Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse: Essays on Fear and Loathing in Response to Global Educational Policy and Practice 9781350043602, 9781350043633, 9781350043619

Citation preview

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

New Directions in Comparative and International Education Edited by Stephen Carney, Irving Epstein, and Daniel Friedrich This series aims to extend the traditional discourse within the field of Comparative and International Education by providing a forum for creative experimentation and exploration of alternative perspectives. As such, the series welcomes scholarly work focusing on themes that have been under-researched and under-theorized in the field but whose importance is easily discernible. It supports works in which theoretical grounding is centered in knowledge traditions that come from the Global South, encouraging those who work from intellectual horizons alternative to the dominant discourse. The series takes an innovative approach to challenging the dominant traditions and orientations of the field, encouraging interdisciplinarity, methodological experimentation, and engagement with relevant leading theorists. Also available in the series Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies, edited by Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares Understanding PISA’s Attractiveness, edited by Florian Waldow and Gita Steiner-Khamsi Internationalization of Higher Education for Development, Susanne Ress Forthcoming in the series Education in Radical Uncertainty, Stephen Carney and Ulla Ambrosius Madsen

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse Essays on Fear and Loathing in Response to Global Educational Policy and Practice Irving Epstein

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Irving Epstein, 2019   Irving Epstein has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page.   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4360-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4361-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-4362-6   Series: New Directions in Comparative and International Education   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India   To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Cecilia, who, through her love, warmth, and kindness, consistently demonstrates the power and meaning of affect

Contents Acknowledgments Series Editors’ Foreword Introduction: Comparative Education and the Case for Affect Theory 

viii ix 1

Part One Fear  1 2 3

Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile: Learning and Unlearning as a Function of Social Memory  The Aesthetic Turn: Engagement and Meaning-making through the Arts  Controlling the Body: Sport, Politics, and the Sport for Development Movement 

39 67 93

Part Two Loathing  4 5 6

7

Addressing Global School Violence: Internal and External Examples of Destructive Affect  Global Youth Protest: Confronting the Status Quo  Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems: Self-Loathing and the Devastation of the University and the Professoriate  Concluding Remarks: The Case for Affect Theory 

References  Index 

123 145

171 185 193 217

Acknowledgments This project has been a work of love for a number of years. Its completion would not have been possible without the support of my institution, Illinois Wesleyan University, as well as numerous friends and colleagues. The Faculty Development Committee at Illinois Wesleyan awarded me an Artistic and Scholarly Development Grant in support of my research efforts. A  sabbatical leave in the spring of 2017 enabled me to travel and collect data for a number of the cases discussed in this book. Erica Colmenares, Chuck Springwood, Noah Sobe, Munib Said Mafazy, Miaad Said Mafazy, and Pennie Gray read and provided valuable comments on various book chapters. I also benefited from the acute observations and insights of Bob Cohn and William Munro, who pressed me to refine and sharpen initial conclusions while Josephina Blumberg, Shakira Cruz Gonzales, Maeve Plunkett, Adna Mujović, and Payton Lethko provided meaningful feedback. My conversations with Cristina Hildago, Cesar Jara, Fernando Jones, Thea Karki, Ricardo Muñoz Villaseñor, and Marcela Sanchez Novoa were tremendously helpful in gaining insights regarding a number of issues explored within these pages. In addition, Donna Haas worked tirelessly to help me prepare the manuscript for publication and I am deeply indebted to her for her grace, professionalism, and good cheer. I am also extremely grateful for the support and encouragement given to me by Bloomsbury Academic commissioning editor Mark Richardson and assistant editor for education, Maria Brauzzi. Mark’s flexibility and patience resonated in an environment that can otherwise be unduly pressurized and stressful. Maria’s attention to detail and consistent responsiveness represented a model of editorial professionalism at the highest level. Writing can be an incredibly lonely experience. Cecilia Sanchez provided constant intellectual and emotional support that helped bring the process to its conclusion. Needless to say, I take sole responsibility for the errors committed in this work.

Series Editors’ Foreword The field of comparative and international education requires its researchers, teachers, and students to examine educational issues, policies, and practices in ways that extend beyond the immediate contexts with which they are most accustomed. To do so means that one must constantly embrace engagement with the unfamiliar, a task that can be daunting because authority within academic disciplines and fields of study is often constructed according to convention at the expense of creativity and imagination. Comparative and international education as an academic field is rich and eclectic, with a long tradition of theoretical and methodological diversity as well as an openness to innovation and experimentation. However, as it is not immune to the conformist—especially disciplinary—pressures that give academic scholarship much of its legitimacy, we believe it important to highlight the importance of research and writing that is creative, thought-provoking, and where necessary, transgressive. This series offers comparative and international educators and scholars the space to extend the boundaries of the field, encouraging them to investigate the ways in which underappreciated social thought and theorists may be applied to comparative work and educational concerns in new and exciting ways. It especially welcomes scholarly work that focuses upon themes that have been under-researched and under-theorized but whose importance is easily discernible. It further supports work whose theoretical grounding is centered in knowledge traditions that come from the Global South and welcomes perspectives that are associated with post-foundational theorizing, non-Western epistemologies, and performative approaches to working with educational problems and challenges. In these ways, the series provides a space for alternative thinking about the role of comparative research in reimagining the social. Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse:  Essays on Fear and Loathing in Response to Global Educational Policy and Practice is a deeply experimental book, in that it embraces the risks inherent in thinking at the cutting edge of the field of Comparative and International Education, taking its readers on a ride into unexplored territories. This is one of the first works to accept the challenges opened up by the Affective Turn in our academic field to take the body seriously, to question the certainty provided by modern Western

x

Series Editors’ Foreword

rationality, and to push at the limits of language. Irving Epstein mobilizes Affect Theory to both provide different interpretive tools to understand contemporary phenomena, such as the legacies of mass atrocity in Chile, or the ways in which university rankings move us in unexpected directions, and to generate new theories that will hopefully multiply and help illuminate aspects of our lives that have been under-theorized. Irv Epstein’s exploration of the feelings that affect our behaviors and thoughts as we grapple with difficult historical, social, and political issues in Comparative and International Education will most certainly become a foundational reading for those of us in need of new approaches to the field that blend empirical case studies with accessible theoretical insights. Stephen Carney and Daniel Friedrich

Introduction: Comparative Education and the Case for Affect Theory

I am a beneficiary and a casualty of Western educational modernism. For much of my life, school has been a source of refuge and comfort. I have had teachers I have idolized because of their care, intellect, and passion for ideas. Their love of the profession, the ethical conduct which they have continually exhibited, and their willingness to share and engage with others are qualities I have tried to emulate. It is not accidental that I decided to become a teacher. Not only am I indebted to those teachers who took the time to care and mentor me, but my debt to them is one I have spent decades trying to repay, through navigating my own development in ways that I hope reflect an appreciation for their wisdom and love of ideas. It is a journey that has not only given me immense comfort but has also shaped my personal and professional identity. In spite of my considerable privilege as an Anglo, middle-class male, welleducated in the Global North, I also struggle with the fears and anxieties that have been part of this educational journey. Such reactions are not particularly unique, nor do they necessarily merit extensive comment. However, living with the pain of failure and adverse judgment, associating one’s intellectual and emotional worth with a rather narrow understanding of what achievement and success mean, and encountering the pressures associated with performance in competitive circumstances are also part of the modernist educational trajectories that have contributed to my life experiences in significant ways. To be clear, the fact that even privileged educational experience can be a two-edged sword is rather unremarkable. One can make such a claim for human experience in all of its inundations. Furthermore, asserting that one’s own educational encounters have salience for those who have had radically different opportunities can easily become an exercise in unrelenting solipsism. I therefore began this project, not as a means of seeking confirmation of personal reflection, but as a way of learning more about the ways in which others negotiate the ambiguities that characterize

2

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the modernist educational project. A second goal was to ascertain if it is possible to embrace alternative ways of conceiving of educational policies, structures, and the interactions that they engender. Engaging with the principles of affect theory helped me to contextualize my findings but the framing of this effort borrows from the terms, “fear and loathing,” that North American journalist Hunter S. Thompson made famous in his 1970s works, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Thompson joyfully inserted himself as a major subject into the stories he reported. He willfully transgressed conventional journalistic distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity and gleefully mixed fact with fiction. His repeated use of hallucinogenic and other drugs compromised his perceptions of fantasy and reality, but it also forced his audience to question acts of meaning-making in the aftermath of the 1960s. In so doing, he unmasked the paranoia that shaped daily life in the United States, made obvious through drug use, and noted the ways in which so many individuals accepted state repression without complaint or resistance, and embraced conformist culture in the pursuit of an imaginary if undefined more prosperous future. Much more recently, I had the privilege of reading anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007), a sensitive and revealing examination of the fragments of daily experience, many of which illustrate the underlying fear, isolation, and lack of discrete direction that characterize our social interactions. The following rumination, titled “Things Have Started to Float,” is illustrative. Things have started to float. It’s as if the solid ground has given way, leaving us hanging like tender cocoons suspended in a dream world. As if the conditions and possibilities of a life have themselves begun to float. We notice our common drifting and the isolation and conformity in it. We know it’s fueled as much by circuit overloads and meltdowns as by smooth sailing. But there’s no denying that there is a buoyancy too. A vibrancy alive with gamblers, hoarders, addicts, and shopping malls. (61)

To be clear, what Stewart describes as “floating,” or Thompson chronicles as conformist alienation, involves their framing and analyses of specific behaviors and dispositions that highlight many of the complex, ambiguous, and messy processes of meaning-making, albeit within specific cultural contexts that exemplify our daily experiences. Their work is noteworthy because it is impossible to conceive of educational encounters without noting the presence of similar meaning-making processes. In this book, a principal concern focuses upon popular reactions to policies and practices that can be broadly categorized

Introduction

3

as being educational. Why is it the case that formal educational policies and practices, with which we tend to associate universalized characteristics of modern schooling, are so frequently met with popular rejection? Why are the alternatives to conventional practices, some of which are not only accepted but admired, often dismissed or marginalized by mainstream educational policymakers and scholars? And, why do such responses often lead to fear, anger, and a rather complete dismissal of the value of formalized educational practice on the part of significant population groups? It is the thesis of this book that concepts associated with what has been termed “affect theory,” can best assist us in addressing these questions. It is also my view that there are assumptions that have been made with regard to the construction of educational policy and global educational research as part of the comparative and international education (CIE) field that ought to be more systematically scrutinized, and that the “affect theory” frame can assist in this process, while also encouraging us to look at alternative perspectives. The final term noted within the title and subtitle of this text is “discourse.” Discourse can be defined in different ways, but in this project, it is used to connote the active processes of meaning-making, rather than the construction of formal language and text that can be separated from practice per se. This interpretation closely follows the argument made by Margaret Wetherell (2012), who notes that language formation and formal linguistic construction involve actions that are as expressive and vibrant as other forms of social activity. The notion of meaning-making is not only both inclusive and expansive, but it frames the notion of discourse formation, particularly as it has been conventionally applied to policy, as a dynamic rather than passive process. In this introduction, some remarks regarding our understandings as to what policy entails, and how and why educational policy is distinctive will be offered. This analysis naturally leads to comments regarding the nature of global educational policy, and the comparative education research that has played a role in defining its contours. Finally, I  will offer a summary of those concepts generally associated with “affect theory,” and explain in further detail why I believe that this framework is useful in contributing to our understanding of the ways in which certain global educational practices and policies tend to be popularly rejected or dismissed, often by the constituencies they are expected to serve and assist. This work offers six thematic case studies that have been selected to elucidate further commentary regarding an affect theory perspective. The cases will be briefly described and contextualized before being discussed at length in ensuing chapters.

4

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

The Field of Policy Studies Smith and Larimer (2017) describe the field of policy studies as including research involving policy design, evaluation, analysis, and process. They view questions related to policy design as related to those that address the ways how policy reflects certain values and results in the distribution of power to certain groups. Policy process involves agenda setting, seeking to understand why policy-makers view certain problems as rising to a level of importance of deserving resolution while others are viewed as less significant or are ignored. Policy evaluation is an area they believe to be quintessentially empirical, whereby the results and consequences of specific policies are noted. Policy analysis on the other hand, is an area the authors view as essentially normative, addressing questions such as what should be done or what is the best course of action (5–6, 19–20). The authors note that the field of policy studies, at least in North America, was conceived as a way of relying upon an applied social scientific perspective to solve policy problems in all of the above inundations, for the purpose of promoting democratic governance. Pioneers in the field, such as Harold Lasswell, were political scientists who became involved in government work during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The positivism they espoused was crafted within the context of their belief in the efficacy of using scientific principles to solve social problems as a means of enhancing democratic governance. Smith and Larimer acknowledge that there were inherent contradictions in this approach, none the least of which is the conflation of scientific investigation with democratic decision-making and practice. They additionally mention conflicts within the public policy field regarding methodological approach, the tendency of policy researchers to borrow from divergent fields at the expense of coherence, and the lack of innovation that occurs as a result of such cannibalization. To be fair, as will be noted later, many of these criticisms are applicable to the CIE field as well. Scholars of policy studies have crafted competing claims regarding the importance of material interests as opposed to ideas in generating policy proposals, negotiating their implementation, and accommodating for change, revision, and reinvention. Those in the former camp have been associated with rational choice theory, where political decision-making is viewed as resulting from cost–benefit analysis, employed by various actors in their role as policyand decision-makers. Those in the latter camp have argued that such a view is deficient in its simplicity, instrumentalism, and inability to account for preferential differences. They view the nature of ideas and the conditions of

Introduction

5

their construction, be they paradigmatic, normative, programmatic, framed, or subject to cultural diffusion, as offering a more sophisticated lens for analyzing policy making (Campbell 2002). In recent years, a great deal of social science research has been devoted to examining institutional change within the ideasbased framework. Scholars such as Kathleen Thelen have argued that policies are crafted often within institutional environments which accommodate for both continuity and structural change, which may be viewed initially as incremental, but nonetheless become substantive. The processes of layering (adding new policy elements to existing institutions), conversion (reinterpreting or reimagining existing institutional policies for new purposes), drift (when a change in external environment does not lead to institutional accommodation), displacement (when new policies are invoked at the expense of older ones), and exhaustion (or institutional breakdown) have been identified as categorizing the range of conditions under which institutions and their associated policymakers function (Thelen 2008; Heijden and Kuhlmann 2016). Thelen’s work has been categorized as encompassing historical institutionalism; others, such as proponents of organizational institutionalism, of which world culture theory is a variant, draw upon the notion of institutional isomorphism (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), to argue that policies and structures tend to be organized by institutions that then replicate themselves across cultural and political boundaries. Scholars have critiqued both perspectives on a number of accounts. With regard to rational choice theory, even proponents have accepted modifications that acknowledge the limits to which rational self-interest guides decision-making, having embraced the concept of bounded rationality. Those who have pioneered the field of behavioral economics have additionally questioned the degree to which decision-making of all types is based upon an objective understanding of the consequences of one’s choices that is as pristine as rational choice advocates might have us believe. Others have mentioned the phenomenon of group think as a particular example of non-rational influences upon decision-making among those in leadership positions (Allison and Zekilow 1999). Critics of historical and isomorphic institutionalism argue that their advocates fail to clearly identify the processes through which ideas effect policy design and the policy process, from where ideas originate, or why they are found compelling. Some view the categorization implicit in historical institutional analysis as artificial, at times redundant, overly rigid, or conversely conceptually ambiguous. The growth of hyper-partisanship and political brinksmanship that has affected decisionmaking in the Global North has additionally raised issues regarding the terms

6

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

under which policy ideas are even considered, let alone pursued or discarded, affirming longstanding findings within the social psychology literature (Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979). For scholars such as John Campbell, as policy influences based upon self-interest or the power of ideas are never mutually exclusive, it would be beneficial to combine the strengths of both perspectives in more efficaciously addressing the nature of public policy. In so doing, he and Ove Pederson (2015) find it useful to examine the comparative contexts in which policies evolve. For example, the plethora of think tanks, non-government organizations, universities, and governmental institutions that compete with one another for policy influence through their sponsorship of policy research is distinctive of the North American environment, as opposed to a more statist environment in France, or the effort to coordinate various knowledge regimes in Germany. Their work, as well as that of the other policy scholars that have been noted, has direct relevance for understanding the evolution of policies and perspectives associated with the international development field, and by extension, international educational development. In these instances, the larger questions, involving the evolving nature of the state and its role in promoting knowledgebased economies are raised as they directly emanate from the framing of policy studies issues. Certainly, advocates for rational choice theory and its human capital theory inundation, or institutionalism, as exemplified by world culture theory, have visibly contributed to discussions of international development and international educational development.

International Development Policies International development policies evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Breton Woods Agreements of 1944 among allied powers set the stage for monetarist economic policies that would later govern international trade agreements, in part reacting to the deleterious effects of post-First World War protectionism that led to the worldwide depression. However, by tying currencies to fixed exchange rates based upon the value of the US dollar which was then supported by the gold standard, it was clear that the meaning of “free trade” was very much defined according to great power interests. Policy-makers within international institutional structures that were created as a result of Breton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Development and Reconstruction, which later evolved into the World

Introduction

7

Bank, crafted policies that governed international development assistance from the 1950s onward. In addition to the World Bank, the bodies that were created out of the United Nations architecture, nation-state organizations such as the Agency for International Development (United States), the Canadian International Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and later the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as non-profit organizations and networks, formed their own knowledge regimes within the international development field (Epstein 2015: 7–8). Although much of the rationale for development assistance was derived from economic theory, the application of theory to practice always had political resonance. It is noteworthy, for example, that the mantra espoused in favor of monetarism, for example, occurred as a counterpoint to a strong global preference for Keynesian economic policy. One similarly cannot view the latter popularity of human capital theory among international development policymakers without acknowledging its Cold War context. Investment in the Global South through maximizing the development of human talent was viewed as a means of insuring that newly independent nation-states would not turn socialist. Later, in response to stagflation pressures in the 1970s, practitioners of neoliberalism rejected the monetarist view of supporting pure economic competition without any government interference at all, and instead argued for governments to selectively pick potential winners as vehicles deserving of investment and favorable state-sponsored support. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the criticisms of international development policies also contested the political assumptions that governed their design and practice. Neo-Marxist critiques viewed development assistance as a dressed up and repackaged version of colonialism, invoking dependency theory and world systems analysis to explain continuing and growing global inequality between North/South countries. Others, dissatisfied with the very narrow terms that were used to define what successful development might entail, offered more humanistic perspectives to frame what development priorities should include. Paolo Freire (1970), invoking the vocabulary of consciousness-raising, offered a perspective based upon liberation theology and socialist vocabulary; Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000), constructing their capabilities approach to development, offered more of an approach consistent with humanistic liberalism (to the degree that they stressed the importance of individual autonomy as a key to cultivating capability). International education development researchers and policy-makers have borrowed heavily from the

8

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

general contours of international development scholarly research, as they seek to apply policy studies principles to educational contexts. In so doing, through their work, they have carved out important space within the CIE field. But it is also the case that educational research has historically included conflicting instrumental and humanistic attributes that lie in tension with one another, a tension whose presence is also noticeable within comparative education. It is thus useful to examine the general evolution of contemporary educational research before examining comparative education more specifically.

Educational Research as a Discursive Field Educational historians have categorized the progressive education movement in the United States as including competing visions between humanists and social efficiency proponents. Labaree (2005) and Tyack (1974) argue that the humanists largely argued in favor of curricular and pedagogical reform that we today associate with child-centered and activity-based curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, while the social efficiency proponents focused upon measurement and administrative control as an area of emphasis. Labaree’s conclusion is that the social efficiency proponents won out, as it has been noted by others that Dewey and his followers’ vision of progressive educational practice was rarely if ever given a chance to succeed during its evolution in the twentieth century (Zilversmit 1993; Lagemann 2000; Kliebard 2004). While debates regarding appropriate educational organization and practice occur in diverse cultural contexts, some of which reimagined the progressive split according to specific circumstances and conditions as played out in North America, it is my contention that the social interactions between teachers and students generically involve a deeply personal set of activities that touch upon basic questions of identity expression. It is, for this reason, that educational policies are often viewed as having special significance. The pressure to obtain educational policy results that can be defended as constituting positive reform becomes understandable and palpable when there is a common understanding that the stakes have intrinsic importance. There are other reasons why the education sector has formed a rather unique subset within the public policy field, as constructed in the Global North. Historically, public schooling has been intimately linked with the legitimacy of the modern nation-state, and its role in molding the state’s citizenry was viewed as an implicit public good. Its other prescribed role, in delivering the

Introduction

9

skills that allow individuals to participate actively in the labor market to the best of their abilities, has been considered to be no less important. Indeed, Bradley Levinson (2011) has noted with specific regard to the teaching of democracy and citizenship that these relationships speak to the crafting of identities as much as they address evolving relationships between individuals and the state. Thus, the pressure to provide proof that educational policy reform efforts are consequential, and that their effects are measurable, determinative, and certain, is an affectation of the humanistic and social efficiency trends within progressivism, the function of the modern school as a supportive state structure, and its role as a vehicle contributing to individual and collective identity formation. As has been noted, US educational historians conclude that ultimately the social efficiency progressives won out, and the typical characteristics that mark the contemporary US educational system are illustrative of their victory. Those characteristics include a reliance upon a graded curriculum with student placement based upon age and student progress assessed according to repeated testing. As schools that cater to different age levels, they become larger, serving increased student populations, taking on hierarchical and bureaucratic characteristics. Students become exposed to curricula and pedagogies that are increasingly specialized; teaching expertise conforms to the required specialization of task. Such are some of the affectations of modernist schooling, and in some inundation, they are present not only in the Global North but in many areas of the Global South as well. Educational research within the North American context has tended to reify these patterns. At least with regard to teacher education and instructional practice, educational research has relied heavily upon psychological concepts and theories that have been applied to educational contexts. To give a small example, behaviorism, constructivism, and social learning theory have all been invoked as foundational frames for the explanation of student learning, while the literature regarding theories of motivation has been applied to analyze optimal classroom environment settings and instructional choices. In most of these instances, the research design that is employed utilizes hypothesis testing to generate results that address the desire for performance improvement, whether it be on the part of teachers, students, parents, administrators, and so on. Such an imperative has tied the conduct of this research closely to policy prescription that is results-driven. Nonetheless, educational research, particularly that referencing classroom interactions, has been broadly criticized, for its failure to accommodate to the polymorphous nature of teaching activities, artificially isolating the variables that are subject to measurement in ways that distort the

10

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

naturalistic environments that represent classroom situations. In addition, in spite of the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) perspective that has influenced much of the conduct of educational research, there has been little effort to replicate results across different contexts, and even when replication has been attempted, the results are not consistent, except if conducted by the original authors of the study in question (Makel and Plucker 2014). That these research models continue to be employed speaks as much as to the power of prediction that they promise, the sense of certainty and definitiveness that they assure, and the affinity that policy-makers have traditionally expressed toward evidence gathering that is scientifically based, as it does to their efficacious nature. The importance of policy to the comparative education field is in some ways even more direct, and a discussion of its evolution is useful in explaining how so many of the assumptions of North American/Global North educational research and more generic policy-making agendas, applied mechanistically to international development contexts, have become a large part of global discourse with results that are rarely satisfying.

The Evolution of Comparative Education Origins Many of the themes that characterize North American policy-studies specifically and educational research more generally find resonance within the comparative education field. In noting those themes, I  present them with a loose degree of historical linearity that may at times oversimplify the accuracy of their origination and development. The aim is to present a level of contextual clarity, not always present in a field that is conceptually messy and complicated. The association of comparative investigation with educational reform can be found in the nineteenth-century writings of educators such as Horace Mann, Mathew Arnold, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (the Argentine politician and leader) who deliberately visited educational systems in other countries and on the basis of what they observed, promoted reform within their own settings. Those who argued in favor of utilizing a more systematic method of engaging in comparative inquiry, who are acknowledged to have contributed to the initial development of the field, include Marc Antoine Jullien, Friedrich August Hecht, Christian Gottlob Heyne, and later, Michael Sadler. Although they viewed comparative investigation as a vehicle for encouraging domestic educational reform, to the extent that they intended their investigations of “other” educational systems to be systematic and comprehensive, they rejected the assumption that

Introduction

11

one could selectively successfully borrow a few educational methods and policies from a different country and apply them to one’s own situation instrumentally (Phillips 2006; Epstein 2017). Jullien viewed comparative analysis as having intrinsic scientific merit, although his notion of scientific inquiry was much more vague and imprecise than that with which one would associate the term today. For him, science meant collecting empirical information and then engaging in comparative generalization on the basis of the evidence that was accumulated. Sadler, whose interests included secondary, adult, and vocational educational reform, worked for government agencies as well as within the academy, not unlike Lasswell and the other North American political scientists who helped shape contemporary post-Second World War policy-studies. Nonetheless, Sadler expressed caution about engaging in the act of comparison solely for purposes of legitimizing policy reform, and noted that educational structures needed to be evaluated within a humanistic lens that demonstrated appreciation for the cultural and social settings where they resided (Philips 2006). Scholars such as Nicholas Hans and Isaac Kandel privileged the nation-state or cultural region as homogenous entities. They viewed them as key units of comparative analysis and their work included broad narratives that framed their depiction of the educational issues of importance to societies they chronicled. Within the nation-state framework, they presented thematic foci that chronicled those political and social issues of national concern that influenced the structure of the systems they analyzed (Epstein 2013). In all of these cases, the tensions between embarking upon reform-based policy study and investigating comparative education issues for purposes of generic scholarly engagement were reconciled by engaging in inquiry that was general and humanistic (in the sense that the compilation of textual evidence in the form of laws, edicts, conference papers, etc. was regularly employed). The International Bureau of Education was initially a privately funded organization created in 1925 with the purpose of serving as a “center for information, scientific research and coordination of organizations promoting international cooperation in educational matters.” It later evolved into a multigovernment-sponsored entity, supported by the League of Nations and, in 1947, UNESCO, with whom it merged in 1968 (Hofstetter and Schneuwly 2013: 216). Its creation and development can thus be viewed, not simply as a practical embodiment of Jullien’s comparative education perspective, but as a vehicle for promoting what would today be categorized as international educational data gathering for the purposes of educational reform. As Erwin Epstein has duly noted, even in the early developmental stages of comparative education as an

12

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

academic field, those professing a scholarly interest in educational practice in countries other than one’s own also engaged in applied activities that can be categorized as having fallen within the international education realm (Epstein 2017). In doing so, they further mimicked the generic sensibilities in evidence within the policy studies field.

Post-Second World War Influences Certainly, within North America, the evolution of comparative education as an academic field can be traced to some of the same factors that more broadly influenced international development policies and concerns, a number of which have been previously noted. The embrace of human capital theory as a justification for investing in education occurred as political decolonization progressed and former European colonies gained their independence, a process that accelerated in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. That the educational models which were advanced uncritically mirrored Western and colonial systems was not recognized as being significant. Nonetheless, the prospects of cultivating “talent” as a means of enhancing economic growth proved to be a powerful argument among those who were obsessed with confronting the expansion of global communist influence. Similarly, proponents of modernization theory associated formal educational investment with an embrace of Western capitalist forms of democratic governance. The latter were viewed as superior to what were deemed “totalitarian” alternatives, with the role of public schooling to expedite political socialization and citizenship building duly noted (Lipset 1959; Rostow 1960; Coleman 1965; Huntington 1971). In the United States, the federal funding of university area studies centers with the passing of the National Defense and Education Act in 1958 had a direct effect in promoting comparative education programs, as scholars and graduate students had expanded access to language training, advanced study, and travel necessary for conducting serious research in geographical areas outside of the United States. Until then, the established academic centers for the study of comparative education were limited and included Teachers College, Columbia University and programs at King’s College, London, and the Institute of International Education, also at the University of London (Epstein 2013: 19). Such was the context in which tensions regarding methodology and philosophical perspective played themselves out. The positivism implicit in Jullien’s writings and a growing belief in the efficacy of social science research,

Introduction

13

largely defined according to terms we would today associate with methodological individualism, complemented conventional assumptions governing public policy studies and of course international development/area studies research. The Cold War context in which positivism was embraced was not critiqued, at least in a systematic fashion. Noah and Eckstein’s Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969) would be the best example of this approach. While there was the traditional advocacy for a more holistic approach to examining national educational systems, as exemplified by the work of Edmund King (1958), Brian Holmes’ embrace of Popperian notions of positivism had the effect of legitimizing policy formation and analysis as a central function of comparative education research. Karl Popper argued that scientific inquiry in its essence involved empirical falsification, whereby the use of scientific method was most powerfully employed in disconfirming a priori held hypotheses, through its reliance upon deductive reasoning (Holmes 1981). Within the comparative education field, it became easy in following this logic to view the boundaries of worthy research as verifying policies or policy ideas already in place, rather than generating new ones. During the late 1950s and 1960s, intergovernmental organizations began to play their roles in generating data which was used to influence policy, initiating a trend that persists in present day. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) was founded in 1958 as a part of UNESCO’s Institute for Education in Hamburg. The organization continues to construct, distribute, and score international achievement tests that purport to measure national educational system performance in comparative terms. The Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), first constructed and distributed in 1995, is a notable example of these efforts (IEA 2018). The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), founded in 1961, similarly became involved in the international testing market through sponsoring its Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2000, a survey that maintains popular currency, having included over half a million fifteen-year-old students representing twenty-eight million of their peers from seventy-two different countries, when last administered in 2015 (PISA 2018). Data generated from the World Bank, UNESCO, OECD, or similar multicountry institutions and organizations has and continues to inform educational policy-making in a global context, PISA results having been specifically used to legitimize or critique national educational policies on the basis of the comparative performance of one’s students. But the level of generalization gathered from such survey research, or the centralization and lack of transparency that has

14

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

accompanied policy formation among some of these agencies led to criticisms, not simply of specific policy agendas or the quality of data gathered in their support, but to the ideological character of the institutions deemed influential in global policy-making, and the positivist frames that contextualized the research that they produced.

Backlash and Critiques In the 1970s, the social science critiques of human capital theory and the conventional international development policies it engendered found their way into the comparative education literature as well. Dependency theory, as applied to educational contexts, focused upon the hegemonic nature of knowledge production as directed by the Global North, with its ramifications for brain drain, textbook production, and dissemination, and the imposition of Western values upon the training of Global South scholars and government officials (Altbach 1980). World systems analysis was applied to the comparative education lens by examining patterns of educational investment in the Global South on the part of Global North countries, with specific regard to their encouragement of inequality through the conditions that accompanied the granting of aid and assistance (Arnove 1980). The structure of core countries controlling their peripheral and semi-peripheral counterparts, with metropoles serving as internally coopted centers of power within peripheral countries, was applied in educational terms to the inequalities that arose from disparate educational planning and resource distribution, as dictated by the core. Critics examined the irrational influence of educational credentialism in distorting the schooling/ marketplace relationship (Foster 1965; Dore 1976), at a time when institutions such as the World Bank heavily promoted vocational education. Others noted the cultural lags that resulted in the reproduction of colonial characteristics within the educational systems of independent states, with regard to language use, curricular choice, and public education structure (Carnoy 1974; Altbach 1980; Anderson-Levitt 2012). An emphasis upon human capital theory as the driving rationale for international development investment created additional tensions too. An area studies approach embraced as a vehicle for understanding disparate cultures and regions promoted tools such as the acquisition of linguistic and cultural competency that those skilled in the economics of education field often did not possess, or saw no need to apply to their analyses. As has been noted,

Introduction

15

the comparative education field had a history of promoting cross-cultural engagement, even if such interactions can be viewed by contemporary standards as having been superficial. Examining educational value according to predicted rates of return or supposedly culture-free international assessment instruments flied in the face of the humanist perspectives that many of the early-twentiethcentury founders of the field (such as Sadler, Kandel, and Hans) had espoused, not to mention the imperative to embrace cultural sensitivity that served as a foundational principle of area studies engagement. It is within such a context that Paolo Freire’s emphasis upon consciousnessraising, political advocacy, and popular education as natural consequences arising from the teaching of adult literacy had such strong resonance with educators on a global level. Influenced by the tenets of liberation theology, Freirean consciousness raising invoked a faith in personal agency that many found absent in the social science–oriented perspectives that heretofore been offered. That it emanated from the Global South and was not beholden to conventional organizational models that originated in the Global North enhanced its popular appeal. However, in spite of its popularity, the successful adoption of generic Freirean methodology to specific educational contexts as a matter of policy on a widespread scale remained challenging. Freire’s own struggle in implementing his vision while serving as a policy-maker in Sao Paulo is illustrative in this regard (Torres 1994). When contextualized within the “fear and loathing” analogy, one could argue that the positivism, borne out of the post-Second World War and Cold War eras as applied to global educational policy, functioned to assuage the fears of those who worried that Western notions of liberalism were being contested. The “loathing” that occurred as a reaction was symptomatic of broader dissatisfaction with the unappreciated negative consequences of such thinking. Thus, the critiques of human capital theory and the positivism it promoted foreshadowed a growing emphasis upon the need to better understand mechanisms of educational inequality, a turn that was also reflective of broader debates within the social sciences. Within North America, Bowles and Gintis’s correspondence theory attempted to explain how deflated parental aspiration contributed to the aiding of the reproduction of class inequality, abetted by sorting mechanisms such as tracking within schools (Bowles and Gintis 1976). Others such as Erik Olin Wright (1978) examined the relationship between skill acquisition and class location within the welfare state, noting that the creation of a managerial class allowed for the creation of disparate reward systems within broad social class designations. Michael Apple’s (1982) emphasis upon

16

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the role schools played in promoting the de-skilling of teachers, and in so doing flattening their class position while embellishing managerialism within school bureaucracies, borrowed from Wright’s insights and not surprisingly, by the 1980s, the work of Apple and Bowles were beginning to be referenced by established comparative education scholars (Masemann 1982).

