Knowledge production in comparative and international education: Southern and postcolonial perspectives

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

In this panel, we investigate the heritage, ethics, and effects of comparative and international education knowledge production processes that label themselves “universal” in a globalized world. The Southern African indigenous concept of Ubuntu is the theme of the 59th Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual meeting. This notion reflects the region’s particular intellectual histories and anti-colonial and post-colonial struggles, and more importantly asks us to take seriously the intellectual work and theoretical insights generated in peripheral regions around de-colonial struggles over knowledge. The Comparative Education Review (CER) – the official journal of the CIES – at the same time as this latter is organizing its Ubuntu-themed conference, is launching a call for papers on a special issue for “Rethinking knowledge production and circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives and Alternative Epistemologies.” This panel is organized as an effort to explore the theme of knowledge production, recognizing that discourses of a metropolitan “global North” are dominating the fields of international and comparative education.
Debates often concentrate on social, political, and economic interventions as “drivers” of development, this latter concept itself a Northern construct. Implementation and donor agencies have to justify educational projects in economic terms of effectiveness or “value for money;” resulting in debates and research that are in turn embraced by academia. Also, critical and post-colonial theories are in many ways Northern-inspired concepts – consequences of the aforementioned debates. These relationships (between donors, implementers, and academia) result in a knowledge production that is to a large extent planned by – and often even geographically located in – the metropolitan North. Paul Feyerabend in Against Method, provocatively said that in the modernist viewpoint, “It doesn’t matter who you are or when or where you are working; good science is good science and good science gives us good reason to believe in its results because its methods are the most rational” (in Gimbel 2011, 281). A modernist approach to research and knowledge production has caused some academics, such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, to characterize the term “research” as “probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (2012, 1).
This panel reviews the ethical and epistemological dilemmas related to the hegemony of “gold standard” Northern knowledge production, and considers alternative approaches and methods that are increasingly populating the field of Comparative and International Education research.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Stephen Carney, Roskilde University, Denmark

Individual Presentations

• Recognizing ‘Other’ Comparative Educations: Alternative Histories, Alternative Discourses - Maria Iluminada Manzon, National Institute of Education, Singapore

• Comparing Ethnographies: Studying Education across the Americas - Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, UCLA

• Decisions Taken in Undecidable Terrain: Discourses and Perpetuation of the Educational Myth in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo - Bjorn H. Nordtveit, U Massachusetts-Amherst

• Doing Southern Theory in comparative education: Insights from a margin - Keita Takayama, University of New England

Discussant

• Stephen Carney, Roskilde University, Denmark