Constructing Knowledge Spaces: Transnational/Interdisciplinary Perspectives is a major project initiative of the WUN concerned with researching and theorising the globalisation of education.

Project Rationale

The broad aim of this initiative is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of internationally distinguished researchers with overlapping interests in the ermging trannational governance of 'knowledge spaces' at a range of scales (e.g. the European education space, Brand New Zealand, the Singapore Global Schoolhouse, Career Space, the lifelong learner, the anywhere-anyplace just for learning subject).

Through a focus on 'education' broadly defined, we examine the material and discursive construction of knowledge spaces, from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Issues thta could receive research and/or dialogue conssideration include:

• Theory questions and dialogues around theory development in relation to the transnational governance of education
• The emerging global geopolitics of and geo-economics of education
• The educational practices associated with the governance of the global citizen-subject
• Global circuits of 'schooling' and the education of elites
• The rescaling of the functional and scalar division of the labour of education and problems of social cohesion and legitimation
• Brain mobility, brain drain, brain concentration
• The commercialisation and instrumentalisation of knowledge
• Multilateral institutions and the governance of education
• The relationship between education and the global city formation process
• Global networks and education
• The virtual university
• Methodological issues in researching globalisation and education

The scales of foci range from the body to the multilateral trading system as governed by the World Trade Organisation, OECD, World Bank, and so on. The context of some of these topics is strongly shaped by the forces and associated discourses of neo-liberalism. We seek to broaden the conversation around neo-liberalism and its asscoated social and state practices, specifically by working across disciplinary boundaries.

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