Post-Structuralism, Cultural Studies, and Post-Foundationalism In the United Kingdom and in France, sociologists Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu examined the role schools played in reproducing class positioning with greater elaboration, using post-structuralism as an analytical frame to examine schools’ use of linguistic codes, curricular and pedagogical framing, and cultural and social capital to enhance social reproduction. Indeed, these terms have become cornerstone concepts in the modern social scientists, with Bourdieu having been among the most frequently cited sociologists of the late twentieth century, his direct impact upon comparative education research having been especially pronounced (Epstein 1995; Broadfoot 1999:  30; Manzon 2011, 2017). Their importance can be understood in part by their embrace of the personal within the broader post-structuralism they mapped out. Bourdieu’s emphasis upon habitus, as the vehicle for dispositional construction on the basis of an internalization of factors present in one’s external environment can be viewed as his attempt to dissolve artificially constructed boundaries between the personal and the social (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1984, 1997). Bernstein’s analysis of the structuration of communication codes within the realms of linguistics, pedagogy, and curriculum provided a similar space for better understanding how patterns of class privilege were representative of our interpersonal social interactions at their most basic levels, having directly affected classroom practice (Bernstein 1975). Post-structuralism represented one analytical method for addressing the nature of educational inequality but it was by no means exclusive. Alternatively, the impact of the field of cultural studies upon the social sciences has also been enduring, and as the writings of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams became accessible to educational scholars, their understanding of the politics of cultural and linguistic representation offered scholars new possibilities for conceiving of the relationships between structure and agency. Paul Willis’s iconic Learning to

Introduction

17

Labour (1977) was a compelling ethnography of the behavior, dispositions, and aspirations of working-class youth in the United Kingdom, and it offered a more complex and satisfying analysis of the dynamics of social class reproduction in schools. The ways in which Willis’s youth consciously opposed school rules and teacher authority in order to assert their own values of masculinity and group solidarity contradicted previous investigations that victimized students on the basis of class or race without acknowledging the agency that they created and expressed. In the United States, Jay MacLeod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It, drawing upon Willis as well as Bourdieu, offered similar insights within a different setting (1987). Willis’s work was also important because it highlighted what ethnographic method could accomplish, presenting an exemplar for educational case study investigation (Foley 2011). Within the comparative education field, for example, Peter Demerath employed Willis’s theoretical analysis of cultural production to elegantly explain Papua New Guinea students’ resistance to the incorporation of educational practices with modernization characteristics (Demerath 1999). Whether or not one subscribed to cultural reproduction or post-structuralist perspectives regarding the nature of educational inequality, Michel Foucault’s emphasis upon the changing nature of power throughout history, its apparent invisibility and the tools that can be used to unmask its presence, provided another umbrella for examining discourse, which, as conventionally defined, had heretofore been relegated to an analysis of text and the written word. In his later writings, his investigations of governmentality, or the ways in which the state increasingly sought to regulate the daily experiences of its citizens, proved to be equally compelling (Foucault 1984), certainly to those within the social sciences, but to comparative educators as well (Rust 1991; Paulston and Liebman 1996; Ninnes and Mehta 2004; Larsen 2009). Although the use of the case study had always been a central component of comparative investigation, its evolution from a descriptive tool to an instrument grounded in theoretical analysis became clear as comparative education field matured. Such analyses have been eclectic in their design, sometimes embracing or critiquing the theoretical perspectives noted above, or on other occasions relying upon different approaches, but their seamless embedding of the theoretical with the empirical was indicative of the field’s growing sophistication. Representative works within this genre that over the years I have found personally compelling include examples such as the examination of schooling practices and rituals and childhood in Japan (Rohlen 1983; White 1994; Lewis 1995); decentralization in Indonesia (Bjork 2005); early childhood educational practices in Japan, China, and

18

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the United States (Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa 2011); educational change in China (Liu, Ross, and Kelly 2000; Kipnis 2011); racism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and masculinity in Africa (Cooper and Stoler 1997; Morrell 2001; Ouzgane and Morrell 2005; Nuttall 2008; Swartz 2009); and literacy, schooling and citizenship, or the plight of street children in Latin America (Arnove 1986; Hecht 1998; Levinson 2001). Lesley Bartlett and Fran Vavrus have, in particular, made a compelling case for the use of the case study as a methodological tool, noting the importance of contextualizing the space where the case is located by identifying vertical as well as horizontal interconnections when formulating its construction (2016).

Neoliberalism and Globalization Regardless of the level and breadth of one’s analysis, international survey analyses and case study research, at least until the later 1970s and early 1980s affirmed the state or the cultural group, as a well-defined unit worthy of comparative investigation, whose boundaries, although fixed, were uncontested. But as was true of the social sciences more generally, the embrace of globalization studies resulted in the growth of new debates regarding the nature of that assumption. David Harvey (2007) traces the origin of neoliberalism to the late 1970s, when the ascendancy of Thatcherism as well as the US federal government bailout of New  York City invoked new rationales for state withdrawal from its responsibilities to provide social services in the name of the public good. It intruded into the market by choosing corporate winners and losers deemed worthy of state investment. Within the policy context, advocates supporting educational vouchers, privatization, charter schools, loan distribution and private financing within the higher education sector, etc. invoked neoliberal sentiments to varying degrees in support of their claims. There has thus been a clear association between globalization as a process and neoliberalism as an ideology, in the minds of some comparativists, with critics especially focusing upon the inequities that have resulted from a belief in the latter (Klees 2017). But globalization theorists writing within the social sciences have broader perspectives than those that constitute the neoliberal frame. Thus, globalization in various inundations has been associated with the expansion of access to knowledge and the creation of new knowledge forms emblematic of the information age as different forms of knowledge become valorized as part of knowledge-based economies (Jessup 2016a, b). The circulation and recirculation of cultural objects, the evolution of consumption as a driving

Introduction

19

force behind economic exchange, and the concurrent growth of global financial industries that have replaced their mid-to-late twentieth-century post-industrial counterparts, have all been viewed as indices of the complex relationships that are indicative of what globalization entails. Certainly, the proliferation of global migration flows and the more general phenomenon of transnationalism have forced a reconsideration of the fixedness with which identities have been constructed according to rigid categories invoking politics, place, religion, and culture. Arjun Appadurai’s work (1996) in labeling these flows as “scapes” has had a distinct influence upon those researching these questions and has been used to reframe comparative education questions as well (Carney 2009). The acknowledged uncertainty that globalization forces unleash, as discussed most eloquently by theorists such as Beck (1992) and Bauman (2002), has created a diverse set of reactions on the part of comparative and international educators. Some have embraced a postmodern lens as an eloquent means of addressing global complexity in ways that recognize the fluidity and lack of boundedness that characterize contemporary social interactions (Paulston and Liebman 1996). For traditionalists though, the blurring of distinct units of analysis that can be employed as subjects for comparison compromises the essence of comparative investigation (Epstein 2017).

Systems Theory and World Culture Theory More specifically within the realm of global educational policy, one view asserts educational borrowing and exchange must be analyzed in rather conventional terms according to the ways in which national ministries invoke cross-national trends as rationales for domestic reform efforts rather than mechanically conforming to global trends (Steiner-Khamsi 2004, 2017). Examining global exchanges systematically, Jurgen Schriewer has explicitly embraced the work of Niklas Luhmann, who constructed a version of systems theory that noted the importance of differentiation, autopoiesis, and communicative action within a closed social system (Luhmann 2012). In so doing, Schriewer (2011) expressed the view that national education systems sponsor the creation of global networks that preserve and negotiate the expressed cultural differences within national systems while continually redefining what universalist norms are purported to mean. Others have argued for an even more dynamic and less static analysis of network relationships, viewing the complex systems approach as limiting and calling for the use of social network analysis as a tool for better understanding

20

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

a fuller context in which ideas are shared, employed, or disregarded among various policy actors (Larsen and Beech 2014). Operating from a perspective whose advocates decline to invoke the same degree of systems complexity that is apparent in Luhmann’s work, a number of comparativists have adopted world culture theory as a way of explaining how educational ideas travel and are adopted within global spaces. The work of Meyer and his associates (Meyer, Bromley, and Ramirez 2010), for example, has been especially significant in chronicling how they view consensus approaches to various educational policies have been adopted in numerous countries and cultural contexts. In one notable example, they, as do political scientists including Kathryn Sikking (2017), point to the expansion of the modern human rights movement, perpetuated by NGO growth, as specifically influencing educational policy with regard to textbook content. Yet, as been noted with larger reference to the international development literature, the world cultures perspective has been severely criticized by other comparative educators for its promotion of value-free, non-contextualized assumptions that tend to characterize processes of global policy adaptation and sharing in mechanical terms (Carney, Rappleye, and Silova 2012).

The Capabilities Approach and the Global South As has been mentioned, the capabilities approach to international development, pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has acquired significant currency among comparative educators, scholars, and practitioners as an alternative to conventional notions of human capital theory. Dissatisfied with policy analyses that privilege the measurement of development indicators as evidence for the successful implementation of specific initiatives, those operating within the field of comparative education understood not only that the indicators themselves may not fully explain when and how progress occurs,  the  measurements of the indicators were often imprecise, and more importantly, the assumptions that govern what development progress is or should be needed to be more fully scrutinized. Do claims that point to the billion individuals who have been raised out of poverty since 1990 argue for international development success when the gap between rich and poor has increased over the past four decades on every continent (World Inequality Lab 2018)? Or, more specifically, does the progress made with regard to universalizing primary education matter when 264  million children and adolescents don’t attend

Introduction

21

school (UNESCO 2017). The capabilities approach, through its argument that development needs to be conceived in more elastic terms according to the ways in which individuals are able to maximize their potentialities in numerous spheres, is to some a more satisfying way of approaching international development issues. Conceiving of educational development in more elastic terms further allows for a greater consideration of alternative approaches to education and schooling. It is this logic that informs the work of Leon Tikly and Angelina Barrett (2013), who embrace the capabilities approach as a mechanism for better crafting research that focuses upon the relationship between education and social justice in the Global South. Tikly and Barrett concede though that adherence to the capabilities approach alone cannot accomplish this aim, but instead must be accompanied by a framework that includes theorist Nancy Fraser’s conception of social justice that includes the principles of “ ‘redistribution’, ‘recognition’, and ‘participation’ ” (Tikly and Barrett 2013: 13). Their admonition speaks to the Eurocentric origins and continued reliance upon methodology and theory emanating from the Global North to frame comparative education policy and research. It is further supported by the writings of Boavenura de Souza Santos (2014), who has labeled the crowding out of alternative knowledge traditions as legitimate areas for social science and scientific research within the academy, as encapsulating the practice of epistemicide, or those of Walter Mignolo, who explicitly links the creation of modernity with coloniality (Mignolo 2011; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Unfortunately, in spite of the work of scholars such as Andreotti (2011, 2016) and van Wyk and Adeniji-Neill (2014), explorations of postcolonial theory remain underutilized within the field although there is a growing awareness of the colonial character of the field’s origins and enduring Eurocentrism (Takayama, Arathi Sriprakash, and Connell 2017).

What Is to Be Done? Indeed, a case can be made that in addition to postcolonial theory, much of the more innovative and creative knowledge advances that have occurred within the humanities and social science disciplines over the past forty years, including those that reside within the fields of cultural studies, gender studies, and social theory more broadly, have been underutilized and marginalized within comparative education research. It is surprising that those writing in an area that is so beholden to the act of translation, as an essential element in the comparative process, have

22

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

been disengaged with questions addressing the nature of literary, textual, and symbolic representation. It is disappointing that the issues gender theorizing has so forcefully raised, including the shifting nature of identity construction, interconnectivity within social relationships, and the incorporation of a sociology of the body perspective as a means of understanding the boundaries of personhood and group affiliation, have found only intermittent expression among comparative education scholars. And, it is of course frustrating that the articulation of indigenous knowledge as applied to questions of the spiritual and our relationship to the environment have received such scant attention in the published literature. When comparative education scholars do comment upon these topics, their insights stand out, not only because of the force of their vision but because their voices are so infrequently heard and then commented upon. Some of the examples of scholarship in the field that deserves greater intellectual engagement in addition to those previously mentioned include, in my view, those of Unterhalter (2014), writing about evolving conceptions of gender and gender theorizing in the comparative field whereby its role as an agent of social interaction within educational contexts is becoming more appreciated, and those of Brown and McCowan (2018), who write eloquently about the linkages between indigenous thought and environmental consciousness. Finally, Rappleye and Kamatsu (2016), provocatively denote the ways in which schooling not only has contributed to a modernist sense of time upon Japanese social consciousness, but is also associated with a cultural nihilism that has marked more recent behavior within that society. Nonetheless, the tensions that are imbedded within the comparative education field are not insignificant and, as has been noted, have been present since its inception. Robert Cowan has repeatedly commented upon the desire of comparative education scholars to create a sense of permanence within an academic field that is inherently non-disciplinary, and has additionally noted the irreconcilability of views regarding the purpose of comparative research as an embodiment of instrumentalism as opposed to an affirmation of humanism (Cowan 2014a, b). Michelle Schweisfurth (2014) has gone so far as to label the field as constituting a tribal space while Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) have creatively depicted the differing ways in which scholars have constructed theoretical rationales for their work on the basis of the formalization of their relationships with their subjects, including knowing the other, understanding the other, constructing the other, and, most recently, measuring the other. Regardless of the epistemological frame that is invoked, it is clear that there are unaddressed issues that I  believe comparative education scholars

Introduction

23

must more forcefully confront if the field is to maintain let alone enhance its relevance. Perhaps its most disturbing characteristics include its ideological and hegemonic proclivities. From an ideological perspective, we have noted the Eurocentrism, embrace of modernism, and the search for outcome certainty that have characterized comparative education, mirroring educational and policy studies research more broadly. The limitations of specific methodological and theoretical orientations that have been invoked in the service of the field such as human capital and modernization theory, world systems analysis, neoliberalism, various inundations of liberal humanism, globalization theory, world culture theory, systems analysis, and so on have not consistently spoken to the lived educational experiences of the global audiences they are expected to address. And, to be clear, no one methodological or theoretical orientation should be expected to ever completely do so. But the various perspectives that have been promoted within the field suffer from a willingness to marginalize, exclude, impose, and privilege, as their advocates compete to maintain positionality and influence within an intellectual space that is fragmented and incoherent. It is the hegemonic nature with which these views are communicated that is particularly disturbing. As there is little reflexivity that accompanies their articulation (Epstein 1995), one is required to embrace a process of intellectual engagement that demands an unconditional acceptance of a specific orientation, whose validity is framed as totalistic, commonsensible, and uncontestable, even when in conflict with alternative perspectives. Two negative results accrue. First, the inability to speak to let alone reconcile methodological and theoretical difference calcifies epistemological incoherence in ways that constrain research significance. There is no mechanism in place for responding to the critiques of the reification of spatial and temporal fixedness, so eloquently noted by Larsen and Beech (2014), Sobe (2016), and Rappleye and Kamatsu (2016), or the call for factoring the importance of contingency as intrinsic to one’s understanding of the world (Kauko and Wermke 2018). For those who have viewed the value of comparative education research according to its contributions to the public policy and international development fields, and view its importance according to the benefits that result from its problem-solving capabilities, it is ironic that the hegemonic tendencies in the field inadvertently work to inherently circumvent its potential effectiveness, as they narrow the scope with which questions of policy design, evaluation, and analysis are framed from the start. Even scholars who construct trenchant critiques of policy and practice, with their emphasis upon the deleterious consequences of policy implementation, tend to reify the

24

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

modernist assumptions of the research that is the subject of their analyses, in their failure to directly question the assumptions they assert. Of perhaps even greater concern is that the hegemonic tendencies within the field compromise its ethical foundation. Regardless of where the purposes of engaging in comparative education research diverge, there has always been a presumption that such engagement is grounded in ethical concern, be it for the purpose of aiding in the preservation and enhancement of education as a public good or, more broadly, facilitating a level of understanding that affirms the significance of educational inquiry as essential to our humanism. The construction of comparative education research projects in hegemonic terms undercuts such aims, validating ideological narrowness at the expense of intellectual engagement. Indeed, if we are to truly talk of “fear and loathing,” the mimicry and mechanical application of externally constructed policy studies, social science, international development, and educational theories and methods to the comparative education field corresponds nicely to the social conformity, and fear of creative and authentic social engagement that Hunter S. Thompson so passionately conveyed in the late 1960s and 1970s with regard to North American social and political relations. Sociology of knowledge analyses situate the ways in which such positioning occurs, and can elucidate the broader implications of the ways in which knowledge/power dynamics operates in various political, economic, and social contexts. But they don’t typically address the ethical implications of exclusion and marginalization, let  alone the self-destructive irrelevance those decisions induce. It is the conceit of this research project to invoke “theories of affect” as one possible way of addressing dysfunctionality within the comparative education field. In so doing, I  make no claim that the application of affect theories to the field solves all or even most of the problems we have noted. As is true of good social theory, its proponents disagree among themselves with regard to those areas of importance that are deserving of emphasis and elaboration, and its critics enumerate its contradictions and limitations. But given the need that so many have articulated for a more dynamic way of examining comparative educational research and practice, I find the promise of employing theories of affect to better elucidate the importance of what comparative and international educators can and should be doing to be especially compelling. At the very least, their invocation promises a more inclusive, flexible, and de-territorialized response to the promotion of discrete ideological narratives.

Introduction

25

Affect Theory: Basic Principles Although there is no set and bounded entity that can be labeled “Affect Theory,” there are theories of affect that share important commonalities. These theories are illustrative of an interdisciplinary perspective, emanating from the sociology of the body literature that seeks to frame the nature of human interaction in dynamic terms. When using the term “affect theory” in this study, we are intentionally using a type of shorthand to refer to the principles many theories of affect share, rather than claiming that there is one particular theory deserving of prescription. Affect theory received initial prominence in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, whose epic work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), is representative in the words of their translator Brian Massumi, of their efforts to construct a “philosophy of difference” (Massumi 1987:  x). Massumi himself subsequently accepted the role of leading affect theory advocate, drawing not only upon Deleuze and Guatarri’s work but those of others from the fields of philosophy and neuroscience. As he noted, A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought . . . In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. (xiii–xiv)

Thus, affect theory has been traditionally associated with the concept of intensity of encounter. In this vein, Deleuze and Guattari drew directly upon the writings of philosopher Benedict Spinoza, in constructing their definition of affect, while also referencing Henri Bergson’s phenomenology. There are additional components of their project that touch upon views regarding the nature of object representation, the creation of rhizomatic connections that define human and nonhuman interactions, and the framing of such connections as assemblages, dynamic in character, in the process of realizing potentiality, and governed by the imperative of de-territorialization. Each of these characteristics is deserving of further discussion. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) view intensities of encounter as incorporating dimensions of movement and potentiality or emergence. Their durations are undefinable, their presence ubiquitous. Interpreting Spinoza, they argue that

26

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

their acceptance directly rejects the assumption that the natural world consists of fixed elements. Substantial or essential forms have been critiqued in many different ways. Spinoza’s approach is radical. Arrive at elements that have neither form nor function, that are abstract in this sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by movement, and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or composition. They are not defined by their number as they always come in infinities. However, depending upon their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of another. Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so on to infinity. There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter. Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individualized multiplicities. (253–4)

With regard to potentiality, again citing Spinoza, the authors claim, “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter compositions with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257). In making sense of these propositions, it is useful to return to Kathleen Stewart’s “Things Have Started to Float” rumination, cited at the beginning of this chapter. Stewart’s references to floating as an alternative to solidity, in a world “of circuit overloads and meltdowns” as well as “by smooth sailing,” nicely captures Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the plane, and the affective tendencies Spinoza claims all objects in the natural world, be they human or nonhuman, possess. But can affects be viewed as more than connected experiences of varying intensities? And how does one address the contention that affect influences encounters with the nonhuman as well as the human? In addressing the first question, some affect theorists (Sedgwick and Frank 2003) initially turned to traditional neuroscience literature, particularly the work of Sylvan Tomkins, in examining how affect is constructed and transmitted. Tomkins and his successors, such as Paul Ekman, viewed affects as innate responses that generate sensory feedback, triggering sets of basic emotions that exist independent of

Introduction

27

social or cultural construction (Wetherell 2012: 37). In so doing, they embraced the notion that affects exist in a priori form generating physical responses that then create generic emotional states that are commonly experienced. Such a view also comports with the assertion that consciousness should not be viewed as autonomously self-generating but also arises from such intensities. Instead, the concept of automaticity, whereby affect flows below the radar, in ways that are nonrepresentational, is strongly emphasized, comporting with the Deleuze and Guattarian perspective. The disconnection between affect and object representation is crucial to the driving principles of their project which involves the de-territorialization, or deconstruction of the boundaries that they view as artificially reifying autonomy and individualism in thought and feeling. Encounters with nonhuman objects represent a further extension of Spinoza’s ethics and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. Certainly, our relations with nonhumans and nonhuman objects evoke the intensities associated with affect. Not only do many nonhumans themselves experience the affective responses attributable to humans, but affect ties humans, nonhumans, and nonhuman objects together as part of the natural world, their interactions contributing to the realization of their potentialities. Donna Haraway (1985, 2008, 2016) has been one of the most provocative authors writing in the post-humanist tradition, exploring our relationships with multispecies, the natural world, and the machine, arguing that those connections force us to reconsider the presumed agency we attach to our self-positioning and the ways in which we assert our dominance. In another vein, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant (2010) speaks of our drive to seek attachments with objects, a drive that is either unrealized or, if realized, harmful. She speaks of cruel optimism as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (94). What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being; because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep living on and to look forward to being in the world. (94)

The larger questions that Berlant raises, involving identity expression through object attachment, speak to how we respond to the circulation of cultural and material objects in an era of globalization. In this work, we examine the perceived educational value of objects of memorialization, aesthetic value, and those that are sports related, as they travel outside of traditional educational boundaries.

28

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) view interconnectedness as a natural phenomenon that they describe as rhizomatic, the rhizome being an underground stem that grows continuously and horizontally. Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings to play very different regimes of signs and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but is always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. (21)

The metaphor of the rhizome frames their understanding of spatial interrelationships as being infinite, non-divisible, multidirectional, and nonhierarchical. In so doing, it comports with their understanding of relations which they view as governed by the principles of assemblage rather than fixed construction. Assemblage refers to the processes by which groups of things or people gather or come together under terms of engagement that are fluid and contingent. The use of the term thus argues against binary, restrictive, and calcified notions of individual autonomy or community as analytical tools for deciphering the terms through which social interaction is conducted.

Criticisms and Revisions There are a number of criticisms of the aforementioned affect theory principles that have invited comment. They center around the proposed relationships between affect and emotion and affect and consciousness, the degree to which forces of affect should be considered to be consequent rather than indeterminate, and the connection between affect and object representation. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2018) is among the more trenchant critiques of the Tomkins/Ekman school. She argues that there are an entire host of context-related variables that factor into the construction of emotions, that the process for identifying which physiological responses induce specific emotions is incredibly inexact, and that what constitutes emotional expression is very much dependent upon an individual’s own set of experiences. In this view, it is fallacious to ascribe specific emotions as foundational and universal. Rejecting a narrow psychological

Introduction

29

approach that privileges interiority as a source for the construction of emotions, Sara Ahmed (2015) alternatively views emotions as social and cultural practices (9)  that “are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects” (10). Although she rejects the interiority of Barrett’s approach, grounded in psychological research, she is also critical of Tomkins’s work as it risks transforming emotion into a property, as something that one has, and can then pass on, as if what passes on is the same thing . . . Emotions in their intensity involve miscommunication, such that even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling. Given that shared feelings are not about feeling the same feeling, or feeling-in-common, I suggest that it is the objects of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such. (10–11)

It is important to note that in spite of their different perspectives, both Feldman Barrett and Ahmed reject the contention that affect can be viewed narrowly as solely comprising uniform elemental physiological response. A second criticism involves the depiction of affect as natural but inconsequent. Deleuze and Guattari argue that intensities of encounter lose their force when consciousness is activated, and when the processes of object representation are initiated. If affect must be viewed as nothing more than intensity of encounter, what is its significance? And, if the processes of constructing affect do not include intentionality, why should they be viewed as anything more than as interesting physiological attributes? As Ruth Leys (2011) notes in reference to Brian Massumi’s work, The whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations of meaning or “ideology” or indeed representation to the subject’s sub-personal material-affective responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their real work. The disconnect between “ideology” and “affect” produces as one of its consequences a relative indifference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politics, culture, and art in favor of an “ontological” concern with different people’s corporeal-affective reactions. (450–1)

Margaret Wetherell, well known for her efforts to redefine conventional notions of the nature of “discourse” to involve practice and application, as opposed to simply reflecting textual understanding (2012), further argues, as was previously

30

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

mentioned, that a recognition of the importance of affect only makes sense within the context of meaning-making. This is a process with which we engage at all levels, be they conscious or preconscious. With regard to the latter, she argues that Judith Butler’s embrace of performativity, based upon the learning of social scripts, and Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus, as the internalized dispositional response to externally sourced social contexts, assist us in understanding the situations in which those below the radar responses that have been characterized as involving automaticity, occur. Thus, meaningmaking arises whether we are conscious of our will to do so or not; it may or may not involve discrete cognitive or emotional responses, or both, and it may or may not induce object representation. In preserving the essential notion of intensity of encounter, Wetherell emphasizes its interconnectedness as well as the cultural and social spaces that give it significance (2012). Although I  view Wetherell’s perspective as more convincing than that of Massumi, Sedgewick, and others who embraced the selective research within the neuroscience literature, I  think it important to note that their position was intended to correct the degree to which rationality was and continues to be reified within the traditional social sciences. In his more recent work, for example, Massumi (2015) uses affect theory to deconstruct neoliberal assumptions that embrace rational choice theory and value experiences based upon the articulation and maximizing of self-interest. An affective art of politics would similarly pack experience with contrasts, at the strike of a sign or the composition of signs. It would hold the actual tendencies in suspense, trying not to allow the affective wave packet to collapse in a way that would determine quanta of satisfaction and success to sort out-at least not right away or in any way assimilable to a calculus of interests . . . Far from interest being primary, it is intensities of experience that give rise to interests. (70)

He thus situates affect theory in a way that reinforces the criticisms of rational choice theory, so prevalent within conventional public policy studies research that was referred to at the beginning of this chapter. His project, along with social critics such as Jeremy Gilbert (2014a, b), is to see if affect theory principles such as intensity of encounter, processes of assemblage, and the reality of contingency, make sense in demonstrating how more democratic and inclusive conditions sympathetic to political and social reform can occur in ways that prevailing neoliberal tropes ignore. But regardless of one’s particular affinity to the differing perspectives of the affect theorists whose work has been heretofore

Introduction

31

summarized, the importance of assemblage, contingency, and rhizomatic connectivity remains widely shared among those writing within this area.

Applications Arguments in favor of the application of affect theory principles to educational contexts are emerging, particularly within the fields of youth studies (Lesko and Talburt 2012), literacy studies (Dutro 2013; Leander and Boldt 2013), sex education (Lesko 2010), gender studies (Niccolini 2016), and pedagogy (Lewkovich 2010; Sellar 2009, 2012). With specific regard to issues of pedagogy, Christa Albrecht-Crane and Jennifer Daryl Slack (2003) have argued that a pedagogy of affect can be useful “to explain and critique agency and action in affirmative and relational terms . . . . Critique consists of the possibility to discern moments of escape from territorializations in a profoundly positive way, as desire is unleashed to generate new sensations, to create new lines of flight” (211). Erica Colmenares (2018) has applied affect theory to the teacher education environment, examining how student teachers in a social justice teacher education program attempt to reconcile neoliberal expectations for their performance with the social justice commitments they espouse. In so doing, she sensitively describes the ways in which classroom and non-classroom objects trigger affective responses and interactions that facilitate expressions of selfdoubt and fear among student teachers attempting to negotiate the differing intensities and qualities of interaction within their various classroom learning environments. In addition, she is one of the first scholars to apply affect theory to the comparative education field, using it as a frame in her analysis of the impact of the widely popular television program, El Chavo del ocho, upon public perceptions of childhood, poverty, and nostalgia for the “good life” in Venezuela (Colmenares 2017). Michalinos Zembylas (2015) has also explored the role of emotion in constructing peace education curricula in conflict areas and has provided needed insight with regard to the importance of affect in creating a critical peace studies education focus. But what about the comparative education field more generally? Is the invocation of affect theory necessary for this particular field to move forward, and if so, are there conditions under which the application of affect theory principles could succeed in accomplishing this goal? As has been noted, there certainly is the intellectual space within the CIE field for critique to be expressed, with most of the dominant paradigms having been exposed to substantive

32

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

intellectual criticism. But such criticism is generally voiced without contesting paradigmatic territorial boundaries and I believe that this consideration alone argues for a more robust response that can encourage more authentic intellectual de-territorialization. Affect theory affords the possibility of such a response. For some, the fact that affect theory originated in and has found its strongest popular appeal among cultural and social theorists situated within the Global North is concerning. Would its invocation represent another Eurocentric effort to frame the comparative education field in ways that exclude epistemologies from the Global South? It is undeniable that, as was true of many of their contemporaries such as Foucault and Bourdieu, Deleuze and Guattari were influenced by the events of May 1968, where widespread popular mass demonstrations, initiated by university students, created a set of exceptional circumstances that almost forced a change in the French government. The resulting realization that thought and political action are inextricably bound to one another encouraged these thinkers to explore their interconnections in creative ways and in contrast to orthodox views that asserted the primacy of rationality as a pristine category, separate from social and political context. So, yes, many of the principles of affect theory owe their formulation to a set of historical events situated in Europe. But a theory’s significance owes more to its relevance outside of the immediate conditions of its origination. In this instance, we assert that an honest application of affect theory principles would preclude the marginalization of different meaning-making initiatives whether they emanate from either the Global North or the Global South. The promise that an invocation of affect theory holds for the comparative education field can be mapped according to three domains. First, adherence to affect theory demands that the scope and quality of comparative education research be truly inclusive. Donna Haraway’s efforts to chart out the promise of a post-humanist perspective, for example, is a clear example of such a perspective. As she seriously explores the power dynamics of interspecies relationships, or the ways in which technological advances force us to redefine our assumptions about ourselves and the ways we position ourselves on the planet, she gives authority to those seek to seriously explore meaning-making as it relates to indigenous knowledge construction and environmental awareness, two areas heretofore underrepresented within the CIE literature. A second domain involves an embrace of complexity and ambiguity. The comparative education field has consistently borrowed selectively from external social science paradigms and applied them (often mechanically) to educational policy contexts. Adherence to affect theory principles would require a more

Introduction

33

sensitive respect for the nature of meaning-making. Two examples are instructive. Within the public policy area, following Wetherell’s argument, discourse would not be viewed as being separate from other forms of planning; dichotomies invoking thought vs. action would dissolve. With regard to globalization studies, the issues of identity, sharing, and agency that are articulated through our interactions with cultural and social objects that circulate within a global context would be highlighted. Sara Ahmed’s effort to enunciate the relationship between the social, political, cultural, and emotive are an exemplary model of such thinking. Finally, an embrace of affect theory requires that one accept contingency and fluidity as recurring characteristics of social interaction. The notion of assemblage reiterates this principle. But with particular regard to CIE, if the ideological and hegemonic tendencies that have been noted are to be successfully contested, then an acknowledgement of the ways in which contingency and fluidity regularly influence meaning-making is crucial. Rolland Paulston’s support for concept mapping according to principles of social cartography represented an early effort to acknowledge these factors as contributing to a greater understanding of the field. Heidi Ross’s presidential address in 2002 affirmed the need for a greater emphasis upon cross-cultural creative collaboration among CIE scholars as a way of addressing territorial and power differentials (Ross 2002). An adherence to the principles of affect theory would further contribute to those sentiments.

Reimagining Fear and Loathing The purpose of this project is to illustrate in concrete ways how affect theory can be creatively used to raise issues not often addressed within comparative education research. In doing so, I make the assertion that modernist educational practices and policies that have been adopted on a global scale elicit both fear and loathing, for at least some of those to whom those policies and practices are exposed. I  contextualize fear as the reaction many experience upon their recognition that traditional schooling practices fail to address their most fundamental of concerns, many of which touch upon issues of identity and respect for children, family members, and their surrounding communities. As a result, alternatives are invoked, presented with the promise of helping the discontented to realize their unfulfilled aspirations. In Chapter 1, I examine the nature of memorialization of mass atrocity with particular reference to Chile, and I  make the claim that such efforts occur because of the failure of formal

34

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

educational institutions to adequately address the existential questions raised in light of the human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime. Although the process of memorialization presents its own set of challenges, and there are limits to which the invocation of social memory is effective, the faith placed in memorials and the artifacts they display for the purpose of speaking truth to the evil committed in the past, says volumes about the fear that schools are incapable of doing so. The language of aesthetic expression offers multiple opportunities for social interconnection and identity expression because of the universality of the vocabulary it employs. Yet the marginalization of arts and music education curricula, their designation as elective rather than foundational subject areas, and the emphasis upon skill acquisition as a key to their dissemination, are factors that work to undermine their potential importance in the modernist school structure. In Chapter 2, I examine three music education programs from the United States and Venezuela that either operate outside of formal school settings or reinvent curricular and pedagogical initiatives that speak to a broader purpose within the school environment. In all of these cases, the connection between aesthetics education and social justice is visible and prominent. Their popularity though, contrasts with a lack of similar interest within conventional educational programs. Chapter  3 examines the sport for development movement with particular reference to South Africa and Kenya. Here too, an international development initiative, globalized in scope, funded through private and non-profit groups, supports youth engagement in sports activities outside of the school, deliberately separating itself from the formal physical education curriculum. The intimacies involved in bodily expression and discipline speak to how we view who we are and how we make meaning in this world. The turn away from the modernist school, as a site where those values can be safely explored, further speaks to the fear that many share, regarding the lack of authentic possibility for our children and youth to engage in meaning-making through engaging in on-site physical education. When fears are unaddressed, or when the alternatives that might dissipate one’s anxiety and alienation are not available, forthcoming, or viable, the sense of being cornered creates feelings of loathing. The second part of this work examines negative reactions to modernist schooling where the effort to destroy or eviscerate educational institutions is visible. Analyzing the nature of global school violence, the theme of Chapter 4, requires a recognition of the interplay between institutional violence perpetrated upon students, the structural violence committed against poor families and communities outside of school walls, as

Introduction

35

well as the nature of violent events that result in the perpetuation of physical harm. Such an analysis further requires us to examine the assumption that schools are, or can be made to be, generically safe spaces for children and youth. In Chapter 5, I examine the nature and consequences of youth protest. What does it mean to walk out of class, to disrupt formal educational routines, to shut down a campus or school site? At what point do such actions speak to the ways in which all faith in educational institutional mission is dissipated? And, how can such actions be contextualized within a larger frame that connects one’s activism to one’s relationship to the state, of which schools are a significant part? These questions are addressed through examining country and regionally situated case studies from 2011 to 2013 and 2014 with reference to Chile, Spain, the United States, and Hong Kong. Finally, in Chapter 6, I analyze the destruction of university mission, ethos, and autonomy in a metaphorical sense, by examining the world-class university rankings craze. While this example leads to a larger exploration of the use and abuse of data to define professorial, student, and administrator roles within the academy, the belief in the importance of comparative rankings in the absence of any evidence that such an exercise has validity is what is most interesting. In this instance, the comparative project legitimizes academic self-loathing, fueled by the desire to acquire positionality and status at all costs. All of the cases that are highlighted share some common attributes. First, I make an effort to ground the case studies in social theory. In Chapters 1 and 6, for example, the application of Jean Baudrillard’s insights with regard to simulation and simulacra is offered with reference to the efforts as disparate as preserving the meaning of mass atrocity or creating a world-class university ranking system. In Chapter 2, Jacques Rancière’s views regarding the nature of effective pedagogy as well as the relationship between aesthetics and social justice is emphasized. In Chapter  3, in addition to examining the sociology of sport through a Foucaultian lens, the concept of grobalization, or the imperialistic efforts of countries and corporations to control the dissemination of material objects within specific regions is noted. And, in Chapter  4, in addition to referencing Raeywin Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity, both Bourdieu and Judith Butler’s works are invoked to better understand the nature of global school violence, inside and external to school settings. To be clear, one can appreciate the importance of these theorists’ writings without necessarily referencing affect theory principles. However, affect theory serves an umbrella function throughout the work insofar as its basic principles anchor discussions of social theory. While the use of social theory is eclectic, it is

36

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

also true that there are strong disagreements among affect theorists themselves, and I make no effort to reconcile such differences in this project. Instead, the aim is one of looking for commonalities as a way of determining whether a basic adherence to affect theory principles that include the notion of encounter and the importance of intensities of encounter, the concept of assemblage and its inference of contingency, and the universal drive for meaning-making which neither privileges the affective or the rational, are useful tools for moving the comparative education field forward. In this vein, regardless of whether one accepts Brian Massumi’s essentialist claims regarding the universal primacy of affect, I believe that his admonition regarding the negative consequences of dismissing affect as a key to our understanding political and social relationships should be respected.

