Post-foundational approaches to comparative and international education blog
The title could be interpreted at least two different ways. Readers who are already orienting their scholarship with a post-foundational approach, perhaps you are wondering what another post on the ever-growing blogosphere can do. Readers who are perhaps PfA curious may be wondering where to look for this approach amongst the scholarly repertoire of “posts.” Rather than provide an answer to either of those queries, this blog is a place for serious epistemological play. Of course, we are not the first or last group with a special interest in this questioning. For instance, scholarship with various “post-” labelling or post- affinity (e.g., post(-)colonial scholarship, post-structural, post-modern) could all be considered post-foundational in some way. Two questions could be- which foundation most interests scholars in these approaches and in which historical moment and anxieties in which they have risen to prominence. These are fair questions to ask of PfA as well! What if several moments at different time periods in different places have contributed to this style of questioning the concepts, categories, and reasoning of education? We consider the future potential of this approach to reflect on inherent limitations pointed out to us by a variety of currents, not only the social sciences, but the natural sciences, cultural studies, and rising modes of disciplinarity (e.g., queer studies, new media studies, mobility studies, post-Soviet studies, fat studies). For instance, PfA are attuned to a variety of “turns” in social sciences- mobilities, affective, and, of special relevance for this year’s upcoming CIES theme, ontological. What does it mean when we re-orient categories in our research and thinking to consider processes and conditions of “being human” in education rather than taking a “human being” for granted? PfA are innovative, not in the trendy sense, but in the sense of questioning the inherent limitations of the “foundations” of Comparative and International Education in Western ideas of modernity, society and development. As a SIG, we recognize that the conversations our members have at CIES are too important and interconnectedto be limited to a meeting at year at one venue. That’s why we’ve opened up new venues beyond our existing website: Twitter, Facebook, and this blog with weekly updates. We embrace a community beyond the walls of who can attend a business meeting at CIES, including scholars and scholar-practitioners scattered across the globe who are interested in PfA and who are already using these approaches [for instance,check out this volume edited by Daniel Friedrich & Erica Colmenares (2017); as well as the recent monographs by Irving Epstein (2019), and Susanne Ress (2019)]. Envisioning the SIG is not the privilege of a very few. Keep sharing your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter or Facebook--in English or any language . We also encourage you to join the SIG; however, we are not limiting our content to official SIG members. Anyone can sign up for our mailing list here. That said, the dues our members pay also will do much to continue developing this and other platform, and we do rely upon this form of expressing commitment to our community. So in this blog, we can’t answer for your yet “why another [blog] post?” because we don’t know yet what you will make of our upcoming content. We can give you a sense of some ideas we’re thinking about and which will begin to appear in our upcoming newsletter
Our aim is to open up new conversations in the study of education and schooling globally. Imagined as fostering exploration and exchange, the SIG with all of our input can be a space where we stretch the conventional means by which education and schooling have been studied: e.g., through disciplinary bodies, regional divisions and cross-national comparisons. Whether you are a long-time member of PfA, PfA-curious, or interested in putting post-foundational approaches into relation with other critical traditions, or just wondering about the CIES theme this year, you’ve come to the right place. It’s not just another post.
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AuthorThe SIG was founded in 2014 to open and foster new areas of inquiry within the field of CIE. In this blog, we aim to convene the curious who want to (and are) challenging and transcending limitations inherent in the field's traditional "foundations" (Western ideas of modernity, society, and development). We can open new conversations in the study of education and schooling globally, going beyond the brick and mortar CIES venue. Less about the topics themselves, this blog features exploration and exchange that allows us to stretch the conventional means by which education has been studied (e.g. disciplinary bodies, regional divisions, cross-national comparison). We are weaving in some of those ongoing conversations from PfA perspectives, with the hope that you, our readers/writers, will pick up threads and (re)conceptualize, (re)theorize, and (re)frame together. Archives
February 2020
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