Contemporary historiography shows a renewed interest in phenomena of transfer, circulation, diffusion, flux and exchange among different spheres. Notions such as internationalization, globalization and others are used to describe these phenomena. Placing these concepts in their historical and theoretical frameworks, the aim of this Conference is to examine the processes that they designate in the field of education. What is diffused, exchanged, transferred? Are these movements linear, circular or deferred? Transcending national borders, how do actors, networks and institutions mediate educational knowledge and practice? In what social and historical conditions do these mediations take place? What are the constraints and the forces –economic, political, cultural, geographic– that structure these exchanges? Who are the principal beneficiaries of the processes of internationalization? What dynamics of emancipation, exclusion, resistance are produced during global exchanges? 

Under various forms and rhythms, these phenomena concern all levels of education, individual and collective actors, as well as spheres of extracurricular activity. They can be discerned in systems, models, theories, curricula and institutions as well as in educational practice. New dialectical relationships are developing between internationalism and nationalism, homogeneity and hybridization, universalism and particularism, openness and withdrawal, solidarity and exclusion; they involve a redefinition of educational knowledge, practice and discourse. These long-term phenomena take the form of specific configurations depending on historical and geographic contexts. An example is the way in which the Universalist project of the Enlightenment was produced, spread, received, contradicted and retranslated in different parts of the world.