Conference Agenda

This panel takes up the invitation of the NW17 call to critically reflect on ‘the extent to which our knowledge of the past can and should inform our understandings of the present’. There is a strong warrant as well as broad consensus across scholarly and policy domains regarding the value of thinking more historically about the present (Miles & Keynes 2025). Yet what is involved in doing so, and specifically what it means to historicise the educational present, is far less clear and requires more sustained and critical attention. Informed by methodologies and concepts from across historical sociology, genealogical studies and philosophy, the three papers in this symposium illustrate different ways of approaching these questions. Uniting them is a shared focus on exploring how traces of the past haunt contemporary educational policies as well as the key concepts that animate them. In various ways, they also look to the multi-faceted ways in which conceptions of the past can activate visions of and for educational futures.

In asking how the past influences the present, there is a risk is positioning the past as if it were a fixed context, a seemingly stable, already-known time/space that simply serves as an orienting backdrop to the present. It also risks ignoring how past/present relations are interwined with the future, positioning the future as disconnected from the past. This is significant in relation to education where the prospect of the future impels much education reform (Robertson & Beech 2023), often as (implied) critique of the present and what has come before, providing a habitual rationale for reform, with interventions justified in service of working to imagined better worlds to come.

In contrast, the concept of temporality underlines the non-linear, messy and productive ways in which past, present and future intersect (McLeod 2017). This is especially valuable for understanding the trajectories of education reform agendas. By foregrounding temporality, rather than attending only to the present in relation to the past, ‘makes it possible to think about encounters with the spectres of a past and a future, where historical memory and future-oriented imagination colour story-telling in the present”. (Seddon et al 2018, p.8). This framing underscores movements across temporal registers but importantly it also brings into view the affective force of memory and imagination, and their significance in understanding attachments to particular policy narratives or anticipated movements of education reforms. Jordheim’s concept of ‘multiple temporalities’ (Jordheim 2014) offers a way into understanding the overlay of these dynamic relations. He proposes that ‘it might be more useful to imagine different temporalities existing in a plane, as parallel lines, paths, tracks, or courses, zigzagging, sometimes touching or even crossing one another, but all equally visible, tangible, and with direct consequences for our lives’ (2014, 508).

While there has been some exploration of these concepts in relation to education research (McLeod 2017; Warren 2025), there is considerable scope to engage the questions they raise for more genealogical and historically oriented studies of education. With these debates as backdrop, each of the three papers offers a different angle onto questions of temporality, futures and historicising the educational present: Paper 1 takes a genealogical approach to consider the future of the university, looking at historical antecedents to current transformations and crises; Paper 2 explores the history and philosophy of a key educational concept, ‘pedagogical autonomy’ and how it is mobilised today; and Paper 3 examines shifts over time in how concepts of the future are framed in global education policies and the impact of the reparative turn in policy to address historical harms.

