Awkward knowledge: the historian of education and cross-border circulations

Abstract

Historians of education are having to face problems which for various traditional reasons, have been avoided. There are strong borders and boundaries around our work which discipline us, and yet to which we may be systematically blind. History of education has had a tendency to treat its subject as naturally national and having impermeable borders. This way, working in an interdisciplinary project on a subject which constantly revealed its cross-border and transnational links, the issue of awkwardness was clearly revealed. In this paper, fragments of the project are discussed to raise questions which I consider interesting and reflexive about the work of contemporary history of education.

Keywords

• conhecimento complexo
• transnacional
• circulação
• nacionalismo metodológico.