Imagining Sociology of Education Otherwise

Abstract

I am an oversea Japanese scholar trained in North America and currently affiliated with an Australian university. Most of my scholarship has appeared in the English-language scholarly outlets in sociology of education, education policy and comparative education. In my writings, I have always attempted to challenge, or at least to raise serious questions about, the virtually unidirectional flow of intellectual influence whereby non-English-speaking education scholarship remains at the receiving end of scholarly knowledge generated in Anglo-European scholarly communities. Among many disciplines of education scholarship in Japan, this problem of uneven intellectual influence manifests most acutely in the sociology of education. This has to do with the highly Eurocentric history of the development of sociology as a discipline and its branch, sociology of education. The recent critique of the Eurocentric foundational knowledge of sociology and the attempt to recognize global 'origins' and histories of the field (see Connell 2007; Patel 2014) has made some inroad into the reconstitution of the disciplinary knowledge. And yet, its impact in the field of sociology of education has been thus far almost negligible. International Studies in Sociology of Education, for which I currently serve as one of the editorial board members, has recently begun to acknowledge this problem, and yet much more work remains to be done in order to align the field with its parent discipline, sociology, where more impressive effort toward global sociology

Edited by Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Yuto Kitamura, Beverley Yamamoto, and Tomoko Tokunaga,<i> Japanese Education in a Global Age: Sociological Reflections and Future Directions</i>

“…The need to reach out to the international readership is also expressed by Takayasu Nakamura (Chapter 15) whose extensive review of the Japanese sociology of education scholarship led to the call for Japanese sociologists "to demonstrate the signifi cance of their research on Japanese education to international sociology of education markets" (p. 278). To achieve what is proposed here, however, is a complicated task, as it requires in the fi rst instance a sociological understanding of the global structure of academic knowledge production.Elsewhere, I have closely examined this structure and elaborated upon both the challenges and promises associated with what Nakamura proposes (Takayama 2017(Takayama , 2016(Takayama , 2011. In one of these texts, I have used two concepts to illuminate the predicaments of writing about…”

“…Elsewhere, I have closely examined this structure and elaborated upon both the challenges and promises associated with what Nakamura proposes (Takayama 2017(Takayama , 2016(Takayama , 2011. In one of these texts, I have used two concepts to illuminate the predicaments of writing about…”

“…Unless carefully done, however, these studies could erase the important diff erences that Japanese education might pose, which could potentially help extend and even unsettle the existing theoretical projects (see Chapter 4, p. 69). I have further developed this discussion in a series of subsequent writings where I articulate two different approaches to the studies of Japanese education, Japanese education as the empirical versus epistemic other (Takayama 2017(Takayama , 2016. To put it succinctly, it is a call for us to become refl ective about the ways in which the studies of Japanese education engage with the broader international scholarship of education and address the existing division of intellectual labor where Japanese sociologists consume, as opposed to develop, theories.…”