ABSTRACT
The focus of this study is the reinstallation of the social question as a historical practice— or, in other words, the discursive reproblematization of social groups as dangerous and potential threats to societal hopes for the future. The purpose is to investigate how the historic figure of the social question returns and is applied in contemporary political discourses, more precisely in the context of education, education policy, and our main focus, teacher education. To highlight this, we use a genealogical method inspired by Michel Foucault, exploring the system of reason that ordered political discourses and policies in the early 19th century and at the turn of the 21st century (Foucault, 1991). We are problematizing and mirroring the fabrication of the social question in two different historical discourses that both deal with social integration: the discourse of philanthropy and the contemporary discourse of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The question we examine is in what way, and under what circumstances, the relationship between included and excluded subjects and society is reproduced and operates from one period to another.
