On January 21, 2025, the day after he was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled: "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity" (Exec. Order no. 14,173, 2025). In it, Trump decreed that the "longstanding … 
editorial
editorial: far-right actors and education: the global circulation of their ideas, agendas, and policies
The electoral success of far-right party actors has been an increasingly noticeable phenomenon across the globe, demonstrated most recently by elections across Europe, which made clear that the European political landscape has taken a ‘major shift to the right’ (Cunningham et al., 2024). This …
editorial: epistemologies of data
Data analysis has always been part of scientific research. For example, while the PISA assessments have significantly informed the educational discourse and the media since the turn of the twenty-first century, the collection and international comparison of quantitative data on a large scale has a …
editorial: segregation
“And you know, there was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Harris, 2019
One of the most remarkable moments during the US Democratic primary election may have been the …
editorial: frontiers of solidarity
Solidarity is one of those multifarious ideas that appears to gain popularity in times of crisis – and is called for by politicians, the media, celebrities, and the general public, (sometimes) from diametrically opposed ideological positions (Chouliaraki, 2013; Lahusen, 2020; Wallaschek, 2020). The …
editorial: the fatigue of critique?
The ninth issue of on_education addresses an ongoing and lively international and interdisciplinary controversy: Has critique run out of steam? (Latour, 2004) Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s early critique of “the methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice” (Sedgwick, …
editorial: vaccination!
Public debates about the pros and cons of vaccination are highly emotionally charged and polarised. This is also the case in the context of contemporary controversies about proper responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (Drerup & Schweiger, 2020). Fears of a potential compulsory vaccination against …
editorial: Provincializing ‘Western Education’
Theories of ‘education’ (broadly construed) have traditionally relied on premises and frameworks that may be called Euro- or Western-centric. Allegedly universal theories of education or the educated person in most cases did not and do not sufficiently take into account the existing global plurality …
editorial: exploring the relationship of money and education
In capitalism, the significance of both money and education for individuals as well as societies as a whole is—mostly—uncontested. Both are desirable “assets” that seem to be important in order to live/provide a “good” life. However, when it comes to the relationship between the two, matters can get …
editorial: teachers – being in control or being controlled?
Teachers find themselves at the heart of historical and contemporary struggles about public education – its purpose, its contents and its means (see e.g., McCulloch, 2011). Many perceived social problems are delegated to schools to be solved by teachers (see e.g., Tröhler, 2016). Inclusion, …
editorial: education in the anthropocene
Scientists from various disciplines have announced a new phase in earth history: the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Zalasiewicz, 2008). What they are suggesting, to be precise, is that somewhere in the (relatively) recent past (when, exactly, is a subject of heated debate) we have …
editorial: academic lives
Academic life has changed dramatically in recent decades. With the expansion of higher education, broader sections of the population have gained access to colleges and universities (Schofer & Meyer 2005; Labaree 2017). This has had a huge impact on the composition of students and higher …
editorial: “human, all too human?” transhumanism, posthumanism and the “end of education”
In 2045 it will be possible to cheat death. This, at least, is the future vision of Ray Kurzweil, engineer in chief at the Google Corporation, leading thinker of the transhumanist movement and eventually the most renowned researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). In this …
editorial: civic education after trump
The rise of right-wing populist movements across Europe and the world, and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, are perceived as a massive crisis of liberal democracy. The label `Trump´ has since then symbolised a widespread perplexity and confusion that pervades …