Deadline: November 30th 2011

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.

The Conference calls upon scholars to contribute by exploring the international dimensions of their areas of study. We will encourage comparative, transnational and entangled approaches to the history of education, the history of childhood and youth and to the history of disabilities. The Organizing Committee will particularly welcome contributions that theorize areas of study, and their inter-relationships, using concepts of class, gender, race and ethnicity.

Submissions should be related to one or more of the following subthemes:

1. Individual and Group Actors: Implications and Fields of Intervention
2. Modes of Internationalization: Cultural Transfers, Traveling Concepts, Multiple Knowledge Bases
3. Institutional Structures and Impacts of Internationalization: between Coordination and Coercion
4. Space, Time and Levels of Analysis: Interaction among Geographic Areas, Time Periods and Educational Structures
5. Economic and Political Stakes: Education as an Agent and an Instrument of Power Relationships
6. Movement towards a Different Form of Internationalization: Utopias and Rebellions
7. New Sources and Historiographic Approaches: the History of Internationalization as a tool for Understanding the History of Education