Globalisation, the research imagination and deparochialising the study of education

Abstract

This paper works in dialogue with Arjun Appadurai's paper, ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’ in an attempt to outline some necessary changes in researching education in the multiple contexts of globalisation. The paper provides two narratives as part of this project, which Appadurai calls the ‘deparochialisation of the research ethic’. The first narrative deals with the emergence of a ‘world or global educational policy field’ and suggests that Bourdieu's epistemological disposition, work on fields and his late political critiques of neo‐liberal globalisation provide a way to begin to deparochialise the national focus of educational policy studies. The second narrative deals with my own pedagogies in relation to a full time MA course in educational policy and practice in Sheffield, where most of the students are from China, and my work in the Caribbean on Sheffield's masters and doctoral programmes. The two narratives demonstrate that Bourdieu's work inflected by postcolonialism, the creolisation of research and theory as a two‐way process of retranslation, and challenges to the dominant research ethic from post‐positivist epsistemologies of many sorts collectively offer an important contribution towards deparochialising research in education.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• Creolisation
• Deparochialisation
• Globalisation
• Postcolonial
• Post‐positivist

Acknowledgements

I thank the following for their contributions towards this paper: Wilf Carr, Trevor Gale, Ian Hextall, Jennifer Lavia, Nicholas Lingard, Martin Mills, Kentry Jn Pierre, Shaun Rawolle, Paul Standish and Sandra Taylor. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Globalising the Research Imagination Conference, Prato, Italy, 24–26 October 2005.