consistent and accessible support for families of disabled chil-dren has led to a growing network of self-help and advocacy groups, established and run by par-ents. Many of these groups are supported by Disability Rights International (Ukraine), a human rights advocacy organization dedicated to the protection and full community inclusion of children and adults with disabilities. Working within the UKRI/unicef framework on Ethical Research in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Contexts (2021), a photo-elicitation project was designed between researchers at Edge Hill Uni-versity and the Director of the Ukraine Rapid Response team of Disability Rights International with a view to capturing the lived experiences of the families of children with disabilities. Whilst questionnaire-based research has been undertaken with the parents of children with disabilities in Ukraine (Telna, et al., 2021), this methodology was selected to be more accessible for those par-ticipating in the research, and those engaging with the research outputs. In this way, seeking out the way in which meaning is co-constructed using visual representations, discoveries can be made about how images ‘embody and enfold people into particular ideologies’ (Stockall, 2013: 31). An additional value of using a photograph is that it can prick the conscience of the viewer, asking them to reflect on what they think and do. When analysing images, Barthes (1980, 1984) draws our attention to conceptualisations of studium (the element that creates interest in a photographic image) and punctum (the element that jumps out at the viewer from within a photograph). These concepts will be discussed in this presentation.

Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1984) Camera Lucida. London: Harper Collins. Stockall, N. (2013) Photo-elicitation and Visual Semiotics: A Unique Methodology for Studying Inclusion for Children with Disabilities. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17 (3):310–328. UKRI/unicef (2021) Ethical research in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Available at: UKRI-161121-Ethical-Research-in-Fragile-and-Conflict-Affected-Contexts-Guidelines-for-Applicants.pdf Telna, O., Klopota, Y., Klopota, O. and Okolovych, O. (2021) Inclusive Education in Ukraine: par-ents of Children with Disabilities Perspective. The New Educational Review Vol. 64 pp. 225-235