Stimulating debate in Comparative Education

• In Event: Reflections on the field of comparative and international education: hosted by the annual review of comparative and international education

Proposal

As we look forward to CIES 2019,
Before you even check your luggage!
Check your positionality!...
How dare we attempt to claim authority, canonization,
or expertise on people we have never met, places we
have never been, without identifying the true canons.
We must no longer deal in false, self-aggrandized
narratives to avoid coping with reality!
The cost of unchecked positionality is too great!
It is why we are here today.
It is the platform for oppression. (Blaché, Cossa and Fuller, 2018: 9)

At the closing ceremony of CIES 2018 we were treated to a lecture from performance poets, which was subsequently reproduced in Perspectives (Blaché, Cossa and Fuller, 2018, 7-9). The poem complains that we have arrived where we are today by deploying false narratives. But rather than introducing a sophisticated epistemology that recognises multiple, competing claims to truth, the poem/performance simply makes an alternative claim to access “reality” and the “true canons”. This is an argument to close down debate, not open it up. “Check your positionality” here means to check that one’s position is correct.
Ironically, or sadly, this poem is an accurate representation of CIES 2018, where what we might call “identity methodology” was in evidence; “I can make an authoritative statement because I am a member of this specific group”, preferably a group that can claim to be subject to some kind of oppression. This seems to be a self-contradictory position, namely that there can be no privileged access to knowledge, but there are some groups, especially “indigenous” groups, who have an understanding of “reality” because they have “decolonised” their thinking.
On the surface this is no more than the cut and thrust of debate: I am right and you are wrong. It is a debating tactic, trying to stand aloof from the skirmish. But underneath that it has a much more damaging effect. It affects the relationship between data and analysis. If I cannot say anything about places I have never been and people I have never met, when those people provide statements about the places they inhabit, that has to be taken as given, as “data”. There is no room for questioning whether they have insight on their own condition, or are telling the truth. There, is in fact, no room for analysis. The result is a growth of facile studies reporting the attitudes of this or that group of people to one or another policy, doing little more than repackaging the data from questionnaires or interviews.
CIES has recently taken this a step further by suggesting that we, collectively, should adopt a political position on the basis of being a research community; the data will lead us to particular views and policies. We are in danger of shutting off analysis and debate when we should be opening them up and nourishing them. The result can only be a generation of scholars who are ignorant of the debates in our field, or who believe that the debates are either settled or insignificant.

Author

• David A. Turner, University of South Wales