Post-foundational approaches to comparative and international education blog
Lê Minh Hằng is an advanced doctoral student in International Education Policy at the University of Maryland-College Park with interests in decoloniality, ‘development,’ and thinking about worlds otherwise. This blog post hopes to be the first in a series of thematic reading curations that bridge hot topics in CIE and post-foundational approaches.
As refugee education and education in emergencies rise further in global education policy agenda, one cannot help but notice how ubiquitous the numbers become. Visit the front page of Education Cannot Wait, the new global fund for education in emergencies, for example. Scroll down a bit and the numbers will overwhelm your eyes: * 1 in 4 of the world's school-aged children and youth live in countries affected by crisis * Education receives only 2 to 4% of humanitarian aid * 75 million children and youth are in need of educational support This is a common technique in education development and intervention discourses. "262 million - or 1 out of every 5 - children, adolescents and youth between the ages of 6 and 17 out school." "If 10 percent more adolescent girls attend school, a country's GDP increases by an average of 3 percent." Short, memorable, to the point, these numbers and indicators package complex situations of social injustice with long historical and political economic roots into bite-size pieces for easier consumption by the international humanitarianism/development community. These numbers allow for an innocent sense of moral outrage and drive to action, without having to pay attention to the complicity of the world/Global North in producing this situation in the first place. Numbers can easily serve as the ultimate tools of distancing. In certain academic disciplines and fields, it seems quite the popular thing to castigate numbers, statistics, and quantification. These critiques of numbers tend to be about the lack of contextualization or about the inaccuracy of numbers. In many cases, the critique stems not only from an epistemological difference on how to discover truths, but also from a place of indignation and desire to recover the marginalized subject (Dixon-Román, 2017; Gorur, 2015). Yet very rarely do they look at the world-making powers of numbers themselves (Gorur, 2015). Numbers do not only represent reality, they act on it and re-construct it. From an affective lens, I want to ask what do numbers make us feel, think, do, as well as not feel, not think, and not do. The practice of counting seems innocuous enough, but counting is often already a practice of standardization and transformation. For example, we can count 1 apple and 1 orange together to have 2 pieces of fruit, rather than just an apple and an orange that are irreconcilable into the same unit. In the case of children and youth in conflict-affected settings that need education support, we add distinct individuals with incommensurate backgrounds and life paths together to make up a neat number of 75 million. The individuality is ignored, because for these particular human beings, it seems that individuality can always be ignored. The moral distance of numbers and quantification has always worked particularly well as techniques to capture the realities of ‘less important’ people (Porter, 1995). Standardization is also a practice of organization, and organization is a practice of governance. Many historians and philosophers of science and statistics have pointed out the historical contingency of modern statistical practices. In many cases, the dominant practices of statistics and accounting were designed and popularized explicit to make the world intelligible to the modern state, especially democratic systems. The discipline of mathematics is rigorous because it operates on pure deductive logic; the process is designed to remove any elements of human flaws and biased interpretations. Thus, the numbers produced are seen as objective evidence for decision-making and impart a sense of fairness. In fact, the political aspect of public decision-making, of wrestling with power differentials and moral concerns, appears to be rendered irrelevant altogether by numbers and what numbers support. There is no alternative choice but that which is supported by the numbers. In other words, “quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide” (Porter, 1995, p. 8). And now in the era of big data: Our behaviors, our lives, are being transformed into tiny data points – singular numbers – that are used to guide complex algorithms that change the ads we see on our screens, the stories we see on our feeds, the very choices that we make through ‘nudge’ behavioral economic policies (Boyd & Crawford, 2012). Let the algorithms make the decision; no one has to be in charge anymore. Except of course, algorithms are algorithms really neutral? (Noble, 2018). Share your thoughts in the comments. Some starting places to explore numbers, data, and governmentality: Gorur, R. (2015). Producing calculable worlds: Education at a glance. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 578–595. Porter, T. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Dixon-Román, E. J. (2017). Inheriting possibility: Social reproduction and quantification in education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Boyd, d., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York, NY: New York University Press. and the subversive potential of math: De Freitas, E. (2016). Calculating matter and recombinant subjects: The Infinitesimal and the fractal fold. Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, 16(5), 462–470. Also check out our 2018 webinar The Datafication of Comparative Education.
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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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