Highlighted Session: Awakening CIE Knowledge Production: A Conversation to Revitalize the Field

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Throughout the past decade, many of us within the Comparative and International Education (CIE) community have been grappling with questions that speak to how the field has been constructed, the types of limitations that have defined its construction, and how it can be re-imagined. Epistemological and well as ontological concerns have been raised in ways that touch upon what comparison means; how it has functioned; how power, privilege, and authority have been and are being invoked to frame comparative discourse; how subjects are represented; how their voices are amplified, marginalized, or erased; and what types of audiences receive the differing sets of ideas that are disseminated within the field. Who gets to speak and who receives one’s thoughts have become implicated in deciphering what it is that has actually been said and what meanings are derived from such interactions. Comparativists are not alone in raising such questions. As social science scholars have looked to Cultural Studies, Feminist theory, and Post-foundational thought to raise and address similar issues, they have engaged in robust critiques that have challenged conventional understandings of identity, consciousness, materiality, and representation.

A few examples are instructive. In a variety of forums developed from her groundbreaking Gender Trouble (1991), Judith Butler has emphasized the process through which we embody social scripts in our efforts to define what gender relations entail. In so doing, she has furthered the larger debate regarding the folly of separating the so-called “natural” from the “social” as we seek to define what it means to be human. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009) not only embraced a reimagining of materialism as a philosophical perspective worthy of pursuit, but forcefully argued against the anthropocentrism implicit in the representation of a world void of an appreciation of the non-living entities that impact and influence our daily lives. in his The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021), Dipesh Chakrabarty built upon Bennett’s analysis in arguing that the planetary consciousness that the future of the planet must involve a reimagination of knowledge creation and reproduction in ways that eschew scientific, social scientific, and humanistic boundaries. In his view, the Western based knowledge assumptions that belie allegiance to such disciplinarity need to be rethought. Karen Barad, in her epic work, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), uses the theoretical underpinnings of quantum theory to argue in favor of an agential realist ontological view. All phenomena, according to Barad, are subject to agential separability, whereby a temporary resolution of the indeterminacy of movement inherent within intra-activity is obtained. Being subject to the characteristics of all forms of matter thus demands of us that we note the artificiality with which we separate ourselves from external phenomena, the limited modes of observation we incorporate to make sense of externalities, and the temporal nature of the measurements we arrive at through being involved in such a process.

Collectively, these theoretical underpinnings compel us to examine not only the content of our ideas, assumptions, limitations, and value of CIE, but argue in favor of also interrogating the ways in which we express such ideas and how our modes of communication impact the ideas themselves. The aim of this panel is to begin such an interrogation. To do so requires us to question the efficacy and limitations of written text itself. Are there alternatives to the social script of author/reader that can be investigated? Are there ways in which the power dimensions implicit in that relationship can be re-imagined so that interesting ideas can be more freely communicated? Is it possible to get away from reifying language that is overly abstract, narrowly focused, and lacking in imagination and creativity? And what might this mean for academic institutions, from societies such as CIES to universities and other spaces of higher learning?

We attempt to address these issues by offering three examples of alternative modes of inquiry salient to CIE concerns. Will Brehm is the creator of FreshEd, a podcast that has a global presence and has become an essential forum for CIE discourse. In this panel, he uses clips from selected podcasts to illustrate how the podcast form can creatively communicate through sound and dialogical discourse that presents salient ideas in embodied form. Irv Epstein, author of Education, Affect, and Film, uses selected film clips to demonstrate how film not only expands our understanding of CIE ideas but uses affect to challenge conventional educational assumptions. Dilraba Anayatova, Iveta Silova, and Carrie Karsgaard use socially engaged art to move education policymakers and politicians on an affective level, imploring them to act on the climate crisis. They will showcase selected climate art flashcards from the Turn it Around! Project – designed by youth for adult policymakers – to illustrate the power of art in radically reframing conventional educational narratives. Hugh McLean, who is responsible for the Cinematic Spaces in Education festivalettes that have become a major part of annual CIES conferences, systematically analyzes the importance of incorporating an aesthetic perspective to the study of educational issues and will serve as a discussant.

Sub Unit

• Post-foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education SIG

Chair

• Will Brehm, University of Canberra

Individual Presentations

• Reimagining CIE through sound: Working at the nexus of art, entertainment, and research - Will Brehm, University of Canberra

• The Power and Importance of Film - Irving Epstein, Illinois Wesleyan University

• Animating Education Futures: Making Art at the End of the World - Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University; Iveta Silova, Arizona State University; Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University

Discussant

• Hugh McLean, NORRAG