Concluding Reflections

Abstract

The contributors to this book have subjected the concept of ‘informal education’ to detailed and often critical analysis, via a range of empirical case studies. Many chapters have highlighted the slipperiness of the term as it has been deployed throughout history and across geographical contexts. Indeed, given that informal education is most commonly understood to take place within, not outside, the run of everyday life, it is often difficult to demarcate where informal education begins and other facets of everyday life end. Nevertheless, the chapters in this book have also focussed upon concrete instances wherein informal education matters, somehow – pragmatically, politically and/or pedagogically. In other words, informal education is not merely deployed differently across time and space but is, recursively, contingent upon and constitutive of the contexts in which it appears. To posit this is somewhat of a truism: yet to exemplify this is a little more difficult. Nevertheless, the chapters in this book – through in-depth, empirical investigations of informal education – have exemplified the context-dependent and constitutive nature of informal education practices across diverse times and places. The book set out to examine both the geographies and histories of informal education; for the sake of clarity, it thereby instituted a rather false divide between space and time, and between disciplinary geography and history.