The 6th ECADOC European Doctoral School was organised in Malta by the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research between 9 and 14 June 2019. The theme of the Summer School was 'Career Guidance for Social Justice: Knowledge, Practice, and Power', coordinated by Professor Ronald G. Sultana (EMCER director), Professor Rie Thomsen (Aarhus University, Denmark), and Professor Tristram Hooley (Derby University), with the support of Dr Manwel Debono (Centre for Labour Studies, UM).
The Summer School brought together 22 doctoral students studying various aspects of the transitions to employment in a historical conjuncture marked by high youth unemployment, precarity, austerity, and the rise of populism. Students hailed from Austria, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, and the UK. The programme included presentations by eight international scholars, most of whom have contributed a chapter to one of the two volumes on Career Guidance and Social Justice – texts edited by Hooley, Sultana & Thomsen and published by Routledge last year.
The Summer School programme and anchor texts informing it have been adopted by other universities with a view to reinforcing sociological and political approaches to career guidance and development, in a field that has, for the most part, been dominated by a liberal and individualistic psychological paradigm. In contrast, the 'Career Guidance for Social Justice' project highlights the need for a more robustly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach that confronts the nefarious global impact of neoliberalism.