Part One

Fear

1

Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile: Learning and Unlearning as a Function of Social Memory

Introduction: Historical, Collective, and Social Memory How societies address events of mass atrocity is indicative of the ways their members express their sense of collective identity and ethical compass. Schools and educational institutions have traditionally played a key role in helping to frame these concerns by reproducing the official knowledge that is posited as representing historical truth in ways that infer consensus regarding the nature of a people’s past. A number of factors arising in the mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have contributed to a questioning of this role, however. On the one hand, the notion of historical memory and its distinctive characteristics that purport to set it apart from other forms of memory and recognition have been contested on a number of accounts. Critics have noted the impossibility of divorcing the subjective biases of the individual researcher from the act of accurately interpreting historical subjects and events. The claim that one must define historical objectivity as dependent upon a personal distancing from the actors, conditions, and events of one’s study is unsatisfying to many, particularly when one’s task is to understand the full implications of historical trauma and atrocity. The privileging of political history to the detriment of social and cultural research areas as the more legitimate source for investigation, renounced by professional historians since the late 1960s but a bias that certainly remains true in the construction of school textbooks, is an additional area of concern for those whose interests lie with crafting a holistic understanding of trauma and mass atrocity. Furthermore, critics have noted the disparate degrees of inequality that subjected groups experience and are then unable to chronicle before larger more powerful audiences. As a result, the presumption of consensus

40

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

that underlies the crafting of official knowledge for the purpose of expressing a shared understanding the meaning of mass atrocity has become less defensible. Efforts to differentiate the concept of historical memory with the notion of collective memory have also been criticized as the demarcation seems overly rigid and at times arbitrary. Indeed, the notion of collective memory, or the shared memories of a community or cohesive social group itself has been questioned. Certainly, not all groups are cohesive nor are communities functional. The concept of collective memory has thus been criticized for its inelegance and lack of elasticity in denoting the fluidity with which personal recollection contributes to the social imagination in ways that evoke reciprocity rather than subservience to the dictates of the larger group. As a result, Olick and Robbins (1998) have encouraged the use of the term social memory to more accurately express the ways in which the historical, collective, and personal interact with one another in ways that are especially relevant when confronting instances of social trauma and mass atrocity. In this chapter, I argue that the framing of official knowledge, as conducted by educational institutions, and the efforts to tap into social memory through adherence to memorialization, both exhibit deficiencies in their abilities to evoke authentic popular engagement with the ramifications of mass atrocity. The evolution of memorialization into a global movement though, also raises questions regarding popular trust in the relevance and adequacy of formal educational institutions to address issues of ultimate social concern. The principles of affect theory, with particular regard to meaning-making, contingency, and assemblage are useful in helping to frame this discussion.

Globalization of Human Rights Discourse and the Narrowing of Educational Mission From the mid-twentieth through the early twenty-first century, we have seen two contradictory trends with regard to global approaches that address mass atrocity. On the one hand, the movement to memorialize mass atrocity has expanded rapidly and has taken on a global presence with a proliferation of monuments, museums, and memorials specifically designed to respond to the horrors of past events. This movement has found support among nongovernment as well as state-related entities. On the other hand, in spite of the global expansion of educational access to previously underserved population groups in partial fulfillment of millennium and now sustainable development goals (United



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

41

Nations 2017), neoliberal trends have promoted a narrowing of school curricula at all levels (Connell 2013). The effects upon the treatment of events evoking collective trauma and mass atrocity have been deleterious. The privileging of skill-based instruction to the detriment of support for systematic educational engagement with some of the basic moral questions that speak to issues of identity and the common good has been well documented in general terms but is of intense interest here. Even when the wish to pursue such engagement does occur, by framing mass atrocity events as part of the larger historical narrative that is posited as official knowledge, the resulting distancing of affect compromises supportive initiatives. At the same time, the institutional authority to dictate what constitutes official knowledge is presumed to be unimpeachable and is only periodically contested, even when the politicized and arbitrary nature of the formal curriculum is exposed. The global expansion of memorialization efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War is no accident, as it paralleled the growth of contemporary human rights discourse and the enactment of supportive international norms and instruments. It is clear that the emergence of a global human rights focus was influenced by the events of the Holocaust and the ensuing recognition that in its aftermath, one could no longer rely solely upon the nation-state as sole human rights protector and guarantor (Levy and Sznaider 2010). Specific to the experience of mass trauma and atrocity is the need for victims and relatives of affected groups to achieve formal recognition of their suffering. Although justice as recognition is only one way of conceiving of what the global sense of the term includes (it being separate from the concept of procedural justice or the notion of acquisition of just desserts), it is fundamental for victims and relatives that their suffering be acknowledged. Thus, memorialization has become a significant component within numerous truth and reconciliation efforts (Hayner 2011). At times the memorial has served as a substitute for the formal truth and reconciliation commission and/or the adjudication of criminality within a judicial system, and at times it has complemented those efforts. Certainly, questions have arisen regarding the therapeutic value of what has been labeled as restorative justice, whose elements include that of the memorial. Many view restorative justice initiatives that don’t include an effort to formally work with judicial bodies to punish offenders with suspicion. Memorials when constructed in the absence of judicial proceedings are thus viewed by some as ineffective social palliatives. A  number of those issues will be revisited in this chapter. However, in spite of such caveats, the importance of memorialization as one

42

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

important component in the framing of restorative justice and human rights discourse is widely accepted. The narrowing of school curricula to privilege skill-based subject matter and the emphasis upon testing that has accompanied this process reify basic neoliberal principles. Whether their presence is indicative of the lack of popular trust that is directed toward teacher unions and the teaching profession in general, the willingness to commit fewer state resources to schools (rationalized through the narrowing of curricula), or the desire of corporate business leaders to train a work force according to its own priorities, the failure of educational institutions to play a more robust role in educating children and youth about events of existential significance must be viewed within a neoliberal ideological frame that has de-emphasized the importance of such engagement, but has nonetheless demonstrated global salience.

The Questioning of State Sovereignty and Legitimacy The ethical questions arising from the aftermath of the Holocaust extend beyond the scope of discerning appropriate responses for addressing the commission of mass atrocity. They additionally cast doubt upon the essential legitimacy of the state. In his pioneering scholarship examining the historical concept of sovereignty, Giorgio Agamben (1998) argues that coming to terms with the Holocaust necessitates an understanding of how traditional notions of state sovereignty have changed. They have always been subject to ambiguity given the role of the sovereign in both protecting bare (basic) life while ending it (when utilizing the exceptionality in law that justifies state-sponsored execution). However, the premise of sovereignty upon which state legitimacy is based has become even more compromised when one analyzes the ramifications of Nazi practice. The Nazi regime politicized the most important aspects of daily life and then justified its own extermination practices on the basis of medical pseudoscience and the worst forms of racism and antisemitism that were framed with scientific justification. In so doing, it is clear to Agamben that in deference to the Nazi state example, the modern state has engaged in extreme forms of the exercise of bio-power to which Foucault in his own writings has alluded, with such practices continuing into the twenty-first century. When the worth of anyone’s life is measured solely according to the specific politics that a regime propagates, the basis for democratic governance, even when historically ambiguous, is further shaken.



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

43

While Agamben’s insights have profound implications for our understanding of the ethical viability of the contemporary state, the doubts they generate resonates in an era when globalization trends serve to evoke further questions about its continued efficacy. The memorialization of mass atrocity can be viewed in part as an embrace of the global cosmopolitanism that is part of these trends. But at the very least in a metaphorical sense, the skepticism engendered with regard to state legitimacy (or sovereignty) also targets educational policy and school curricula, insofar as the school’s role continues to be defined by its relationship with the state and the state’s embrace of the educational function it serves, whether the specific educational institution be public or private. The embrace of inclusivity that marks basic education provision, supported by law and statute, is defined according to its own terms of exceptionality, whereby students can always be threatened with restrictions upon their enrollment and the possibility of expulsion or dismissal without final recourse. In the name of inclusivity, the threat of violence as perpetrated by educational decision-makers is always present, in the same ways that the state more generally enforces its criminal and civil laws and statutes. With regard to our specific areas of concern, when state-sanctioned textbooks omit, marginalize, or slant their coverage of events of mass atrocity, the politicization that is engendered represents a concerted effort to further politicize students’ daily lives. Restrictions upon educational access that invoke students’ medical or psychological conditions or rationales that couple textbook coverage with students’ age and their presumed limited psychological capacity to comprehend disturbing historical events offer examples of bio-power being applied to daily school contexts in ways that may be less visible but no less pernicious than blanket bias or the censorship of textbook content.

Memorialization and Education: A Complicated Relationship It is the basic thesis of the first portion of this book that a lack of trust in educational provision contributes to an embrace of alternative forms of knowledge creation and dissemination. With regard to the institutions devoted to memorialization and their relationship to formal schooling, the relationship is complicated. To clarify, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the global embrace of memorialization is solely due to dissatisfaction with the performance of educational institutions. As we have noted, this trend is part of a larger movement that has recognized the importance of human rights discourse

44

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

in many iterations. It is also true that memorials have increasingly taken on educational functions. They have created archives for researchers, have invited the public to contribute personal artifacts that give evidence of suffering, share recollections and testimony that further document the scope of mass atrocity, and regularly create programs of interest to school-aged children and youth, while initiating adult and public education forums. Schools take advantage of these opportunities and often take children on field trips where they visit memorial sites and engage in off-campus encounters where the scope of atrocity is displayed through vivid presentation. A clear differentiation of institutional purpose and function between the school and the memorial can be difficult to discern. Nonetheless, in lieu of the school’s traditional function as cultural capital gatekeeper and disseminator (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970), it is remarkable that the memorial, which is often funded independent of state resources and operates with a greater degree of autonomy than the school, has captured the public imagination to such a considerable degree. In spite of the symbiotic characteristics of this relationship, it is clear that memorials are established to seek alternative ways of communicating what is essential to the public good, there is some degree of popular support for memorials as vehicles that are well equipped to do so, and as a result, a faith in the power of education to singularly fulfill this function is no longer viewed as unconditional.

Baudrillard and the Nexus between Education and Memorialization There have been few cultural critics of global capitalism who have written with Jean Baudrillard’s prescience and insight. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulation (1994) Baudrillard chronicled the dissolution of the relationship between symbol or signifier and its material object. In so doing, he noted the changing nature of modern capitalism, from a system based upon the perceived value of production, to one based upon consumption and commodification, where no intrinsic value between signifier and object is even postulated. He thus argues that we live in an age where meaning devolves into self-reference, and where fantasy and the imaginary rule. Whether commenting upon topics as wide ranging as the nature of fashion, the growing popular obsession with polling and survey research, or power dynamics of the striptease (1976), Baudrillard saw a world confined to hyperreality, where no effort is



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

45

made to connect symbol to material object but where signs are constructed to create their own referents among one another. One result of this process is the elimination of the distinction between life and death, with life becoming little more than “a survival determined by death” (1976: 127). Notions of immortality, which connect an appreciation for the importance of death with giving meaning to the present, are similarly compromised, as are all modernist perceptions of time with their embrace of progressivism. His commentary regarding contemporary encounters with the Holocaust is particularly salient in this regard as he notes, Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that efface the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination—but late, much too much late for it to be able to make the real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves. One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and the image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated to a mass level. (Baudrillard 1994: 49)

For Baudrillard, we are consigned to construct simulacra (copies without originals) and perform simulations as substitutes for substantive social interactions with cultural objects as well as with one another. To do otherwise would require the ability to create a degree of authentic engagement with the social that would result in a correspondence between symbol and object which in the current era of global capitalism can never be fully realized. For the purposes of this chapter, it seems clear that Baudrillard’s insight applies both to memorialization and formal educational initiatives that are involved in depicting the nature of mass atrocity. The reliance upon technique or form of presentation to the detriment of framing the meaning of the historical event, a willingness to commodify empathy through the construction of simulacra and simulation as modes of knowledge presentation, or the disassociation with past events through official knowledge categorization, together speak to the ways these institutions form competing narratives that share the inauthenticity

46

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

Baudrillard so passionately derides. Before examining specific instances of their limitations, it behooves us to look a bit more systematically at the techniques both sets of institutions employ in order to frame mass atrocity as being socially, historically, and culturally relevant.

Memorialization and the Construction of Empathy Cultural historians and critics make a distinction between the monument and the memorial. The monument, it is argued, evokes permanence (Young 1993: 8–11). It is often constructed in ways that accentuate its upward direction toward the sky from the ground up, unlike those memorial sites that may be situated at ground level or below. It can accompany the memorial or stand alone, but its function is one expressing a permanent recognition of the mass atrocity event and/or its victims. Memorials are constructed in a variety of forms; many are situated on the exact sites of mass atrocity and inhabit the space where the atrocities occurred or from where they were directed. Others are constructed from scratch with the aim of appealing to contemporary sensibilities. Internationally known architects, such as Donald Libeskind, who have been commissioned to design some of the world’s more prominent memorials, view their job as one of creating a sense of disarray or disturbance that forces audiences to engage with the subject matter of trauma or atrocity. It is a view that asserts that aesthetic disruptiveness is necessary as a guard against public complacency toward the subject matter the memorial presents. Memorials, in this view, do not perform the same function as traditional museums. Their function is not one of preserving and displaying knowledge in safe and protected spaces, but involves forcing the public to take on the role of actively engaged participant rather than simply that of cultural consumer (Arnold-de Simine 2013). To that end, the nature and display of artifact collection and presentation can differ significantly when comparing the memorial with the traditional museum. First, memorial artifacts are given significance because of the context in which they are presented, rather than because of their intrinsic value. The postcard, piece of clothing, and photograph have meaning for what they signify, even though the context has changed from the conditions of their creation. Often, the items selected for presentation, unlike those displayed in the museum, are valued for their ordinariness rather than their uniqueness. These items also tend to be more eclectic; they include an emphasis upon the visual—the photograph, the video narrative of personal testimony—and are intentionally more interactive with their visitors than is



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

47

true of displays within the typical museum. There are artifacts that have become iconic, particularly when referencing holocaust memorials, and they include the suitcase, the concentration camp uniform, shoes. And, there are often efforts to create sacred space within or adjacent to the memorial, encouraging reflection, presumably after having achieved a personal connection with the victims whose circumstances have been portrayed.

International Coalition of Sites of Conscience The distinction between museum and memorial can best be observed when noting the growth of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience Network. Starting in 1999 with 9 funded sites, it now includes over 200 members in 55 countries that “are united by their commitment to connect past to present, memory to action” (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience 2017). One of the original founders of the network was initially associated with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a landmark space dedicated to honoring the experiences of thousands of New  York City immigrants who frequented the space from the late 1800s until the 1930s. She sent out a call to museums articulating the view that museums had a role to play in defending human rights and received eight responses. Together, the participants established criteria for the organization that included the promotion of humanitarian values, the use of dialogue to communicate and engage with audiences to link past legacies with contemporary issues, and the exploration of opportunities for concerned advocacy. Among the founding members were representatives from Argentina, Russia, Bangladesh, South Africa, the United States, and Senegal. Initially, the Network only included historic sites, with all sites receiving formal site accreditation, as would be appropriate for those participating in a museum association. A number of years ago, as the Coalition evolved, it moved away from this model and the focus has been one of encouraging regional coordinators to facilitate Network activity and develop Coalition growth, with different levels of membership now available. At the same time, it became clear that limiting the Coalition focus solely to an official historic site and in a sense, reifying the museum model, was an insufficient mechanism for accomplishing advocacy goals. There have been many groups in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, who have wanted to do Coalition work but don’t have access to memorial sites due to the regimes that are in power. Thus, in its current iteration, Coalition activities include more direct efforts to use memorialization as a

48

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

vehicle for transitional justice and include training and direct advocacy efforts. Assisting members in refining documentation techniques through the creation of a documentation tool kit, offering grants in support of model programming, and supporting the establishment of learning communities are some of the initiatives of the Coalition sponsors, in addition to helping members preserve and construct memorialization sites. In this regard, the Chilean case is particularly instructive. Of the seven Chilean coalition members listed on the website, four are situated on locations where mass atrocity was planned or directly occurred. The eclectic nature of the seven sites includes the National Stadium (Estadio Nacional), where over 40,000 prisoners were held during the early weeks after the coup; NIDO 20, housing the Committee for Human Rights; “a former clandestine detention center . . . that was used to transport, torture, and execute political opponents . . . and is now a community center and museum”; the Museum of Memorial and Human Rights (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos); the Park for Peace, Villa Grimaldi, one of the most famous torture centers in the country; and the timber forest memorial located in the county of Paine, south of Santiago. A number of Chilean memorials, some of which have been mentioned above, will be later discussed in further detail. Suffice it to conclude that the wide range of memorials that comprise the Sites of Conscience Coalition Network is complemented by its general embrace of transitional justice advocacy and political activism. The contrast with conventional museum purpose and function is clear. Critics of memorialization processes express concern regarding their tendency to commodify empathy. No matter how well intended, the interaction between the visitor, the memorial setting, and the materials displayed within the setting is inherently inauthentic. The gaze with which one encounters the memorial reiterates an otherness that distances oneself from the ramifications of the trauma that is displayed. One enters and leaves the site on one’s own terms and exercises the autonomy to pick and choose which artifacts to commemorate, or which ones to ignore. One is the quintessential outsider, always in control of the affect one is encouraged to express. It is clear that the context in which the imagery of mass atrocity is expressed is so different from the horrors of the actual experiences that are depicted, that their enormity remains beyond full comprehension. As a result, one is consigned to simulate an appreciation for past atrocity through exposure to the ultimate simulacrum. Paul Williams (2007) has commented upon the privileging of the photographic image as a part of memorial materials and notes that such a reliance raises the implicit question regarding the ethical role of the photographer in chronicling the atrocity that is



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

49

being depicted without having intervened to stop it. In a similar vein, one can question the ethics of memorializing mass atrocity if the emphasis focuses upon the depiction of the horrific event rather than a contextualized understanding of its historical context or the contemporary circumstances that would encourage or avoid its repetition. The turn toward advocacy that members of the Sites of Conscience Network has embraced, makes logical sense given this possibility. To simply manufacture an emotional reaction as the primary consequence of memorialization, without more substantively encouraging transitional justice work is thus morally unacceptable. And yet, the global phenomenon of dark or “thanatourism,” where tourists are encouraged to visit places where death and tragedy has occurred, raises profound questions about the unintended consequences of memorial sites promoting voyeurism, or worse, “thanacapitalism” (a belief in the survival of the fittest through engaging with the collective death of others) (Korstanje 2016). It certainly is the case that the relationship between memorialization and tourism is one where profit contributes to the political economy of the state. But it is equally true that globalization has encouraged the establishment of norms dictating the form and type of objects that memorials need to include to enhance their value. In so doing, the commodification of empathy has become an unfortunate reality. I find a number of case studies illustrative, for in examining memorials to mass atrocity and the corresponding treatment of the events within formal school settings, they offer a further elucidation of the strengths and challenges both settings are forced to confront.

The Case of Chile: Political Context The overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, led to seventeen years of brutal dictatorship, headed by General Augusto Pinochet. After a plebiscite called for a return to democratic rule, Patricio Aylwin was elected president in 1990. He established a truth commission, including representatives of the major political factions, which was chaired by former ambassador Raul Rettig. The Rettig Commission chronicled the torture and death of thousands of victims, but did not investigate the torture of survivors (which became the mandate of the follow-up Valech Commission in 2003) (Hayner 2011: 47–8). In 2011, an additional 9,800 victims were added to the previous numbers of those who suffered human rights violations, for a total of 40,018. Some 3,065 were killed or disappeared (BBC 2011). The Rettig

50

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

Commission did establish a system of reparations to victims and victims’ relatives, and the Valech Commission recommended that on-site concentration camps and detention centers be memorialized. Suffice it to note that twenty-nine years after Aylwin commenced his presidency, the country continues to wrestle with the political context surrounding the Allende years including the reasons for his ascendancy to the presidency, the divisions that occurred during Allende’s rule, the degree of external support for the coup and the ensuing dictatorship on the part of the United States, as well as the numerous human rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although the country’s political leadership has generally reflected a center-left orientation, with the exception of the center-right Piñera government, in power from 2010 to 2014, with a second center-right regime taking office in 2018, the current governing constitution was constructed during the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980, although amended in 1989 and 2005. Pinochet himself was arrested for human rights violations in London in 1998 after having been indicted in Spain. He was returned to Chile where he was subsequently indicted for a number of crimes, and died in 2006 without having been convicted of any charges. In recent years, investigations and prosecutions of human rights abuses have increased, and as of 2014, there were approximately 1,000 cases that were being pursued (Marengo 2015). Nonetheless, efforts to repeal the 1978 Amnesty Law protecting human rights violators (on the books but not enforced since 1998) has been met with resistance. The politics involving the Pinochet legacy have intruded into cultural and social spheres as well, in symbolic and material terms. The placement of a statue in Allende’s likeness positioned in front of the Presidential Palace (along with the other presidents of the country) in June 2000 was postponed for a number of years after its initial proposal in the early 1990s (Hite 2007; Stern 2010: 267). Similarly, the decision to rename a street in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago as its initial name (Once de septiembre) memorialized the day of the coup, occurred only as recently as July 2013, almost forty years after the coup (CBS News 2013). In both cases, these rather symbolic actions were met with tension and opposition. Many of the memorials and monuments we highlight have been the subjects of similar controversy.

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace The Valech Commission identified approximately 1,200 detention, concentration camp, and torture sites in its report; Villa Grimaldi, now



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

51

referred to as the Park for Peace, was one of the most notorious. Located in a southeastern suburb of Santiago, the site was originally housed a restaurant when it was forcibly expropriated by the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA) in 1974, under the leadership of its director, Manuel Contreras, and converted into a detention center. Its proximity to military instillations contributed to its logistical convenience. It was transferred to the authority of the National Information Center (CNI) from 1977 to 1989 and was finally closed in 1989. From 1974 to 1977, it held between 4,500 and 5,000 detainees, of whom 226 were executed or are permanently disappeared. Almost all were tortured; those who did not die in captivity were transferred to permanent detention camps or were sent to direct execution, where their bodies were flown by helicopter and dumped into the ocean. The former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and her mother were among the victims held at the facility. Torture, including electroshock, feigned assassination, as well as multiple forms of physical and sexual abuse and degradation, perpetrated upon both male and female victims, was common. After its official closure, efforts were made to sell the property to a housing developer, and the site began to be raised. However, its decimation was halted after popular protest, and in 1993, it was reconstructed to serve as a permanent memorial (Rojas Corral 2015). Today the site offers an audio tour of thirteen stations, including a memorial plaque of its victims listed by name and date of arrival, a reconstruction of holding cells, no larger than tiny boxes too narrow for individuals to lie down, some of which include torture machinery and detainee writings, and a garden including a variety of floral species planted in honor of the victims. A  few of the stations are particularly memorable. A  tree, hundreds of years old is commemorated as a site where a guard, judged to be overly sympathetic to the detainees was lynched. A few prisoners themselves were also lynched at the site. The tower, where much of the worst forms of torture occurred, and where the majority of the detainees were designated to die, remains intact, adjacent to a swimming pool, used by the families and relatives of guards and DINA officials, often in sight of the detainees held within the tower. There is also space noting the various political party affiliations of the detainees in a demonstration of inclusivity regardless of ideological proclivity. The final station is enclosed and includes artifacts and remains of the disappeared, including the railroad planks used to tie up victims and wrap them in plastic bags before their bodies were ejected into the ocean. This process, along with efforts to recover the bodies of the disappeared, is chronicled in the Patricio Guzman film, The Pearl Button,

52

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

which refers to an artifact from the clothing of one of the victims that is encased in this station. Upon touring Villa Grimaldi, one is given the solitude that allows for an enhanced interaction with the various stations on one’s own terms. The use of the audio tour guide, offered in multiple languages, is not uncommon to memorial sites and certainly offers a degree of expediency that allows a narrative to be communicated according to the visitor’s specific needs. It represents one example of the use of technology that while certainly unobtrusive, epitomizes a certain irony, given the ways in which technology was used at the site to inflict intense pain on the detainees. Indeed, a specific connection has been made between the bio-power exercised at this site and Agamben’s depiction of its consequences representing the denouement of modernity (Rojas Corral 2015). The evocation of solitude and the space for contemplation that the Park has been designed to protect, is somewhat jarring when one considers the horror that occurred on the premises. However, as is true of many memorial sites, the desire to create a sense of introspective space is clear, and the Park for Peace/Villa Grimaldi’s design should be viewed in that light.

Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos The idea for the Museum of Memory and Human Rights was announced in a speech by President Michelle Bachelet on May 21, 2007, and its formal inauguration was held on January 11, 2010, shortly before the end of the first Bachelet government (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 2011). Because President Bachelet was herself a victim of the Pinochet dictatorship, as were her mother and father, a military general who died after being tortured and held captive, the establishment of the Museum thus had personal as well as political resonance. The memorial structure itself is situated below ground level in the Santiago neighborhood of Quinta Normal. Outside of the building, a statement indicates that the purpose of the memorial is to educate. At its entrance, it includes reference to all of the truth commissions and mass atrocity memorials around the world. With regard to Chile, it makes reference to the different memorials and monuments throughout the country, including Valdivia, La Serena, and Antofagasta, and notes the many types of structures that evoke commemoration: statues, grave sites, sculptures, and so on. Special exhibits are shown on the grounds of the memorial and in the basement where a documentation center is also situated. During a visit on July 20, 2016, for



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

53

example, I saw an exhibit of the work of Chilean photographer Rodrigo Rojas who was burned to death at the age of 19 by members of an army patrol in 1986 while setting up a barricade. The video testimony of his disfigured companion, Carmen Quintana, who miraculously survived the assault, complemented the imagery in the exhibit. The first floor of the memorial includes an hour by hour timeline of September 11, 1973, the date of the coup, including photographic and videoimagery of the bombing of the Presidential Palace, the shelling by the navy of Valparaiso, and the other events of the day including Allende’s death. As one moves on, artifacts such as victim and survivor testimonies; torture instruments; writings; letters and messages from incarcerated detainees smuggled out to their relatives; artwork created for their children; and a replica of an iron bed typifying conditions of imprisonment typify the nature of the displayed items. I personally was struck by the letter of a nine-year-old written to President Pinochet asking for information about the whereabouts of her grandparents. The second floor, labeled “Truth and Justice,” chronicles popular efforts to speak out against the coup and the practices of the dictatorship during the years of its reign through displaying replicas of newspaper articles and other documents, arranged chronologically. There is also a display of thousands of lights, representing candles, along with photographs of dictatorship victims and the disappeared. An interactive screen allows one to read short biographical sketches of these individuals. On the third floor, space is reserved for special art exhibits; a permanent exhibit of arpilleras, the quilts that were woven displaying family life, often with political messages in opposition to the dictatorship, is also on display. The Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Santiago. Although similar in form and structure to many memorials of mass atrocity throughout the world, the number of artifacts that have been collected and are on display are voluminous, and it is clear that it provides an educational function commensurate with its articulated purpose.

Museo de la Solidaridad Chile The Museo de la Solidaridad Chile differs from the typical memorial in a number of ways. Housed in a former DINA headquarters, the museum deliberately makes no reference to the atrocities that occurred on its premises during the Pinochet dictatorship. The third floor of the building, where DINA

54

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

administrative operations occurred, and where a holding cell for prisoners was constructed, remains off limits to the public and today includes offices that house museum administrators and staff. The museum was conceived of as a “people’s museum” in 1971 during the Allende regime, and noted artists from around the world donated their work as a gesture of support for the government. After the coup, the museum and its holdings were placed in exile. The idea of creating a permanent space for the museum in Chile occurred in 1990 after Chile’s return to democracy. Upon its conception, it was hoped that the museum would provide an alternative public space for art, a model where artists would no longer be dependent upon the traditionally capitalistinfluenced art market for their works be shown and appreciated. Although that goal was never realized, when visiting the museum today, one can see a permanent collection that includes work from some of the most important modern artists in the world, including Victor Vasarely, Frank Stella, Joan Miro, Yoko Ono, and others (Zaldivar 2013). During a visit on July 19, 2016, a special exhibit examining the influence of pop art and pop crit art upon the Chilean artist community in the 1960s and 1970s was displayed. Thus, the connection between art and politics is never downplayed although the importance of art in its pure form, and its symbolic meanings with reference to universality and the possibilities of transformation, is what is most clearly emphasized within the museum structure.

Estadio Nacional From 1938 to 1973, the National Stadium hosted numerous sports events and concerts including the World Cup in 1962. Indeed, after the Second World War, it served as a temporary transit site for European refugees (Hite 2004). Immediately after the coup, however, it became the country’s largest detention center where between 12,000 and 20,000 individuals were held for up to two months, many of whom were tortured (Hite 2004; Waldstein 2015). Estimates regarding the number of actual executions at the stadium site vary from 35 to 500 (Read and Wyndham 2016:  62). Hite quotes from the Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Valech Commission) in noting, “There is information on the practice of torture and abuse of prisoners in the National Stadium. For example, the room for medical treatment was sometimes used for this purpose. Firing squads were simulated and other cruel



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

55

techniques were employed. As a rule the prisoners were subjected to constant and intense interrogation” (Hite 2004). With Chile’s return to democratic rule, the National Stadium was continued to be used for concerts and major sporting events. A group of seats remain permanently vacant in honor of the coup victims in the north end of the stadium and a small museum with commemorative photography is present underneath the stands (Waldstein 2015). The decision to continue to hold major recreational events at the stadium parallels to some degree, the thinking behind the Museo de la Solidaridad Chile. Be it art, athletics, culture, or entertainment, there is a tension regarding what and how to memorialize, and how to be respectful of the past without feeling captured by it. As documented by Read and Wyndham, though, the decisions made regarding the memorialization of the stadium—whether to raise the entire structure, whether to memorialize at all, to whitewash detainee messages scratched into the walls, or preserve specifically notorious torture sites within the premises such as the women’s swimming pool changing room—were decisions that were all heavily contested. From the perspective of some, given the stadium’s longevity as a sport and cultural center, emphasizing the two months it was used as a detention center represented an overblown concern. For others, any effort to capture the enormity of the horror that transpired on these grounds would be doomed to failure. The resulting erection of a monument, creation of a small museum, and preservation of empty seats as a symbolic representation of what transpired on the site are indicative of the political compromises that were necessitated by the discord among the various factions.

Cementerio General: The Allende Grave and Patio 29 The General Cemetery is Chile’s largest burial ground, where over two million individuals are interred. It is the site of Salvador Allende’s final resting place, after his body was first unceremoniously placed in an unmarked grave in Viña Del Mar and, in 1990, transferred to the General Cemetery. In May 2011, the body was exhumed again, so forensic scientists could confirm that his death was by suicide with final internment occurring on September 8, 2011 (Ebergenyi 2011). Patio 29 is a small section of the cemetery that was used for disposal of the bodies of those who were killed in the days of the immediate aftermath of the coup in Santiago. The numerous bodies floating in the Mapocho River and

56

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

on the city streets, along with those murdered in the National Stadium, were deposited in Patio 29 as there were 320 vacant lots in this section of the cemetery immediately available (Read and Wyndham 2016: 43). Read and Wyndham note: Out of sight at the very back of the cemetery, it seemed ideal; so far, in the life of the cemetery, it had been used only for the graves of paupers who had died in the public street or the State Psychiatric Hospital. Thus, from mid-September 1973, truckloads of makeshift coffins began to arrive from the morgue or the freezers of the Medical-Legal Institute. When the supply of coffins ran out, bodies were piled two or three at a time in wooden boxes, even on planks of wood. Under close military watch the bodies went into the front four rows of 80 waiting graves, each unmarked except for a tin cross bearing NN. Three months later Patio 29 was bursting; excess bodies went into Patio 7. Workers were warned to keep strict silence while any unauthorized approach to the area was strictly forbidden. (43–4)

Not unlike the Allende case, the interred bodies at Patio 29 were repeatedly disturbed and sometime removed by military forces through the early 1980s. In 1982, out of the supposed 320 bodies that were buried on the site, approximately 200 were exhumed and presumably cremated (Read and Wyndham 2016: 50). Even after the transition to the Aylwin government, efforts to identify the remaining 126 bodies in 107 graves were problematic. Between 1993 and 1998, 96 of the 126 remains had been identified with families and relatives being notified; in 2006, newer DNA analyses showed that 8 of the 96 remains had definitely been wrongly identified and the identification of the other remains was questionable (55). In both of these cases, you have the conflicting symbolism of the monument or grave site marker, representing permanence and finality, with the factual evidence of disruption and disrespect for bodily integrity and presence. In Baudrillardian terms, the violence that is perpetrated upon living relatives, by denying them the opportunity to create closure regarding the death of loved ones, is disruptive of their efforts to negotiate issues of memory and identity in ways that are constructive. The denial of death, its finality, and its importance as an essential component of the life cycle is vicious and inhuman. The issue is not simply one of seeking psychological closure in order to deal with the horror of atrocity as much as it is being able to connect the meaning of the lives of the departed with our efforts to find meaning in the present. It is thus left to the monument or the grave site to serve as a substitute for a more complete engagement with the horror of past events. In the Allende example, the politics that characterized burial, displacement, and exhumation speak to Agamben’s



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

57

admonition regarding the overt politicization of everyday life on the part of the modern state.

