Disruption and Recovery: Transitions, Transformations and Trends in Histories of Education

In times of radical global precarity and unprecedented change, how might histories of education be researched and written and what might be their utility? This special issue of Encounters explores how we might do histories of education in times of disaster and disruption, and how methods, theories and sources in the history of education are being transformed or reinterpreted in light of our precarious planetary and emotional condition (e.g., Grosvenor and Priem, 2022; Priem, 2022; Novella, 2022; Sriprakash, 2022). The unfolding global pandemic, ecological crises, and reckoning with colonial violence have exposed the hubris and failure of anthropocentrism. Human vulnerability and entanglement with the material and natural world has been laid bare. Today, modernist developmental conceptions of change over time, which position the future as the potential fulfilment of that development, look decidedly less assured in a world where the future now heralds unprecedented, catastrophic change. The frameworks of nationhood that rationalised the idea of history as a process of continual movement towards the future with the transcendental human subject as its hero, are now threatened by entangled planetary forces of epidemic and ecological collapse. The myth of human exceptionalism has been sustained by modernist historiography’s emphases on human sovereignty, agency, and development. Histories of education specifically have justified anthropocentric worldviews. Education has been invoked as the place where ideals of human autonomy, freedom, progress, and rights might be developed, realised, learned. Histories of education as a modernising tool, histories of the stratifying effects of education systems, and of the development of human subjects and societies, have long been written without recourse to their ecological consequences. This special issue asks: what modes of historical understanding are needed to orient us in the maelstrom of our times? It confronts questions of planetary responsibility and centres entangled relations and post-anthropocentric perspectives. Historians have a crucial role to play in the broad-scale historical thinking needed to provide orientation, build community, and open possibilities for generative ways of making sense of our present and repairing our past and future (Pietsch and Flanagan, 2020). Papers in this special issue consider transformations, transitions, and trends in the history of education that are responding to these conditions