Challenges and Opportunities for Decolonializing Global Knowledge-Production: A Reflexive Review of 45 Years of International Research on Chinese Rural Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Rethinking Education with A Reflexive ‘Double-Negation’ of Western-centrism and Nationalism: China and Beyond

Proposal

More than half a century after the ostensible end of classic colonialism, the modernity-coloniality nexus persists in global knowledge production (Mignolo, 2011). While scholars outside the colonial core increasingly contribute to English-language social science knowledge production, the universality and centrality of Western social theories and methodologies to a large extent remains taken-for-granted; the experiences of other societies and peoples continue to serve as sources of data to test and improve Western theories, rather than as sources of plural knowledges and social imaginations (Mignolo, 2011; Chen, 2011). Even fields like comparative and international education have given little attention to “the critical role that uneven power relations play in the constitution of its comparative knowledge” (Takayama, Sriprakash & Conell, 2017, p. 3).

With a focus on international research on Chinese rural education, we examine how uneven power relations in global knowledge production enterprises have constrained the field and identify emergent opportunities for decolonializing it. To this end, we carried out systematic content analysis and discourse analysis on 173 research articles about Chinese rural education published in 41 high-impact English-language international academic journals between 1978 and 2022.

The number of articles that these high-impact journals published on Chinese rural education grew rapidly after 2010, rising from 11 in 1990-1999 and 30 in 2000-2009 to 123 in 2010-2022. Much of the increase in visibility is driven by the growing contribution of ethnic Chinese scholars within as well as outside PRC. Nonetheless, this body of literature primarily examined rural education in China through the lenses of classic Western social theories like social stratification theories, human capital theories, critical social theories (especially theories about social reproduction and social justice) and child development theories. The vast majority of articles drew on these existing theories to explain phenomena in Chinese rural education or refined these Western theories with empirical data collected from rural China. As a result, this body of literature reinforces the centrality of existing Western theories and suffers from persistent blind spots in terms of understanding local ecologies, indigenous knowledges and lived experiences. It also offers limited insight in terms of addressing the identified social problems.

Against this backdrop, we also identified a handful of articles that illuminated promising decolonializing strategies, including focusing on local meanings, deconstructing western concepts, and leaning into comparisons with other Asian societies. As China expands its investment in rural development and rural education, the field now faces new opportunities for moving beyond these blind spots through working with – rather than doing research on – local communities, attending to local ecologies, and learning from indigenous wisdoms. At the same time, it needs to be mindful of falling into the traps of Chinese nationalism or exceptionalism.

Authors

• Xin Xiang, Beijing Normal University

• Min Yu, Wayne State University

• Jingjing Lou, Beloit College

• Jun Teng