Memorialization in Chile: Some Preliminary Conclusions The examples of memorialization that have been noted represent fragmented, contradictory, and at times incomplete efforts to engage with the past. There is of course disagreement regarding what such engagement should include, from where sponsorship should originate (state vs. nongovernmental agency or private foundation), how past events connect with contemporary pressures or future aspirations, as well as what constitutes their appropriate depiction, in the form of the museum, monument, park, or interactive center. We have also seen that the framing of memorialization differs as well, with a global focus tapping into prevalent global human rights discourse, or a focus that contextualizes atrocity according to the actions of the state. Steve Stern has argued that one cannot understand the dynamics of Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy without noting the changing uses of memory to buttress political legitimacy. It is his view that in spite of a tension between the use of hard and soft power, and the fact that there were repeated impasses during the transition, ultimately the importance of pursuing human rights principles as a means of redefining historical memory met with popular acceptance. Such acceptance can’t be explained simply by decisions that allowed elites to maintain their economic power in return for a guarantee of their allegiance to a democratic transition. Nor can they be explained by the winners of conventional state and non-state actor conflict, for in fact, representatives from both groups eventually coalesced in support of a broad human rights agenda. He views the importance of associating memory with a human rights sensibility as a major social accomplishment in light of the political difficulties in transitioning from dictatorship to democracy (Stern 2010: 357–86). The methods of memorialization that have been noted are reflective of those difficulties. It is reasonable to conclude that they encourage various simulacra that fail to articulate the enormity of the past atrocities. Modes of memorialization are not immune to pressures from the state; alternatively, they have sometimes been influenced by globalization trends that encourage their commodification. Nonetheless, their presence also reflects differing efforts to engage with the past authentically, even if such efforts can at best be assessed as containing only partial and ephemeral success. Indeed, even when one examines initiatives that give little overt acknowledgment of past atrocities

58

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

committed on the specific site (e.g., the Museo de la Solidaridad Chile) or do so in a circumscribed manner (e.g., the Estadio Nacional), the past is always present, as a comparative reference point contextually framing the nature of present and future aspiration.

Education in Chile and the Treatment of Mass Atrocity Chile has had a long history of support for public education. It was the first Latin American country to establish a public education system in 1842; in its 1925 constitution, educational provision was explicitly acknowledged as a state responsibility (Pastrana 2007). The Escuela Nacional Unificada (ENA) platform of the Allende government sought to further expand educational access while better coordinating elementary, secondary, and vocational sectors (Farrell 1986), but after the coup, the educational system underwent radical neoliberal reform. The system incorporated aspects of privatization, decentralization, and a voucher system that allowed for direct state subsidy of private schools. Although sporadic educational reform has occurred since the end of the dictatorship, the system as configured forty years ago remains in place, as does a significant degree of educational inequality, reflective of class standing. State-subsidized private schools and elite private schools that don’t feel the need to accept government funding cater to the lower-middle-, middle-, and upper-class students, with those from less affluent backgrounds consigned to attend municipally operated schools. At the same time, with Chile’s entrance to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in 2010, its frame of reference for comparing its level of educational progress as well as its social and economic development has expanded to include developed and more highly developing countries. The country’s national testing mechanism, the Measurement System of Educational Equality (SIMCE) has played an increasingly important role in the assessment of school progress; performance results on international testing instruments such as TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) are also listed with national results on the SIMCE webpage. Thus, the willingness to define educational quality in terms of technocratic neoliberal values is quite apparent. It is therefore not surprising that the treatment of mass atrocity, let  alone the Pinochet dictatorship, is reflective of educational structure and the values that it perpetuates. For example, because private schools purchase their own textbooks, and in deference to a parent population that tends to be more elitist



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

59

and politically right of center, issues of mass atrocity are rarely covered at all as part of the school curriculum in these particular settings (Wright 2016). But even when they are used, as Chilean textbooks are constructed to reflect curricular guidelines crafted by the Ministry of Education, their orientation differs according to the political leanings of a particular government in power. Minte notes, for example, that through the 1980s, history textbooks did not include any historiographical work at all. In the 1990s, historical events may have been summarized but without critical analysis, and their presentation reflected the biases of conservative historians. After 2000, more critical analyses from a variety of perspectives began to be incorporated into high school textbooks (Minte 2014). With specific regard to the treatment of the dictatorship and the atrocities committed during its rule, textbook content is indicative of an even stronger degree of politicization. For example, there has been repeated controversy over the use of the term “dictatorship” to describe Pinochet rule. As recently as 2013, popular outrage was expressed over the Ministry of Education decision to substitute the term “dictatorship” for “military regime” in state-supported textbooks, a decision that was later reversed (BBC 2012; Telegraph 2013). There are of course, more subtle ways of conveying textbook ideological bias. Otieza (2003) and Otieza and Pinto (2008) in their analysis of two tenth-grade high school textbooks, one of which is used in over 85 percent of Chilean high schools, noted that as is also true of history texts in Spain, there is a tendency to “look ahead and not be critical of the past. In order to do this, complex explanations are simplified and causes and effects are construed to naturalize the discourse.” The coup itself, is depicted as resulting from the conflicts and errors of the Allende government, and thus is framed as a rational consequence of that government’s ineptitude (Otieza and Pinto 2008: 354). Furthermore, the unity of Chilean society is idealized by depicting the military coup as a response to the popular will for regime change (Otieza and Pinto 2008: 355). The use of the passive voice as well as other linguistic devices are employed to eliminate individual agency and culpability for the atrocities that were committed during and after the coup. As the authors state, In the case of Chile, for example, although human rights violations are denounced, those that suffered are presented in a victimized manner that allows the silencing of the responsible parties . . . The objectivization and existentialization of conflictive events is one of the main linguistic resources to avoid assigning responsibility in the discourse, as is the construal of

60

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse agentless events. In the Chilean textbooks, the military coup and the human rights violations are objectivized by means of nominalizations, impersonal constructions, and existential processes. We are less likely to question events depicted without explicit human intervention since they are explained as the way things are and the way things happen. (355)

Wright’s more recent analysis concurs with Otieza and Pinto’s findings. She notes that current middle and high school textbooks blame the Allende government for creating the conditions that led to the coup, acknowledge the fact that the Pinochet dictatorship was repressive, but assign blame for the repression to the DINA and its successor, the CNI, rather than the government as a whole. The general narrative of the dictatorship creating order out of chaos while emphasizing the importance of Chile’s “economic miracle” as opposed to the human rights violations prevalent throughout the years of the dictatorship remains intact (Wright 2016). The impact of the treatment of historical events certainly extends beyond the formal presentation of word and image within the textbook itself. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the issues involving the Chilean approach to the dictatorship and the mass atrocities it perpetuated, make interesting comparisons with the global textbook treatment of the Holocaust. With specific reference to history textbooks that cover the Holocaust, there is a prevalence of efforts to objectify victimization in ways that preclude discussions of agency, in addition to a frequent use of the passive voice. In both cases, coverage often lacks historical context or due attention paid to the complexity of events that are described. One interesting difference is that Holocaust textbooks tend to oversimplify the cause of the Holocaust by emphasizing Hitler the person and the uniqueness of the historical character, omitting a more robust discussion of the social structures, group power dynamics, and ideological conflicts that contributed to the Holocaust (Carrier, Fuchs, and Messinger 2015). In the Chilean example, personal references to individuals as direct perpetrators of mass atrocity are less frequently employed and in fact tend to be obfuscated by the use of general terms, for example, the military, the police, the DINA, and so on. It thus comports with what Michaelinas Zemblyas identifies as a process of harmonization, where “harmonization entails a harmonized discourse of ‘truth’ that avoids the recognition of victimhood and demands from the victims that they manage their emotions in the name of a common (reconciliatory) narrative.” (Zembylas 2018: 206).



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

61

Conclusion A basic premise of this chapter is that social memory inextricably connects us with our past, frames how we view ourselves contemporaneously, and speaks of our future aspirations. As Andreas Huyssen (2003) notes, “At stake in the current history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a foundational crisis in our imagination of alternative futures” (2). The use of the term “social memory” is thus designed to contest the notion that the need to come to terms with the implications of mass atrocity is simply an intellectual exercise, of limited importance except for perhaps a few who have been directly affected by past events. We have also relied heavily upon the theoretical contributions of Jean Baudrillard and Giorgio Agamben to help us contextualize memorialization and the formal school treatment of mass atrocity in Chile, using these insights to better comprehend how social memory is expressed. Baudrillard’s moral voice compels us to examine the ways in which the past is denied or eliminated. This occurs as a result of a collective willingness to separate object from signifier, replacing efforts of authentic social engagement with simulations and fake copies of what is known or presumed to be known. Agamben’s moral voice forces us to confront the ramifications of the state exercise of bio-power that demonstrates little limitation or respect for the protection or preservation of life. The determination of life’s worthiness has increasingly been defined according to political vulgarity. We have further juxtaposed the treatment of mass atrocity through the processes of memorialization with its treatment within the formal educational sector, primarily with regard to textbook content and curricular guidelines. In both areas, the voices of Baudrillard and Agamben speak to the Chilean case. The forms of memorialization described in this chapter, and the ambivalence with which the Pinochet dictatorship is treated within school curricula, exemplify the types of inauthentic simulations and simulacra of which Baudrillard speaks. Can the creation of a Peace Park on the grounds of one of Chile’s most notorious detention camps do justice to an understanding of the trauma that occurred on those grounds? What about the conversion of a former secret police headquarters into a modern art museum, ostensibly to embrace the transformative possibilities of art and its connection to political advocacy? Can such a redesigned setting adequately respect the horrific consequences of the decision-making that occurred with the same walls forty-odd years ago? Or, how can the use of the country’s national stadium for sports events and rock

62

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

concerts be reconciled with its history as a detention camp where torture and murder occurred during the first weeks of the coup? What do we make of the juxtaposition of seats left permanently empty or the construction of a small museum on stadium premises, with the regular promotion of spectacle that occurs on the same grounds? And, what about the myths of permanence and solitude that are represented by the Allende gravesite, or the gravesites at Patio 29 in the National Cemetery? We know that the bodies at these locations have been violated, and in the later instance their identities permanently compromised. So why do we need to feel comforted by the fiction that our connections to the past are unbroken, or that resting place for these victims is secure and respectful? To be clear, no memorial can accurately capture the horror of trauma and mass atrocity. But it is our willingness to pretend that they can do so that so infuriates Baudrillard and drives his moral passion. That passion is often directed at the ways we commodify material objects in ways that minimize our own humanity. As memorialization has become globalized, it is easy to see this trend with regard to the norming of artifacts deemed appropriate for display, the commissioning of global architect “stars” to design memorials, their importance to global capitalism and tourism, and the creation of thanatourism or dark tourism. In the Chilean case, there are some examples of these phenomena in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, such as the display of video interviews with victims and relatives; a reliance upon photographic image to tell the story of atrocity; the letters, cards, and writings of victims; and the commissioning of a renowned Brazilian architect to design the Museum structure. However, the worst abuses of commodification tendencies including “thanatourism” do not seem to have permeated Chilean borders, at least yet. Nonetheless, memorialization, in general, and the Chilean memorials we have discussed represent quintessential simulation experiences. As long as one dictates the conditions of one’s engagement with the memorial and its content, the length of time and specific circumstances of one’s encounter with the site, the experience will always necessarily be superficial and inauthentic. The notion of the simulacrum, or the copy that can never be the same as the original, is apropos. The larger issue involves the tension between remembrance and a distancing of oneself from the past. Do the acts of remembrance as conducted within these contexts reify one’s positionality, affirming one’s privileged distance from the victims one acknowledges? Can one simultaneously remind oneself of the past while forgetting its consequences? As we struggle to answer



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

63

these questions, we must consider the possibility that our engagement with memorialization represents the very act of folly that participation in simulation and the construction of simulacra implies. The depiction of mass atrocity within school settings presents us with an alternative simulation. Here, the meaning of historical events is expressed as absolute, didactic, and uncontested narrative. The distancing between present and past eliminates affect as a tool for wrestling with questions of social identity. It offers the fiction to students that one can engage in contemporary decisionmaking and craft future aspirations without attempting to address the intellectual and moral complexity of mass atrocity. Instead, textbooks create the impression that political repression was the cost that had to be paid for the country’s economic growth. The banality of that contention affirms the presumption that daily life itself can be construed as being void of moral content. The educational system further perpetuates the fiction that it is acceptable to calibrate engagement with the historical record of trauma and atrocity and that the record itself can be rewritten periodically, according to the ideological proclivities of those in control of the Ministry of Education. We can thus conclude that memorialization and formal educational processes do perpetuate contrasting simulations that encourage a fictionalizing of the relationship between object and its referents; they assist in the elimination of death (or the past) as a meaningful factor in defining the worlds of the present and future. And, they affirm an overall view of social memory as being little more than a disposable commodity. Giorgio Agamben’s concern regarding the state use of bio-power to choose and politicize the meaning of life in an unchecked proclamation of its sovereignty is apparent in both of these simulations too. It is continuously expressed in the state’s murder of innocent victims during the Pinochet dictatorship, to its determination of which bodies are deserving of identification, or the rights of final internment, let alone its indiscriminate use of scientific expertise to inflict torture, pain, and death in Villa Grimaldi and other detention centers. But it is also expressed in the Ministry of Education and state-approved textbooks that determine with impunity whose lives are deserving of being formally remembered or forgotten, or why it is justifiable to ignore discussing with children and youth why the government of their country murdered and tortured innocent people, or how it is that a significant number of perpetrators were allowed to go unpunished. Steve Stern’s conclusion that “soft power” has been employed successfully to combat the “hard power” of the state and to help move Chile forward by beginning to recognize human rights abuses of the past, is instructive here. With

64

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

all of the weaknesses of memorialization efforts, it is clear that at the very least, these efforts have promoted human rights discourse in ways that have been absent in the schools. Although these efforts have been tenuous, often superficial, and of questionable substance, many have at least tried to evoke a response that encourages affective connection with the victims and circumstances of mass atrocity, while noting the importance of continued human rights advocacy. The failure of the schooling system to serve as a protected space for these values is not surprising, nor is it specific to the Chilean school system. The Chilean case does illustrate that there is a cost when schools selfmarginalize to such an extreme degree. Memorials and museums are increasingly taking on educational roles by creating their own documentation centers and providing educational outreach to students and the community. They manufacture affect as a tool for presenting human rights violations and in some instances, embrace advocacy in support preserving memory and discovering truth. One can only wonder if their appropriation of what once has traditionally been associated with the public school educational mission has become a permanent phenomenon. When schools fail to address the most important and existential questions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is reasonable to question whether public faith in their efficacy is warranted. It has been noted that the adoption of human rights discourse within school textbooks is an increasingly global phenomenon, fueled by NGO activities and human rights advocacy (Meyer, Bromley, and Ramirez 2010). But it is my contention that the turn toward memorialization represents a deeper fear that an educational mission so closely associated with the state is deeply compromised and that educational responses that simply respond to prevailing social change are inexorably retroactive and reactionary. If there are lessons to be learned from this case and from Baudrillard’s humanism more generally, they affirm the presumption that educational policy and practice cannot be crafted in a vacuum and that their legitimacy is always subject to contestation. The larger questions involve the relationship of the educational institution to the state. One would hope that schools could be constructed to be more than state appendages. However, determining whether they can reassert their importance in articulating and framing what constitutes the public good is a question that remains unresolved. It is also clear that the principles of affect theory to which we have alluded, intensity of encounter, meaning-making, assemblage, and contingency, help characterize the issues raised by the Chilean case. To be sure, most of those issues reverberate within many other settings as well. For example, misplaced efforts at the US Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los



Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile

65

Angeles to artificially manufacture empathy by giving audiences limited biographical information of Holocaust victims in the form of an identification card, so that they may discover whether they actually perished or survived only after completing a viewing of the exhibit, have been roundly criticized (Lennon and Foley 2004: 184). Similarly, the lack of sensitivity of some of the visitors to the iconic Holocaust monument in Berlin, who play hide and seek, take selfies, and even sun bathe, is further evidence that empathy is not a quality that can be easily programmed (Kirchik 2017). Criticism of the use of the Estadio Nacional for sporting events and concerts should thus be accompanied by a recognition that when confronted with the existential questions raised when a recognition of mass atrocity occurs, no society is immune from the difficulties in addressing those questions in a respectful manner. But regardless of how far they fall short in their efforts to do so, affect matters. It matters in the decisions to engage with or avoid confronting the past. It matters in the intensities with which such engagement or avoidance are articulated. It matters in the ways in which groups use instruments of the state to assemble to create a unified voice or become discordant, and it matters how those involved with formal education respond to the past as well, even if their responses are illustrative of the contingencies that mark their relationship to the state.

2

The Aesthetic Turn: Engagement and Meaning-making through the Arts

Introduction In recent years, social theorists have begun to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Based largely upon the writings of Jacques Rancière, with some debt to the earlier writings of Frankfurt School intellectuals, assumptions involving the nature of the aesthetic as being inherently divorced from the political have been challenged, particularly when considering globalized contexts. Rancière has argued that the separation of the aesthetic from the political represents part of the larger modernist project that dismisses the connectedness between the two spheres and is conceptually harmful to both. In so doing, he argues that traditional and formalistic ascriptions as to what beauty entails have failed to account for the basic processes of meaning-making that result from engagement with the sensible. His contribution to affect theory and the broad theoretical orientation of this project is thus clear. But he has also written about the failures of conventional educational thinkers and practitioners. He has decried prevailing attitudes regarding the nature of student ability and learning that artificially construct categories of ability difference. He additionally has noted the unwillingness of pedagogues to engage in effective strategies that encourage students to make the connections that assist in fostering students’ conceptual engagement and development. Thus, for Rancière, the reliance upon mis-categorization and unduly rigid classification is present in both aesthetic and pedagogical domains. His larger claim, involving the natural interconnectedness of human experience and our failure to affirm the universal qualities of creative personal expression, further ties together his writing in these distinct areas of inquiry. The premise of this chapter is that a greater appreciation of the power of aesthetic sensibility to contribute significantly to educational reform

68

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

is warranted, and Rancière’s work can serve as a useful guide in analyzing the possibilities and limits of this claim. The general notion that the creation, expression, and distribution of the artistic has political significance is certainly not a new one, and was discussed at length in the writings of Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno during the earlier half of the twentieth century. The comments of Benjamin and Adorno, in particular, foreshadowed more contemporary discussions involving the commodification of artistic products as an affectation of globalization. Today, theoreticians such as Jeremy Gilbert, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri view the sharing of aesthetic sensibility as one mode of creating community, if only on a contingent basis, in response to the atomization that some globalization tendencies actively promote. One would expect that this literature would hold salience for educational scholars and practitioners, given the nature of the modern school and its relationship to the community and the state, and our evolving understandings of the globalization forces that are affecting educational policy and practice. Sadly, with few exceptions, the power of the insights of these thinkers has received little attention within conventional educational literature. This is true with particular regard to what a refocus upon the “sensible” might mean within a conventional school setting and what the possible implications might portend for our understanding of schooling and inequality. This aim of this chapter is to reexamine the connection between aesthetics and politics within a global educational context by highlighting a few case study examples that aim to counter educational policy shortcomings, with respect to their neoliberal effects upon classroom practice and school organizational structure. In making this case, I  will first review the theoretical literature linking the aesthetic and the political in more detail and will then examine how conventional educational policies marginalize the importance of an aesthetic perspective. I  will then discuss two global movements that have embraced the use of music as a vehicle for educational reform, the El Sistema movement and Playing for Change Foundation, and one individual case that does so on a smaller scale, the Blues Kids Foundation in Chicago. The cases that will be profiled lead to an examination of larger questions involving the nature of the relationship between schooling and inequality and the challenges of employing a “soft cosmopolitanism” approach as a means of ameliorating the reproduction of inequality. Such an approach embraces the power of affect as a means of furthering social justice aims within educational settings. Specifically, the importance of intensity of encounter,



The Aesthetic Turn

69

assemblage, and meaning-making help us understand why the “aesthetic turn” is so powerful.

Rancière on Education, Sensibility, Aesthetics, and Politics In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991) Jacques Rancière recounts the story of French teacher Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot was exiled from France after the Bourbon Restoration in 1815 and sent to Belgium where, in subsequent years, he embarked upon a career of teaching Flemish students who knew no French. As Jacotot did not speak Flemish, issues of translation and pedagogical authority were implicitly embedded in his new situation. His solution was to give his students a bilingual edition of Telemaque (a utopian novel recounting the Telemachus story), and have them learn the French version with the help of the translation. When they finished half of the book, their task was, through repetition, to reread this portion of the text until they could recite it solely in French. Later, when asked to write in French what they had learned, the students managed on their own to perform exceptionally well, writing commentaries that equaled or exceeded the quality of native French speakers (1–2). In deriving lessons learned from this story, Rancière uses the expression, “Everything is everything,” whereby he asserts that “the power of the tautology is that of equality, the power that searches for the finger of intelligence in every human work” (41). Prevailing beliefs in the inherency of intellectual inequality harm both the student and the teacher. The student becomes predisposed to rationalize one’s feelings of inferiority that lead to a lack of will to investigate and explore. The teacher justifies one’s pedagogical authority with a belief in the exclusive superiority of one’s own intelligence (40). Rancière views neither of these positions as being intellectually defensible. Instead, he constructs a notion of “universal teaching” that includes two important principles. First, of central importance to the Jacotot story is its affirmation of the process of translation as a means of discovering what is accurate. In distinguishing between the concept of veracity, which implies a process of fluid examination and discovery, as opposed to truth, which he defines as certainty, Rancière sees translation as a mode whereby the will to seek understanding can be effectively realized. He states, It remains that thought must be spoken, manifested in works communicated to other thinking beings. This must be done by way of languages with arbitrary

70

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse significations. One mustn’t see in this an obstacle to communication. Only the lazy are afraid of the idea of arbitrariness and see in it reason’s tomb. On the contrary. It is because there is no code given by divinity, no language of languages, that human intelligence employs all its art to making itself understood and to understanding what the neighboring intelligence is signifying. Thought is not told in truth; it is expressed in veracity. It is divided, it is told, it is translated for someone else, who will make of it another tale, another translation, on one condition:  the will to communicate, the will to figure out what the other is thinking, and this under no guarantee beyond his narration, no universal dictionary to dictate what must be understood. Will figures out will. It is in this common effort that the definition of man as a will served by an intelligence takes on its meaning. (62)

A second principle that Rancière invokes is the connection between artistic expression and collective liberation, as the arts become for Rancière a medium for engaging in the translation process described above. As he notes, We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence. It would only know minds in action: people who do, people who speak about what they are doing, and who thus transform all of their works into ways of demonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone. Such people would know that no one is born with more intelligence than his neighbor, that the superiority that someone might manifest is only the fruit of as tenacious an application to working with words as another might show to working with tool; that the inferiority of someone else is the consequence of circumstances that didn’t compel him to work harder. In short, they would know that the perfection someone directs toward his own art is no more than the particular application of the power common to all reasonable beings, the one that each person feels when he withdraws into the privacy of consciousness where lying makes no sense. They would know that man’s dignity is independent of his position … that the reflection of feeling that shines in the eyes of a wife, a son, or a dear friend presents to the gaze of a sensitive enough soul adequate satisfaction. (71)

Rancière’s views regarding the relationship between aesthetics and politics extend this discussion to a broader focus upon the ways in which modernist paradigms serve to limit the possibilities for participation in the politics that are embedded in daily life, while also decoupling the meaning of artistic expression from communal life. They thus limit the possibilities for realizing the utopian version of society expressed in the above quote. It is his contention that there is a



The Aesthetic Turn

71

“distribution of the sensible” or “a system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Rancière and Rockhill 2015:  7). Processes of distribution define what people have in common but also create exclusive spaces determining who can participate in government and more fundamentally, “who can have a share in what is common to the community based upon what they do and on the time and space in which the activity is performed” (8). The criteria upon which such spaces are defined, and the exclusionary practices that are employed are modernist in their design; the worthiness and value of one’s contributions to the community are defined according to a prescribed assessment of the importance of one’s work, social position, education, and so on, compared, assessed, and measured in the name of progress. But the process of carving out social space that excludes some from participation in the politics of communal engagement is also visible in the way in which art is conceived. Rancière views artistic practice as an essential form of human activity and rejects views that separate artistic work from other forms of labor. Instead, engaging in the creation of art necessitates reimagining and “redistributing the sensible.” The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is less the discovery of the essence of human activity than a re-composition of the landscape of the visible, a re-composition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying. Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities. (Rancière and Rockhill 2015: 42)

Yet the assertion that the pursuit of the aesthetic should be viewed separate from common activities including work, and social and community engagement, is quite prevalent and is only occasionally contested. The school, constructed as a quintessentially modernist institution, does its part to separate students’ exploration of the arts into the elective realm, apart from those curricular domains viewed as foundational or essentialist. In the United States and in much of the world, focused study in the arts is relegated to specialized schools or afterschool programs where their mission is expressed in ways that define aesthetic engagement in the narrowest of terms. It is not coincidental that schools are also expected to communicate to children and youth the boundaries and limits under which their citizenship responsibilities and levels of “appropriate” political engagement are defined. It thus is important that the theoretical

72

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

discussions regarding the politics of aesthetics be noted when considering the larger questions involving educational policy and practice, school structure and organization, and their relationship to economic and social inequality. However, a fuller appreciation of Rancière’s claims cannot be realized without examining the importance of aesthetic practice within globalized contexts, as those contexts have also influenced contemporary educational practice.

The Frankfurt School and Beyond There have been few scholars whose theoretical insights into the relationship between art and politics were more trenchant than that of Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno, the latter two being closely associated with the Frankfurt School, with all three contributing to the development of twentieth-century Western Marxism (Adorno et al. 2007). As cultural critics, they tackled questions involving the relationship between art, work, and politics in ways that continue to have contemporary resonance. Georg Lukacs, for example, wrote convincingly of the development of the novel as a bourgeois endeavor, with its structure promoting character autonomy and interiority, quintessentially modern capitalist values. Efforts in the early twentieth century to promote artistic innovation were expressed through support of the avant garde. But whether manifested in surrealism, Dadaism, or within the musical context of atonality, these efforts failed to challenge the legitimacy of modernism at its core in spite of their surface-level oppositional stance to prevailing convention. Artists who embraced the avant garde, and in so doing proclaimed their individual autonomy and independence from accepted artistic principles, actually reaffirmed modernist beliefs. Their argument favored the same separation of the aesthetic from the political that was true of artistic movements in previous centuries. Lukacs’s response was to call for a politics of aesthetic practice that reflected the social reality of class conflict, in a sense reiterating the importance of decoding the base/superstructure relationship as an essential component of Western Marxism (Lukacs 2007: 28–59). He believed that the connection between aesthetics and politics should be one where art characterizes the prevailing contradictions within capitalism, while promoting alternatives that affirm socialist principles. Theodor Adorno, in critiquing Lukacs’s analysis, noted that according to this view, the purpose of art becomes no more than constructing a fixed representational imagery of a preexisting object whose meaning is never contested. It ceases to be a creative force but



The Aesthetic Turn

73

instead devolves into mechanical representation (Adorno 2007b:  151–76). Indeed, since conventional Western Marxism was itself a variant of modernism, the challenge for cultural critics sympathetic to the Marxist tradition has been to envision artistic practice that can be truly revolutionary by constructing new aesthetic sensibilities rather than reiterating prevailing ones. Enamored with the incorporation of technology in the service of the aesthetic, Walter Benjamin viewed newer forms of artistic production that were based upon technological advancement, such as film, as having the potential to truly empower the masses. Borrowing from Baudelaire’s notion of the “flâneur,” or “passionate spectator,” Benjamin viewed all of us as twentiethcentury flâneurs, able to exercise a degree of agency in identifying the meaning behind artistic products that circulate as consumptive objects (Benjamin 2002). He was very much aware of the social distinctions made within the art world that distinguished artistic purity from craftsmanship and favored encounters with idealized form as opposed to application. In addition, Benjamin certainly understood the role of globalized mass consumption in influencing artistic production. But in confronting the challenges posed by these aesthetic practices, he placed his faith in the power of the individual to discern the representational meaning of objects subject to cultural production and exchange. In so doing, one could then determine the conditions whereby modern capitalism was embodied or subverted. As Hannah Arendt noted, Benjamin had a passion for small, even minute things. . . . For him the size of an object was in an inverse ration to its significance. And this passion, far from being a whim, derived directly from the only world view that had ever a decisive influence on him, from Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which “significance” (Bedeutung, the most Goethen of words, keeps recurring in Benjamin’s writings) and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide. The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form of everything else. (2007: 11–12)

For critics like Adorno, Benjamin’s faith that exposure to artistic forms with mass appeal would encourage audiences to exercise agency in their role of the flâneur were overstated. He additionally criticized Benjamin’s characterization of the relationship between consumer and cultural object decipherer as being static and rigid (Adorno 2007a:  110–33). Although the debates between these scholars may appear to be overly theoretical and esoteric, reflecting an

74

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

early twentieth-century context that is no longer relevant, they are crucially important to our understanding of the politics of aesthetics and the possibility that artistic engagement can help address educational inequality. Simply put, Rancière’s vision linking artistic expression with collective liberation cannot be adequately contextualized and evaluated if the aesthetic process fails to subvert the conventional scripts we follow that order our sensibilities. The ways we interact with and give meaning to the cultural objects we possess, exchange, and interact with speaks to the power of the aesthetic process. Thus, the debates that Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno conducted regarding the fundamental nature and purpose of aesthetic practice do have contemporary salience. Furthermore, a fuller understanding of contemporary globalization tendencies demands that we confront the ways in which consumption patterns (including those involving cultural objects) affect our decision-making, our life choices, and our identities. The contributions of the twentieth-century scholars to whom we have referenced began this discussion.

Globalization, Neoliberalism, Education, and the Aesthetic Turn Contemporary globalization theorists are divided with regard to what globalization means and how it affects individual and collective agency. Globalization theorists such as Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman have emphasized the uncertainty that globalization invites, particularly because of the fluidity of global flows, the disruptive nature of financial policies that invite risk and reify consumption, and the general erosion of temporal and spatial fixed categories. For Beck, negotiating such uncertainty demands making accommodations that acknowledge the inevitability in confronting risk in one’s daily life (Beck 1992). For Bauman, the personalized nature of the ways in which we relate to consumable objects speaks of our need to exercise a sense of bodily agency in response to the lack of control we perceive around us. According to this view, we equate the worth of the object we possess, exchange, and consume, with our personhood (Bauman 2012). This is indicative of our compliance with, rather than resistance to, a set of forces that are externally reshaping our personal identity in ways that are often alienating. Associating one’s personhood with the objects one comes to possess as a part of their globalized circulation is a response to the alienation globalization creates.



The Aesthetic Turn

75

A contrasting view, shared by theorists such as Appadurai (2010), is one that affirms the possibilities for redefining how cultural objects are represented through the processes of exchange and reappropriation. Appadurai points to the ways in which the original meanings associated with cultural practices and objects, be they the cricket game or the fashion show, are reconfigured by non-Western subjects in ways that speak to their own sensibilities. For further confirmation of the elasticity with which global cultural flows develop and change, one can also note the expanding global popularity of various cuisines and their fusion with regional tastes, or note ways in which musical forms such as hip hop or Afro-Latin rhythms are retransformed by artists and audiences from different cultures and regions. The representational meaning of the cultural object is embedded in the way in which it is produced, exchanged, and shared. Thus, while some may think of globalization forces as being alienating and isolating, aesthetic practice, even in contemporary global settings, involves a sharing that is inherently social. It offers an explicit alternative to the atomization that globalization critics deride. Nonetheless, the challenges implicit in creating a politics of aesthetics that affirms the values of participatory social democracy are daunting when one examines the global influence of neoliberalism. To be clear, as was noted in the introductory chapter, neoliberalism and globalization are not synonymous; the former is only one element of the latter. But the values its proponents espouse— an uncritical affirmation of individualism; the importance of competition and the ensuing categorization of persons as winners or losers based upon the terms of that competition; the implementation of policies and state regulations that favor the privileged under the guise of being neutral; and the tendency to applaud these principles for their universality and inevitability—have been widely disseminated and are only sporadically contested. They are certainly present within modernist organizations such as schools with their graded curriculum, testing regimes based upon achievement criteria that invoke competition but are deemed inherently meritocratic, and their bureaucratic, rule governing regulations that seek to control behavior in the name of accountability. But as Hardt and Negri (2009) argue, globalization forces including those of neoliberalism have also created a recognition of a “common world,” “a world that we all share” (vii) and can change through committing to a process of producing subjectivity. They go on to note: A democracy of the multitude is imaginable and possible only because we all share and participate in the common. By the “common” we mean, first of all, the

76

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse common wealth of the material world-the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty=which in classic European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. We consider the common also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. (viii) The ultimate core of bio political production, we can see stepping back to a higher level of abstraction, is not the production of objects for subjects, as commodity production is often understood but the production of subjectivity itself. This is the terrain from which our ethical and political project must set out . . . A key scene of political action today . . . involves the struggle over the control or autonomy of the production of subjectivity. (x)

Jeremy Gilbert, in the spirit of Hardt and Negri, further applies the implications of their thinking to social institutions, including schools, stating that Political and social institutions should be judged at least partially in terms of their creativity, which is to say in terms of the extent to which they facilitate the expression of the creative potential which is implicit in any set of social relations. How far do schools enable collaborations between students and teachers to develop new and innovative forms of learning and knowledge? How far do clinics enable patients and doctors to find innovative ways of improving public health? How far do broadcasters and other cultural institutions enable genuinely new ways of thinking and feeling to emerge? These would be the criteria for judging political institutions according to this logic: as opposed to the neoliberal managerialist demand that such institutions be judged in terms of their ability to meet a predetermined set of “targets,” or the conservative communitarian demand that they enable given communities merely to remain exactly what they already are, these democratic criteria would ask how far they enable any given collectivity to explore its own potential. (2014: 168)

Critics of this view would argue that regardless of the form and structure of the modern school, measurable educational outcomes matter, particularly when they involve ameliorating poverty, unemployment, street violence, and other forms of social dislocation. Whatever its faults, the modern school offers the best opportunity to promote social mobility and address economic and social inequality. They would further state that the argument presented in this chapter, regarding the importance of affirming aesthetic sensibility as a means of creating an alternative to neoliberalism’s claims, is at best overly idealistic, and at its worst, myopic. Such criticism certainly deserves a response if a further exploration of the relationship between aesthetic sensibility and education is warranted.



