Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

The Spatialization of Education and the Educationalization of Space: Divergent Studies of Affect and Power in Educational Research

I. Background

The relationship between education and space is often taken for granted within education research. This common sense is articulated as debates about the appropriate scale by which to apprehend phenomena ('global,' 'national,' or 'local'), the boundaries of research ('case studies' or 'community partnerships') or causal relationships ('urban' and 'rural,' 'centers' and 'peripheries,' or hemispheric totalities like 'East' and 'West' or global 'North' and 'South'). In these classifications and categories, space is the place for highlighting forms of sameness and difference. These spatializations offer timeless means for dividing kinds of children, schools or systems, upon which temporal and affective dimensions tend to operate as a consequence. As an interruption to this common sense, this special issue seeks contributions that problematize the naturalization of this spatial logic and, instead, examine spatialization as a process charged with desire and anxiety (Stoler, 1995, 2002; Schuller, 2018). The special issue will examine how efforts to reconfigure educational spaces as antidotes to or refuges from 'modernity,' (e.g., 'late capitalism,' 'climate devastation,' or 'alienation from nature') are historically contingent, frequently contested, and therefore political.

To clarify our terms of engagement, by "the spatialization of education," we mean the process by which educational knowledge and practices produce specific spatial categories and arrangements (e.g., 'urban' schools, 'rural' children); by "the educationalization of space," we refer to the way that spaces are imbued with pedagogical purposes to edify or improve. To examine educationalization and spatialization's co-constitutive dynamics requires reapproaching 'space' as not simply a given dimension upon which objects relate and time unfolds, nor merely a social construction that presumes some non-social or material remainder. Instead, we call for papers that examine space as a gathering or composition that enables projects of empire, biopolitics, and capitalization to be constructed and mobilized within systems of 'reason' about education and society, all of which are indissolubly linked to racial, gendered, and classed distinctions necessary for the management and control of desires and emotions of populations.

The special issue builds upon a diverse body of scholarship spanning the history of education, comparative education, and curriculum studies that has increasingly recognized space as crucial to understanding how hierarchies of humanness are (re)inscribed in research, policy, and reform as 'kinds' of people (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022; Edwards et al., 2022; Kirchgasler, 2025; Popkewitz, 2022; Saito et al., 2023; Takayama et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2022). Drawing from what has been deemed the ontological turn, some of this scholarship has centered on the physical spaces of schools and their surroundings, highlighting how school infrastructure (McKenzie et al., 2025), playgrounds (Dussel, 2019; Larsson, 2013; Norlin, 2018), bathrooms (Dussel, 2021), classrooms (Sobe, 2018), everyday school objects (Billmayer & Jobér, 2025), or gardens (Grosvenor & Myers, 2020; Rockwell, 2020) are embedded with notions of kinds of students produced. On the other hand, broader historical discussions about space have challenged distinctions between the urban and the rural (Biddle & Azano, 2016; Dupuis, 2009), nature (Asdal, 2003; Cronon, 1996; Daston, 2019), the planet (Latour, 2017, 2018; Tsing et al., 2024), and utopia and heterotopia (Foucault, 1986). Education scholars have entered these debates by questioning how ideas like nature or rurality become articulated with particular values ascribed to childhood, youth, and education (Biddle & Azano, 2016; Grosvenor & Myers, 2020; Ideland, 2019; Mayer, 2020; Palacios, 1999; Roberts, 2020). What unites this varied scholarship, for our purposes, is its emphasis on the contingency and temporality of transcendental concepts used to understand space, while foregrounding the role of affect in shaping the educationalization of space and the spatialization of education.

