Knowledge production in a constructed field: reflections on comparative and international education

Abstract

Adopting Maria Manzon's theoretical framework, which draws on Foucault and proposes that comparative education as an academic field is socially constructed, I suggest that the field is neither stable nor well defined. To demonstrate this,

Teaching cross-cultural and comparative perspectives of teacher development online: A reflective practitioner inquiry.

“…These possibilities highlight certain trends in recent years, however, of first, a shift in interest from educational content to social and political contexts, and second, the nature of CIDE to cross thematic, disciplinary, methodological, and geographic borders (Foster et al, 2012). In a content analysis of the Comparative Education Review, Nordtveit (2015) noticed the lack of unifying features in the CIDE field in favour of certain "frequent elements": (1) a focus on the "national" as the primary unit of analysis for understanding education as both "comparative" and "international"; (2) a characteristic of CIDE's "academic practitioners" as interested in not only studying but improving the educational systems that they study, and (3) a focus on educational development.…”

Comparative and international education research in a post‐truth era

“…Bjorn Nordtveit (), editor of the CIES premier journal Comparative Education Review, asserts that the majority of submissions to the Review come from scholars whose native language is not English. Irrespective of these diverse backgrounds, he finds that the field is still dominated by Western social science discourses that marginalise and silence alternative voices (Nordtveit, ).…”

“…Still others are spatial, representing disciplines, hierarchies of power, and geographies of travel, birthplace and schooling. The continuous influx and departure of people moving through networks signifies instability and fluidity of the CIE boundaries and as poststructuralist comparativists like Nordtveit () maintain, the perpetual construction of CIE as a field.…”