The Aesthetic Turn

77

Proponents of a politics that embraces the notion of the “common” as an antidote to neoliberalism’s individualism, to be realized through an embrace of aesthetic sensibility, first question the narrow way in which we define poverty. To be sure, poverty denotes a set of material conditions that repeatedly intrude upon one’s efforts to maintain the necessary sustenance to survive in the face of hunger, illness, lack of shelter, and so on. But as was inferred in the introductory chapter to this work when referencing the capabilities approach to international development, the state of poverty should also be viewed as encompassing a severe restriction of human potentiality, denying the poor of the means to strive toward achieving possibility. In echoing Gilbert’s more general comments noted above, Hardt and Negri state, The poor was a widespread political concept in Europe, at least from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, but although we will do our best to learn from some of those histories, we are more interested in what the poor have become today. Thinking in terms of poverty has the healthy effect, first of all, of questioning traditional class designations, and forcing us to investigate with fresh eyes how class composition has changed and look at people’s wide range of productive activities inside and outside wage relations. Seen in this way, second, the poor is defined not by lack but possibility. The poor migrants, and “precarious” workers (that is, those without stable employment) are often conceived as excluded, but really though subordinated, they are completely within the global rhythms of bio-political production. Economic statistics can grasp the conditions of poverty in negative terms but not the forms of life, languages, movements, or capacities for innovation they generate. Our challenge will be to find ways to translate the productivity and possibility of the poor into power. (2009: xi)

In the United States, since the 1960s, culture of poverty proponents have demonized the poor repeatedly as being responsible for the oppression that they are forced to confront. Advocates of neoliberal policies have fueled this attitude as it rationalizes the dramatic shift in capital from the working and middle classes to the affluent. However, schools also promote an achievement ideology that inculcates a sense of student individual failure as children are blamed for their own lack of academic success. The poor, conservative voices claim, are unwilling to work and gladly take public funds from those who are more deserving by virtue of their better economic position. Student failure is similarly rationalized. Students don’t succeed in school because of their laziness, inherent lack of ability, and so on. Both neoliberal perspectives vilify their subjects in ways that assault their dignity and self-worth. Originally published in 1972, Sennett and Cobb’s

78

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

The Hidden Injuries of Class (1993) noted how the internalization of the failure of one’s cognitive and academic ability becomes instrumental in defining views of one’s own class position in relation to others, and how it dampens aspiration and intellectual self-worth. Their findings are no less relevant today, nearly five decades after they were first disseminated. A second issue involves the way in which neoliberal advocates have framed the school/inequality relationship in their own interests. There is a narrow focus upon educational policy reform without conceding how detrimental other public and social policies have been in decimating communities and neighborhoods. In the areas of housing and employment discrimination, juvenile and criminal justice practices, disparate allocation of public resources, tax policy, and so on, there certainly is evidence for complicity in the perpetuation of the material conditions that one associates with poverty. A singular critique of educational policy, while politically popular, encourages the unfairness of policies in these other sectors to be propagated without being subjected to deserved scrutiny. Parenthetically, it is important to note that the work of Pauline Lipman, in referencing the implementation of neoliberal urban policies in Chicago, is a significant counterexample to the trend (Lipman 2011). In examining the education/inequality relationship, I  think it important to review the different forms of social justice that characterize this dynamic:  procedural, distributive, and justice as recognition. Within an educational context, issues of procedural justice could involve the unfairness of testing and tracking policies, zero tolerance regulations involving student misbehavior, the inconsistent application of special education labels and categories, and so on. Distributive justice concerns might include unequal funding mechanisms that privilege wealthier school districts, the lack of available resources for curricular materials, inadequate teacher pay, substandard building maintenance, and so on. But it is the concept of justice as recognition that lays the necessary foundation for a redress of injustice in the other two domains. If student, parent, and community needs and aspirations are not acknowledged, there is no plausible avenue for successfully addressing the other social justice concerns. Within a larger frame of reference, Nancy Fraser (2010) has noted that all theories of justice “must become three dimensional, incorporating the political dimension of representation alongside the economic dimension of distribution and the cultural dimension of recognition” (15). The central question of this chapter is whether the implementation of an aesthetics-based perspective can speak to the need for justice as recognition on global and local levels. Three initiatives are analyzed in an effort to answer



The Aesthetic Turn

79

this question:  El Sistema, which originated in Venezuela and has grown into an international movement; the US-based Playing for Change Foundation, which originated in the United States, but has sponsored educational initiatives throughout the world; and the Blues Kids Foundation in Chicago. Whatever the strengths and limitations that these programs might be, their existence speaks to the fear that conventional school policies and structures are unable to support the creative potential of their students and to treat them with a degree of dignity that recognizes the legitimacy of their aspirations.

El Sistema On February 12, 1975, José Antonio Abreu, a classically trained musician and member of the Venezuelan government, gathered eleven youth of disparate backgrounds in a Caracas parking garage under the promise of creating a renowned orchestra. After their initial meeting, they brought their friends and with word of mouth, a youth orchestra of seventy members was formed, performing a public concert on April 30 (Tunstall and Booth 2016:  4–5). Eventually, a national youth orchestra was created (which ultimately became the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra) and as a result, the impetus to develop ensembles throughout the country evolved into what is now known as El Sistema, an expansive initiative promoting the teaching music in an ensemble setting for economically underprivileged children and youth (7). El Sistema thus became a source of national pride in Venezuela and at least until recently, when the country’s economic circumstances became catastrophic, maintained significant public support (15). The mission of El Sistema was one of encouraging youth and children to learn music together, and in so doing, to build self-esteem, confidence, self-discipline, and peer support, attributes that translate to academic success along with life lessons that can be applied in a variety of situations. The mission thus did not involve training children and youth to become professional musicians, although many of its alumni have gained widespread acclaim, the most famous being Gustavo Dudamel, the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The foundation for the El Sistema program in Venezuela was the nucleo, or neighborhood center, which can be a warehouse, garage, or other like-minded facility. Children and youth practice three to four hours a week after school for six days a week. The nucleo experiences formed the base of a pyramid, as the children and youth learn to regularly perform, with many graduating to

80

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

participate in youth orchestras or other musical groups. At least until a few years ago, there were 423 nucleos in Venezuela’s 23 states that supported 1,305 orchestras and 1,121 choirs; 80  percent of the 128 municipalities designated by the government as high risk included nucleos (Tunstall and Booth 2016: 8). As of 2018, 400,000 children and youth participated in the program but the El Sistema model has indeed become globalized and as of 2018, there were Sistemainspired programs in over 60 countries with approximately one million children participating (Sistema Global 2018). Tunstall and Booth (2016) identify a number of key attributes that characterized El Sistema programs. First, they note that from its start, there was a commitment to what they label “radical inclusivity,” or the belief that all children, regardless of their musical ability, should be encouraged to participate in an ensemble. The authors describe one program that included special needs students (90–7), another that included incarcerated individuals (16–17). But regardless of the specific configuration of the project, there is the view that children of youth of varying musical abilities, ages, and experiences can come together and make music. As a result, a second characteristic emblematic of El Sistema programs was that they relied upon a high degree of peer tutoring and peer support. Because it was unrealistic for instructors to give excessive individual attention to each student, peer support, where more advanced students helped their less accomplished ones, was essential, if the goal of inclusivity is to be realized. Of crucial importance was the understanding that musical training should occur within an ensemble setting and rather than have students practice individually before being placed in the ensemble, the aim was that their musical development is fostered through collective interaction. The ensemble is viewed as a bonding force, so that the learning that is fostered is intrinsically shared. There are numerous stories of students assisting and comforting one another such as that depicted by Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the famous conductor, who witnessed a youth symphony concert in Caracas where a clarinet player mistakenly played an extra note at the beginning of a piece. The conductor started over a few times but the student continued to make the mistake throwing off the entire orchestra. Eventually, the conductor had the orchestra play on and eventually everyone got on the same page. Afterward, the clarinet player received emotional hugs and visible support from his fellow players, an act of generosity uncommon among professional and aspiring professional musicians (Bernstein 2017). Tunstall and Booth also note that there was a high level of intensity that characterized the expected degree of participation in El Sistema programs. The rigorous practice schedule that was emblematic of the first ensemble that



The Aesthetic Turn

81

José Abreu compiled has been emulated as a key element in the structuring of contemporary ensembles. Requiring students to make a concerted commitment to the program was viewed as being not only pedagogically necessary but important in building comradery within the ensemble setting (Tunstall and Booth 2016:  168–94). The intensity of commitment that was expected from participants was supported by were expansive performance schedules that complement after school practice times. In fact, the scheduling of regular public performances was itself motivational, as it reiterated to students the connection between practice and performance (162–5). The aspirations for student musical achievement were high, and the pattern of scheduling numerous performances reiterated the significance of those aspirations. There was a general expectation that family and community members be involved in El Sistema programs; the ensemble was viewed as itself replicating a sense of community and community pride through its accomplishments (Tunstall and Booth 2016:  217–40). And, as the US El Sistema website notes, there is an expectation that teachers play the roles of citizen/artist/teacher/ scholars, in support of the social justice mission of the movement, giving lessons and workshops in schools while working actively in the local community (El Sistema USA 2018). The Tunstall and Booth depiction of El Sistema comports with a largely positive view of the movement, accentuated by the numerous international awards and accolades its founder, José Abreu, received, along with the success of musicians such as Dudamel and other prominent conductors and artists. However, the movement has its critics, Geoffrey Baker (2014) being among the most trenchant. For example, Baker criticized the classical music approach that defines El Sistema programming, wondering whether its adoption within the Venezuelan setting reifies the privileging of Western cultural colonialism to the detriment of indigenous and folk musical traditions. Tunstall and Booth report that there were efforts to expand El Sistema programming to address the criticism, but the assumption that the Western classical tradition has implicit universalist appeal and merit is one that can be questioned. Baker further questions the role of the orchestra ensemble, as a structure that fosters community, peer sharing, and collective support. Most orchestras are not organized in an egalitarian fashion, given the traditional role of the conductor, and even though there is abundant anecdotal evidence to suggest that Jamie Bernstein’s concert experience is not exceptional, it is questionable whether the creation of community among the children and youth is consistently achieved, given the nature of the ensemble structure.

82

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

This concern raises the larger question regarding the tension between students’ experiencing the pleasure of engaging in performance and the pressure of playing well. On the one hand, the numerous public performances that are arranged do allow students to learn as they perform, and their audiences are affirming of their efforts, in spite of glaring musical errors that may be apparent. On the other hand, the rigorous daily practice schedules and the pressure to create musical excellence (intensified through the success stories of internationally acclaimed graduates from El Sistema programs) can create pressure that is antithetical to the building of confidence and self-esteem. The role of José Abreu is also controversial. El Sistema was started in 1975 when Abreu was an official in the center-right national government. He was able to maintain the support of the subsequent Chávez and Maduro regimes by emphasizing its social justice orientation as being fundamental to its mission. However, that emphasis certainly became more pronounced with the ascension of the Chávez government. The lack of criticism that Abreu and notable El Sistema graduates offered with respect to the authoritarian tendencies of the Chávez and Maduro governments further raises questions about the principled nature of the program’s commitment to social justice. Perhaps more importantly, not only was El Sistema a product of Abreu’s vision, but he exercised enormous influence and control in managing the programs under the El Sistema brand with little oversight. Instructor complaints regarding working conditions and favoritism have been documented. More recently, in response to the growing authoritarianism of the Maduro government, there have been increased calls for El Sistema members and affiliates to speak out against government brutality. On May 3, 2017, El Sistema member Armando Cañizales was killed in an anti-government protest, and although there was initial widespread criticism of the government, including musician protests and a public statement of censure by Gustavo Dudamel, such resistance has been short-lived (The Conversation 2017). Abreu passed away on March 24, 2018, and it remains questionable as to whether his successors will be able to negotiate a space for El Sistema that balances pressures to promote the government’s political agenda as a result of its international visibility while maintaining its social justice mission. One of Baker’s most important criticisms, however, is that there have been few good research studies that support many of the claims made on behalf of El Sistema programs. Is it really the case that the learning and dispositional growth with which students engage in the musical ensemble transfers to formal classroom behavior and academic achievement? Why does the extensive



The Aesthetic Turn

83

after-school commitment to El Sistema programming complement rather than clash with engagement with the school curriculum? What percentage of students from impoverished backgrounds actually have participated in ensembles and what percentage of the students have come from middle-class backgrounds? What percentage of the participants stayed in the program after they initially join? What are the factors determining whether participants stayed or left? Certainly, the claims that are made for the benefits of El Sistema programming deserve more empirical verification. But that fact in a sense reiterates how impressive its worldwide embrace has been, in spite of a lack of concrete evidence pointing to the effectiveness of its messaging. The significance of El Sistema as a positive learning and developmental tool for children and youth makes intuitive sense for so many population groups, because it is so easy to recognize the universal role of music in touching our sensibilities.

Playing for Change Foundation In 2002, North American record producer Mark Johnson and philanthropist Wendy Kroenke had the idea of traveling around the world to document the work of street musicians. Their documentary, “A Cinematic Discovery of Street Musicians,” was a result of this vision. In 2005, Mark Johnson heard local street musician Roger Ridley perform the Jerry Lieber/Mike Stoler/Ben E. King rock n’ roll standard, “Stand By Me,” on the Santa Monica California promenade. They then enlisted his cooperation in making a “Song around the World” video, whereby Ridley and other street musicians around the world recorded singing segments of the same song. The video went viral and has now been viewed on YouTube by over 100 million people. Its success led to the creation of more “Songs around the World,” a Playing for Change touring band, and the distribution of CDs, memorabilia, and so on. In 2007, a Foundation was created, funded by 20 percent of the profits of merchandise, membership subscriptions, and band touring proceedings. In 2008–9, the Playing for Change Foundation was officially incorporated (Karki 2017; Playing for Change Foundation 2017). As the filmmakers traveled around the world making videos, they heard that the musicians with whom they worked and members of local communities where they filmed were pushing for the creation of more local music schools. The first school to be created as a result of these efforts was situated in the Gugulethu Township outside of Cape Town, South Africa. Today, there are fourteen music education initiatives that have been funded by the Foundation in Africa, Latin

84

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

America, and Asia. Some historical background regarding the creation and evolution of a few of them is instructive. When filmmakers traveled to South Africa and met musician Pokei Klaas, he lobbied for the building of a music school in Gugulethu Township as a way of partially ameliorating the effects of the violence and its impact upon local youth that was rampant in postapartheid South Africa. The school that was constructed from 2009 to 2010 was built on Klass’s own property without any formalized arrangement with local educational authorities. Conceived as a space to provide an escape from the daily challenges the children and youth confronted, music, including jazz, was taught to students after school and all day on weekends. Their regular school attendance was difficult to discern; the perception was that most of the younger students were attending public school, but this was not necessarily true for the older students. Those who came to the music school tended to live in close proximity to the school grounds and heard of its programming through word of mouth. Teachers were selected by Klass and community members; they included teaching artists, some of whom were professional musicians. The majority had experience working with children, but they included licensed music teachers as well as a couple of teachers well connected with the community. The musicians were primarily involved in offering workshops. From the start, the school was designed to have a music focus with perhaps some life skills also being taught. It housed anywhere from 50 to 100 children aged 7–18. There was a focus upon performance as students were taught to read music and studied music theory while playing jazz-based instruments and participating in popular ensembles. The Foundation assisted in paying for the costs of instruments and their replacement costs, later soliciting community support for school resources. Eventually, the initiative was transformed into a series of transitional after school and weekend programming at four separate public schools within the township. Under new leadership, more instruments including marimbas were purchased; there has been a desire for a more interdisciplinary curricular focus and for music education to become part of the formal curriculum of the public schools, but this goal has yet to be realized (Karki 2017; Playing for Change Foundation 2017). The Bizung School of Music and Dance, located in Tamale, Ghana, was established in 2010 under the initiative of Mohammed Alidu, a member of the Playing for Change Band. Courses are offered in drumming, xylophone, gonje, keyboard, vocals, and guitar, and as there are no other free tuition schools of any kind in the area, many of the students attending the Bizung School are attending school for the first time. Some of the children work at home and others work



The Aesthetic Turn

85

to help their families in their spare time. As a result, parents and community members have had to be convinced of the importance of supporting a music school. Although initially more boys than girls attended the school, the ratios are now equal with some programs enrolling more girls than boys. As the school has expanded, a music studio has been operationalized allowing students to learn how to use recording equipment and software (Karki 2017; Playing for Change Foundation 2017). L’Ecole de musique de Kirina was created from the ground up in the village of Kirina, in Mali, under the leadership of Mahamadou Diabaté, an accomplished musician and brother of Toumani Diabaté, a Grammy award winning kora player. The school was built with the assistance of donors in an area where there was no electricity, running water, or plumbing. The school serves over 200 children and offers classes four days a week in the afternoons, on an afterschool and evening basis. In addition to musical training, including the study of kora, djembe, balafon, dance, and tamba, French, English, math, and science are subjects that are also taught in the evening with the assistance of teachers from the local public school. Well-known musicians have come and visited the school as the village has a strong musical heritage that dates back to the thirteenth century; the Griot inhabitants of the village are known as gatekeepers of Mali’s oral and cultural traditions. The Playing for Change Foundation has assisted in the construction of a village solar pump and cistern, which has allowed for clean water to be provided to the community (Karki 2017; Playing for Change Foundation 2017). In Nepal, the Tintale Village Mothers’ Society enlisted the Foundation’s support to use dance, music education, storytelling and performance, as vehicles for teaching young girls about the dangers of human trafficking as well as related women’s issues. The collective is located in an area near the Indian border where much of the trafficking involving Nepalese girls and women occurs (Karki 2017; Playing for Change Foundation 2017). As these anecdotes indicate, the Playing for Change Foundation has worked to support traditional music and the arts through community engagement. Although it has supported stand-alone schools, there has also been a concerted effort to collaborate more closely with existing schools and create program partners with them. There is an awareness that one has to be more strategic in the planning process and defer from making commitments in areas that are too risky or the community connections are not yet strong enough to benefit from the initiation of a specific set of programs. Finding good community partners is thus an essential requirement before establishing a new program. The Foundation’s

86

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

success can be seen in its growing sponsorship of musical programs that touch upon community needs and social justice concerns, as the fourteen programs it sponsors are situated on three continents, Africa, Asia, and South America. UNICEF funding has further supported this expansion to a point whereby over a thousand children attend free weekly classes with over 16,000 children having been helped in since the Foundation’s inception (Karki 2017). Although it is not part of the Foundation itself, in 2011, Playing for Change established Playing for Change Day, with the purpose of “uniting the global community through music.” The idea is to have musicians from around the world gather to perform in various venues for the purpose of bringing music to youth. In 2016, over 200 events were held in 48 different countries with funds being gathered for the distribution of instruments and music instruction. It is not coincidental that the event is held close to the regular scheduling of the United Nations International Day of Peace (Playing for Change Foundation 2017).

Blues Kids Foundation In 1988, a substitute teacher with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) decided to bring his guitar to class to better connect with disengaged students. He recognized that as this generation was conversant with musical forms that were largely preprogrammed and digitally generated, their introduction to live performance could be eye-opening, especially when the genre to which they were exposed was the blues. Fernando Jones, who already was an accomplished blues artist, in continuing to work directly with students in subsequent years, gave concerts in schools, and offered in-service and professional development workshops to teachers, explaining how engagement with the blues could be used in a variety of settings to enhance student learning. In writing about his own pedagogical orientation, Jones noted the importance of creating sessions where a regular routine such as call and response is initiated, age-appropriate songs are selected, historical connections are made between contemporary music and its antecedents, interdisciplinary connections with other subject matter areas are emphasized, and classroom culture is connected with performance culture (Jones 2009a; Jones 2009b:  1–12). Today, the “Fernando Jones and My Band” group continues to perform before CPS students, regularly visiting three or so schools a year.



The Aesthetic Turn

87

Jones, who is a member of the Columbia College faculty, has also created a Blues Kids Foundation to further support his efforts and has obtained assistance from partners including the Mary Barnes Donnelley Family Foundation, Microsemi, the LeFort-Martin Fund, Columbia College, Jim Dunlop USA, the Chicago Federation of Musicians, and the Tokyo School of Music and Dance. The Foundation is responsible for underwriting the Fernando Jones’s Blues Camp, a series of camps that began in 2010 and are held for youth aged twelve to eighteen (occasionally some are younger than twelve) who are interested in learning how to play the blues. Interested participants submit an audition tape, and if selected, receive a tuition-free scholarship of $1,500–$2,500 to attend one of a number of camps that are held in Chicago, Nashville, Miami, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and London. Each camp lasts from three to five days with the Chicago camp offering the most extensive experience. Camp instructors in addition to Jones have included members of his band (Grammy award-nominated bassist Felton Crews, drummers Patrick McFowler and Quincy Cochran), Columbia College faculty (Gary Yerkins and Frank Donaldson), as well as alumni from previous camps. Noted recording artist Jackie Scott leads a team offering administrative support (Jones 2017). Approximately 100 students attend the Chicago camp (the other camps have twenty to thirty students each), and upon their arrival, they are immediately placed into beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels, where they then form musical ensemble bands with seven to twelve members per ensemble. Instruction is offered in the areas of music literacy (playing by ear and reading chord and tab charts), music history (examining the historical and sociological factors involved in the development of the blues), understanding blues patterns (call and response, eight- and twelve-bar blues), learning vocal accompaniment, and developing an appreciation for digital learning and technology. Students learn about the music industry. They read Jones’s book I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot and write a paper describing their own philosophy of the blues (Blues Kids Foundation 2017). But in addition, they are given ample opportunities to perform publicly. They play a final public concert the last day of the camp, but often give performances during afternoons subsequent to the final concert. It should be noted that all forms of the blues (Chicago style, Delta Blues) are covered in the classes and that the blues are presented as a quintessentially unique American art form. Thus, all students start the day singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a blues song. As most of the camp participants have some musical training prior to their acceptance into the

88

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

camp, an emphasis upon improvisation and personal expressiveness as being endemic to the musical form is stressed (Jones 2017). The camp concept works because in spite of their prior musical backgrounds, students feel empowered to explore new avenues of creative expression. A  parent of a fourteen-yearold commented to me that her son came to the Blues Camp only wanting to play his guitar. Afterward, he told her that he wanted to sing although she had never known that he had this interest or that his voice was conducive to a public performance. Embarking upon his third summer at the camp, he decided to begin composing his own material. There are thus a large number of returnees to the camp year after year, and family members are themselves publicly supportive of the camps, participating in fundraisers and similar activities. What is most impressive, however, is the fact that a number of the students remain in contact with one another through use of the social media after the camp ends. The band members stay together, and some regularly perform locally throughout the year, in public venues. Indeed, some even perform at the annual Chicago Blues Fest that attracts an international audience. And, in the past, luminaries such as B. B. King have offered encouragement to the young musicians (Jones 2017). The model of intense instruction over a relatively short period, coupled with the space for practice and public performance, finalized through students themselves working together to master the idiom, is reflective of the pedagogy of Rancière’s French teacher Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, students are given the instructional tools that offer them the opportunity to creatively shape their sensibilities in a collaborative fashion, with a minimal amount of instructional intrusion.

Conclusion We have made four assumptions regarding the relationship between aesthetics and education in this chapter. Following the writing of Jacques Rancière, we assume that the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility is a foundational component of learning, and is central to how we make meaning in the world around us. A  second claim that Rancière makes and that we agree to, is that given the centrality of aesthetics to meaning-making, efforts to separate aesthetics from politics and to marginalize the importance of an aesthetic perspective with regard to the negotiation of daily life challenges are indefensible. Our third assumption is that although globalization pressures can create conditions that lead to alienation and fear of the loss of personal autonomy, they also create



The Aesthetic Turn

89

the possibilities for community building and collective responsibility. A  final assumption that we make is that when examining various iterations of social justice, the importance of justice as recognition is of primary importance. When applied to issues of schooling and social justice within a globalized context, we note that global educational policy promotes a modernist notion of the school with respect to organizational structure and curriculum that is at fundamental variance with these assumptions. Often, the importance of cultivating an aesthetic sensibility is marginalized in favor of neoliberal assumptions regarding the importance of competition and individual achievement. The view that encouraging students to embrace their creative potential is less important than their mastery of basic literacy and numeracy skills is common, and too often, the “modernist” school is characterized by a managerialism that is buttressed by the imposition of accountability mechanisms, not the least of which is externally constructed standardized testing. The three case studies profiled in this chapter offer an alternative educational vision. In so doing, they share a number of characteristics that reaffirm the assumptions we have described. First, the programs within the case studies emphasize the importance of shared learning. Whether it be through the ensemble or the band, music and artistic performance are defined in settings that emphasize group learning. Second, the programs emphasize performance in ways that force students to connect with others: their peers, public audiences, and community members. What makes the act of performance empowering is that it is intrinsically interpersonal. The programs we have chronicled highlight the importance of this factor and its presence is evident not only in the act of performance but in the teaching and mentoring that is supportive of the performative act. These programs also stand out for their embrace of interdisciplinarity. Although they emphasize direct engagement with music and the arts, they make a point of tying that curricular focus to other knowledge domains. The Playing for Change Foundation, for example, has embraced indigenous music and art, even though the original videos that were created highlighted Western rock n’ roll and pop music. The Blues Kids Camps make sure that students learn a variety of blues genres but also apply the blues to all types of music as a way of emphasizing the centrality of its importance. The Eurocentric classical music orientation of El Sistema perhaps represents the narrowest of the curricular orientations that have been noted, but even in this case, there is a recognition of the need to support different musical genres, although classical music remains its primary focus (Tunstall and Booth 2016: 155–62).

90

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

It is additionally clear that the cases demonstrate that making a connection between aesthetics and politics, in this instance social justice, is both natural and is a relatively easy endeavor. The importance of El Sistema lies in its targeting of disadvantaged youth in local nucleos. The Playing for Change Foundation has created schools and after-school programs in parts of the world where access to any form of schooling has been at best intermittent. And, in the Blues Kids Camp, students learn not only of the history of the blues but of its social and political significance. The programs we have surveyed are products of the globalization forces that characterize twenty-first-century life. All of these programs have benefited from the celebrities with international reputations who have embraced their mission. The programs have received various degrees of global recognition, even those that are regionally or locally based. But what is most interesting is that they have in their various iterations, embraced a sense of community and affirmed in their missions, a sense of the common good that offers oppositional resistance to the alienation and atomization some associate with globalization tendencies. That they do so through the lingua franca of music and the performing arts, is significant because of the acknowledged universality of the medium, a characteristic vividly displayed among the Playing for Change videos. In this way, these programs represent what is best about the type of “soft cosmopolitanism” that Kwame Appiah advocates. Appiah argues that awareness of the other does not necessitate the type of homogenization that some critics of globalization fear. Such awareness demands instead that the importance of cultural and ethnic diversity be reiterated, because in so doing, one necessarily realizes the similarities within all forms of human experience that draw us together (Appiah 2007). Extending oneself to become Benjamin’s twenty-first-century flâneur by embracing the cultural objects (such as music) with which one is unfamiliar is not simply an exercise in self-realization; it results in a greater appreciation for the common good. Finally, the three case studies discussed also reaffirm the importance of conceiving of justice at least in part as involving a recognition of the dignity of those who are forgotten, or are under-appreciated. Foundations such as Playing for Change or El Sistema do not eliminate the poverty and political chaos that plague certain regions in Africa or in Venezuela. Yet it is difficult to see how in the long term, social injustice will be constructively addressed if the values implicit in the mission of their programs are not shared. All of the programs express a commitment to each of their students, and in various ways affirm Rancière’s belief in the unlimited potential of all persons while also aligning with



The Aesthetic Turn

91

Gilbert’s vision of democratically responsive social institutions, operating within a globalized environment. There are important caveats that should be noted when considering these programs as models for educational reform. First, in spite of the sincerity of the efforts that underlie the strengths of these initiatives, their scale of operation pales in comparison with that of schools that are funded and administered by the state. They simply lack the aggregate resources and capacity to reach the number of students served by traditional means. Second, all of these programs lack strong procedures for assessing the quality of their performance, and there is a paucity of assessment data to collaborate their success. But these truisms underscore a more important point. In spite of these limitations, the programs we have surveyed remain wildly popular, even though their capacity is limited and the quantifiable evidence of the effectiveness of their outcomes is at best spotty. How can this be? In an era where mistrust of state-sponsored institutions is pervasive, why are these programs able to maintain their popularity? It is clear that these programs maintain community support because they make intuitive sense, because creating meaning from what is sensible is so fundamental to human experience, and these programs affirm that realization. Their popularity is not unlike that accorded Freirian consciousness raising in the 1970s and afterward, both speaking to a humanistic set of values that are easy to embrace. These cases do raise important questions about the larger nature of global educational reform. The fact that the programs surveyed largely were constructed outside of the state-sponsored school setting is instructive. We view their presence as at least in part indicative of a lack of faith in the ethos of the modernist school, as supporters of these programs view children’s learning experiences as being not only more authentic and substantive but antithetical to its values. Their popularity thus speaks as much to the failure of the modernist school to capture a collective imagination in a globalized world as it does to their intrinsic merit. It is also true that the four attributes of affect theory that have been emphasized in this project—intensity of encounter, meaning-making, assemblage, and contingency—are salient to our understanding of the forms of aesthetic engagement highlighted here. The intensities of encounter that participants in these program experience involve the interpersonal—playing in the El Sistema ensemble or a Blues Kids Foundation inspired band—as well as interaction with material objects:  instruments as varied as the violin, the electric guitar, and indigenous forms of percussion. Those encounters are significant not because the students are consumers of the objects, as Bauman argues. They occur

92

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

as the students seek to become one with their instruments, the instruments contributing to their growing sense of self-efficacy. The imperative to engage in musical expression for the purpose of meaningmaking is also very much in evidence here and speaks to the embrace of cosmopolitanism that has been noted. At the same time, whether it be through the mechanism of the ensemble or the band, within or outside of school settings, as a part of or separate from formal course instruction, patterns of assemblage are intrinsic components within each of the cases that have been described. But the conditions of assemblage and indeed the success of each of these programs are marked by contingency as well. In the El Sistema case, the severity of surrounding political and economic conditions raise questions regarding the long-term viability of the Venezuelan youth orchestras and the nucleos that serve as their foundation. With regard to the Blues Kids Foundation, the success of this program is in no small measure due to the charisma and talent of its director, qualities that are not necessarily transferable over time to new or different leaders. Similarly, some of the success of the Playing for Change Foundation is attributable to the resources made available by its cofounders, along with their persistence and dedication. From a holistic perspective though, it is difficult to analyze any of these programs without considering importance of affect in framing their importance or assessing their success.

3

Controlling the Body: Sport, Politics, and the Sport for Development Movement

Introduction In Chapters  1 and 2, we have explored the relationship between affect and education with reference to social memory and aesthetic performativity. In this chapter, we extend the discussion to discuss the relationship between affect, corporeality, and educational policy with particular reference to physical education and the sport for development movement. To do so invites a discussion regarding the nature of bodily integrity, control, and ownership and the ways in which such processes have been formulated in an age of globalization. Certainly, the processes with which we associate such control did not originate in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the contest over bodily integrity and ownership has played itself out in a variety of historical inundations as has been famously chronicled by Foucault. But if one is searching for common threads between the past and present, one might first look to the representation of the body as a metaphorical construction of boundedness and the negotiation of boundaries, a process that implies inherent social interactivity while speaking to the possibilities and limitations in constructing evolving meanings of otherness, identity, and personhood. As it is through the body that we form the basis of emotional expression, it is fitting that in a study of affect, we look to patterns of bodily performance and regulation in schools and in exterior social spaces to better understand the consequences of managing affect through control of the physical. We additionally seek to understand how the promise of bodily control and interactions among bodies are viewed as representing the four principles of affect that have been highlighted throughout the project. Modern schooling, through its promotion of physical education, has played a significant role in creating norms that justify bodily regulation, norms that have largely comported with state interests. Indeed, there are few curricular areas

94

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

that so graphically illustrate the historical effects of the relationship between the state and the school than do physical education. It has been explicit in helping to shape sexual, racial, militaristic, ethical, gender, and wellness related norms imposed upon children, youth, and the general citizenry. That relationship has been subject to change and reinvention, in part due to the adoption of neoliberal educational policies on a global scale and in part due to a fear that the school can no longer be counted on to effectively control and regulate students’ bodies. Commensurate with this trend has been the crafting of and subsequent adoption by United Nations members of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Both initiatives have had the effect of indirectly promoting the sports for development (SFD) movement. This movement, after arising in the early 2000s, has perpetuated the growth of sports clubs and recreational initiatives that have sometimes complemented and other times taken for themselves, roles once primarily associated with physical education activities housed within the modern school. We view this appropriation as another indication of a lack of trust the public as well as policy-makers express in the mission and efficacy of the public school. But in a larger sense, their growth is reflective of the broader tensions international organizations and nonprofit NGOs confront as a result of their participation in mainstream international development initiatives. In this chapter, we will review the literature regarding the sociology of sport and of the body as they particularly relate to affect theory, note the evolution of physical education curricula and practices, and comment upon the sport for development movement in light of that background. Two case studies examining nonschool sports clubs and associations, situated in South Africa and Kenya, will be juxtaposed with an analysis of current global physical education and sport activity trends.

Sociology of the Body Sociology of the body discourse became popular over forty years ago, as cultural theorists and social scientists viewed it fruitful to analyze the body in material and metaphorical terms as a source of knowledge production. There of course is a long history within the Western philosophical tradition of viewing bodily materiality as a basis for thought and action, but after Michel Foucault’s works were translated into English and scholars became more familiarized with his insights, the impetus to focus upon the body as a social site grew significantly. Whereas Foucault, in his earliest writings such as Madness and Civilization (1988)



Controlling the Body

95

and Discipline and Punish (1995), focused upon explicitly historical techniques to use knowledge as a means of exacerbating external bodily control; in his later writings such as The History of Sexuality (1990), he emphasized the importance of bio-power and governmentality as invisible mechanisms used by the state to exert its influence over its citizenry as an entirety. State entities, according to Foucault, manufactured a dependency so that the individual could now expect to be told by the government as to what her/his personal needs might be. Thus, the compilation of statistical information about the characteristics of a citizenry, ostensibly for the purpose of supporting its health and welfare, rationalized an assault upon individual privacy. At the same time, pressure was placed upon the citizenry to engage in self-regulation, whereby one would discipline the self, so as to preserve what the state determined to be acceptable personal health and well-being. The anxiety created under such conditions further promoted a dependency upon state-sanctioned expertise, further legitimizing the state’s role in interfering within traditionally private spheres. When writing specifically about the history of sexuality, Foucault referred to the state’s use of bio-power in these terms, whereby the terms of population control and explications regarding its general health became associated with the providence of the bureaucratic state. It is fair to note that Foucault’s writings failed to account for the impact of globalization forces upon our daily lives. Indeed, the expansive role of multinational and international organizations to facilitate global governance has enlarged the scope with which his notions of governmentality need to be evaluated, particularly with regard to their positioning toward the Global South (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Certainly, the evolution of sport as a global phenomenon is one example where the norms, practices, and terms through which bodily control and regulation are expressed have had global resonance with particular relevance, and more recent globalization theorists who have contributed to sociology of the body discourse, writing within the sociology of sport literature, have built upon Foucault’s insights, as well as those of Bourdieu and others.

