Education as Borderlands: Comparing Relational Par/Des(i) Identities

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Being/Becoming a Par/Desi (i): Making Sense of Higher Education as Borderlands

Proposal

In the field of comparative and international education, notions of comparison have been central to the development and implementation of different educational discourses, policies, and practices related to areas such as quality education, teaching and learning pedagogies, curriculum development, and teacher education among others. Critical scholars have highlighted how West continues to be the frame of reference, sometime in visible and other times in invisible ways, in shaping the concepts of empowerment, development, and education for the so-called developing countries (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Chakrabarty, 2000; Connell, 2007; Takayama, 2011). Within such comparative framing, difference becomes intelligible as a fixed entity embodying a conceptualization of the very identities, processes, and development that are compared in educational research and policy endeavors. In other words, the very process of comparison mobilizes the West and its related concepts and terms, such as modernity, tradition, rights, development, progress, and education, as static and measurable entities to develop and reinscribe a comparative representation of the non-Western entities, which in turn, reproduces the “West”.
In this paper, the authors employ Bhattacharya’s (2019) Par/Desi(i) framework to provide a conceptual and methodological framework to facilitate creation of a dialogic community of South Asian educational scholars who are interested in engaging with their identities and experiences as fluid, tentative, in-making, and contextual. This framing aims to facilitate a critical engagement with diverse lived experiences that are shaped but not determined by nationhood, religion, caste, gender, class, and sexual orientation among others. This dialogic engagement, that at times invites comparison, recognizes the limitations of the modes of thinking and terms grounded in the history of Western imperialism and aims to situate these lived experiences in the borderlands of being South Asian, immigrants, diaspora, people of color, educational researchers, and doctoral students, among others.
Through focusing on lived experiences, this approach, that we call relational comparison, aims to highlight how these identity markers can simultaneously empower and constrain while feeling both familiar and unknown. We define relational comparison as a framing that enables us to engage with lived experiences through mobilizing particular modalities of comparison that are grounded in relationality, dialogue, and community building. Through highlighting the fluidity and ambiguity of these Par/Desi(i) identities, we aim to disrupt the modalities of comparison that have been normalized within the field of international and comparative education. These forms of comparison end up reproducing the colonial discourses that position non-Western modes of thinking and being as the ‘other” - unmodern and needing Western knowledges and interventions.

Authors

• Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina

• Ravi Bhatt