This paper looks at a specific set of corporate images, namely photographs of apprentices of the Luxembourg steel conglomerate ARBED, and analyses how young workers are depicted in these images. The paper draws on a collection of 2251 glass-plate negatives (re)presenting ARBED's industrial cosmos, including its vocational school the Institut Emile…

This paper explores 'articulations' or 're-turnings' of ill-/health and energy/fatigue in education, re/configuring bodies and minds as 'body_minds'. The Luxembourg vocational school "Institut Émile Metz" (IEM) thereby serves as a starting point. This institute is analysed 'diffractively' through health education institutes as part of an…

This paper unveils the body_machine as a key element of dynamic mental maps that have come to shape both educational praxis and research. It traces and analyses instances in which the human and the mechanical encountered each other in metaphorical, material and visual forms, thereby blurring to some extent the boundaries between them while…

This article analyses the initiating role of the steel industry in educational selection by means of psychometric techniques used in the psycho-physiological laboratory associated with a vocational school in Luxembourg founded in 1914. It first considers the origins of, and initial meanings bestowed upon, this first (and perhaps also last)…

In the authors' aim to go beyond the "silent" school desk they returned to sources such as public contracts, photographs, advertising leaflets and (the often neglected) patents kept in the municipal archives of Brussels. In this article, they focus on the first half of the twentieth century and two phases of the "life-cycle" of…