Highlighted Session: Critical Comparative Education: Understanding the Research Complex and its Consequences

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

New visions for research—Africa insights. Education held extraordinary promise at Africa's independence. Rapid expansion and imaginative innovations proved difficult to sustain. High expectations and enthusiasm were joined by distress and dependence. Understanding that troubling combination requires attention to the intersection of local and global dynamics and the institutionalization of international influences. Research is consequential, regularly reinforcing education systems’ conservative charter. Notwithstanding disciplinary border crossers, methodological orthodoxy is blinding. Social engineering remains far more important than social justice. Scholarship about Africa is only rarely by Africa. Scholars study poverty and miss impoverishment. The research process itself constrains inquiry. Examining the research complex—interconnected institutions with distributed authority acting in concert—requires attention to how knowledge is generated, where, and to whose benefit.
CIES's 2026 theme challenges us to explore the interssection of education and peace in a divided world. Essential to reducing conflict are development and social justice. Our context is an unequal and unjust world. We seek to understand education research in that context in order to imagine new futures. New visions for education research require systematic and critical attention to the history and practice of education research to date. The setting for our exchange is education in Africa. A review of research on education in Africa highlights the importance of the research process itself—not just the findings, but how scholars specify questions and look for answers. That process operates within a larger complex that includes universities and research institutes, academic societies, research funding agencies, review boards, scholarly journals, and publishers. Each domain within that complex has its own character, governance, rules, and accountability. Their interactions are often layered, indirect, overlapping, even contradictory. Here we see distributed authority and at the same time, action in concert. Sometimes starkly visible, often so deeply institutionalized that it is barely perceptible to practitioners, the research complex is neither impartial nor neutral. Its foundational assumptions and broadly shared stated and unstated objectives reflect, and also shape, the driving forces of the contemporary global political economy. Exploring the research complex helps to clarify the links among education research, the conservative charter of most of Africa's education systems, and the persistence of inequality at the international scale. The analytic challenge that presents is to recognize the importance of research rigor and at the same time to identify and challenge the ways in which the rules of rigor are used to assert control over knowledge generation and knowledge generators. For researchers, the tasks are to develop research strategies that maintain attention to research reliability and validity, that are sensitive to complexity and context, and that bypass the border posts of the research complex in order to transform it.
Early in the development of our analysis, we emphasize the exchange of ideas, experiences, and insights—thus the symposium format. In this session we challenge the research complex and examine and expose the exclusionary rules for generating knowledge. We will begin with a provocative presentation, followed by critical commentaries from scholars with extensive empirical research and analysis, and, for most of the session, inclusive discussion. To reiterate, our format will be interactive, with emphasis on exchange, critique, debate, and generating new insights and understandings.
Symposium participants: Joel Samoff; Jonathan Jansen; Martial Dembélé; Sangeeta Kamat; Carlos Alberto Torres; Frances Vavrus.
Our intent is both generative and transformative. The session's premise is that developing alternative research strategies for a world that is less unequal and less unjust requires unraveling, understanding, challenging, and transforming the hegemonic research complex and in doing so, expanding the pool of those who undertake and participate in education research.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Organizer

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University

Chair

• Jonathan david Jansen, Stellenbosch University

Individual Presentations

• A Challenge for Comparative Education: Transforming Sites of Control into Locales of Opportunity - Joel Samoff, Stanford University

• Challenging the Research Complex: Engaged and Committed Scholarship - Carlos Alberto Torres, UCLA

Discussants

• Sangeeta G. Kamat, Univ of Massachusetts Amherst

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University