A 'Moot' for Educational Research in Europe?

For many years the EERJ Roundtable has been a standing event within the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). In a discursive style it addresses issues related to contemporary relationships between educational research and educational policy in Europe. The changing educational landscape, together with shifting practices and discourses of educational research, prompted researchers to discuss the need for increased self-governance. It was taken up as the topic for the 2013 EERJ Roundtable and couched as a question: What is the possibility of a "moot" for educational research in Europe? This article reports on the 2013 Roundtable. Its three short presentations and subsequent audience discussion have been summarised and reflected upon to make a case for a moot: a self-governing space for educational research. It reveals ECER, and particularly the EERJ Roundtable, as a scholarly and a political arena where the interplay between research, policy and larger patterns of social change can be reviewed, interrogated and appropriated critically into the disciplinary logics of educational research.