Conference Agenda

Across national systems, education seems increasingly shaped by narratives of promise, potential, and profit (Jones & Ball, 2023). Not only are students addressed from a human capital perspective as future-oriented subjects whose biographies are expected to unfold as trajectories of limitless development, innovation, and self-realisation (cf. Allais, 2012). Furthermore, education itself is framed as a potentially endless field of investment, promising returns for all involved and presenting educational and economic gains as mutually interlinked (cf. Cone & Moos, 2022). Although empirical insights raise doubts about these promises of individual and economic prosperity (Brown et al., 2020; Cunningham & Samson, 2021), these neoliberal narratives of salvation do not remain at the level of policy rhetoric; they circulate across political decision-making, institutional programmes, funding arrangements, and everyday pedagogical practices, shaping how education is imagined, experienced, and lived through different actors within educational contexts (Hogan & Thompson, 2020; Rönnberg et al., 2025).

From an epistemological perspective, the symposium starts from the premise that educational transformations cannot be understood if policies and experiences are treated as separate domains. It brings together studies on the politics and marketization of education with qualitative studies of actors’ perspectives, processes of meaning-making, and interactions. The symposium examines how the logics and practices of promise, potential, and profit intersect and reshape educational landscapes, arrangements and biographies.

A central focus concerns education as a field of powerful promises of social mobility and integration (1). Across national and transnational perspectives, education is framed as a pathway to upward mobility and a primary means of overcoming social inequality (Ingram & Gamsu, 2022). Contributions not only explore how this promise operates as a legitimising and orienting narrative that structures reforms and institutional missions, while simultaneously individualising responsibility for success and failure. From a subject oriented and biographical perspective, they also look at how students, families, and educators encounter, appropriate, contest, or reframe the promise of mobility in the course of educational trajectories. Particular attention is paid to narratives of aspiration and constraint, and to moments in which educational promises appear deferred, fragile, or broken.

A further focus lies on education as a site of intensified potentialisation (2). Contemporary pedagogical formats increasingly construct subjects not only as developing capacities, but as reservoirs of open-ended, continuously expandable potential (Sellar, 2015). The symposium analyses how such constructions reorder what counts as educational success and failure, devalue forms of knowledge, experience, or limitation, and confront learners with expectations of constant self-optimisation. From a subject and practice-oriented perspective, the papers attend to how individuals navigate these demands, narrate educational turning points, and cope with experiences of misrecognition, stagnation, or blocked mobility.

Within this framework, profit-making activities (3) are addressed as institutional arrangements and horizons of meaning that permeate educational landscapes and practices - for instance, when education is framed as investment, employability project, or means of entrepreneurial self (Jones & Ball, 2023). Although these arrangements are often justified as innovative responses to challenges and as mechanisms to enhance equity, it seems that they rather normalise private accumulation while reproducing or deepening social inequalities. Thereby, contributions discuss how profit-making has become increasingly embedded in educational contexts through diverse and often opaque public-private arrangements.

In doing so, the symposium opens a space for critically interrogating education as a marketized field of promises and exploring what this implies for educational biographies, inequalities and arrangements. By connecting studies of marketization in and of education with biographical and practice-based perspectives, it contributes to debates on how education is governed under neoliberal rationalities and how research - entangled in these conditions - can reconstruct and critically challenge them.

This paper examines contemporary educational transformations through the lens of intensified potentialization. It explores the emerging ideal that children and young people must keep all possibilities open in order to meet a future described as radically uncertain yet urgent. The paper develops a theoretical framework by drawing on systems‑theoretical understandings of education as a system observing the child as a not‑yet‑realized potential (Luhmann 2021; Luhmann & Schorr 2000) and current analyses of potentialization (Andersen, Knudsen & Sandager 2024; Andersen & Pors 2021; Knudsen & Andersen 2025). Potentialization is an actualization of form that preserves looseness, privileging adaptability, reversibility, and continual openness over stable learning trajectories. Using empirical examples from LEGO’s First Lego League, Danish career learning initiatives, and the UK Open University’s FutureYOU programme, the paper shows how learners are addressed as infinitely expandable reservoirs of potential. These practices reframe education not as the realization of potential but as the cultivation of permanent formability. In this logic, the ideal learner is a hypothetical subject living in a subjunctive mode of “as if,” inhabiting what Greco and Stenner (2017) call a zone of permanent liminality. While often framed as empowering, this ideal also generates new vulnerabilities and may even contribute to youth distress. When learners must avoid closure, resist committing to specific identities, and remain open to all futures - including those destabilised by societal and labour‑market volatility - openness itself becomes an obligation. By articulating the logic of potentialization, the paper contributes to understanding how educational actors negotiate tensions between promise and precarity, opportunity and overwhelm.

