Towards a new articulation of comparative educations: cross-culturalising research imaginations

Engaging with the More-Than-Human and Decolonial Turns in the Land of Shinto Cosmologies: “Negative” Comparative Education in Practice

“…That is, the question of research rigor is often conflated with epistemologies in the so-called international scholarly field (deWaal, 2003; Takayama, 2011a; Tierney, 2018). Much of my recent writings have explored the tensions, possibilities, and challenges of writing across multiple language-based scholarly communities in comparative education (see Takayama, 2011a, 2011b, 2018, 2019). Writing across different national/linguistic communities of scholarship, especially when they are not in sync, requires us to take multiple epistemological positionings, that is, to assume different expectations, readerships, and scholarly conventions.…”

“…Likewise, another U.S.-based scholar of Japanese education LeTendre (1999) states that “studies of Japanese education and schooling are excellent sources of data that expand a general pool of theoretical and practical knowledge about education” (p. 43). This tradition of the so-called Japanese problem approach remains current among comparative researchers of Japanese education today (e.g., Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017; Takayama, 2018).…”

“…Setting the work of South American decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo as its central theoretical underpinning, the workshop also encouraged the participants to explore links to other bodies of intellectual work, including ecofeminism and East Asian (Chinese and Japanese) thought, to explore collectively the alternatives beyond Western epistemic and ontological horizons. Having written some articles on postcolonial and decolonial approaches in comparative education (e.g., Takayama, 2016Takayama, , 2018Takayama et al, 2017), I was expected to contribute to the discussion from this particular theoretical position. Among all the readings assigned for the workshop participants, however, I was drawn to what was least known to me at the time, the posthumanist ecofeminist literature represented by Plumwood (1993), Rose (2005Rose ( , 2013, and Stengers (2012), as well as the education scholarship that builds on their theoretical projects (e.g., Silova, 2019;Taylor, 2017).…”

“…possibilities, and challenges of writing across multiple language-based scholarly communities in comparative education (see Takayama, 2011aTakayama, , 2011bTakayama, , 2018Takayama, , 2019. Writing across different national/linguistic communities of scholarship, especially when they are not in sync, requires us to take multiple epistemological positionings, that is, to assume different expectations, readerships, and scholarly conventions.…”

Indigenous education in Russia: opportunities for healing and revival of the Mari and Karelian Indigenous groups?

“…The field of comparative education has been imbued with colonial thinking from its inception with comparativists often adopting a patronising and condescending stance towards the contexts outside the Western bubble (Crossley and Tikly 2004;Sobe 2016;Takayama 2018). As a way forward from the colonial legacy in the field, Larsen and Beech (2014) call to transcend conventional lines of demarcation and reject the binary differentiation of 'the global' and 'the local' and instead, apply spatial thinking in comparative studies focusing on 'the relational conceptions of space through the analysis of networks, connections, and flows ' (p. 192).…”