The special issue will contribute to the debates on the relationship of space and education in two ways. The first contribution is to establish a dialogue with the literature on educationalization. Scholars of educationalization tend to argue that it is a historical process that translates a diverse set of issues (e.g., poverty, inequality, health, or child development) into the logic of pedagogical knowledge and schooling. One of the core arguments of this perspective is that educationalization had one of its most profound effects by constructing space and time through the language and concepts of pedagogy, education sciences, and schooling. In this sense, and as its title suggests, the special issue challenges the social constructivist assumptions that can be expressed through this perspective (where abstract pedagogical knowledge shapes an outside world waiting to be educationalized) to instead explore the material practices by which educational knowledge produces spatializations and how, in turn, such spatializations shape intelligible forms of education. The second contribution is to stress the importance of affect theory as a perspective that contributes to the discussion about school materiality by exploring how particular constructions of space are formed in relationship to notions of impressibility, communicability, and transmissibility of 'outer' and 'inner' worlds (whether nature and self, environments and bodies, or infrastructures and populations) (Ahmed, 2006; Brennan, 2015; Brinkema, 2014; Massumi, 2021; Schuller, 2018).

At a moment characterized by the seeming obviousness of a 'permacrisis' and the urgent need to take action to address 'its' global dimensions (see, e.g., Brown et al., 2023), the special issue will feature scholarship problematizing how such spatializations of social problems have become so easily naturalized. Moreover, the contributions will challenge the onto-epistemic assumptions embedded in such spatializations, turning the focus to the compositional manner that affect plays in spatialization, thereby constructing the very grounds of educationalization.

II. Contributions Sought

The objective of this special issue is to advance the ongoing dialogue critically engaging with topologies, assemblages, objects, and materials, and the histories of education concerned with the co-production of space and affect. We seek to bring together historically informed scholarship that builds critical reflexivity toward taken-for-granted notions of space. To do so, we encourage submissions that draw upon an allied set of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as poststructural spatial geographies (Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2007), de- and postcolonial studies (e.g., Stoler, 2002, 2010; Mbembe, 2020; Mudimbe, 1988), postfoundational approaches (e.g., Barad, 2007; Derrida, 1996; Foucault, 1977, 2002). Papers in this special issue will offer perspectives that reflexively situate how their own theoretical and methodological approaches co-produce the very forms of space that they seek to denaturalize.

We are interested in papers that focus on different 'locales' (especially those produced as 'outside' the metropolitan centers, or in, across, and through multiple 'localities'), temporal 'moments' (whether a couple of months ago, the 19th Century, or entangling both), or those that trouble typical formulations of 'spatial' problems (from classrooms objects or buildings to the construction of more abstract categories like 'the urban,' 'the settlement,' 'nature,' 'the planet,' or 'utopia'). We are especially interested in theoretically informed and innovative pieces that can dialogue between the different ways space is understood as an onto-epistemic problem (e.g., Zhao & Popkewitz, 2022).

Finally, we seek contributions from both emerging and established scholars, including graduate students. Contributions are expected to be theoretically conversant with the special issue's aims while offering their own unique and novel engagements with them. While not exhaustive, we invite scholars submitting contributions to the special issue that pursue questions such as:

• How does 'nature,' as a concept, animate conceptions of educational spaces across time periods? What anxieties does nature express in relation to time and how are these affectively articulated?
• How are spatial categories that define non-metropolitan spaces (the colony, rurality, or a stateless community) also imbued with desires to manage the emotional states of populations contained therein?
• How do geospatial topologies, whether employed within school curricula or educational research itself, embody or transmit narratives about unity, progress, and the forms of affect necessary for their realization?
• In what ways do the material and physical design of school spaces, such as classrooms, playgrounds, textbooks, or desks participate in the construction of affective infrastructures, thereby shaping the relationships of those related with and to them?
• How can the genealogy of spatial categories (e.g., 'rural,' or 'urban') reveal desires integral to the formation of modern school reforms, educational policy, and educational research?
• What affective assemblages organize educational spaces, such as those of high-stakes assessments or low-fee, for-profit schools, and how do these produce notions of the (un)educated subject?
• How do 'pre-digital' educational technologies and media like educational films, the mass-market textbook, or multiple-choice grading machines (i.e., 'Scantrons') establish principles by which teaching and learning can be respatialized through their digitalization?