Andersen, N. Å., Knudsen, H., & Sandager, J. (2024). Potentialising the potential: Dream of everything you can become, and become everything you dream of. EERJ, 23(4), 578-597. Andersen, N. Å. og Pors, J. G. (2021). From self-evident norms to contingent couplings, EERJ, 20(6), 821-840. Greco, M. and Stenner, P. (2017). From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics, Theory and Psychology, 27(2), 147-166. Knudsen, H., & Andersen, N. Å. (2025). Det hypotetiske subjekt: Uddannelse til en åben fremtid. LEDERLIV, 9. Luhmann N. (2021). Education: Forming the life course. EERJ, 20(6), 719–728.

This presentation explores how first-generation students in Austria and Germany experience social mobility within higher education under conditions of persistent inequality. Across the European educational landscape, higher education institutions have been presented as engines of upward mobility and equal opportunity (Nairz-Wirth et al., 2021). Economically driven perspectives in particular frame higher education as a rational investment promising higher incomes and reduced risks of precarious employment (OECD, 2024). Within this logic, social mobility functions as a central narrative of meritocracy, suggesting that individual effort and ambition are the primary drivers of success (O’Shea, 2020). Yet beneath this seemingly universal promise lie deeply rooted national and socio-historical inequalities that complicate the relationship between education, policy, and mobility (Brooks, 2017). In German-speaking countries, higher education institutions were positioned within post-war education policy as key instruments for addressing social inequality, a role that was consolidated through the higher education expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, which institutionalised education as a central means of widening participation and promoting social mobility (Petrik, 2025). However, inequalities in access to and completion of higher education remain strikingly evident (Kracke et al., 2024). Despite comparatively lower levels of market-oriented funding arrangements in Austria and Germany (e. g. the absence of tuition fees and a stronger reliance on public funding) than in many other European higher education systems, historically marginalised groups, including first-generation students, remain underrepresented. Drawing on 24 biographical case studies, the paper examines first-generation students’ narratives as a critical site for analysing social inequality in higher education. It asks how the promise of social mobility appears in students’ accounts of entering and attending university, and how they experience, negotiate, and make sense of social mobility through higher education. Methodologically, the study combines a Grounded Theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) with in-depth biographical analysis (Schütze, 2016) to capture the complexity of biographical meaning-making. By connecting how social mobility is discursively framed and institutionalised within policy to how it is experienced, the paper foregrounds the biographical work through which educational promises become subjectively meaningful. In doing so, it complements policy-oriented research by showing what these promises do at the level of educational biographies: how they shape self-understandings, orient aspirations, and generate tensions that must be negotiated in everyday lives. In this light, the promise of mobility often emerges as a “broken promise,” reorganising how students understand themselves, account for success and failure, and imagine their futures.

Brooks, R. (2017). Understanding the higher education student in Europe: A comparative analysis. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 48(4), 500–517. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2017.1318047. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452230153 Kracke, N., Schwabe, U., & Buchholz, S. (2024). Neuer Bildungstrichter: Trotz Akademisierungsschub immer noch ungleicher Zugang zur Hochschule. DZHW Brief, 02/2024. Nairz-Wirth, E., O'Shea, S., & Lessky, F. (2021). Higher education access, participation and progression: Inequalities of opportunity. European Journal of Education, 56(1), 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12441. OECD (2024), Education at a Glance 2024: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing, Paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/c00cad36-en. O'Shea, S., May, J., Stone, C., & Delahunty, J. (Eds.). (2024). First-in-Family Students, University Experience and Family Life: Motivations, Transitions and Participation (2nd ed. 2024). Springer International Publishing; Imprint Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34451-0. Petrik, F. (2025). Practices of Becoming: What and How Do First-Generation Students Learn When Transitioning to University? Studies in Adult Education and Learning, 31(2), 135-153. Schütze, F. (2016). Biography analysis on the empirical base of autobiographical narratives: How to analyse. In W. Fiedler, & H.-H. Krüger (Eds.), Sozialwissenschaftliche Prozessanalyse: Grundlagen der qualitativen Sozialforschung (pp. 75–116). Barbara Budrich.

After-school provision is a significant yet under-examined component of public schooling systems. Positioned at the intersection of schooling, care and labour-market participation, it is expected to support children’s development and to enable parents’ paid work. Building on prior research examining the financing and provision of public education (Thompson et al., 2019; Hogan & Thompson, 2023; 2020; Hall et al., 2024), the paper draws on policy analysis and qualitative insight into everyday experiences to examine after-school provision in Queensland, Australia and Sweden. We analyse how governance arrangements, funding models, and institutional expectations shape the provision of care beyond the school day and the implications for equality. In Queensland, Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) has become a feature of the services public schools offer to families. Incorporating marketised and entrepreneurial logics, and usually operated by parent associations or private providers within public schools, these entities are funded primarily through parental fees. Substantial financial surpluses generated by OSHC are reinvested into schools to supplement government funding for core educational services. Fee-based provision and profits have become normalised as necessary and responsible practices, even as they shift financial risk and responsibility onto parents and school communities. However, the costs, risks and access to after-school care are unevenly distributed and exacerbate existing inequalities, particularly with regard to surpluses. Community socioeconomic disadvantage reduces the capacity to produce surplus, meaning that less is being reinvested in schools serving these complex communities. In contrast, Swedish school-age educare constitutes a formal part of the school system, with its mission specified in national curricula. Alongside municipal provision, nearly one out of five leisure time centers are operated by private school organisers, within a voucher-based funding framework and a capped parental fee. Compared to other parts of the marketised Swedish system (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019), privately delivered school-age educare functions as an institutional space in between education and care, where marketisation is normalised through promises of children’s learning and wellbeing, as well as support for working families, while responsibility is redistributed and company revenues are extracted. Through this comparison, the paper demonstrates how after-school provision functions as a key site of marketisation and how children’s potential is mobilised as a rationale that embeds profit-making within everyday practices beyond the school day. After-school provision is a form of educational infrastructure through which market-based transformations of public education are being enacted, reshaping educational landscapes in uneven ways.

