Being, Doing, Becoming - Exploring Educational Processes in Social Relations of Power and Inequality

Call for Papers for the Third Networking Conference of the SGBF/SSRE Working Group “Education in Social Relations of Power and Inequality”

10 June 2027, Interkantonale Hochschule für Heilpädagogik HfH, Zurich

Organisation

• Daniel Hofstetter (HfH, Professor für Heil- und Sonderpädagogik als soziale Praxis)
• Annette Koechlin (HfH, Institut für Professionalisierung und Systementwicklung)

Processes of education and upbringing unfold within social relations of power and inequality through the production and marking of belonging, differences, positions, and subjectivities. Educational institutions are significant social spaces in this regard: norms of ability not only become salient within them but are also intertwined with social inequalities. Social orders and relations are reproduced when capital (especially cultural capital) is reinterpreted as individual achievement (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1971). Through ability-based categorisations, institutional decision-making processes and practices produce consequential identities, for example as “with a learning disability” (Mehan, Hertweck & Meihls, 1986) or “in/sufficiently able” (Merl, 2019). They also shape which educational pathways, achievements, and ways of life appear expected or legitimate for whom.

A perspective informed by the analysis of subjectivation examines how subjects are constituted and shaped within and through social relations of power/knowledge (Foucault, 2005; Butler, 1993). For critical educational research concerned with power and inequality, this perspective allows for an investigation of education as a process through which subjects are constituted (Ricken, 2015, 2019), understanding education not as the opposite of power but in relation to it (Bünger & Jergus, 2023).

Moving away from the notion of a sovereign subject (Foucault, 2005) enables an analytical shift from being to doing (Sacks, 1984; Kelle, 2005; Hofstetter & Koechlin, 2024) and, particularly with regard to norms of ability, from identifying deviance to analysing the construction of normality (Goodley, 2017; Waldschmidt, 2020). Attention thus turns to historically constituted discourses, classifications, institutional arrangements, and social practices through which subjects are produced as distinguishable from one another (Ivanova-Chessex & Steinbach, 2017; Youdell, 2006). This also brings the processual character of such subject formation into view. Such formations can be understood as a continuous becoming , performatively enacted, for instance through interpellations and positionings (Althusser, 2019), within social and institutional conventions, and ambivalently involving both subjection and existence (Butler, 2001).

From these analytical perspectives, dis/ability and norms of ability can be examined and described in terms of their significance for educational processes and their intersections with racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and other relations of power. This Call for Papers therefore invites explorations of educational processes within social relations of power and inequality:

• How do doings and becomings unfold in pedagogical practices, interactions, and institutional arrangements?
• How are forms of belonging, differences, and subject positions produced and intertwined in these processes?
• How are these processes entangled with racism, classism, (hetero)sexism, ableism, and other relations of power and inequality, as well as with educational policy frameworks?
• What spaces for agency, counter-movements, and forms of resistance emerge within such orders, and at what cost?

We welcome contributions addressing:

• theoretical and conceptual questions that examine educational processes within social relations of power and inequality from the perspectives of doing and becoming;
• methodical and methodological reflections on how the production and entanglement of social differences and inequalities in educational processes can be empirically investigated and critically reflected upon;
• empirical and historical studies of educational processes that examine institutional arrangements, pedagogical routines, and social practices from a contemporary and/or historical perspective in terms of the production and intersection of different orders of difference and inequality, and their situatedness within specific social relations of power.

The conference aims to provide a space for discussing empirical research on educational processes within relations of power and inequality across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. Researchers at different stages of their academic development and with projects at various stages of progress are invited to present and collectively discuss their research project or a theoretical, methodical, or methodological question.

We invite abstracts for presentations (300–500 words, excluding references; in German, French, Italian, or English). Abstracts should outline the research question, the theoretical, empirical, methodical, or methodological focus, and the context of the underlying project. The organisers will group presentations into thematic panels.

Each panel will consist of three presentations (30 minutes each) followed by a concluding discussion (30 minutes). Abstracts should be emailed to Daniel Hofstetter at daniel.hofstetter hfh ch by 31 January 2027, with the subject line “Vernetzungstagung SGBF-AG”.