ISCHE 45 seeks to inquire into diversity and (de)coloniality as constitutive dynamics of the history of education. Longstanding narratives built through and along colonial domination and persistent across time and space have produced hierarchies and exclusions between knowledges, people, territorial units, bodily practices and affects. The history of diversity and (de)coloniality in education demands complicating univocal views of progress, reason, and inclusion, and paying attention to the multiple ways in which they have been contested by different movements and struggles in diverse temporalities and spatialities. By bringing to the fore the discussions around diversity and (de)coloniality in histories of education, the organizers of ISCHE 45 want to encourage researchers to explore and analyze the multiple processes of production and circulation of various types of knowledge, and how they are taken up and redistributed in different localities by diverse groups and institutions amid unequal power relations. To advance the critique of a single, universalized notion of education, this theme invites new inquiries into the hierarchies, inclusions and exclusions in inter- and trans-national relations and into questions of diversity in terms of e.g. ethnic, racial, gender, social, religious, linguistic, (dis)abilities and intergenerational bonds. It specifically asks for reflections on the historical role of education in fostering inequalities and oppression as well as in generating resistance, struggle, and reversion of these trends.

The conference seeks to promote scholarly conversations among historians of education that acknowledge the epistemological, ontological, and cultural diversity that organizes societies and educational processes and institutions. The notion of cultural diversity intends to interrupt the globalized localisms produced by hegemonic nations or groups that seek to erase the multiplicity and plurality of groups and people while invisibilizing power relations. Moving away from an understanding of the history of schooling as a unified process, the conference asks for analyses of the complex and heterogeneous configurations of temporalities and spatialities, teaching methods and technologies and how they involve multiple and diverse relations and identities. At the core of this conference, there is an invitation to rethink how relationships between center and periphery have been approached, to help reimagine the geopolitics of education beyond old and new imperial dreams and nightmares, and to dismantle the epistemological and cultural domination that has historically pervaded educational processes and institutions. The conference also seeks to promote a discussion about how archives, sources, and methods are used in these decolonizing attempts, and reflections on the effects these movements have on the teaching of educational histories.