Dahlstedt, M. & Fejes, A. (2019). (Eds.) Neoliberalism and market forces in education: Lessons from Sweden: Routledge. Hall, J. B., Møller, J., & Rönnberg, L. (2024). (Re)configurations of public education: marketisation, teacher professionalism, and individual rights of students and educators in Norway and Sweden. Critical Studies in Education, 1–19. Hogan, A. & G. Thompson, G. (2020). (Eds.). Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education: How the Public Nature of Schooling is Changing: Routledge. Hogan, A., & Thompson, G. (2023). Running the canteen for profit: funding, parents and philanthropy in Queensland state schools. Critical Studies in Education, 64(5), 464–478. Thompson, G., Hogan, A. & Rahimi, M. (2019). Private funding in Australian public schools: a problem of equity. Australian Educational Reserarcher 46, 893–91.

In Germany and Switzerland, private vocational schools and non-elitist private universities are increasingly positioning themselves as market niche within the fractures of the meritocratic promise of education (Herrmann, 2019; Preite et al., 2025). While private fee-paying education is internationally widespread, these developments rather contrast with dominant assumptions about the German and Swiss education systems. Both contexts seem traditionally characterised by publicly funded higher education with comparatively low tuition fees and by collective skill formation systems in vocational education and training (VET), in which private schools have historically played a marginal role. Drawing on research on the marketisation and commercialisation of education, the paper conceptualises the emergence of these for profit private providers as part of an expanding global education industry into contexts where it has previously been less visible (Piromalli, 2024; Rönnberg et al., 2025). With tuition fees that are substantial yet significantly lower than those charged by elite private institutions, these private providers not only target a broader mass of students but at the same time potentially re-promise further education for those marginalized by the exclusionary logic of selective school and company-based VET systems. In view of this, the paper asks how and why students opt for these fee-paying educational arrangements (1), and how their decision-making processes related to the reproduction of social inequality (2). Empirically, the contribution draws on two qualitative research projects conducted in Switzerland and Germany. The Swiss study is based on problem-centred interviews with students attending private vocational schools, while the German study focuses on students enrolled at non-elitist private universities. Methodologically, both studies follow a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). In theoretical and empirical terms, the contribution rather questions rational-choice understanding of school choice and instead conceptualises students’ agency as embedded in structural relations of inequality, power, and domination (Wilson & Scarbrough, 2018). Paying for private education in these researched contexts thus seems not merely an expression of free choice, but rather as a socially structured response to constrained educational opportunities within “youth-transitions regime” (Walther, 2006) in which further education and VET seems increasingly expected, but yet not systemically guaranteed. Paying for the promise of further education therefore appears to simultaneously privatize and marketize existing educational inequalities, both on an individual and structural level.

Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory a practical guide through qualitative analysis. SAGE. Herrmann, S. (2019). Sozioökonomische Merkmale und Erwartungen von Studierenden privater Hochschulen in Deutschland. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 41(2), 34–55. Piromalli, L. (2024). Making markets in higher education: State reform, global EdTech, and virtual universities in Italy. Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 16(Italian Journal of Sociology of Education 16/2), 109–130. Preite, L., Gmür, S., Imboden, J., Fischer, E., & Pfister, N. (2025). Berufsbildung gegen Bezahlung: Beweggründe und Ausgangslagen von Lernenden in der kostenpflichtigen privatschulisch organisierten beruflichen Grundbildung und Berufsmaturität. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften, 47(1), 44–56. https://doi.org/10.24452/sjer.47.1.4 Rönnberg, L., Holm, A.-S., & Carlbaum, S. (2025). Swinging Asymmetries: Swedish Education Companies Establishing in New National Contexts. European Education, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2025.2539514 Walther, A. (2006). Regimes of youth transitions: Choice, flexibility and security in young people’s experiences across different European contexts. YOUNG, 14(2), 119–139. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308806062737 Wilson, M. A. F., & Scarbrough, B. (2018). Neoliberal contradictions in two private niches of educational ‘choice’. Critical Studies in Education, 59(1), 74–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1167756