Across diverse higher education systems, the university is undergoing a profound qualitative transformation. Longstanding civic and democratic imaginaries of the university—as institutions of public knowledge, critique, and scholarly autonomy—have been unsettled by successive waves of marketisation, managerialism, behavioural governance, and, in some contexts, increasingly authoritarian forms of state intervention (Bennett & Burke 2018; Nehring & Brunila 2023; Zembylas 2023). These pressures have reshaped higher education governance, academic labour, and the very meaning and purpose of scholarship. While such developments have often been analysed through the concept of the “neoliberal university,” recent crises suggest that higher education may be entering a phase that exceeds familiar analytical frames (Angiolillo & al. 2025; Braw 2024; Brunila & Nehring 2023). In this presentation, we draw on After the University (link below), a 15-week international essay series that brought together scholars from different regions, disciplines, and career stages to reflect on contemporary transformations of higher education and their historical genealogies. Contributors engaged with the present through the past, tracing how current crises echo, rework, and diverge from earlier moments in the history of universities. Rather than treating the present as unprecedented, the series foregrounds how higher education has been shaped by tensions between public purpose and political power, autonomy and governance, critique and control. The series demonstrates that contemporary transformations are not only institutional or structural but also deeply affective, temporal, and subjective (see also Zembylas 2023; Gravett & Lygo-Baker 2024; Valero & al. 2019). Contributors explore how current modes of governance reshape academic selfhood, moral responsibility, political agency, and imaginaries of the future, often narrowing what can be hoped for, imagined, or claimed within the university. From a historical perspective, this raises critical questions about how past educational ideals such as Bildung, academic freedom, and the university as a space of collective intellectual life are selectively remembered, emptied of substance, or mobilised in technocratic and managerial forms in the present. We argue that analysing the present moment requires more than institutional critique or policy analysis: it demands historically grounded rethinking of what universities have been, whose interests they have served, and what kinds of futures they have enabled or foreclosed. The After the University series functions not only as a diagnosis of crisis, but as an invitation to reclaim historical imagination as a resource for thinking otherwise about higher education futures, beyond nostalgia, inevitability, or managerial realism. https://aftertheuniversity.wordpress.com/

Angiolillo, F., God, A., Nord, M. and Staffan I. Lindberg, S. (2025). Democracy Report 2025: 25 Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped? V-Dem Institute (Gothenburg). Bennett, A., & Burke, P. J. (2018). Re/Conceptualising Time and Temporality: An Exploration of Time in Higher Education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(6), 913–925. Braw, E. (2024). Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World. New Haven, Yale University Press. Brunila, K & Daniel N. (2023). Precision education governance and the high risks of fabrication of future-oriented learning human kinds. Research Papers in Education38 (5): 727-742. Gravett, K., & Lygo-Baker, S. (2024). Affective encounters in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 50(2), 228–238. Nehring, D., & Brunila, K. (2023). Affective Capitalism in Academia: Revealing Public Secrets. Policy Press. Zembylas, M. (2023). Time-as-affect in neoliberal academy: theorizing chronopolitics as affective milieus in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 49(3), 493–504. Valero, P., Jørgensen, K. M., & Brunila, K. (2019). Affective Subjectivation in the Precarious Neoliberal Academia. In D. Bottrell, & C. Manathunga (Eds.), Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume I: Seeing Through the Cracks (Vol. 1, pp. 135-154). (Palgrave Macmillan

Educational policy reforms over the last 30 years have instigated fundamental changes for educators and educational institutions (e.g. privatization of educational institutions, global comparability), creating significant professional conflicts for many teachers. To analyse these, Nordic researchers often use frameworks from Freidson 2001 or Fredriksson 2010 and distinguish between bureaucratic, professional, market-oriented or user-oriented logic. Many such studies focus on the challenges teachers face in navigating between bureaucratic rule management, market-oriented customer satisfaction, and their own professional pride and autonomy (e.g. Lundström & Parding 2011). However, the paper argues that such conflicts are secondary. Taking a closer look at the history of the concept of educational autonomy, I argue that the market adaptation of pedagogical work creates ethical and existential conflicts of loyalty that corrupt the purpose of education; the “soul of teachers” (Ball 2003; even: Løvlie 2020, Giroux 2004). The paper revisits Weniger’s (1929) distinction between three levels of pedagogical autonomy: a) pedagogical praxis itself, b) pedagogical institutions and the teaching profession, and c) pedagogical science (Weniger 1929/1975). Autonomy in these areas is internally related, but most fundamental is the educator's autonomy in their concrete pedagogical relation with students. According to Weniger, pedagogical autonomy expresses the teacher's responsibility to protect students’ integrity from possible external interests that try to gain power over young people, seeing autonomy as "the ultimate means of preserving human freedom and dignity in the face of absolutist power claims" (ibid. p. 12f). He further argues that pedagogical autonomy in educational praxis is both possible and necessary, even in situations which pressure the educator to instrumentalize the student for the interests of others. Today’s threats to teachers’ autonomy are thus less about the problem of not being able to exercise their professional right to determine course methods and content or navigate between bureaucratic and market logics. Instead, market driven work-environments are forcing teachers to choose between the interests of their employer and responsibility towards their students, putting at risk trust in educational relationships. This points to existential and ethical dimensions that are not captured by dominant explanations of the challenges to pedagogical autonomy (Løvlie 2020). Finally, the paper argues that many contemporary critiques of declines in teacher autonomy do not take sufficient account of the historical and philosophical context of the concept, yet this is essential for building a fuller understanding of the dilemmas for pedagogical autonomy today and for envisaging autonomy differently for the future.

Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043065 Fredriksson (2010). Marknaden och lärarna. Hur organiseringen av skolan påverkar lärares offentliga tjänstemannaskap, Göteborgs universitet. Freidson (2001). Professionalism, the Third Logic, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001 Giroux (2004). Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Lundström; Parding (2011). Marknadslogikens inflytande på lärares arbete och villkor: Lärares uppfattningar om effekter av skolvalsreformerna. In: Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv, ISSN 1400-9692, Vol. 17, no 4, p. 59-77 Løvlie (2020). Politisering og pedagogisk motstand. Veien til en barneorientert praksis. Fagbokförlaget. Weniger (1929/1975). Die Autonomie der Pädagogik. I: Weniger, Ausgewählte Schriften zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Pädagogik. Weinheim: Beltz.

This paper posits a ‘reparative turn’ in global education policy as symptomatic of broader transformations in how human societies orient themselves in relation to past, present, and future. We argue that recent UNESCO education policy (2021) reflects shifting modes of historicity—that is, socially produced meanings of historical change—which have become increasingly disjointed in the context of intensifying social, ecological, and political crises. Drawing on theories of historicity and historical change (e.g. Simon & Tamm 2023), the paper situates UNESCO’s 2021 ‘Futures of Education’ report within this wider reorientation of historicity. We surface tensions in how education policy is positioned to manage ‘unruly’ legacies of unjust pasts (Miles & Keynes 2025) alongside anticipations of an increasingly risky and undesirable future (Robinson & Beech 2023). We argue that this policymaking illustrates how international organisations such as UNESCO are seeking to restore their legitimacy in the face of past policy failures to deliver the futures they promised. Central to this reassertion is a growing emphasis on repair: a turn towards anti-racist, anti-colonial, and justice-oriented forms of historical thinking as a means of addressing historical harms (Sriprakash 2023). While this reparative orientation opens new possibilities for redressing unjust pasts within global education policy, it also generates tensions with the humanistic ideals of education and future-making that have long underpinned UNESCO’s raison d’être (Elfert 2018). The paper therefore interrogates whether, and how, reparative orientations to history sit alongside UNESCO’s enduring commitments to human flourishing and attendant conceptions of historical change. Empirically, we present a preliminary analysis of UNESCO’s three major futures-oriented education reports: the 1972 Faure report, the 1996 Delors report, and the 2021 Futures of Education report. Through comparative textual analysis, we examine how each report constructs relations between past, present, and future, and consider how education is positioned within these shifting orientations to historical change. In doing so, the paper considers some of the affordances and limits of the reparative turn for global education policymaking.

UNESCO. (1972). Learning to be. Paris: UNESCO UNESCO. (1996). Learning: The treasure within. Paris: UNESCO UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our Futures Together. Paris: UNESCO Miles, J., & Keynes, M. R. (2025). Education and Historical Justice: Redress, Reparations and Reconciliation in the Classroom. Bloomsbury. Elfert, M. (2018). UNESCO’s Utopia of Lifelong Learning: An Intellectual History. (2017). Routledge. Robertson, S. L., & Beech, J. (2023). ‘Promises promises’. Comparative Education 60(3), 423–440 Simon, Z. B., & Tamm, M. (2023). The Fabric of Historical Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.