Awkward knowledge: the historian of education and cross-border circulations

Abstract

Historians of education are having to face problems which for
various traditional reasons, have been avoided. There are strong
borders and boundaries around our work which discipline us, and
yet to which we may be systematically blind. History of education
has had a tendency to treat its subject as naturally national and
having impermeable borders. This way, working in an
interdisciplinary project on a subject which constantly revealed its
cross-border and transnational links, the issue of awkwardness
was clearly revealed. In this paper, fragments of the project are
discussed to raise questions which I consider interesting and
reflexive about the work of contemporary history of education.