Sociology of Sport In referencing the work of McPherson, Curtis, and Loy, Richard Giulianotti ascribes five characteristics to the nature of sport. It involves structure, goal orientation, competition, playfulness, and is culturally situated (2016: xii). One can easily see that the imposition of structure, goal orientation, and competition

96

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

upon a set of behaviors that are intrinsically playful in ways that are culturally situated offers potentially telling evidence for many of Foucault’s insights. But almost all of the important themes that characterize the entire sociological tradition find some resonance when examining the nature and history of sport. Thus, authors such as Giulianotti describe the ease with which sociology of sport research can be placed within Durkheimian, Weberian, Marxist and neo-Marxist, post-structuralist, and cultural studies traditions. Indeed, I  have argued that sport can also be viewed as a metaphor that elucidates important assumptions embedded within the comparative education tradition as well (Epstein 2011). But such analyses can extend beyond metaphorical ascriptions of sport to prevailing social issues and themes. More importantly, they can also offer evidence for the ways in which social structures impact our daily lives. E. P. Thompson, in his classic article, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), chronicled the ways in which our sense of time, work, and leisure were socially constructed to reiterate the values of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Preindustrial life rarely distinguished between work, family, and play; the rules of engagement in each of these spheres often blended into one another. The ethic of industrial capitalism thus created a fixation with the notion of time as a set of divisible, measurable entities, reflective of the results of competition for profit, the management, investment in, accumulation and distribution of capital, and for the nascent working class, elimination of control over one’s work. Leisure and family time, no longer intertwined with productive labor, became discrete entities unto themselves and were refashioned to reflect capitalist values. The evolution of sport in industrial England offers evidence for this process. The need for rules, for which participants might be held accountable, the distinction between participant and spectator, and the evolution of sporting activities into contests with specific time limitations all speak to the ways in which sport as emblematic of leisure activity, mirrored the ways in which industrial capitalism changed the lived experiences of British society members. The creation of sport as spectacle, made possible with the creation of stadia, could not have occurred without the inauguration of railway system expediting mass transportation to and from the stadium sites. The subsequent articulation of the role of the spectator, as passive observer of the sporting contest, was thus a socially constructed phenomenon that accompanied sports’ professionalization. Thus, the evolution of sport in industrial England, as its changing nature, mirrored and reinforced the growth and development of the British middle class.



Controlling the Body

97

Certainly, the connection between sport and colonialism has also been researched at length with particular emphasis upon the role of cricket in India (Guha 1992; Appadurai 1996) and football (soccer) in Africa (Domingos 2007, 2017; Alegi 2010). In both cases, there are processes of colonial imposition and local appropriation that mark the complexity of the oppressor–subject relationship. The example of apartheid South Africa is one where the intertwining of colonialism and racism resulted in the appropriation of distinctive sports cultures on the part of the Anglo and African population groups, the former gravitating to rugby, cricket, and tennis as sports of preference, the latter, football (soccer). The use of sport as a means of promoting racial justice will be commented upon later; suffice it to note that was one of the important historical factors contributing to the struggle to preserve or eliminate apartheid. The impact of sport upon sociology and the social sciences more generally is certainly not limited to historical context, and in fact is clearly visible in the writings of contemporary social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1984, 1997). Bourdieu’s notion of field as a representation of social space, for example, is obviously based upon a sports metaphor. One’s positionality within the field, as defined by conditions of practice, exercise, and the learning of expected rules and normative behaviors, closely relates to his concept of habitus, or the ways in which we form dispositions based upon our willingness to assimilate the logic of existing structures within our external environments. Indeed, the prowess and expertise one develops through habitual practice further speaks to his notion of cultural capital, or the accumulation and exchange of knowledge in the furtherance of one’s social position. These concepts, which have become seminal to the study of modern social theory, have obvious relevance to the study of sport as a set of social phenomena.

Historical Trends Regarding the Construction and Practice of Sport and Physical Education The association of physical exercise with military training dates back to the Greeks as does the worship of the body as a human form, with the invocation of exercise as a noble pursuit viewed as enhancing and being protective of that form. In the nineteenth century, Mathew Arnold, Thomas Hughes, and other

98

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

advocates of muscular Christianity viewed sports, as practiced within the British elite public school system, as assisting in the cultivation of manliness and character development, highlighting its importance in preparing citizen soldiers. Their graduates served prominently as colonial administrators, introducing the practice of football to elite schools in Africa, laying the foundation for the  expansion of the sport on that continent (Alegi 2010). Basically though, the origins of modern physical education within schools heavily emphasized instruction in gymnastics and calisthenics until the early twentieth century. The first known gymnastics school was established by Friederich Ludwig Jahn in Berlin, in 1811, and the Royal Gymnastic Central Institute was founded by Pehr Henrik Ling in Sweden in 1813. Under the influence of twentiethcentury progressives, physical education became a required part of the modern secondary school curriculum. An emphasis upon encouraging wellness and physical fitness became more pronounced, particularly in the United States, in the aftermath of the Second World War. By then, a rapid development of team sports as well as the creation of the modern Olympic Games influenced the proliferation of sports, contributing to their growing popularity and incorporation into extracurricular schooling activity (New World Encyclopedia n.d.). The advancement of physical education and sports activities more generally thus have played a contributory part in the efforts of the modern school to socialize students into accepting citizenship roles whose contours it has worked to define. In the twentieth century, attention to sports and physical education activities prominence increased as their association with health, wellness, and character building became reified. As has been noted, the role of sport in promoting colonialism and empire building through its incorporation into the school curricula was especially significant. The growth of football in Africa, in particular, was a result of a number of confluent factors, one of which was the teaching of the sport through school along with the concurrent growth of club activity as urbanization expanded. Schools, other state institutions, and private efforts were involved in sponsoring teams. But as the popularity of football proliferated, a distinctly African version was created, borrowing from indigenous cultural traditions such as a reliance upon magic and faith healing as rituals designed to assist potentially victorious teams. Subject to the vulgarities of colonial racism, participation in football also served as a form of resistance to colonial rule. Indigenously influenced styles of play, differing levels and types of spectator roles, and various forms of community support further served to create identities that were distinctive and separate from colonial norms.



Controlling the Body

99

The use of the school, along with other state institutions, for the purpose of disciplining the indigenous body was an important part of the colonial project. As Anne Stoler notes, Colonial regimes based on overseas settlements did more than produce their overseas others. They also policed the cultural protocols and competencies that bounded their “interior frontiers.” In monitoring those boundaries, they produced penal and pedagogic institutions that were often indistinguishableorphanages, workhouses, orphan trains, boarding schools, children’s agricultural colonies-to rescue young citizens and subjects in the making. Such colonial institutions, designed to shape young bodies and minds, were central to imperial policies and their self-fashioned rationalities. Colonial states had an abiding interest in a sentimental education, in the rearing of the young and affective politics. (2001: 850)

Clearly, sport generally and physical education more specifically contributed to this goal. Given the importance of missionary education, particularly in Africa, it is not surprising that muscular Christianity tropes were recycled in African contexts and that the impact of the anti-slavery movement in nineteenthcentury England could be felt in the “civilizing” charge of modern schooling as it was introduced to the continent. The planning for British decolonization actually began in the 1920s and 1930s; after the Second World War, the process sped up and involved all of the traditional European colonial powers with the transformation of former colonies into independent states being accompanied by creation of a postSecond World War new monetary world order, in the midst of Cold War geopolitics. Scholars have noted the extent to which international development policies of the 1950s and 1960s represented a substitution of traditional forms of colonialism with policies that fostered less visible but still pernicious forms of dependency upon countries in the Global South (Kallaway and Swartz 2016: 16). But it is also noteworthy that during the post-Second World War era there was a formal recognition of the existence of global human rights norms, of which the right to an education was prominently affirmed in documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The use of rights language as applied to physical activity was part of this movement and was first codified in the International Charter of Physical Education and Sport, adopted in November 1978. Article one of the Charter stated categorically that physical education and sport was a fundamental right; article two affirmed

100

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

physical education and sport as essential components of lifelong education in the overall education system; article ten stated that national institutions needed to play a major role in promoting physical education and sport; and article eleven noted that international cooperation was a prerequisite for obtaining universal support for these goals (UNESCO n.d.b). The Charter has been periodically revised and now addresses principles that affirm the importance of “gender equality, non-discrimination and social inclusion in and through sport.” It also highlights the benefits of physical activity, the sustainability of sport, the inclusion of persons with disabilities and the protection of children (UNESCO n.d.a). The creation of international instruments such as the International Congress on Physical Education and Sport (ICPES) have further encouraged the growth of NGOs, international institutions, and consultative bodies dedicated to their implementation. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Intergovernmental Committee for Physical Education and Sport (CIGEPS) are two of the more prominent organizations that fulfill that role with regard to the ICPES, the latter representing eighteen UNESCO states, appointed for four-year terms (UNESCO n.d.b). It is not surprising that trends depicting the growing popularity of physical education and sport-related activities have historically mirrored larger trends identified within the sociology of sport literature. However, regardless of time period there seem to be enduring themes that have continually framed their social significance. Whether subject to the changes precipitated by industrial capitalism, the growth of modern school as organ of the bureaucratic nationstate, the missionary projects embedded within nineteenth-century colonialism, or the post-Second World War turn to global human rights as a rationale for global governance, physical education, and sports-related activities have always reflected larger social and political concerns. Their importance has thus consistently been tied to the moral imperative to discipline the body and therefore build character, be it as a member of the industrial working and nascent middle class, the colonized subject, or the citizen of the newly independent nationstate. The attribution of physical activity in schools or in sporting activities more generally to wellness, health, character building, and citizenship has thus remained remarkably constant regardless of historical context or time period.

Globalization and Sport It is instructive that the original International Charter of Physical Education and Sport specifically addressed the need for international cooperation (if its



Controlling the Body

101

principles were to be successfully implemented) in article eleven (UNESCO 1978). In its revised form, it not only reiterated this fact but additionally spoke of the need to promote ethical values in sport (article ten) and the importance of sport in promoting peace and conflict resolution (article eleven) in addition to addressing concerns regarding gender and disability that have been previously noted. These textual refinements represented a recognition of larger global trends that were affecting international development policy, expansive mandates for educational provision, and the growing commercialization of sport on a global level. As a product of Cold War politics, international development assistance originating in the multinational organizations of the Global North and offered to Global South nations was initially rationalized as a means of encouraging nation-building to confront communism. With their emphasis upon human capital theory and its faith in the collective ability of a nation’s citizenry to serve as a valuable resource worthy of educational investment, international development policy-makers subscribed to a liberal anti-communist agenda, viewing educational expansion as a tool in addressing political instability while affirming the importance of capitalism. At least in these years, educational investment in public educational systems did not clash with privatization initiatives. Hence, admonitions in the 1978 ICPES that proclaimed the importance of nongovernmental sports entities working with official state bodies such as schools were reflective of international development priorities. As was noted in the introductory chapter, and in Chapter 2, neoliberalism has significantly influenced global educational policy embracing privatization at the expense of the public sector while rationalizing a narrowing of what the public good entails and what public education should do. During the 1970s and 1980s, sports concurrently became increasingly professionalized and commercialized on a global level spurred by the growing popularity of the Olympic Games and the influence of the IOC, the World Cup and FIFA, and so on. Over the short term, clubs or sporting associations were viewed as complementary to rather than in competition with the physical education and wellness initiatives promoted within school grounds, as the ICPES indicates. But it is also true that as sports became more commercialized and globalized, the function and mission of the public school as a guarantor and provider of the public good, became more restricted. To be sure, the call for the expansion of basic education as a global human right was articulated as a significant international development focus from the start, and after years of inconsistent coordination among multilateral organizations, it became especially pronounced with the adoption of Education for All goals as enunciated in the Dakar Framework for Action in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals established in 2000, and the

102

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. However, the accompanying growing embrace of global testing and accountability schemes, also resulted in the privileging of core subjects and a narrowing of school curricula. As neoliberal economic policies took effect, education budgets were slashed, alternative teacher training schemes promoted, and resource availability became more problematic. The delivery of robust physical education curricula has been one of many curricular casualties as a result of this process. It was also in 1981 that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized as a disease, with the 1980s and 1990s bringing about worldwide concern with regard to its spread. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and other subsequent conflict areas including Somalia and Darfur further gave impetus for the growth of the sport for development movement, an internationally sponsored initiative for the purpose of encouraging the proliferation of sport activities as a means of fostering peace, conflict resolution, and wellness. An ultimate paradox lies in the contrast with the idealism of the sport for development movement’s mission with the commercialization trends that have increasingly defined its global practice. A  closer examination of local, regional, national, and international initiatives associated with the movement for the purpose of better understanding this as well as other contradictions is thus warranted.

Sport for Development Although it was as early as the aftermath of the First World War, when the Olympic Movement was identified as a source for assisting returning war veterans (Burnett 2001; Peachey et al. 2018), the articulation of the importance of using sport for social benefit on a global scale occurred more recently. In 2001, the United Nations established an Office of Sport Development and Peace and in 2003, an International Conference on Sport and Development ratified the Magglingen Declaration, establishing a commitment to sport for development, noting its usefulness in addressing physical and mental health issues, trauma in the midst of conflict situations, its potential effectiveness in overcoming racism, religious intolerance, gender and disability discrimination, and more generally sustainable development (2003). In 2005, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, and Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, issued a proclamation stating that “sports entities are working together ‘to harness the great power of sport to change people’s lives



Controlling the Body

103

for the better,’ noting that well designed sports programs can be cost effective catalysts for social change” (UNOSDP 2005 as cited in Spaaij, Magee, and Jeanes, 2014:  104). These statements spurred the proliferation of numerous profit and nonprofit sports organizations at local and regional levels that have aligned themselves with the SFD movement, further buttressing the sentiments expressed within the ICPES and its subsequent revisions. As these organizations have grown in number, their successes and failures mirror much of what characterizes the larger NGO world. A considerable degree of the attraction in linking sport to development lies in the premise that sports participation invites inherent social inclusivity, postulated as a positive outcome. Some degree of sociability is required of sports participants who perform in public settings, as even when individual performance is emphasized, one’s efforts are generally witnessed by external audiences. The rule-governed nature of sport demands that the participant(s) conform to a set of generic expectations that are popularly understood. The necessity of learning the rules of the sport, of engaging in practice for the purpose of enhancing performance, and of subjecting oneself to a competitive situation in order to better one’s execution, address the concerns of those who view youth as suffering from social exclusion and whose situation is in need of remediation. Yet, as Spaaij, Magee, and Jeanes (2014: 30–1) argue, the meaning of social exclusion is certainly context specific, even though the appeal to sport as a catalyst for personal and social development is viewed as possessing generic benefit. The authors note that when the target population is situated in the Global North, factors that depict social exclusion that are commonly referenced include unemployment, poverty, and economic disparity, while in the Global South, social exclusion is more likely to be defined according to human rights violations broadly involving social injustice. These factors might include but certainly would not be limited to a lack of respect for expressions of personal and/or cultural identity, nonavailability of basic resources that might offer modest sustainability, violations of land rights, exposure to physical violence, and conflict within the community. In both types of settings, the challenges SFD programs confront in creating positive outcomes for children and youth are daunting. The use of sport in the Global North to promote vocational skill development or address mental health issues, two goals of programs that the authors highlight, can be problematic insofar as the transference of skills and dispositions from the playing field to the workplace may be ancillary or indirect. Similarly, as so many of the problems confronting Global South communities are structural in nature, sometimes resulting from the very neoliberal economic

104

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

policies that emanate in the Global North, it becomes questionable whether an investment in community-based SFD initiatives can create results that are more than palliative. Peachey et al., in their study of twenty-nine SFD organizations, further chronicle a number of issues contributing to their effectiveness or lack thereof. For example, they note that there can be a disconnect between the push for athletic excellence that mainstream global organizations promote and the larger social justice goals community-based SFD groups seek to achieve. As is true of the NGO world generally, SFD groups often find themselves in competition for scarce resources with sister groups making collaboration difficult. In addition, it can be especially challenging to communicate the nature of one’s local needs and make the case for the viability of one’s programs to external donors, not conversant with the SFD movement or the specific mission of one’s organization (Svenssen 2017). P. G.  Svenssen characterizes SDP (Sport for Development and Peace) organizations into four hybrid archtypes:  differentiated, symbolic, integrated, and dysfunctional. Differentiated hybrid SDP structures compartmentalize functions into different sectors, such as units whose purpose may be commercial and are therefore revenue-generating, as opposed to those components that are exclusively nonprofit and operate in concert with the organization’s overall mission. Symbolic hybrid SDPs selectively borrow from elements of different approaches even while privileging one approach over the other. Global South organizations that operate in response to local needs while searching for and obtaining funding from Global North donors are an example of this type of organization. Integrated hybrid SDPs, more common in the Global North, often display a social entrepreneurial focus and seek to distinguish themselves from the norm, rather than conform to mainstream organizational patterns. They often create legal mechanisms for insuring that their revenue-generating and programmatic functions are in concert with one another. Dysfunctional SDPs, on the other hand, fail to successfully manage the tensions that are inherent to these organizations, some of which tend to involve soliciting participatory volunteerism as opposed to embracing professionalism, in addition to the other tensions that have been noted (Svenssen 2017).

Physical Education and the Global South A balanced perspective regarding the strengths and challenges of SFD organizations cannot be achieved without examining the current state of formal



Controlling the Body

105

physical education programs, particularly within the Global South. To that end, Ken Hardman’s analysis of the Second Worldwide Survey of the situation of physical education is instructive. He notes, for example, that physical education “is a compulsory subject in a large majority of educational systems globally and, where it is not compulsory, it is generally taught as a matter of general practice” (2008: 7). Generally, it is a recognized part of the formal school curriculum, and has “examinable status,” whereby student achievement is assessed (8). However, Hardman also recognizes that implementation of the formal policies regarding the delivery of physical education curricula has varied widely for a number of different reasons. He states: The “gap” between official policy and regulations and actual practice is geographically widespread and pervasive factors contributing to it are seen in devolvement of responsibilities for curriculum implementation, loss of time allocation in some cases because time is taken up by other competing prioritized subjects, lower importance of school PE in general, lack of official assessment, financial constraints, diversion of resources elsewhere, inadequate material resources, deficiencies in numbers of properly qualified personnel and attitudes of significant individuals such as head teachers. (8)

Hardman concludes that in spite of a recognition of increasing child obesity as a global phenomenon, the emphasis within most physical education curricula lies in the development of motor skills and, at the upper educational levels, skill development within specific sports, rather than wellness per se. Competitive sports where performance is emphasized make up 70 percent of the primaryand secondary-level physical education curricula (2008: 16). With the exception of North America, access to appropriate equipment is problematic, the qualifications of physical education teachers are often of a very basic generalist nature, and professional development opportunities for instructors are inconsistent (2008: 19–22). It is clear that organizations aligned with the sport for development movement or those state-sponsored schools that deliver the formal physical education curricula confront a number of challenges some of which are similar, others that are distinctive. We look to the cases of South Africa and Kenya to better understand the complexities of their interrelationship.

South Africa The legacy of apartheid marks both sports affiliation and activity and educational policy and provision in contemporary South Africa. As early as 1904, two black

106

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

South African runners participated in a marathon race during the Olympic Games creating the first mutiracial team the country’s history (Department of Sport and Recreation South Africa 2010: 3). Yet, the overall history of sport in South Africa has continuously been a racialized one. Team and club segregation was regularly practiced from their inception, reflective of the pervasive racism that marked the society from its colonial origins. In 1956, after the National Party had come to power and codified existing racist practices under the apartheid label, the government formally enforced racial segregation among the various sporting bodies in the country (Booth 1998:  5). Organizations began to fight back, as most notably evidenced by the creation of the South African Sports Association (SASA) in 1958 and later, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) in 1963, and the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) in 1973 (Department of Sport and Recreation South Africa 2010: 13, 14, 32). SASA pressured the International Olympic Committee to allow Black athletes the right to participate in the 1960 Rome Olympics, a demand that was rejected by the IOC, then headed by Avery Brundage, who was notorious for his lobbying against the boycott of the 1936 “Nazi Olympics” in Berlin. In the aftermath of the Sharpesville Massacre in March 1960, and the political repression that ensued, it became clear that the fight against apartheid had to become internationalized. When SANROC was created by SASA, the aim was to have it replace a South African National Olympic Committee that upheld the racist policies of the government. Consequently, SANROC, which went into exile in 1965, became a leading voice for boycotting South African sports at the international level. In 1973, the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) was formed and it evolved into the leading sports voice for fighting against all forms of apartheid. In so doing, it lobbied not simply for the integration of sporting spaces and activities but tied the practice of sport to the larger social injustices that apartheid promoted (Booth 1998: 109–10). As later South African governments grudgingly attempted to ameliorate world pressure against its policies by allowing sports teams that included non-White athletes to represent the country in international competitions, they held firm in their efforts to preserve the apartheid system. But the pressure of international boycotts had an effect. In 1977, the Commonwealth countries signed the Gleneagles Agreement, which discouraged initiating sport arrangements with South Africa. The UN compiled a list of “Sports Contacts with South Africa,” which pressured athletes from engaging in competition with their South African counterparts, and in 1981, demonstrations were held in New Zealand, protesting the All Black Rugby Team South Africa tour (Department of Sport and Recreation South Africa 2010: 32). Hence the stance of SACOS in



Controlling the Body

107

lobbying international boycott protests was extremely important. Modest efforts on the part of the South African government to address international concerns were often cosmetic. Even in the 1980s, the government claimed to decouple sport from politics and argued that it promoted autonomous decision-making on the part of sports entities in reference to making participation multi-racial. As Booth notes, although lip service was paid to introducing White-dominated sports into Black township areas, the lack of resources available in the townships mitigated against true racial integration of the sports. Sports development programs in the townships did not “prove” a commitment to racial equality. While they introduced thousands of black school children to several sports, notably cricket and rugby, the overwhelming majority were discarded because there were no facilities or structures to enable them to pursue whatever interest that might have been fostered. The early programs took little cognizance of the absence of resources in the townships, the historical bias against sport in black schools, the high dropout rate among black pupils, or the club structure of South African sport. (1998: 140)

With the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s, sport was used as a vehicle for national reconciliation, most notably through its hosting of the World Rugby Cup in 1995. Nelson Mandela’s role in supporting the South African Springbok team subsequent to and after their winning the tournament was memorialized in print and in film and is viewed as an epic moment in the history of rugby. However, given the historical association of rugby with Afrikaaner culture, the events of 1995 can also be viewed as further confirmation of the continuing ways in which sport served as a vehicle for the expression of lasting forms of individual and group identity, in spite of an implicit endorsement of national unity in the midst of apartheid’s demolition. It is also clear that a historic infatuation with the importance of sport, in affirmation of its admittedly symbolic power, drew attention away from the structural and systemic inequities that have characterized government policies since the country’s inception, a tactic that has remained evident throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Those inequities are most clearly evident within the country’s educational system, before, during, and after the apartheid era, and are clearly apparent when examining physical education provision. Upon its ascension to power, the Nationalist Party promulgated the view that education for Black South Africans should involve the teaching of menial skills, lest integration take place. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 helped to create the township system and enforced educational segregation in ways that have had lasting negative effects upon

108

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

educational provision among the non-White South African school population even today. There was no interest in offering more than the most rudimentary and menial forms of education to Blacks because the entire apartheid system was based upon the premise of denying them the possibility of economic mobility and social integration. Apartheid was made possible through prohibiting the possibility and likelihood of successful educational aspiration. By the 1970s, per capita expenditure of Black schools was one-tenth that spent on schools for Whites. In the 1980s, teacher:pupil ratios in primary schools averaged 1:18 in White schools, 1:24 in Asian schools, 1:27 in Colored schools, and 1:39 in Black schools. Moreover, whereas 96 percent of all teachers in White schools had teaching certificates, only 15 percent of teachers in Black schools were certified. Secondary school pass rates for Black pupils in the nationwide, standardized high school graduation exams were less than one-half the pass rate for Whites (Byrnes 1996). It is within this context that the inequities involving physical education funding in schools are not surprising. Booth quotes MP Ken Andrew, who publicly noted the ubiquitous nature of these inequalities in 1983, and actually overestimated the degree of government support. He specifically noted, When one looks at per capital figures, one sees that for white children there is an amount of R9.84 per child for sport. For black children it is 0.41 cents, i.e. less than 0.5 cents per child. This government is spending 2,400 times as much furthering the participation in sport for each white child compared with each black child. Surely there is something seriously wrong with our priorities if we spend more on tug-of-war visitors to South Africa than on 3.6  million black school children when it comes to sport activities? It is an astonishing manifestation of selfishness and greed and it is also a crystal clear example of what happens to a community that has no political rights worth talking about. (1998: 70)

The inequities that characterized sport and education during the apartheid years remain in the postapartheid era, albeit in different forms. From the perspective of sport, although a government-directed quota system is now in place guaranteeing that there is at least some racial diversity in the representation of national teams such as cricket and rugby, the historic disparities regarding resources, facilities, and coaching among White and non-White population groups continue to effectively racialize sport participation in the country. With respect to educational provision and outcome, systematic inequities remain in place, a quarter of a decade after the elimination of apartheid. This is in spite of the fact that access to primary education is nearly universal, and the overall



Controlling the Body

109

amount of GDP spent on educational provision, 6.4 percent, is higher than the average 4.8 percent among EU countries (The Economist 2017). Critics blame the somewhat decentralized nature of the South African educational system, with the implementation of legislative mandate devolved to provincial governments (Motola 2013: 223), poor teacher training, corruption within teacher unions, the fees that better schools charge on top of the state funding that they receive that allow their students to far outdistance their less affluent counterparts, and the overall disparate effects of poverty, race, and class, as contributing to what some have labeled one of the worst performing educational systems in the world (The Economist 2017). It is noteworthy that upon its ascension to power, the African National Congress embraced a perspective to curricular and policy reform that adapted an “Outcomes Based Educational approach (OBE).” As implemented in South Africa, the policy demanded excessive teacher documentation and verification of one’s meeting predetermined curricular goals. Perhaps more importantly, it was couched as a liberating series of reforms that would address previous systemic weaknesses. As Soudien and Baxen noted, this stance ignored the impact of the historic structural inequities of which we have spoken: Omitted in the educational reform discourse is a deliberate awareness of the very divides and fractures that have specified the nation’s public face. Specifically, a challenge to racism, as an ontological and epistemological reality embedded within pedagogical practice in the South African educational system, has been conspicuously absent from the modalities of OBE. OBE is presented as a mediating device for entry into a modern future, but not as a device for working with the suppressed identities and the stereotypes to which South Africa’s people were forced to conform in the past. (1997: 457)

Although abandoned in 2010, its negative effects have endured critics decrying the willingness of South African educational authorities to embrace policy reforms that hold international popularity and currency but lack local and regional relevance (Jansen 2010). Such an embrace of internationalism (within the educational policy domain) is one of a number of characteristics that advocates of sport and educational reform have historically shared. It is clear, for example, that actors within both domains have repeatedly failed to successfully confront the larger social fissures of race and classism that have characterized the country’s history. Indeed, some advocates in both fields have at various times defended and have used available tools to promulgate racism, even if others have sought to confront its existence and fight against its perpetuation.

110

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

This being said, the relationship between sport and education is somewhat more complex in the South African case than in other contexts. As has been noted, the investment in sport has at various times been used to facilitate exclusionary group identification through the promotion of sports associated with specific racial groups, or the fostering of feelings of national inclusivity, as was true of the 1995 Rugby World Championship or the 2012 Olympic Games. Education has also been viewed in contradictory fashion, as a vehicle for facilitating state oppression and the subjugation of the Black majority in the apartheid state, and as a transformational engine for asserting the group identity in the face of such oppression. In the postapartheid state, educational investment has been significant, but the outcomes have been disappointing, with the failure to successfully confront long-standing historical educational disparities widely acknowledged. Indeed, the reintroduction of physical education as a part of the formal school curriculum occurred only as recently as 2009 (Norman 2009). At first glance, it is questionable as to why the sport for development movement would have any currency in South Africa at all, given the longstanding historical reluctance of most official international sporting bodies to confront the apartheid state. The idealistic evangelism that has fueled this movement rings hollow when one considers the struggle that was waged to enlist the help of international sport organizations in ending apartheid and their ambivalence to do so. However, to the degree that one can reasonably view postapartheid public schooling as being complicit in serving the interests of the state, the turn to the sport for development movement makes sense, particularly in light of the government’s initial reticence to acknowledge the AIDS/HIV crisis in the country, and the sport for development movement’s call for the use of sport engagement to combat the crisis. To be sure, as organizations such as UNICEF embraced the sport for development movement, they have worked both with the South African Department of Education as well as with nonprofit organizations in providing facilities, coaches, life skills and AIDS/HIV training to youth throughout the country. There has not been an either/or mandate that has limited exclusive involvement to one of the two sectors. In support of this effort, the UNICEF/South Africa pledged to assist 585 of the most disadvantaged schools in the country, as identified by the country’s Department of Education, in providing for “sport coaches, play and sports infused life skills programs. These initiatives aim to promote mass participation in sport through community sporting events that foster physical development and increase awareness of child rights, health and survival” (UNICEF South Africa). In 2008, 9 of the 585 schools were targeted for pilot programming. But, at the same time, many



Controlling the Body

111

of the South African Sport for Development initiatives have originated in and have emphasized involvement in the private and nonprofit sectors, not always from the ground up. Sporting Chance is one example of the above. Starting in 1990, with external sponsorship from a number of Global North as well as local corporations and businesses, the organization’s goal is to provide opportunities for sporting achievement for as many children as possible—irrespective of race, gender or social class—by offering professional coaching within all community sectors. Based on the knowledge that the foundation for sporting ability is laid during the formative years, Sporting Chance advocates and implements various programs for coaching school-age children. Sporting Chance’s philosophy is to get children off the streets, or away from their computer games and TV’s and instill in them, a love of sport. With disciplined, structured coaching that strikes a balance between sports, academics, and “play.” Sporting Chance has developed some of South Africa’s most promising sportspeople. (Sporting Chance 2018)

Sporting Chance also has created a foundation, whose projects include street soccer, calypso cricket, health education, Inter Media Cricket Challenge, street cricket, and Khulani Beach Soccer. The Foundation operates mainly in Cape Town, but the organization also offers extensive coaching services and a specific health education initiative, serving 20,000 students in 40 schools located in 4 provinces (Sporting Chance 2018). Unfortunately, the results of these types of initiatives haven’t demonstrated consistent success in offering reasonable alternatives to physical education and sports activities initiated within the public school space. As Cora Burnett notes, with specific regard to the Youth Development Through Football program, operating in South Africa and in other African countries, SFD projects rarely result in creating lasting social changes that address pervasive structural inequities. Instead, youth who are trained as peer coaches receive limited funding that temporarily addresses their unemployment circumstances but rarely results in their obtaining long-term skills that translate into permanent employment opportunities (Burnett 2013). One explanation for the popularity of the sport for development movement lies in the need to respond to the continued poverty, gang, and gender violence to which youth are exposed in township areas, the ineffectiveness of local institutions in combatting their effects, and the moral panic that unfairly ascribes derogatory explanations to the supposed deficits to youths’ characterbuilding capacities (Swartz 2009; Oduro, Swartz, and Arnot 2012). That the

112

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

solution to such a problem lies in the embrace of sport as defined in not simply local but global terms, speaks to the global neoliberal resonances that advocates find extremely attractive. To be sure, for many Black African youth, the school is a site where the violence of the street and the township is reproduced, through bullying as well as sexual harassment. In her study of a Durban working-class primary school, Deevia Bhana notes the ways in which hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005)  plays itself out, with violence and misogyny viewed as a way of gaining status and social position among young boys. Bhana describes the archetype of the “tsotsi” boy as one who perpetually uses bullying and violence against younger and physically more slight peers and verbal harassment against girls. She contrasts this profile with that of the “Yimvu” boys who attempt to avoid engaging with their more violent counterparts while demonstrating more tolerance toward girls, although the pressure to succumb to “tsotsi” hegemonic masculinity is always present (Bhana 2005). Swartz (2009) notes that South African township youth do engage in moral reasoning but, given the violence and poverty they confront, are not given either the space or the opportunity to act upon their evolving ethical understandings. Indeed, the school she profiled included corrupt teachers who engaged in sexual relations with their students, as well as ones who deliberately distanced themselves from them, unwilling or unable to effectively counsel youth as they themselves turn to violence or predatory sexual behavior. The logic of turning to the sport field as an alternative space where youth can affirm a sense of physical and emotional competency, may thus be understandable given such circumstances. Indeed, youth gravitate to sport on the streets even in the absence of adequate resources and playing conditions because they view their participation as giving them some sense of agency within their lives. However, the very lack of investment in township areas generically has limited the efficacy that such an alternative might present.

Kenya After Kenya became an independent country in 1963, it adopted in 1964 a structure that included seven years of primary school, four years of lower secondary education, two years at the upper secondary level, and three years of university, borrowing from the colonial British model. The system did not include compulsory preprimary education, and it was criticized for its strong formal academic character and its insensitivity to employment needs and concerns. Large numbers of students dropped out of the system before their graduation;



Controlling the Body

113

they, as well as graduates, endured severe unemployment and the system’s inflexibility was heavily criticized. In 1985, an 8-4-4 structure was introduced for the purpose of emphasizing greater curricular opportunity in vocational and technical education while addressing some of the criticisms of its predecessor. Nonetheless, the system, which persists in being examination-driven, continues to be criticized because of its reproduction of class inequality, corruption, and limited functionality. The guarantee of free primary education was enacted by law in 2003, with free provision of secondary education enacted in 2008. One of the country’s major educational policy reform efforts occurred with the passage of the Kenyan Basic Education Act of 2013, whereupon national and county boards of education were created, and the education secretary was charged with enforcing the 2003 and 2008 edicts. Such enforcement remains problematic because at the local level, public institutions are able to charge supposedly nominal fees to parents for school expenses. A  2015 regulation attempted to better control this process through establishing Boards of Management for schools and standardizing policies for the allocation of resources, but for many poor families, the issue of paying any fees at all can be daunting. Nonetheless, in the urban slums and informal settlements in Nairobi and in other Kenyan cities, residents prefer to enroll their children in low-cost nongovernmental private schools, because of better geographical access and because they are perceived to deliver comparatively better educational quality than is true of free government schools (Ngware et al. 2013). The creeping trend toward the privatization of basic educational delivery, while certainly not specific to Kenya, has thus become a major factor in determining educational access for the poor. However, in spite of the popularity of low-cost nongovernment private schools, it is questionable as to whether children have the same opportunities to progress through the educational ladder and enroll in the upper secondary level, because the reputations of these schools and student examination performance are so mixed. When examining the specific history of physical education in Kenya, a few trends are noteworthy. First scholars have commented upon the importance of sport in precolonial Kenya: spear throwing, running, swimming, and wrestling, for example, being especially viewed as essential survival activities in societies where hunting, fishing, communication, and community defense were daily preoccupations (Mwisukha et al. 2014: 270). The British colonial era introduced modern sports into the school curriculum at the expense of their indigenous counterparts, but it was only in 1980, seventeen years after independence, when physical education was made mandatory in Kenyan public schools,

114

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

although students have never been subjected to formal assessment in the subject matter (Mwishkha et al. 2014: 271). Indeed, Mwisukha et al. note that with the passage of educational reform efforts in 2003 and 2008, ensuing school enrollment expansion actually hurt the quality of physical education pedagogy and learning, given the increased number of students who have had to have been accommodated as a consequence of the reforms. For the most part, the formal curriculum is practical rather than theoretical including the teaching of exercises, ball games, track and field, and swimming (Mwishkha et al. 2014: 273), in increments of five 30-minute periods and three 35-minute periods for lower and upper primary students, and one 40-minute and three 40-minute periods offered for lower and upper secondary level students, respectively (Mwishkha et al. 2014: 272). Suffice it to note that the same issues that plague the teaching of physical education globally are in evidence in Kenya. Schools lack equipment, physical education teachers are poorly trained, and the prestige of the field is comparatively low, as evidenced by the lack of formal assessment of student performance. Nonetheless, the Kenyan Institute of Education does disseminate physical education curricular guides and recommendations, and there is growing recognition of the need to address wellness and health issues as part of the physical education experience, even if that need is rarely addressed on a consistent basis within schools. It is within this context that organizations in support of the sport for development movement have created a visible presence within the country. The Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) is probably the best example of the above. Founded in 1987 by Bob Munro, a Canadian senior advisor for environmental policy and water management for African governments and the United Nations, the MYSA has become Kenya’s largest and most famous sport for development organization and the largest of its type in Africa (Mathare Youth Sports Association n.d.). Created as an organization dedicated to using sport to promote community development in one of Nairobi’s largest and most densely populated slums, the MYSA website notes that the organization engages in sports, slum cleanup, AIDS prevention, leadership training, and assisting formerly imprisoned youth, while offering non-sport activities such as photography and music. Over 30,000 youth participate in all of MYSA’s programs in Kenya; another 10,000 participate in programs centered in other African countries. With regard to football alone, members of 2,052 teams participate in 252 different leagues, with over 15,000 matches played a year. It is notable that a number of the country’s most accomplished football players and coaches, some achieving world-class status, are alumni from MYSA.



