Revisiting "Asia as Method": Toward ontologies and epistemologies of difference

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This is the second of a two-part series on Revisiting "Asia as Method" in Transnational Higher Education.

Educational researchers have long sought insights for domestic education by drawing on lessons learned from abroad. The home context is normalized within these traditions as the centre from which the other is understood. But rarely has the field examined the ontological changes of educators themselves working abroad, and the implications this holds for challenging and transforming accepted theoretical and pedagogical norms of the field.

As long-term international work provides insights that transcend simple travel abroad or traditional ethnography, this Group Panel (drawing on a forthcoming Special Issue of the Asia Pacific Education Review) explores how university educators working abroad in the long-term experience ontological and epistemological transformations. A longer period of employment and life abroad provides unique insights as the educator goes through personal ontological and epistemological transformations via ‘border thinking’ that informs his/her analysis (T. Kim, 2014; Rappleye & Komatsu, 2017).

Theorizing the borders, Gloria Anzaldua (1987) writes, “the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes touch” (preface). She goes on to illustrate with the US-Mexico border as an example, “The US-Mexico border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (p. 3). Educators working in international contexts encounter these ontological and epistemological borders daily and are brought to grapple with the role of Otherness in their scholarly practices. Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006) write, “Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is of the outside created from the inside” (p. 206).

At the same time, the Western gaze in recent years has been critiqued as the hegemonic lens through which education is theorized (Silova et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2015), and scholars in East Asia (and elsewhere) have called on Asian and non-Asian educators alike to think beyond Western-centricity and beyond domination-oriented thinking (Chen, 2010; B.Y. Kim, 2002; Takayama et al., 2018). These scholars argue against Western-centricity and against the adoption and adaptation of Western (as well as domestic exclusionary) concepts as mechanisms of control by scholars and the political elite (T. Kim, 2016; Vickers, 2020).

In reference to the East Asian context bringing West and East together, Chen (2010) states, “The Taoist concept of taiji, as a structural totality in place prior to the existence of yin and yang, has to be analyzed on two levels. On the higher level, the unity of yin and yang is complementary and indeed encompasses a totality. But on the lower level, yang is higher than yin, and the former governs and encompasses the latter” (p. 264). Chen’s double critique here of Western-centric practices and domestic hierarchies – e.g., caste, class, and gender – is especially visible for those educators who working long-term abroad encounter the constraints and affordances of difference.

This Group Panel, then, seeks to offer responses to the following questions: How are educators' theoretical and pedagogical practices informed by migration across contexts? What sorts of ontological and epistemological transformations might educators experience during long-term periods abroad? How might these transformations initiate decolonial moves in regard to educational pedagogy, policy and practice?

The Panel explores these questions within and beyond the contexts of Asia drawing on the unique insights of diverse educators. Importantly, beyond examining Asia as a defined territory or object that is distinct from the West, this Panel looks toward the ways that Asia, the West, and the Global South co-exist within each other. Drawing on Kuan-Hsing Chen's (2010) Asia as Method and Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) Borderlands, the panel seeks to re-center Asia within educational discourse, not as an object of analysis but as an agential subject. To deeply access issues of ontological and epistemological transformation, the speakers will offer a diverse range of autoethnographic reflections on the challenges and opportunities of practicing cross-border transnational higher education across various contexts. Reflections on higher education praxis will be offered from scholars working in and across Australia, Brunei, Canada, South Korea, the UK, and US.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Kevin Kester, Seoul National University

Individual Presentations

• Decolonizing research imagination: A journey of reshaping research epistemology and ontology - THI NHAI NGUYEN, Monash College; Yeow-Tong Chia, University of Sydney

• Student-centred, “embodied inter-referencing” as antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy - Ayaka Yoshimizu, University of British Columbia

• Unraveling the EFL Expat: Challenging Privilege through Borderlands and Asia as Method - Brandon Sherman, IUPUI School of Education

• Decolonization and Asian epistemology: reflections on identity, contradictions, and inequality - Jack Lee, University of Edinburgh

• "Asia as Method" as a quest of the spirit and finding we-togetherness: a collaborative autoethnography - Yishin Khoo, University of Windsor; Jing Lin, University of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• Vandra L. Masemann, OISE, University of Toronto