Over the last decade, education has been advanced as a new and legitimate core of the humanitarian crisis response. "Education in Emergencies" (EiE) developed into an institutionalised field of humanitarian practice, advocacy, and scholarly work. Identifying how emergency discourses have been critiqued to operate as "social…

The aim of this article is to analyse the evident use of the notion "educational quality" from the perspective of a critical "ontology of the present" by focusing on governmental relations. Through mapping present discourses on educational quality and related technologies, the authors analyse how our present concern with quality is part of a…

This paper starts from a brief sketch of the classical figure of critical educational theory or science (Kritische Erziehungswissenshaft). Critical educational theory presents itself as the privileged guardian of the critical principle of education (Bildung) and its emancipatory promise. It involves the possibility of saying "I" in order to speak…

Participation has become very popular as a new strategy and approach in research, in policy, in private and public affairs. As an alternative to top-down approaches participation promises to empower people, to acknowledge and to build competence and (local) knowledge, to recognise and to be responsive to people's different and differentiated needs…

In this article, the authors deal with the question whether the concept of "Bildung" or "cultivation/edification" is still a concept which one can use to analyse and criticise actual developments in the field of education (both in thought/discourse and in action/technique) which are themselves related to broader social transformations often…