Education and learning are key processes that shape the life chances of individuals and the sustainability of democratic societies, even if the question of what counts as knowledge and education remains highly contested in different political regimes and realms of society.Since the first two International Conferences on Geographies of Education were hosted in the Department of Geography at Loughborough University in 2010 and 2012—in order to enhance understanding of the performances, practices, and processes that shape education and learning from distinctively geographical research perspectives—new geographies of education and learning have become a vibrant intra- and interdisciplinary as well as international field of research (e.g., Holloway & Jöns 2012; Freytag, Jahnke & Kramer 2015; Bilicen & van Mol 2017; Pini et al. 2017).
Recent contributions to the field range from changing and highly segmented spaces of education (Brooks, Fuller & Waters 2012; Findlay et al. 2012) via the cultural and radical geographies of alternative, informal, and formal education (Kraftl 2013; Mills & Kraftl 2014; 2016; Meusburger, Freytag & Suarsana 2016; Mitchell 2017) to the socio-political geographies of (re)constructing nationalisms in schools (Mavroudi & Holt 2015) and of professionalised parenting under neoliberalism (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson 2016). Geographical studies of higher education have diversified to examine philanthropy and fundraising (Warren, Hoyler & Bell 2016) and its new regional geographies (Harrison, Smith & Kinton 2017); the career trajectories of women geographers beyond the academy (Monk 2017); and other highly diverse knowledge mobilities (Jöns, Meusburger & Heffernan, 2017). A new emphasis examines international study in the global south (Gunter & Raghuram 2017) and discusses the decolonisation of geographical knowledge and education (Esson et al. 2017).
The third International Conference on Geographies of Education aims to bring together scholars working in different disciplines on the diverse range of historical, cultural, social, political, and economic topics that constitute this creative field of inquiry. We invite paper submissions in the English language on the following topics and associated themes, including conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions, and distinctively critical geographical research perspectives:
- Historical geographies of education
- Histories of geographical education
- Geographies of educational provision and experience across the life course (pre-school,
school, higher education, on-the-job training, personal development, life-long learning)
- Geographies of non-formal educational settings, practices, and experiences
- Geographies of informal learning processes
- Knowledge exchange and outcomes of education and learning
- Discourses, imaginations, and emotions in/of education and learning
- Mobilities, internationalisation, and neoliberalisation in/of education and learning
- Materialities, technologies, and virtual realities in/of education and learning
- Intersectionality, assemblages, and triadic thought in education and learning
- Multi-scalar geographies of education and learning
- Contesting and decolonising education and learning
Keynote speakers
The programme will evolve around keynote lectures covering the latest scholarship on the geographies of education in schools, universities, and wider society. The confirmed keynote lecturers are:
Tim Freytag (University of Freiburg)
Mike Heffernan (University of Nottingham)
Katharyne Mitchell (UC Santa Cruz)
Parvati Raghuram (Open University)
Johanna Waters (University of Oxford)
Abstract submission
Please submit an abstract of up to 200 words by 16 March 2018 to Heike Jöns (h.jons@lboro.ac.uk).