What is yet to come? A ‘Moot’ addressing the future of European educational research

In addressing the question about the future of European educational research I want to emphasize the actual and potential agency of the community of European educational researchers. Thus, my choice has been to interpret the question as ‘what future should we struggle for among the innumerable possible futures that lie ahead us?’. In my speech I will present some brief statements about a possible and desirable (in my view of course) future for educational research, with a specific reference to the configuration of the field we inhabit, the publics we talk to, the politics of knowledge we practice and the effects of our agency as a research community. One of the main idea I will try to develop, recalling Deleuze, is that in addressing its future question, the educational research community has to think ‘its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present), and be able finally to ‘think differently’ (the future)’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 119).