Controlling the Body

115

Participating in non-sports-focused activities focusing upon community service allows one’s team to accrue points that help boost one’s league standing and serves as an incentive for youth to pursue volunteerism within the community. An organization that has received global recognition, MYSA has sponsors that include FIFA, USAID, the Australian Sports Commission, UK Sport, Comic Relief, the UN’s SDP, along with numerous other organizations. It is distinctive, according to Coalter (2013), because of its success in helping participating youth to develop social capital. They are involved in decision-making, as they are elected to serve on the Sports/Council/Community Service Council and at a higher level, the MYSA Executive Council. In addition, hired employees have all been MYSA members/participants (160–1). Although MYSA has also promoted girls’ football, it is not the only sport for development program in Kenya to do so. Moving the Goalposts (MTG), located in the Kilifi district of the Coastal Province, was founded by writer Sarah Forde in 2001 with 100 girls, and now has more than 8,000 participants. The organization prides itself on its focus for encouraging female empowerment, leadership skills, while also addressing issues of reproductive health including unwanted pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and low school retention (Moving the Goalposts n.d.; Forde 2008; Alegi 2010: 125). In recognition of the growing importance of sport to the country and the need for better regulation of sports activities, the Sports Act of 2013 was enacted, establishing the entity of Sports Kenya to oversee stadia and facilities construction, a national sports fund to support organizations and individuals engaged in constructive sports activity, and an Academy of Sports for the purpose of establishing and managing sports training academies, technical courses in the areas of sports management and administration, and supporting sport research (Republic of Kenya 2013). It is noteworthy that offering support for sport for development initiatives is an explicit goal of the legislation.

Conclusion In this chapter, the presentation of formal physical education curricula, pedagogies, and practices within schools has been contextualized as occupying an increasingly shrinking space, as clubs, associations, and leagues associated with the sport for development movement have taken it upon themselves to promote sport as an intrinsically positive social good. Efforts to control the body are in evidence in both arenas, although the growth of the sport for development

116

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

movement over the past two decades is a relatively new phenomenon. Previously, both club sports, associations and leagues, and physical education initiatives coexisted within their separate spheres. But as has been noted, in the aftermath of neoliberal structural adjustment policies that resulted in state retrenchment from educational funding on a global scale, the sport for development movement grew and rapidly expanded. The important questions that arise from the growth of SFD extend beyond issues of territoriality of course; they focus upon the reasons why engagement in sport has become a popular site for the exercise of such control in the first place, what similarities and differences are apparent when examining the case of sport with the other cases presented to date in this project and what specific contributions the affect theory frame may provide in clarifying our evolving understandings as to why the popular fear of formal educational provision on a global scale is pervasive. At its core, sport involves play, which infers that when one is so engaged, one experiences enjoyable activity. One can also associate with play some degree of spontaneity where outcomes are not predetermined, with creativity where participants use the skills they have acquired to negotiate the challenges of new situations, and with considerable degrees of cognitive, emotional, and physical investment. On the other hand, the execution of bodily control is certainly intrinsic to the meaning of sport. It thus involves an elaborate set of practices and rules that circumscribe without totally foreclosing the spontaneous elements of play. The attributes of play as defined within sport, not unlike the uses of memory to help construct personal and social identity, or an embrace of the aesthetic, touch upon core elements of our humanity. It is therefore unsurprising that the evangelism that accompanies protestations asserting the importance of sport is so widespread, and has helped to fuel the sport for development movement. It is also noteworthy that the association of sport with individual character building, and its perceived significance in the construction of all forms of social life including social class, racial, and gender identity, nation-building, colonialism, and more recently global influence, is perceived to be strong. Indeed, the logic of employing sport as a vehicle for expressing individual and collective aspiration is impeccable, when one notes the similarity of sporting engagement with what we have described as affect: the intensity with which bodies encounter one another, the ways in which meaning is constructed from practice, the holistic manner in which bodily systems perform together, and the manufacturing of assemblage through the creation of the team or, on a more abstract level, fandom. But one must also question why it is that the other aspects of modern sport that involve the overt regulation of play and the control of bodily expression are also



Controlling the Body

117

so uncritically accepted as being beneficial to the individual and the group. In addition, it is important to examine why physical education has been relegated to such a minor role within the formal school curriculum if the benefits of physical activity and sport engagement are so obvious. I believe that in addressing both of these questions, one must analyze how threatening the notion of sport is perceived to be within the context of the modernist school structure. Second, it is necessary to examine the deleterious effects of neoliberalism that have created a commercialized and consumptive global space where sport activities have been able to circulate more freely. Scott Eberle states that there are six characteristics of play that cognitive neuroscientists have identified as being salient: anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise (2014: 222). David Graeber, in one of his more provocative assessments in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2016), states that, “What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is the fear of play” (2016:  193), and for our purposes, one could easily argue that the modernist school structure has been conceived with the purpose of replicating many of the characteristics of generic bureaucratic organizational structure. It is within such a context that we can begin to understand the ambivalent treatment of sport and athletics within the school space. Even though sport and athletics have at times been used as vehicles for affirming educational relevance in the colonial, postcolonial, apartheid, and postapartheid states of Kenya and South Africa, reifying the values of those regimes, they are positioned as less significant curricular and cocurricular practices than other elements of the modernist school program. The lack of formalized assessment of student performance in these activities, a truism that has resonance globally as well as within these cases, offers justification for the marginalization of school-based athletics, given the importance placed upon the graded school curriculum and its reliance upon assessment as an affectation of modernism. But it is the characteristics that sport has in common with play that are most threatening to educational modernism: the unlikelihood of guaranteeing outcomes on a regular basis, the impossibility of regulating individual or team effort, the difficulty of determining how and when athletic creativity expresses itself, and the pure joy of physical engagement. To be sure, learning in all of its inundations can never be totally regulated. It involves activity as well as passivity, emotional investment as well as acquiescence, and risk-taking as well as experiential familiarity and comfortability. But the fear of loss of control, over what constitutes acceptable conditions for learning, over what knowledge forms are valuable, over who

118

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

deserves to learn and how the quality of one’s learning should be evaluated, that permeates the values that characterize modern public schooling, at the very least within the cases we have examined. As is true of social memory and aesthetics, it is this fear that compels many to seek alternatives to the educational modernism exemplified by the school. Bureaucracy, according to Graeber, gives us a sense of order, stability, and emotional comfort that allows us to manage the fear of risk and uncertainty to which we have become accommodated. This is why he believes we secretly believe in its value. But there are limits upon which the school/bureaucracy analogy holds weight. The teacher role can include characteristics we associate with performativity and charisma. The social capital acquired in some school settings speaks to the power and importance of relationship-building among peers in ways for which an emphasis upon bureaucratic organizational structure does not account. As has been noted, with varying degrees of intentionality, schools tend to perpetuate hegemonic masculinity and as will be commented upon in Chapter  4, violence directed toward students. Indeed, the working hypothesis of this book is contrary to Graeber’s view. Instead, the argument here is that it is the lack of trust in modernist educational bureaucracy rather than its affirmation that has led to the seeking of alternatives to what the conventional school structure represents. Thus, the global embrace of the sport for development movement only makes sense if one factors in such mistrust of the school as a reason for its popularity. The sport for development movement is emblematic of many of the characteristics we associate with globalization. Its blatant commercialization and consumerist appeal are noteworthy with particular regard to the subsidizing of nonprofit clubs and leagues in the Global South by Global North corporations and multilateral organizations. More so than the global circulation of artifacts of memorialization or the varieties of musical expression that we have noted in Chapters 2 and 3, sporting objects, practices, events become noteworthy for their ability to attract international attention, let alone capital. Andrews and Ritzer argue that this process is emblematic not simply of glocalization, or the merging of global and local sporting practices, but is indicative of what they label grobalization, or the overpowering of the glocal by the global (2007:  29). They admit that late global capitalism allows for a degree of cultural differentiation affirming the value of the distinctiveness of glocal sporting practices in cities and regions that entices consumerism and popular appeal (33). Sport for development initiatives in Kenya, in particular, can be viewed in this light. Nonetheless, it is difficult to



Controlling the Body

119

conceive of contemporary sport without accounting for its corporatization. As Andrews and Ritzer state, Today, virtually all aspects of the global sport institutions (governing bodies, leagues, teams, events, and individual athletes) are now un-self-consciously driven and defined by the inter-related processes of:  corporatization (the management and marketing of sporting entities according to profit motives); spectacularization (the primacy of producing of entertainment-driven [mediated] experiences); and, commodification (the generation of multiple sport-related revenue streams). Moreover, since sport cultures around the world have become ever more subject to revision by this late capitalist strain of grobalization, sport’s institutional infrastructure is beginning to reflect a high degree of global uniformity. . . . The commercial corporation, is, effectively, the institutional vehicle through which late capitalism has become grobal; corporatized elements such as sport (education, religion, and health domains being equally applicable in this regard) becoming both a product, and an important process facilitating the grobalization of late capitalism. (2007: 33)

The differentiation embraced within grobalization tendencies may account for the popularity of sport from the bottom up in spite of its corporatist tendencies, but it doesn’t explain the depths of the faith in the power of sport, which as has also been noted with regard to memorialization and aesthetic practice, is virtually unconditional. The contrast between the embrace of sport for development with the skepticism attached to the efficacy of public schooling generally, and the importance of physical education specifically, is striking. This is in spite of efforts such as those in South Africa to ensure that physical education was taught in all schools in 2009, and the creation of a sports academy for the training of coaches and sports administrators in Kenya in 2013. As a matter of public policy, it seems indefensible that resources that could be channeled for school improvement are diverted to sport for development schemes, given the enormity of the challenges Global South schools regularly confront, the lack of capacity of sports clubs, leagues, and teams possess to more systematically address the needs of youth, and the lack of evidence of their consistent success. Of course, such decisions are indicative of larger tendencies including the privatization of schooling even for the poor, as noted in the Kenyan case, a trend also picking up steam in South Africa. But they are also reflective of how important the control of the body has become in many of life’s spheres, along with the negative repercussions for institutions such as schools that fail to account for the importance of affect and play, as meaning-making components of daily experience.

Part Two

Loathing

4

Addressing Global School Violence: Internal and External Examples of Destructive Affect

Introduction It is difficult to read reports of school violence without concluding that children are in need of greater political support and protection on a global basis. The sensational events that result in mass killings on school grounds, the kidnapping and recruitment of child soldiers, and a preponderance of gang violence in neighborhoods close to school sites, all capture our attention and reinforce the concern that schools need to be supported as safe spaces, allowing children and youth to learn in ways that are unencumbered by peripheral forces that cause physical violence. Such a narrative presumes that schools are generically safe and that the horrible instances of school violence to which we have become accustomed are external to and disruptive of an environment that is constructed to be naturally accommodating and supportive of students with particular regard to their learning and psychosocial development. When violence within schools occurs, its exogenous nature contributes to its disruptiveness because its occurrence is unpredictable and unanticipated. Yet the data show a more complex picture. Of the more than one billion children and youth who attend school, 246  million experience some form of violence and bullying (UNESCO 2017). In an opinion poll conducted in 2016 surveying 100,000 children and youth from 18 different countries, two-thirds of those surveyed indicated that they had been bullied (UN News 2016). Nor are these necessarily singular instances. To a significant degree, such violence is recurrent and present within children’s daily school lives on a regular basis. At the same time, it would be myopic to view the school-related violence perpetrated against children and youth as only occurring within the physical boundaries of the school site. Children are increasingly forced to confront incidents of cyberbullying; they experience instances of domestic, neighborhood,

124

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

and community violence that complement the institutional patterns of violence they experience within school walls. The sensational singular event, chronicling a tragic loss of life due to the use of gun violence, for example, cannot be used to hide the fact that violence is intrinsic to the daily lives of many twenty-firstcentury children. Recognizing that schools are potential targets for externally sourced violent acts should not detract from the realization that they are also internally contested sites where violence is regularly tolerated and accepted as an institutional norm. If we are truly concerned about improving children’s lives, then an accounting must be made with regard to the various forms of violence they confront within and beyond school walls, be they sporadic or routine. It is not surprising that regardless of venue, there are certain commonalities that underscore the prevalence of violence in children’s daily existence. We know that violence perpetrated against children is strongly gender related; we know that one’s sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, and class status also play compelling roles in determining the likelihood of becoming a victim of violence. In addition, we know that the use of violence as an expression of one’s power over the victim is not limited to student-to-student interactions. The violence that children and youth confront in schools and at home also involves corporal punishment and/ or physical or sexual attack on the part of teachers and parents as well as peers. But what of the physical violence that purposefully and intentionally targets children, youth, teachers, and staff on a sporadic basis? Why is it that schools become the foci for these encounters? And what do we make of the political efforts to disrupt the academy and inflict violence at the university level? How is it that the most prestigious institutions within the educational ladder have become sites of armed conflict, as the day-to-day routines of university life are compromised with police and armies shutting down and transforming campuses to military sites in countries where armed conflict predominates? To examine global school violence in its various forms and to best explore their interrelationships, we view it important to look at violence against children and youth holistically. But in so doing, it is crucial that the tools of social theory be utilized to do so, with particular regard to gender theory, the nature of structural violence, and the relationship between educational institutions and the state. In previous chapters we have commented upon the school as an appendage of the state (Chapter 1) and its positioning in lieu of globalization tendencies (Chapters 2 and 3). In this chapter, a more nuanced analysis is necessary. We thus rely upon the writings of Raywin Connell and Judith Butler with regard to better understand hegemonic masculinity, performativity, and their relationship to physical violence; on the writings of Pierre Bourdieu to appreciate the importance of habitus in assisting



Addressing Global School Violence

125

our understanding of structural and symbolic violence, and on those of Bob Jessup to appreciate the complex, relational nature of the state. It is important to reiterate that this chapter and the subsequent chapters that comprise the second half of the book tackle issues that represent a fundamental shift from the orientations that have been previously discussed in Part One. In the same way that the violence that children and youth confront in and outside of school represents a direct attack on their personhood, when schools become contested sites where violence is allowed to occur, their mission and purpose is directly compromised. When schools are viewed by outside parties as legitimate targets for physical attack, the distinctiveness of their purpose is dismissed as their campus sites are violated. Under such circumstances, schools are forced into confronting the challenges that other state-related organizations address, all of which are subject to an anger that fuels perceptions of their lack of authenticity, their privileging of “others,” and their generic antipathy toward large members of the population.

Bullying The most commonly accepted definition of bullying states that bullying is an “unwanted aggressive behavior among school-aged children that involves a real or perceived imbalance of power. The behavior is repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time” (UNESCO 2017). It involves an effort to inflict “intentional harm” upon a victim and can be verbal, physical, or relational” (Olweus 1991, 1993; UNESCO 2017:  15). The definition is problematic on a number of accounts. First, for the purposes of global comparison, it is quite vague. It serves as a broad umbrella to include the distinct categories of verbal, physical, and relational harm, but there are questions as to whether the differences between verbal and physical attacks are part of a continuous spectrum or are fundamentally different. Is an insult the same thing as a threat? Is it appropriate to view verbal threats as constituting preludes to the use of physical violence? Second, the sexual relationship to bullying is not noted in the definition. Of course, not all bullying involves sexual affiliation or identity, but much of it does. Is sexualized bullying part of the same phenomenon or should it be treated differently? Can one talk about bullying without addressing issues of power that are often generically sexualized? Another set of problems involves the reporting of bullying. Generally, students are surveyed and are asked to self-report incidents of bullying and their

126

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

frequency. As admitting to having been bullied can be viewed as stigmatizing, at least in some cases, there are questions as to whether its prevalence is actually underreported, whether guarantees of confidentiality in the data collection process are strong enough to invite cooperation, and whether the self-reporting or the reporting of peers who have been bullied is accurate (given the difficulty in finding alternative forms of collaboration) (Cornell and Cole 2012). It is also true that much of the survey information that has been collected references Global North sampling with less reporting in the Global South occurring. Nonetheless, major international surveys indicate that between 29 and 46  percent of the children in the countries surveyed have been bullied (Richardson and Hiu 2016: 101). In spite of the noted methodological concerns, it seems clear that bullying in schools has become a significant issue, and the immediate questions to be addressed are why this is the case and to what can we attribute its presence? When examining the sites where bullying takes place, it is noteworthy that bathrooms, playground areas, cafeterias, and hallways are spaces where bullying is likely to occur, spaces where teacher and staff surveillance of student interactions is more indirect and less visible, and where groups of students are likely to congregate in groups (UNESCO 2017: 19). These open spaces complement the enclosed space of the classroom unit where teacher’s presence and authority is pronounced. Of course, if such open spaces did not exist and all of the school spaces were so tightly regulated as to eliminate the possibility of spontaneous peer interactions with one another, the school’s ability to promote students’ psychosocial development would be compromised. However, the issue is not simply one of regulation or increased surveillance of open spaces. It is within such spaces that school norms find their expression; and it is here that students feel the freedom to act out upon their impulses. Indeed, even when such impulses are destructive, they become sanctioned actions within the school environment. When fighting among students breaks out, peers often encourage the participants to continue to harm one another rather than seek to stop its immediate occurrence. And while adults may eventually seek to stop physical violence from getting out of control, they too often don’t see it as part of their responsibility to directly interfere with peer interactions when bullying is alleged. Students’ willingness to deal with being bullied without calls for help is viewed as a developmental life skill. Too often, bullying and ensuing school violence are not only tolerated, their presence is expected. In this way, schools create exceptional environments that differ from traditional workplace and other social environments where



Addressing Global School Violence

127

such behavior would violate legal as well as procedural norms and expectations (Benbenishty and Astor 2012).

Corporal Punishment On the one hand, addressing the repercussions of being bullied is viewed as a child’s responsibility; to do so successfully is commonly viewed as being part of natural maturation and developmental processes. But students must also confront teachers and administrators who also resort to inflicting violence against them, through their reliance upon corporal punishment to assert authority and keep order. Not only does the use of corporal punishment compromise their ability to teach against bullying, it affirms its utility. The most common forms of violence against students on the part of teachers and administrators include hitting, smacking, spanking, often with an implement such as a whip, stick, belt, shoe; kicking, shaking, throwing children, pulling hair or boxing ears; or forcing students to stay in uncomfortable positions (Global Initiative to End all Corporal Punishment of Children 2018). Although corporal punishment is now illegal in 117 countries, as primary education has become universalized and enrollments have increased, there are strong incentives to use of corporal punishment as a means of maintaining classroom order. Teachers’ classrooms are becoming increasingly overcrowded, they are given limited resources, and they must confront the pressures that arise as a result of the use of increased standardized testing to assess both student and teacher performance (Office of the Special Representative for the Secretary General on Violence against Children, United Nations 2013:  36). In Tanzania, for example, teachers report feeling that they have few alternatives to employing corporal punishment in order to manage their classrooms effectively. They believe that as difficult students interfere in their ability to carry out their jobs, and as they are under increasing scrutiny to perform well, corporal punishment is justified. There is an expectation that men will use the cane to punish students, and that, in order to ensure that students do not become spoiled, they are duty bound to do so (Tao 2016). In certain parts of India, there is strong parental support for the use of corporal punishment in schools, and of course, corporal punishment as a parental tactic to discipline one’s children is also quite common around the world (Morrow and Singh 2016). Under such circumstances, the tendency to rely upon traditional corporal punishment methods is understandable if not justifiable. Nonetheless,

128

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

students are forced into operating in environments that encourage or at least tolerate verbal and physical assault against them by both peers and adults.

The Gendered Nature of Bullying and School Violence The repercussions of bullying and of teacher/administrator abuse of students cannot be fully appreciated without specifically noting their gendered ramifications. Boys are more likely to engage in physical violence than girls; girls are more likely to engage in verbal threats against their victims. But it is inescapable that incidents of sexual taunting, abuse, and violence are often a part of or are associated with bullying. Sexual violence against students on the part of school adults has been known to include, apart from sexual assault, the trading of grades for sexual favors and general engagement in sexual relations with minors on the part of teachers, both of which are common in many African countries and was noted in Chapter 3 with specific respect to South Africa (Swartz 2009; Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Violence Against Children, United Nations 2013: 35; Burton and Leoschut 2013). What then is the nature of the relationship between bullying, violence, and gender? The evidence is overwhelming that the modernist school perpetuates norms that affirm hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity. Connell defines hegemonic masculinity, one of a number of masculinities, “as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (Connell 2005:  77). Specific traits attributed to hegemonic masculinity have included the exercise of violence and aggression, stoicism, courage, toughness, physical strength, athleticism, risk-taking, adventure and thrill-seeking, competitiveness, achievement, and success in support of the ideal (Donaldson 1993). Although the school site is not the only venue where patriarchy is legitimized, scripted, practiced, and performed in children’s lives, it is a significant one given the amount of time children spend in the school. In responding to criticism of the concept, Connell and Messerchmidt (2005) acknowledge that in its initial formulations, hegemonic masculinity was used to posit superficial attributions of generalized masculine traits and simplistic depictions of hierarchy. Some viewed the term as supporting a rigid social reproduction view of masculinity, whereby gender was mechanically learned and reproduced from generation to generation, a view that the authors claim



Addressing Global School Violence

129

was not intended. They admit that context, agency, and an appreciation of the fluidity with which masculinity is defined and practiced were not emphasized while still affirming the basic concepts of the principle. In that vein, the claim that school environments generically reproduce bullies is certainly specious. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the existence of bullying and violence within schools does demonstrate that hegemonic masculinity is played out in various forms on a global level. To be sure, school violence is not always overtly sexualized. But it does occur within an environment where curricular and social practices are constructed in ways that favor hegemonic masculinity and articulate heteronormative values repeatedly. A  graded curriculum closely ties individual achievement based upon competition and test scores, to age and presumed personal growth and development. That such growth is defined for children and youth in heteronormative terms, within the formal and implicit curricula, and through day-to-day interactions with peers and adults, explains why when bullying does occur, those whose social positions are less secure by virtue of gender, LGBTQ status, disability, ethnicity, and social class are most at risk. Certainly, the child’s physical size, strength, and age correlate with the chances of being bullied as well, with victims being physically smaller and shorter than their perpetrators, and with younger children in the early primary grades being more susceptible to bullying than their older counterparts (Benbenishty and Avi Astor 2005: 15). We further know that a significant portion of those who bully were themselves previous bullied victims. This speaks to the fluidity of social positioning within the school environment but also the resort to bullying as a form of playing out of a social script. The writings of Bourdieu and Judith Butler are particularly instructive in this vein. Bourdieu argued that the habituses we practice stem from an internalization of environmental conditions that help shape our dispositions, in ways that are hidden behind conscious intent. The symbolic violence that results explains how those who are dominated accept their social positioning with reference to those who dominate. In the school setting, this plays itself out in an acceptance of one’s victimization resulting from being bullied as a natural result of being in school, as well as the resort to bullying after previously having been a victim of bullying. In the former case, one’s submission to domination is not a strategic conscious choice but is an affirmation of how one perceives reality. Such self-degradation is the material consequence of the symbolic violence that is pervasive in social relations. Similarly, the victim becoming bully affirms the conclusion that the threatened or direct use of violence in order to preserve or acquire standing is

130

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the only acceptable response to the perceived precariousness of one’s own social position. As Bourdieu notes, Symbolic force is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic, without any physical constraint; but this magic works only on the basis of the dispositions deposited, like springs, at the deepest level of the body. If it can act like the release of a spring, that is, with a very weak expenditure or energy, this is because it does no more than trigger the dispositions that the work of inculcation and embodiment has deposited in those who are thereby primed for it. In other words, it finds its conditions of possibility, and its economic equivalent (in an expanded sense of the word “economic”), in the immense preliminary labor that is needed to bring about a durable transformation of the bodies and to produce the predominant dispositions that it triggers and awakens. This transformative action is all the more powerful because it is for the most part exerted invisibly and insidiously through the insensible familiarization with a symbolically structured physical world and early, prolonged experience of interactions, informed by the structures of domination. (2004: 340–1)

Threats and expressions of violence are the epitome of affect; they demonstrate intensity of encounter, are contingent upon social positioning and power relationships, and are of ephemeral duration. Bourdieu argues that the symbolic violence to which the victims of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity are subject is at least as powerful as the material acts of violence or threats of violence that they experience. But his pessimism regarding the likelihood or possibility of altering the habituses and dispositions that mark the symbolic violence that is inflicted upon its victims has been contested, most notably in the writings of Judith Butler. For Butler, gender is performative, crafted through the repetition of actions. She states: In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity of locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time— an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief. If the ground



Addressing Global School Violence

131

of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation, between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. (2003: 415)

The resort to violence can, under these terms, be viewed as an effort to reconcile the discontinuities of hegemonic masculinity that threaten one’s self-perceived ability to successfully perform maleness. Bullying and subsequent violent activities should thus be viewed as performative acts that evoke a degree of agency, destructive as it may be, through the need to act upon the perceived threats to one’s masculinity. Indeed, the need to resort to violence is indicative of instability with which masculinity is socially constructed (Parkes and Unterhalter 2016: 21). Butler thus allows for the greater possibility of altering the ways in which we perform gender even if the enactment of violence is one terrible outcome of one’s performativity. As she notes, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performativity constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 2006: 34). Whether schools are generically structured to flexibly accommodate for the doing and making of gender is an overriding question that will be addressed later in this chapter. But what we do know is that adherence to dispositions that accept school bullying and violence as givens, and that in the process confirms the ubiquity of heteronormativity, is difficult to jettison and replace, even if we accept a view that it may be possible to do so. What we have also discovered is that the implications of school violence and its social meaning are not confined to the fixed geography of the school site, the existence of teen suicide, and cyberbullying as global phenomena speaking directly to this assertion.

Teen Suicide and Mental Health The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that as of 2018, suicide and selfharm was the second leading cause of mortality among adolescents, aged 15–29 and the second leading cause among older adolescent girls (WHO 2018). Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia are the geographical areas where it is most prominent (McLouighlin, Gould, and Malone 2015). The relationship between school climate factors and teen suicide is significant, if at times indirect; it seems clear that from a macro-level perspective, bullying increases the likelihood of teen suicide, acts of

132

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

self-harm, along with numerous other mental health challenges. As McLouighlin, Gould, and Malone (2015) note, “Adolescents who report bullying by peers are significantly more likely to experience depression, to experience/report suicidal ideation, and are at an increased risk of suicidal behavior” (776). Indeed, in the United Kingdom, 22 percent of suicides among children and young people were linked to bullying (Rodway et al. 2016). The UK example comports with global trends in other regions too, as UNESCO reported in 2016: Studies from Belgium the Netherlands, Poland and the United States suggest that LGBT students and young people are between two and more than five times more likely to think about or attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. The 2013 study from Thailand showed that 6.7 per cent of LGBT students who were teased or bullied for being or being perceived to be LGBT, reported attempting suicide in the past year; compared with 1.2 per cent of students who were not teased or bullied. In Mexico, the first National Survey on Homophobic Bullying conducted in 2012 revealed that one in four LGBT people had thought about suicide as a result of the bullying they suffered at school. (20)

The UNICEF opinion poll survey of 2016 reported that 25  percent of all participants listed gender and sexual orientation as a reason for their being bullied, 25  percent listed physical appearance, 25  percent listed ethnicity or national origin, and 25  percent attributed their being bullied to other factors (UNESCO 2017:  17). Indeed, the percentage of LGBTQ students who consistently indicate that their being bullied is associated with sexual orientation is consistently significant across many regions and countries. A UNESCO evidence review found that the proportion of LGBT students experiencing school violence and bullying ranged from 16% in Nepal to 85% in the USA and the prevalence of violence was higher among LGBT students than among their non-LGBT peers. For example, a New Zealand study in 2014 found that lesbian, gay and bisexual students were three times as likely to be bullied as their heterosexual peers and transgender students were five times as likely to be bullied. Data collected in Norway in 2015 found that between 15% and 48% of LGBT students were bullied compared to 7% of heterosexual students. In Asia, studies show that the proportion of LGBT students who experience bullying in school ranges from 7% in Mongolia to 68% in Japan. (24)

Adolescents don’t live lives confined to the physical boundaries of the school, and as the mental health and teen suicide statics showcase, the ramifications of on-site school bullying extend beyond its premises. In recent years, the explosion of cyberbullying gives further testament to the folly of conceiving of bullying



Addressing Global School Violence

133

and school violence as behaviors that are solely confined to the school site as its ramifications have been extremely deleterious to the welfare of LGBTQ youth.

Cyberbullying While definitions of cyberbullying may differ, they closely follow traditional definitions of bullying. Peter Smith’s definition, for example, states that cyberbullying is “An aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend himself or herself ” (2012: 96). But as Smith and others note, cyberbullying does not always lend itself to such broad considerations. Power imbalances between perpetrator and victim may not be obvious or visible, and dramatic incidents with far-reaching repercussions may occur once rather than repeatedly. Nonetheless, there are specific behaviors widely attributed to cyberbullying that range from flaming (hostile insults and provocative messaging), harassment, stalking, physical threats, denigration, tagging and untagging (linking of subjects to unwanted images, photos, videos, etc.), impersonation, outing and trickery, and exclusion (from online lists and groups) (Nickerson, Guttman, and Van Hout 2018: 331). Smith lists seven characteristics that distinguish cyberbullying from traditional forms of bullying. They include the use of technological expertise communicated through electronic means; contact that is indirect as opposed to direct; failure of the perpetrator to directly see the response of the victim; a variety of bystander roles where the bystander may be with the perpetrator, victim, or neither when the act occurs; a lack of immediate status gained by performing the bullying act in front of a discrete group; the size of the audience witnessing the bullying event; and the difficulty of victims to escape from public view after the event(s) occur (95–6). Certainly, as internet access has expanded, the problems associated with cyberbullying have increased. Although it typically has been associated with students in the older grades, younger children are increasingly encountering its presence as they are introduced to the internet. Between 2009 and 2011, 6 percent of 25,000 students aged 6–19 from 25 European countries reported being bullied, with 3 percent having admitted to engaging in bullying themselves. From 2010 to 2014, the percentage of those reported having been cyberbullied increased from 8 percent to 12 percent, and the reports in 2012 showed that one in five secondary level students reported some form of cyberbullying within the past

134

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

year (Burton and Leoschut 2013: 11). In a Reuters poll conducted among 18,000 adults in 24 countries in 2012, 12 percent of the parents expressed awareness of their child having been cyberbullied and 25 percent reported knowing of a child who had been cyberbullied. India and Indonesia were countries where the worst incidents of cyberbullying were self-reported, where 35 percent of children aged 11–13 indicated that they had been victimized (Puresight 2018).

Loathing and Self-loathing The growth of teen suicide and cyberbullying emphatically illustrate the truism that children’s exposure to school violence and the mental health issues that can accompany such exposure do not begin nor end in classroom, playground, bathrooms, hallways, or other physical spaces of the school site. Although the causal evidence directly linking school climates and environments to these specific acts can at times be ambiguous, there are associative connections that are powerful and speak to larger issues involving the nature of violence directed toward children and youth. In this chapter, the link between violence and the heteronormativity has been stressed. That link is clearly present in these phenomena. The destructive effects of social exclusion, for example, are powerful within the school setting as within cyberspace. The consequences of the exercise of power and positionality become evident in multiple environments. But, be it in the school, the community, the family, or through the media, children and youth confront structural violence regularly in multiple settings. To a certain degree, the notion of human experience as being void of violence in a natural state is clearly in error. As Arthur Kleinman notes, Rather than view violence, then, simply as a set of discrete events, which quite obviously it can also be, the perspective I am advancing seeks to unearth those entrenched processes of ordering of the social world and making (or realizing) culture that themselves are forms of violence: violence that is multiple, mundane, and perhaps all the more fundamental because it is the hidden or secret violence out of which images of people are shaped, experiences of groups coerced, and agency is itself engendered. (2000: 239)

In commenting upon the Peruvian case, Anna Maria Buller directly links the structural violence of poverty and the violence of everyday life to which children are repeatedly exposed. The types of school violence that we have commented upon need to be contextualized within the larger frame of family and neighborhood



Addressing Global School Violence

135

violence exposure, where daily encounters involve threatening violence, engaging in violence to avoid violence, and the performative use of violence to assert masculinity, status recognition, revenge, anger, guilt, and emotions that are related to views of the father figure (Buller 2015). Amy Shuffelton (2018) and Douglas Kellner (2008, 2018) further comment upon the notion of honor, traditionally defined according to the adherence to hierarchical authority, as a way of understanding how masculinity tends to be violently performed in North American contexts. To assert that conditions of structural and symbolic violence are present in many of the institutions and surroundings that influence children’s lives, and to acknowledge that they as a result acquire dispositions and engage in performative actions that respond to these conditions underscores the importance of understanding affect. What meanings are children and youth making when they submit to violence or bullying or engage in such acts themselves? What are the intensities of encounter that trigger both the loathing and self-loathing that are acted out through suicide and violence conducted toward others? Sara Ahmed notes that in order to hate, one has to connect with others, whose presence facilitate one’s own sense of bodily integrity. She states, Hate is involved in the very negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, band between communities, where “others” are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat. This other, who may stand for or stand by other others, presses against me, threatening my existence. The proximity of the other’s touch is felt as a negation. Hate involves a turning away from others that is lived as a turning towards the self. We can now see why stories of hate are already translated into stories of love. Of course, it is not that hate is involved in any demarcation between me and not-me, but that some demarcations come into existence through hate, which is felt as coming from within and moving outwards towards others. If hate is felt as belonging to me but caused by an other, then the others (however imaginary) are required for the very continuation of the life of the “I” or the “we.” To this extent, boundary formations are bound up with anxiety not as a sensation that comes organically from within a subject or group, but as the effect of this ongoing constitution of the “apartness” of a subject or group. (2015: 51)

Whether it be within the school, neighborhood, family, or community, the need to negotiate or redefine one’s understanding of self in relation to others under the perception of external threat, is present among those children and youth who perform violence or are victims of it. All of these sites are spaces for assemblage and separation; associations are fluid and contingent in spite of the fact that the forces that induce feelings of social inclusion or exclusion,

136

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

positionality, and the othering of gender, sexual orientation, race, disability, and social class are heavily structured. And, given its global pervasiveness, the anger, fear, or resignation that perpetrators and victims of violence express with regard to their situations can’t be dismissed as aberrant or exceptional. This leads us to the larger questions involving schooling and school violence. Given their own complicity in encouraging structural, symbolic, and physical violence, is school a place where structural violence can be mediated, and the performativity of violence redirected? In addressing this question, we first make note of curricular and policy efforts to address this question, and then look more closely at the relationship between the school and the state.

