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Session Submission Summary

When Beings Encounter: The Multiplicities of Peace

Mon, March 30, 4:30 to 5:45pm, Hilton, Floor: Lobby Level - Tower 3, Golden Gate 7

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Objectives
Peace has always been one of the significant goals of education. Instead of taking "peace" as a predetermined concept, this symposium intends to investigate its sliding conceptual boundaries through a transcultural and transdisciplinary perspective. Authors in this panel come from different subjects, including education philosophy, curriculum studies, education policies, moral education, and early childhood education.
Drawing on Confucianism and post-foundational theories, this multidisciplinary panel approaches the theme of "peace" by providing cases, images, and daily practices of understanding how beings could coexist in the world. To deconstruct grand discourse that fabricates beings, this panel seeks to show the multiplicities of beings that have been taken for granted: the disadvantaged being, the gendered being, the national being, and the species being. This panel demonstrates how the multiplicities of beings are made possible and practicable beyond "Western" paradigms. It also shows how different academic traditions could have conversations beyond the frames of “East” and “West”, “Foundational” and “Post-foundational”, “theories” and “practice”. This conversation is a “between”(Gilles Deleuze, 1987) in the sense that what mattered was not the points, as each author only “functioned simply as temporary, transitory and evanescent points of subjectivation, but the collection of bifurcating, divergent and muddled lines” (p. ix) which constituted this panel as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without ever going from the one to the other.
Despite different academic traditions and research interests, authors in this panel demonstrate “Peace” through a collaborative emergent practice of “significant otherness” that “in vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures.” (Haraway, 2003, p. 8) Therefore, all fpapers commonly address three questions: Firstly, how to live and how to coexist in this world? Secondly, what are the theories and practices that fabricate and reimagine “self and other” relationships? Thirdly, how do past and future fold in the present, making it (im)possible to conceptualize “peace” in a particular way?
Overview
The First paper examines Yingchun Zhu’s innovative pedagogy, where students engage with bugs as marginalized “Others” to cultivate the ethical dispositions necessary for peaceful cohabitation in nature-culture. Grounded in Confucian principles, Zhu’s “next to-among” methods challenge Eurocentric humanism, reframing peace education through relational attunement. The study bridges Eastern philosophy and postcolonial critique to propose decolonial ecological ethics.
The Second paper explores how women early childhood educators in China navigate cultural expectations, precarity, and dominant notions of professionalism. Drawing on ethnography and feminist, Foucauldian, and indigenous Chinese perspectives, it shows how care operates as a transformative practice, enacting everyday peace and reimagining professionalism as grassroots peacebuilding beyond Western paradigms.
The third paper examines education policies targeting “Disadvantaged Children” in China and the US. Drawing on Thomas Popkewitz’s concepts of “Indigenous Foreigner” and “Traveling Libraries” (Popkewitz, 2019), this research demonstrates different models of “differentiation” in Project Head Start and “Rural Education” in China's education policy to address localized “disadvantaged children.” It shows how this differentiation embodies ways of reasoning the self-other relationship.
The fourth Paper examines China's shift in education policy from "open integration" toward balancing autonomy and openness during the Techno-Cultural Cold War. It analyzes external pressures, policy mechanisms, and key adjustments using mixed methods, contributing to policy change theory.
Taken together, the four papers provide a rich and nuanced account of how peace can be rethought in education, foregrounding relationality, multiplicity, and justice. This collective inquiry demonstrates how transcultural, transdisciplinary scholarship can shift academic debates while also offering educators and policymakers new vocabularies for imagining coexistence in uncertain times.

Scholarly Significance
This panel holds strong academic significance by advancing theoretical, methodological, and transcultural debates on how “peace” is conceptualized, practiced, and contested in education. Instead of treating peace as a fixed and universal ideal, the papers demonstrate how its meaning emerges through diverse philosophical traditions, policy discourses, and everyday pedagogical practices.
Methodologically, this pane illustrates how methodological diversity can illuminate the entanglements of peace with education, through ethnography, policy analysis, critical historiography, and discourse analysis. The cases span early childhood educators’ care practices, ecological pedagogy that cultivates relationality with non-human others, and comparative analyses of education policy in China and the U.S. This methodological breadth demonstrates the value of studying peace at the intersections of daily practice, institutional arrangements, and transnational flows of policy and knowledge.

Structure of the Session
75 minutes as follows:
Chair’s introduction 2 minutes
Papers 1-4: 14 minutes each 56 minutes
1 Discussants: 5 minutes 5 minutes
General Discussion/Q & A 12 minutes

Sub Unit

Organizer

Chair

Individual Presentations