Session Submission Summary

Form as Praxis: Aesthetics, Affect, and Dialogue in Comparative & International Education

Mon, March 30, 9:45 to 11:00am, Hilton, Floor: Ballroom Level - Tower 3, Continental 7

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In an era of rising authoritarianism and what many scholars are identifying as "global fascism," as well as intensifying polarization, metrics-driven audit cultures, extractive policy logics, and accelerating climate change, the imperative for comparative and international education (CIE) to take scholarly form as seriously as scholarly content has never been more urgent. This panel builds upon our 2025 exploration of "awakening knowledge production" by examining how scholarly forms and practices can serve as acts of democratic resistance and public engagement. We consider how these forms sustain the wider epistemological and ontological questions of representation, audience, and authentic engagement, even in the face of forces that threaten academic freedom, international cooperation, and peaceful dialogue across differences. Crucially, we pursue this breadth without narrowing inquiry to a single political frame.

The current global context—marked by attacks on higher education, restrictions on international student mobility, and the weaponization of educational policy—demands that we reconsider not only what knowledge we produce but how we produce it and for whom. Drawing inspiration from scholars like Quinn Slobodian's analysis of how far-right movements have co-opted mainstream economics for racist ends, this panel uses Slobodian as an entry point to ask how ideas travel, congeal as “common sense,” and slide into propaganda, across domains—from economics to climate discourse. We also ask what responsibility scholars bear for those transformations, and we interrogate the political dimensions of our epistemological and ontological choices within CIE.

We argue that aesthetic, affective, and dialogical approaches to knowledge production do more than resist: they broaden the conditions for both intellectual and activist engagement, cultivating plurality across ideological divides, especially where climate change debates fuse scientific knowledge, lived experience, and policy contestation. Through podcast dialogues that model democratic exchange; cinematic and moving-image work attentive to human and more-than-human relations; manifesto-making as speculative, plural method; socially engaged youth climate art; and related cinema-based inquiry grounded in education and climate change awareness, we demonstrate how alternative scholarly practices can serve both intellectual rigor and activist purposes without collapsing one into the other.

Contributions
° Podcasting as democratic praxis (Will Brehm): dialogical knowledge that models rigorous disagreement without hostility.
° Affect, authenticity, and film (Irv Epstein): how cinematic form reconfigures representation, audience relations, and responsibility in CIE.
° Worlds otherwise: manifesto-making (Iveta Silova): reclaiming the manifesto as speculative, plural, and anti-authoritarian in method and effect.
° Youth climate art / Turn It Around! (Dilraba Anayatova & Iveta Silova): socially engaged art that moves policy audiences affectively.
° Learning across cinema: a Kyrgyz–Kazakh quintet (Hugh McLean): five films on education as a social mirror — from Soviet schooling and post-1991 unravelling to contemporary legacies of governance, ‘tradition’, and modernisation — read as aesthetic pedagogy.

Session format: The session uses a conversational format with structured audience participation, modelling knowledge as a shared civic practice and inviting participants to test how their own scholarly forms can serve peaceful, plural, and purposeful engagement.

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Individual Presentations