Educate, Work, or Live? Re-making the Spatiotemporality of Education Through the Radical Openness of the Home

The paper scrutinises the transformation of the space-times of education, work, and the home, the seeming naturalness of which was seriously disrupted by the pandemic. In contrast to studies focussed on spatial forces that operate through the system or policy, our empirical observation focuses on the everyday spatial and temporal practices of people deprived of seemingly stable policies, administrative timetables, and maps. We contest prevailing arguments about blurred boundaries of the home and suggest an argument that draws on a topological approach to address the limits of the theory of interpenetration between school and society. The article analyses the repeated in-depth interviews with teachers who were mothers of children under 10 years of age and experienced the overlap of the teaching, working, and parenting roles during the pandemic. The analysis shows that the boundaries of the home were not blurred but discarded, and the home became a topological site of experimentation operating simultaneously through expansion and narrowing, bringing about radically open time-space which is made of evolving and coeval plural trajectories that are no longer more or less shared by the whole society, but there is an individual coordination according to milestones important for a particular family or school.