Marianna Papastephanou

The thematic description of this forthcoming ECER conference emphasizes the responsiveness of educational research to societal change and turbulent times across the world. We are invited to acknowledge epochal “challenges and uncertainties” and to rethink prospects for a future of better promise and hope. We are summoned to understand ourselves as inhabitants of a new age. The theme of this conference sets the “age of uncertainty” as the ultimate context of educational theory and practice. This reflects a broader tendency of educational studies in our times to use temporal metaphors that predicate our circumstances as exceptional: “critical times”, “pandemic age”, “precarious times”, “times of shipwreck”, “years of upheaval”, etc. However, most educational research employs such metaphors without exploring the politics of doing so. Lack of meta-theoretical, self-reflective attention to the operations of “the age of uncertainty” rhetoric reproduces the use of this metaphor as a stopgap, a cliché, or a modish slogan with possibly pernicious political effects. This keynote lecture aims to retrieve the neglected educational-philosophical task of disclosing the ambiguous politics of the “age of uncertainty” metaphor. More awareness of, or vigilance about, such politics is needed for: giving historical memory its due; noticing deeper connections of education with diverse causalities of adversities related to “our current realities”; and avoiding some risks that accompany the uncritical overuse of “crisis” and “uncertainty” epochal metaphors.

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