Inventing other spaces for European education: Summer School in European Education Studies as a laboratory for educational research in Europe

Abstract

This editorial introduces the European Educational Research Journal special issue that hosts four articles co-authored by emerging researchers in the field of educational research in Europe who participated in the Summer School in European Education Studies. We present the Summer School in European Education Studies project, its history and approach, and its ambition to establish a laboratory for inventing ‘other spaces’ for educational research in Europe and beyond. In sharp contrast to the contemporary pressures towards the ‘technicization’ of educational research, the Summer School in European Education Studies is described as a project whose aspiration is to reaffirm the significance of theory and theorizing, and its generative power for the production of alternative outlooks on education and educational research. The aim of the summer school is, thus, to support the discursive construction of new communal spaces in which to reinvent the politics of educational research and the role of education in the nurturing of the European project. The articles published in this special issue are presented as an example of the kind of text work/identity work for which a space such as the Summer School in European Education Studies creates the conditions of possibility.