Call for Applications – Finnish History and Philosophy Summer days: “Disciplinary struggles in the history of education”

The 13th Summer Days of the Finnish Research Network on History and Philosophy of Education will take place in University of Tampere, from 7-9 June 2017, organized in collaboration with research associations and networks in Tampere, and will address the “Disciplinary struggles in the history of education”.

Discipline is a core concept in education, both in practice and in theory. Are educational practices necessarily also disciplinary despite their overt commitment to empowerment and emancipation, and how have the conceptions about discipline transformed historically and in different contexts? While justification of educational practices is increasingly based on authorized knowledge about education, how has the ownership and power of educational knowledge transformed historically and in different contexts? The position of education as a discipline has always been controversial: is it a genuine academic subject (science) with its distinctive categories, concepts and theories, or just application of conceptual and theoretical tools from other disciplines? Has the traditional human-centered fixation to certain disciplines – such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, economy – also contributed to environmental, economic and social crisis, which endanger the continuity of human life itself? What counts as education and educational knowledge is also essential for diversification of educational discipline into sub-fields or even new disciplines. This in turn relates closely to diversification of educational professionals, whose conceptions about education may fundamentally differ and even contradict each other.

The Summer Days event invites senior and junior researchers, students and practitioners to discuss and debate about different kinds of disciplinary struggles in the history of education, preferably from historical and philosophical perspectives. Students are welcomed to present their theses and we strongly recommend that their participation will be recognized as part of their studies.

We invite abstracts of presentations (max 1 page) in English and Finnish by the end of February 2017.
Submission of abstracts and information about the event can be found here.