Acrobats, phantoms, and fools: animating comparative education cartographies

ABSTRACT

Acrobats, phantoms, and fools. Such experiences often stem from our attempts to ‘fit’ into the official cartography of Comparative Education, which reflects a particular reading of the formation of knowledge and knowing subjects in the field. Rather than viewing cartographies as universal, we reframe them as embodied and embedded. Combining reflections on our own intellectual journeys in Comparative Education with those of other scholars and fictive characters, we move across time and space to develop a collective biography that explores our interwoven positionalities. We begin by outlining both the parallel lines along which our biographies have unfolded and their various points of intersection. We then present a series of generic scholarly experiences that shape our collective biographies and the field’s boundaries. Our own recollections are entangled with experiences and voices of ‘Others’ who did not appear at the time or perhpahs were present but remained beyond out horizon. Animating our-selves by entering into these relationships with ‘Others’ enables us to reclaim pluraity in the very structure of the field’s cartography and our own biographies. This in turn provokes reflection on the implications for doing comparative education, especially in relation to encountering ‘otherness’ or ‘foreignness’. In closing, we suggest that embracing the contradictory vistas opened by such entanglements can help enhance the field’s mobility, as well as our own.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective biography
• memory
• comparative education
• decolonial theory
• intellectual cartography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Iveta Silova is professor and director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative education and political sociology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on globalisation and postsocialist education transformations, including intersections between post-colonialism and post-socialism after the Cold War. Iveta’s most recent research engages with the decoloniality of knowledge production and being, childhood memories, ecofeminism, and environmental sustainability. Her latest books include Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life (2018, co-edited with Millei & Piattoeva) and Reimagining Utopias (2017, co-edited with Sobe, Korzh, & Kovalchuk). She is a co-editor of European Education: Issues and Studies and an associate editor of Education Policy Analysis Archives.

Euan Auld is Assistant Professor at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in International and Comparative Education & Policy Studies from the UCL Institute of Education. His research to date has focused primarily on international large-scale assessments and their influence on education research and governance, drawing on philosophical perspectives and narrative theory.

Notes

1 We draw on the work of Donna Haraway (1997), Karen Barad (2007), and others who use the concept of ‘diffraction’ to rethink relationality and difference. As a counterpoint to reflection and reflexivity, which are about ‘geometries of sameness’ (i.e. as reflected in the metaphors of mirroring and sameness), diffraction is about ‘differences that our knowledge-making practices make and the effects they have on the world’ (Barad 2007, 71). Diffractive methodology is about becoming attuned to the entanglement. It involves ‘reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences are made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter’ (30).

2 This section draws on Eric Voegelin’s (1974) concept of historiogenesis.

3 See Kim (2014) for discussion of Wissenschaften in Comparative Education, which she suggests is always entwined with mobility and Weltanschauungen derived from lived experiences.

4 This becomes increasingly awkward when founding fathers are implicated in the field’s early days of colonialism and overt racism (Sobe 2017; Takayama 2018).

5 Whether published in the 1960s or today, most foundational texts include a list of the field’s ‘founding fathers’, which typically includes Sadler, Bereday, King, Holmes, Kandel, Hans, and Lauwereys, among some others. Look at these foundational texts closely: Who does not appear?

6 See Rappleye et al. (2019).

7 See Zhao (2012).

8 See Shahjahan (2006).

9 See Auld and Morris (2014, 2016) for discussion.

10 Song retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtwJvgPJ9xw.

11 The quoted excerpt from the review letter was paraphrased to protect the anonymity of the Reviewer and Editor, while retaining the key message.

12 ‘Manels’ refer to all male panels, which continue to go unnoticed (simply business-as-usual) at various comparative education conferences.

13 This concept of ‘holographic transition’ is adopted from Chengxin Pan’s (2018) article proposing a new relational ontology in global politics. Pan’s paper is part of a sustained discussion that seeks to develop non-Western theories of International Relations; that is, ones that are not premised on a Cartesian/Newtonian ontology that assumes a mechanistic world made up of independent, self-contained parts.