School Prevention Policies Given what we know about the existence of structural and symbolic violence within schools, is it conceivable to expect that they are in a position to assist children and youth in confronting its occurrence and preventing its expansion? In a relatively early study using TIMMS data, Akiba et al. (2002) concluded that internal factors including school climate, student–teacher relationships, level of academic achievement, and so on had a larger effect than external factors (such as crime within the community or internal family conflict) in determining levels of school violence. Sharlene Swartz (2009) also reported that in the South African case, school sites did serve as a comparatively safer space for impoverished youth with regard to their exposure to violence. In their more comprehensive research, focusing upon the Israeli case in comparative perspective, Benbenishty and Astor (2005:  146) concluded that the three dominant types of violence students experience in schools—verbal-social violence, physical violence, and threat victimization—could be categorized according to their severity (severe vs. mild/moderate) and their verbal as opposed to nonverbal forms. Their findings demonstrated that school environment had the largest impact upon mild/ moderate forms of victimization both in Israel and in other countries. There appears to be growing consensus as to what types of steps can be helpful in addressing school violence from a global perspective. First, numerous countries (including the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and the United States) have initiated antibullying legislation (UNESCO 2017). Second, initiatives that promote teacher training with regard to recognizing and addressing bullying occurrences have been implemented in Norway, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Argentina,



Addressing Global School Violence

137

Chile, and South Africa; the KiVa program in Finland requires all preservice teachers undergo sensitivity and anti-bullying training while in France, new teachers receive similar training (UNESCO 2017: 38–9). Specific curricular programs emphasize the teaching of life skills and social emotional learning such as the Paths Program initiated in the United States but adopted in other countries and geographical regions including Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Southern Germany, and England; the SAVE project in Spain; and the Second Step program in the United States (Kusché and Greenberg 2012; UNESCO 2017: 39–40). But underlining many of these programs is a general embrace of children’s rights principles, the Convention on the Rights of the Child offering guidance with regard to child protection priorities. The movement to outlaw corporal punishment, for example, arose from the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment #8, which defined corporal and physical punishment, and whose publication led to the “Report of the Independent Expert for the United Nations Study on Violence against Children” published in 2006. The study recommended, among other things, a prohibition of all violence against children, including corporal punishment, as well as the adoption and implementation of a code of conduct applicable to educational staff, the use of nonviolent forms of teaching and learning strategies by school administration and teachers, the implementation of prevention measures to reduce violence in schools, and the conformity of curricula and teaching process with the provisions and principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2006: 28–9). The growing popularity of restorative practice, particularly at the primary level, but at middle school levels as well, is further evidence of this trend. Teachers engaged in restorative practices model their efforts upon restorative justice principles crafted as a part of truth and reconciliation projects in postconflict areas. The philosophy behind restorative practice is to offer students alternatives to traditional forms of punishment usually invoked as a result of classroom or school disturbances. Instead, students sit in circles, explain why they feel harmed or injured, ask those peers responsible for the conflict to acknowledge and demonstrate responsibility for the harm they have committed, and empathetically agree to a consensus-based plan that would limit the possibility of similar behavior occurring in the future. Popular in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, a call for such programming has also occurred for South African schools, where restorative justice (if not evident in

138

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

educational practice) has formed part of the country’s postapartheid history (Reyneke 2011). Rights-based initiatives such as these do face constraints in spite of their increasing popularity. Anti-bullying legislation and sensitivity training for prospective, novice, and experienced teachers while certainly admirable in intent, do not necessarily directly create positive classroom outcomes given the intervening and often unpredictable dynamics that shape learning environments. Social and emotional learning programs such as those that evoke restorative practice principles also transgress more dominant paradigms that privilege the maintenance of behavioral control as a means of effecting classroom management, the School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program, originating from the University of Oregon, being an example of the above (Sprague and Horner 2012). As has been noted with particular regard to corporal punishment practices, the concern for assertion and maintenance of pedagogical authority and classroom control as expressed by teachers, administrators, and parents has global resonance, and speaks to the truism that in spite of the efforts to exert control over students’ bodies on the school site, the dynamics that comprise these power relationships are inherently unpredictable and uncertain. In noting the evolution of the academic field of Peace Studies, Hilary Cremin and Alex Guilherme reference the work of Johan Galtung as having been seminal, particularly with regard to his distinction between negative peace where there is an absence of violence, and positive peace, where group cooperation is directly encouraged (2018:  563). Given the demands for control that characterize bureaucratic modernism within school structures, it is easy to see how conflict resolution that privileges the former is more popular than the latter when efforts to address school violence are enacted. In a larger sense, such constraints force us to question whether it is even reasonable to consider the school as being able to be comparatively more supportive of anti-violence protection than any of the other social institutions that are also compromised by structural violence and heteronormative practices. Whether such a faith in schooling is or is not misplaced, there are larger issues involving the relationship between the school and the state that need to be addressed. Why do schools themselves become venues of external attack where visceral physical violence is directed toward their students, faculty, and staff? Why is their political and social legitimacy also increasingly subject to external attack? To do so requires a further reconsideration of the role of the school in relationship to the state.



Addressing Global School Violence

139

The School as One of Many State-contested Sites In this work, we have referenced the relationship between schooling and the state in rather conventional terms, noting the role of education in promoting citizenship as well as job skills (Levinson 2011)  while historically reinforcing colonialism in curricular and pedagogical practice (with reference to sport and physical education). In addressing the ubiquity with which schools and children have become explicit targets of physical violence, even as schools condone and generate their own forms of structural and symbolic violence, a reconsideration of the relationship between the state and the school is warranted. It is tempting to think of the school as an organ of soft state power, in contrast to those institutions that embolden its overtly coercive nature, such as the military and the police. But the presence of incidents that target schools as venues for external violent attack question the validity of this dichotomy. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack in its 2018 Education Under Attack Report notes that from “2013–2017, there were more than 12,700 attacks harming more than 21,000 students and educators in 70 different countries,” attacks as having been defined as “any threatened or actual use of force against students, teachers, academics, education support and transport staff (e.g., janitors, bus drivers), or educational officials as well as attacks on education buildings, resources, material, or facilities (including school buses). These actions may occur for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic, or religious reasons.” Over 1,000 attacks occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Israel/Palestine, Nigeria, and Yemen, perpetrated by both state and non-state actors; between 500 and 999 occurred in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Syria. The use of schools and universities as military barracks and sites occurred at least once in twenty-nine different countries; child soldier recruitment and the use of sexual violence against students going to and from school occurred in sixteen and seventeen different countries, respectively (Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack 2018). With regard to the higher education sector in particular, the Scholars at Risk Network reported that from September 1, 2016 to August 31, 2017, of the fifty-five individuals who were subjected to violent attack and were targeted because of their association with higher education, forty-six were killed, hundreds of others were injured, and still others were disappeared, or experienced extreme violence. These incidents include killings and disappearances either in retaliation for particular academic content or conduct, or targeting of members of higher

140

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

education communities, including higher education leaders, academic and nonacademic staff, and higher education students. Disappearance includes arrest, detention, abduction, or other deprivation of liberty by government or quasi-government officials, by groups, or by individuals acting on behalf of, with support, consent or acquiescence of the government, followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned, or a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of their liberty, which places such persons outside the protection of the law. Violence includes violent physical assaults causing serious harm to individual members of higher education communities, including beatings, shootings, or other injuries with weapons, and torture. (2018)

There were mass attacks upon universities in Syria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, retaliatory responses toward students for engaging in nonviolent political protest, and there were forty-five incidents of wrongful prosecution and eightythree incidents of wrongful imprisonment of university community members during 2016–17. The politicization of violence in these ways raises questions about the state/educational sector relationship with particular regard to soft/ hard power dichotomies and the school/university as state appendage. Those who engage in such attacks seemingly reject the notion of the school or the university as representing a minimally coercive nonthreatening state institution. Indeed, these instances force us to think hard about what the nature of the state is, how our perceptions of what it is and what it does shift, and how our views of schooling contribute to these determinations. In this vein, Bob Jessup’s work is particularly compelling. Jessup reminds us that it is most useful to think of the “state” as encompassing various social relations among its differing parts, dynamic and subject to repeated reinvention rather than consisting of a monolithic whole. For some, the “state” is protector of the “nation” or in Benedict Anderson’s terms, an imagined community. For others, the “state” consists of those judicial/legal entities that define the workings of civil society. State apparatuses are commonly perceived to be bureaucratic and centralized; yet in recent decades some have taken on managerial and administrative roles that camouflage more definitive executions of their authority. In many parts of the world, particularly in rural and isolated communities, there is little evidence of state institutions being present at all let  alone effective in playing any kind of meaningful role in the lives of its citizenry. On the other hand, even when giving the impression of acting in concert with one another, state apparatuses are beholden to particular class interests that are in conflict with one another but still influence their mandates and the ways their mandates are executed. Class interests further represent themselves as serving the common



Addressing Global School Violence

141

good, while they seek to implement their aims coercively (through use of the military or police) or hegemonically (through the work of political parties) even when the spheres of coercion and hegemony conflict with one another. As a result, the assumed coherence with which state power is crafted and its authority is exercised tends to be heavily mythologized. There are never guarantees regarding which interests will prevail under what conditions, and when other interests will renounce the perceived space in which the state as a whole operates as being illegitimate (Jessup 2016). The educational contexts in which modern school operates are reflective of many of these contradictions, a number of which become glaringly visible when one examines its role in creating structural and symbolic violence, while concurrently becoming victimized by mass physical violence. We point to the irony of compelling school attendance while lauding school practice as a generic public good or the mixed messages of inclusivity and exclusion that mark modern school practice as examples of such contradictions. But it is in its asserted roles as protector of childhood, and at the higher educational levels, generator of new ideas contributing to social progress, that those contradictions evoke particularly visceral responses. In the former instance, when the worth of the child is less than that of prized material objects—be it the gun, monetary currency, or barter—there is no reason to offer children the developmental protection the school asserts as its ethical imperative. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the notion of the child has radically shifted in many cultural contexts, from that of generic innocent to that of contaminant and disposable entity, as children’s lives have increasingly become demonized. Childhood, with all of its complexity and occasional dysfunctionality, is increasingly associated with polluting society rather than serving as its potential savior (Epstein 1999, 2011; Evans and Giroux 2015). Efforts to make schools safer, less inhuman and exclusionary, and less dangerous, make little sense under these circumstances. At the higher education level, the association of the educational institution with state illegitimacy is even more visible. Even if one were to accept the proposition that the generation and circulation of ideas that are subjected to scrutiny and testing is of generic social benefit, and that universities create safe spaces where such processes occur, the university becomes associated not simply with the “state” but with the class interests it purportedly serves. As a result, claims regarding its social importance become difficult to defend. Indeed, the willingness to convert university spaces to military facilities belies the failure of the higher education sector to separate itself from the mundane daily

142

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

coercive activities of state apparatuses that operate in conflict zones, making it the presumed legitimacy contested and fluid. Such precariousness may explain how interests that are intent on destroying hegemonic notions of educational progress have achieved some success in their efforts. It does not explain why they endeavor to do so.

Affect and the Violence of Comparison Schools are one of many social spaces where children confront violence as a part of their daily lives. The forms of violence they experience—structural, symbolic, and physical—manifest themselves in different ways, but their shared characteristics include a heteronormative frame that serves as a rationale for initiating exclusion, helping to define who is subjected to violence and who deserves to be. In Chapter  1, we referenced Giorgio Agamben’s emphasis upon the role of the state in determining the worth of its citizen’s lives through enacting legalities that define normalcy and exceptionality, the rule of law being historically used to isolate, marginalize, and obliterate exception. In the introduction, and in Chapter  2, we noted Nancy Fraser’s work that emphasizes the importance of justice as recognition insofar as those whose presence is unrecognized cannot possibly be treated in a just manner. Many of the victims of school violence are marginalized as being exceptional, and the lack of recognition to which they are entitled is rationalized as befitting their status (weak, ethnic, female, poor, LGBTQ, disabled, etc.). Even those who are perpetrators of school violence are depicted as being exceptional and out of the mainstream, their actions dismissed as apart from the norm (Shapiro 2018). On the one hand, it is reasonable to expect that the objectification of personhood that such categorizations enable elicit reactions that can be intense if not vehement on the part of victims. Objectification fuels the loathing that accompanies the structural and symbolic violence to which children are exposed within and outside of the school site; it rationalizes the politicized attacks on universities and educational sites that are viewed as supportive of an intrusive, arrogant state. But if we think about the performative nature of violent engagement, it is also clear that the perpetrator is not simply distancing himself/ herself from the source of one’s discomfort but is embracing the proximity with one’s victim. This is what Sara Ahmed meant when noting the ways in which the connection between perpetrator and victim becomes intimate, the victim’s presence threatening the perpetrator, a recognition of her/his presence actually



Addressing Global School Violence

143

assisting in the definition of their relationship. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom makes a similar point in arguing that it is by viewing one’s victim as a fellow human being that encourages one to act in a destructive manner with a sense of moral entitlement, albeit with potentially devastating consequences (2017, 2018). The objectification of the subject and/or the construction of imagined intimacy with the other are processes we as comparative educators are well familiar. As noted in the introduction, the history of the field is replete with examples of both of these processes. Yet the case presented here is graphically suggestive of the harmful consequences of such outlooks. In the first part of this book, we have argued that acts of educational comparison can be viewed as efforts to find alternatives to conventional approaches whose limitations evoke popular fear of their authenticity and relevance. The school violence case is the first of three where such anxiety is destructively channeled. It foreshadows a recurrent theme:  that as natural as acts of meaning-making and an embrace of the comparative might be, such acts have the capacity to be harmful when framed in the pursuit of domination rather than respectful engagement.

Conclusion If we review the tenants of affect theory that have been highlighted in this work, they all play a role in contributing to our understanding of global school violence. We have viewed the school site as a dynamic space of shifting social relations, mirroring that of other state apparatuses. We have also concluded that the ways in which school violence expresses itself within the material site resonate with similar off-site patterns, and that it is unhelpful to view the school as being safer or less structurally and symbolically violent than other social institutions. The concepts of intensity of encounter and meaning-making hold special salience given these conditions. They highlight the levels of engagement in which children, youth, teachers, and adults operate that help us to explain how powerful encounters with school violence can be whether they are implicitly or explicitly constructed, regardless of their degree of visibility. Those encounters lead to efforts at meaning-making that occur under conditions where structural and symbolic violence is present; they occur during acts of performativity in reaction to dominant social scripts that are exclusionary and heteronormative; they occur in reaction to the lack of recognition schools and other state apparatuses afford the children, parents, and community members they are intended to serve.

144

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

The significance of assemblage and contingency is also apparent in this case. Much of the conventional research involving school violence is framed from the disciplinary perspective of psychology and privileges individual child/student attitude or behavior as a fundamental unit of analysis. The cost of employing that frame is the lack of appreciation of assemblage and contingency: characteristics of the school site and other social spaces that acknowledge the interactive nature of social encounters that include violence or threats of violence; the lack of predictability as to how those encounters arise; what meanings they evoke, what consequences they render; and the contingent nature of social relations where the markings of power and positionality tend to be heavily contested. Ignoring these factors means ignoring the power of affect in shaping and, in some instances, destroying children’s lives. Such ignorance is additionally harmful as it fails to further our understanding of why school sites can evoke such popular anger and even hatred, even in the midst of their official portrayals as inclusive and pristine entities.

5

Global Youth Protest: Confronting the Status Quo

Introduction One of the recurrent themes throughout this book has been the importance of understanding the relationship between affect and recognition. Whether it involves the nature of social memory with regard to the victims of the Pinochet regime’s repression, the necessity of giving space for artistic and musical expression as vehicles for appreciating identity, or embracing bodily expression through sport, we have seen how different groups have sought alternatives to the modernist school project that affectively offer them the space to engage in meaning-making in ways that promise to redress their marginalization. We have categorized their responses as embodying a fear that the educational practices to which they are accustomed are irrelevant, exclusive, and disrespectful. In Chapter  4, we further examined the nature of global school violence from a perspective that also emphasized exclusion and a lack of recognition for vulnerable school populations. We viewed these processes as contributing to school climates that encourage institutionalized verbal and physical violence, and further examined the ways in which external forms of physical violence directed toward schools and school populations involved a comparative identification of self with other that often results in destructive and tragic consequences. But what about the nature of assembly and its relationship to meaning-making more broadly? What does it mean when students walk out of a classroom in protest or youth occupy public spaces through mass demonstrations, sit-ins, or temporary encampments, to express their rejection of the status quo? In this chapter, we associate loathing with such rejection, and conceive of the term, not its more destructive variant as discussed in Chapter 4, but within the larger context of assemblage. To do so requires discussion of the contemporary context in which assemblage occurs, a context that involves the ways in which neoliberal,

146

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

globalization, and new media tendencies have shaped our understandings as to what assemblage means. In support of this effort, we reference and extend the discussion of these themes that were prominent in ­chapters 1, 4, and 10 of my edited volume The Whole World is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age (Epstein 2015a, b, c). In so doing, we reflect upon student movements that were active in 2011–13 in Chile, the United States, and Spain, and make reference to youth protests in Hong Kong in 2014. To be clear, engagement in protest does not necessarily involve “loathing.” Like many US high school students of my generation, I  wore an armband protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War during my high school graduation ceremony. That gesture, in effect, reified the legitimacy of the physical and symbolic space of the school site in question, validating the school norms that determined who was worthy of commendation for successfully progressing through the educational ladder, even as it sought to demonstrate the importance of exercising political speech in an educational environment. It was a perfectly acceptable form of student protest but under no circumstances would one associate it with an expression of “loathing.” Indeed, a year before this incident occurred, the US Supreme Court ruled in its Tinker v. Des Moines decision that the display of armbands during school ceremonies such as graduations was constitutional precisely because it was not disruptive of the school’s ability to exercise its educational mission. In this chapter, we are examining a different phenomenon. Here, the institutional legitimacy of the school and of the institutions with which it is associated are directly rejected. In this case, an appeal to the politics of symbolism is more focused and intentional precisely because other forms of conventional political engagement have been systematically rejected as ineffectual. The “loathing” we describe in this chapter is a “loathing” of the status quo, but one that employs affect in an effort to construct new and more inclusive social and political relationships. When I  and my school classmates “assembled” for our “armband carrying” graduation ceremony, it was the school that determined the conditions of our assembly, barring a more substantial form of protest from occurring. The fact that parents, relatives, friends, and community members were invited to the ceremony highlighted its “public” nature, albeit subject to the control of school authorities. As Judith Butler has noted, such is the case for assemblage more generically, as it is the state that presumes to dictate the terms through which engagement in the public sphere can occur. She states, “As long as the state controls the very conditions of assembly, popular sovereignty becomes an instrument of state sovereignty, and the legitimating conditions of the state



Global Youth Protest

147

are lost at the same time that the freedom of assembly has been robbed of both its critical and democratic functions” (Butler 2015: 163). Butler’s further discussion of assemblage as a form of embodied affect is particularly instructive, especially when coupled with the social science literature that speaks to the nature of social movements. We discuss concepts in both of these domains as a prelude to our analysis of the specific social movements that emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Butler on Assemblage In her book, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), based upon a series of lectures she delivered at Bryn Mawr College, Butler highlights a number of concepts that ground her understanding of assemblage. They include notions of performativity, recognition, precarity, and a discussion of the nature of political freedom and the right to assembly. As is true in her analysis of gender, Butler views performativity within the context of assemblage as entailing not simply a series of speech and linguistic acts, but as a form of embodiment that leads to action. In this case, she views assemblage as an occurrence where people come together in recognition of their precarity and vulnerability, exercising their expressive freedom to politically contest exclusionary practices of the state (2015: 9–10). It is especially significant to Butler that the collection of embodied bodies make themselves publicly visible in an exercise of their agency, precisely because the state in their view has failed to recognize their precarity. As she notes, “sometimes it is not a question of first having power and then being able to act; sometimes it is a question of acting, and in the acting, laying claim to the power that one requires. This is performativity as I understand it, and it is also a way of acting from and against precarity” (2015: 58). By precarity, Butler means The politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death . . . precarity is thus the differential distribution of precariousness. Populations that are differentially exposed suffer heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and vulnerability to violence without adequate protection or redress. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized state violence, to street or domestic violence, or other forms not enacted by states but for which the judicial instruments of states fail to provide sufficient protection or redress. (2015: 33–4)

148

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

To be clear, precarity is a condition to which we all are potentially subjected, especially in the neoliberal era. Part of the nature of assemblage is recognizing that the vulnerability we experience is universally shared. But this does not mean that conditions of precarity are the same for all groups; indeed, state apparatuses regularly decide who and under what conditions is disposable or worthy of protection from vulnerability. Thus, the act of assemblage is a demand for recognition of one’s presence and one’s right to protection as performed within a public space. It also involves the exercise of freedom through the assertion of one’s rights. Butler makes three important points here. First, she notes that through the act of assemblage, groups may assert rights that they have not yet enumerated but still exist, precisely because their vulnerability or potential vulnerability is a condition that all peoples share, and their right to protection speaks to conditions of their (and our) humanity. Second, the process of assemblage speaks to the exercise of freedom in ways that contest liberal understandings of the term that privilege the protection and assertion of autonomy and independence. Not only is the space where assemblage occurs public but the bodies that congregate its boundaries reiterate the intrinsically relational nature of freedom. Freedom, as she views it, is not exercised at the expense of other groups but in recognition of the need to contest precarity and vulnerability generically and under conditions where we negotiate and work with bodies distinct from ours, brought together by shared circumstance (Butler 2015: 151–2). Her final point is that the ability to exercise this freedom is present even amongst those who are most vulnerable. The performance of assemblage is not simply an expression of distinctive class, ethnic, or identity politics: the possibilities that allow for its expression are rooted in the relational nature of our lived actions that define our humanity.

Social Movement Theory Butler’s insights offer a roadmap for understanding the meanings of assemblage in support of social action; social movement theory, as developed by social scientists, supplements her insights and offers insight regarding the ways in which specific social movements can best be understood and evaluated. Social movement theorists, who gained prominence in the 1970s, reacted against a conventional perspective that viewed social movements as irrational gatherings of individuals, influenced by the power of the group, to protest, usually ineffectively and unsuccessfully, in their efforts to enact lasting social



Global Youth Protest

149

change (Smelser 1962:  361; Cohen 1985:  671–3). Noting the large numbers of youth who engaged in these movements (particularly in the United States during the Vietnam War), some viewed these efforts as generational displays of an adolescent rejection of authority (Feur 1969). This type of analysis of course did not account for the success of the US Civil Rights Movement or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, let  alone other rights-based social movements (feminist movements, movements in favor of environmental justice, LGBTQ rights movements, disability rights movements, etc.). Scholars noted the planning and strategic decision-making that were crucial elements in social movement activity, and also were aware of the fact that it was simply wrong to assess the results of movement actors and participants as being inconsequential or ephemeral. A robust body of literature arose as a result. That literature has focused upon four areas of investigation that have been hypothesized as incorporating crucial elements that contribute to the formation and evolution of social movements:  mobilization of resources, opportunity structures, repertoires of contention, and framing mechanisms. Although theorists have emphasized the importance of these elements to differing degrees, they all have played a role in enhancing our understanding of social movement dynamics. This being said, their importance with regard to contemporary events is in the process of being reassessed given the impact of globalization and social media processes.

Mobilization of Resources McCarthy and Zald (1977) and Jenkins (1983) were among the first to claim that the ability to mobilize resources was crucial in determining the success of a social movement. They viewed resource mobilization specifically as the ability to create an efficient organizational structure and capacity, recruit leadership, and identify the resources (financial and otherwise) necessary to attract and engage with potential followers. The development of a professional capacity to so engage was important given the existence of a plethora of competing political interests, often in conflict with one another, vying for public attention and support (Jenkins 1983). Therefore, the process of identity salience, whereby individuals would come to associate their personal interests with the collective interests of the larger group, thereby displaying a willingness to participate in social action, was crucial in determining a social movement’s ultimate effectiveness. David Snow (2013) has noted that identity salience not only involves a willingness to

150

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

align one’s own interests with that of a specific group, but it also involves an additional alignment with the social, more broadly conceived. In this way, his analysis parallels the discussion offered in Chapter 1 regarding the distinction between individual, collective, and social memory. How one defines what it means to identify with the social in an era where social media and globalization forces have influenced communicative possibilities and opportunities is one of the important questions that those focused upon the dynamics of mobilization are now forced to confront. Of course, for Butler, the categories of personal, collective (or group), and the social are themselves artificial constructions given the relational nature of our daily existence. But how we come to align these constructions is key in understanding how mobilization occurs.

Opportunity Structures Sidney Tarrow (1994) contributed important insight regarding the nature of social movements in his emphasis upon opportunity structure. Simply put, historical and contemporary political, economic, and social conditions serve as a predicate that determines when social movements arise, their duration, and how successful they may be. Here too, the speed with which information is now conveyed and shared globally along with the ease with which ideas and cultural artifacts are circulated argues for a more expansive definition of what was opportunity structure was originally perceived to entail. At the same time, few would argue that social structures are homogenous across cultures or regions if they exist at all. The challenge in the twenty-first century is one of constructing a more elastic as well as more nuanced understanding of social relationships and their presence within political, economic, and cultural domains. In addition, there is evidence that with the growth of networking and horizontal relationship-building, Tarrow’s rather conventional understanding of organizational structure and networking should be rethought. This being said, there are important contexts with which one can view contemporary social movements that do offer evidence for the belief that conditions create opportunities for successful social movements to percolate. For the purposes of this study, they include a history of strong student protest in Chile along with a growing number of students demanding eased higher educational access that foreshadowed the massive protests in 2011–12. Other examples include the results of ineffective coalition politics, dramatic and seemingly unsolvable youth unemployment, and government efforts to control the internet in Spain resulting



Global Youth Protest

151

in the Indignados Movement. The legacy of British colonialism in Hong Kong, coupled with the failure of elites there to push back against efforts to minimize democracy on the part of China resulting in the Umbrella Movement of 2014, is a final illustration that emphasizes the importance of opportunity structure in determining social movement development and ultimate success.

Repertoires of Contention Charles Tilly viewed social movements as being distinctive for their performative character in where authority was regularly contested within the public space. Chronicling the history of social movements in Great Britain and France in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he argued that social movements distinguish themselves from other forms of political action in their reliance upon their ability to challenge those in power through engaging in performative contentious acts (repertoires of contention) that repeatedly call upon power holders to address their demands. As he notes, A social movement consists of a sustained challenge to powerholders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those powerholders by means of repeated public displays of that population’s numbers, commitment, unity, and worthiness. A  social movement embodies contentious interaction; it involves mutual claim-making between challengers and powerholders. The claim-making, furthermore, often engages third parties:  other powerholders, repressive forces, rivals, allies, citizens at large. The definition excludes many forms of struggle:  feuds, civil wars, electoral competition, insurrections. Although movement activists sometimes take direct action against authorities, rivals, or opponents, in general social movements center on indirect forms of action: actions that display will and capacity, but that would not in themselves accomplish the objectives on behalf of which they make claims. Social movements call instead for powerholders to take the crucial actions. While obviously applicable to campaigns for civil rights, women’s suffrage, or peace, this indirectness also characterizes movements for environmental action, Third World solidarity, abortion rights, or sexual preference; they organize around the demand that powerholders recognize, protect, endorse, forward, or even impose a given program. (1993–4: 7)

The specific techniques utilized to elicit numerical support for a cause—express a clear commitment to challenge authority, demonstrate unity of purpose and articulate the worthiness of one’s commitment—were clearly in evidence during

152

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the movements we seek to analyze. In the Chilean case, students reenacted Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, performing as they were zombies in front of the country’s Presidential palace because they argued, if reform of higher educational policy did not occur, they would be dead anyway. The occupation of Zucotti Park during the US Occupy movement (as well as that of Gezi Park in Istanbul during Turkish protests in 2013)  was especially significant as the sites of occupied spaces represented neoliberal merging of commercial and privately owned real estate under the protection of the state. The symbolic importance of Zucotti Park given its proximity to Wall Street, for example, should not be underestimated. Umbrellas, popularly used for protection against weather-related elements, were employed to shield Hong Kong demonstrators against the tear gas and pepper spray that was inflicted upon them by police (Henly 2014). A  symbol representing one form of ubiquitous protection thus became politicized, exemplifying the need for protection against the exercise of repressive government tactics. But among the most important repertoires of contention that were in evidence within student movement protests were the encampment and the assembly, the former in evidence as part of the Indignados Movement in Spain, the Occupy movement in the United States, and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Encampments have often been used as repertoires of contention, one of the most clearly evident occurring in Tahir Square in Cairo, during the Arab Spring protests of 2011. The Indignados Movement borrowed the tactic and used it in the Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid as well as in other cities, with US Occupy movement and later Umbrella Movement participants following suit. The symbolic nature of the performative act of shelter construction cannot be overstressed, as the fragility of the temporary shelter structures served in stark contrast with the permanence of state structures that defined the public space that was subject to contestation. As Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy note (2013: 57), addressing the basic human needs of encampment participants including the distribution of food, human waste removal, and personal safety protection can be quite daunting. Such challenges were met with varying degrees of success but to the extent that the protest camps endured over time, their presence represented a strong symbolic threat to those surrounding state buildings that asserted a heretofore uncontested sense of permanence. Encampment is representative of one type of a repertoire of contention; there were many others of significance as well. During both the Indignados and Occupy movements, participants created alternatives to conventional



Global Youth Protest

153

institutions as signifiers of their rejection of the status quo. Makeshift libraries were established on protest sites in Madrid as well as New York. In the Puerta del Sol, an alternative banking system was constructed based upon the bartering and exchange of skills rather than the use of currency. In New York, when police restricted the use of megaphones and electronic amplification, participants created a human microphone system whereby speaker utterances were repeated on mass by large groups so that all of those assembled could understand what was being said (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy 2013: 63). Of perhaps even greater importance was the creation of the assembly model of governance in Spain, replicated in New York. Assemblies as so constituted were leaderless, and participatory gatherings that were designed to promote consensus through their emphasis upon grassroots decision-making (Epstein 2015c: 97). As Manuel Castells (2012) noted, they were intentionally leaderless, rejecting traditional forms of hierarchical decision-making in favor of the creation of horizontal relationships that mirror the flexibility of social networking, to which so many of the participants had become accustomed. In the Spanish case, when consensus efforts became difficult to realize, commissions were established whereby groups were assigned specific tasks of investigating issues and arriving at recommendations. They then reported their findings to the larger group for further deliberation with the hope that their efforts would aid in large group consensus building. In so doing, these assemblies represent an effort to mirror Butler’s embrace of social democracy as the defining characteristic of assemblage. Finally, one cannot fully appreciate the power of repertoires of contention in the twenty-first century without commenting upon the use of social media in recruiting participants and communicating group messaging. In Tahrir Square, in Puerta del Sol, and in Zucotti Park, for example, webcams were set up to record activity within the camps on a twenty-four-hour seven-day-a-week basis. The use of YouTube videos, along with social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and so on not only allowed for expedited global messaging to occur but themselves were utilized as repertoires of contention. Student protest leaders such as Camila Vallejo in Chile and Joshua Wong in Hong Kong became international social movement “rock stars,” as a result. And, while in recent years, we have become fully aware as to how states have weaponized these same tools in efforts to stifle dissent and promote their own interests, the breadth of audience, organizing capacity, and intensity of activity would never have been realized among these social movements without their use of social media as a twenty-first-century repertoire.

154

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

The Power of Framing In 1974, Erving Goffman published Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, where he argued that we use frames to interpret events and ascribe meaning to them, based upon schema we develop that are influenced by social and cultural contexts. David Snow (Snow and Benford 1988; Snow 2004, 2013) has applied Goffman’s concept of framing to social movement theory, arguing that it is through understanding the process of framing that one can best assess the character of a social movement. He argues that as we negotiate the multiple identities to which we ascribe, at some point identity pervasiveness occurs, whereby a specific identity becomes more significant than others, taking over with regard to how we more generally view ourselves and how we decide to act (Snow 2013: 269–70). Within the social movement context, pervasive identities are constructed through exposure to discursive fields, which offer the space for issue discussion, meaning-making, and framing (Snow 2013: 273). The meaningmaking that Butler ascribes to the very nature of assemblage, and indeed, the meaning-making that we have emphasized as being crucial to considerations of affect theory, is thus reaffirmed in his analysis. There are three separate identities that Snow and his associates identify within a social movement as being influenced by framing. They include the portrayal of protagonists, antagonists, and audiences (Hunt, Benford, and Snow 1994; Snow 2013: 274). It is thus interesting to note that in Chile, for example, the protagonists were student leaders who rose to their levels of prominence in rather conventional ways through asserting their leadership by assuming the leadership roles of wellestablished large student organizations by election. Their stature was framed accordingly. In the Spanish case, the framing that occurred among protagonists was that of a rejection of conventional leadership: there were no named leaders who took credit for organizing the encampments on the Puerta del Sol. What is most impressive about the social movements of 2011–12 though, in my view, was their ability to connect with audiences, constructing a discursive field that made the case for an identification of student and youth grievance with the larger injustices with which others outside of these groups could identify and offer support. In Chile, the educational inequalities that students protested against became proxies for larger, more wide-scale dissatisfaction with government corruption and inefficiency. In Spain and in the United States, a strong reaction against social inequality and the unwillingness of governments to address its consequences led to specific calls for political reform, of which educational reform was a significant part.



Global Youth Protest

155

A major theme in The Whole World Is Texting was that the success of the social movements that were portrayed needed to be evaluated not simply on the basis of their material outcomes, but according to the ways in which public discourse regarding the inevitability and promise of neoliberal and/or statesponsored authoritarianism, had changed as a result of their occurrence. Slogans such as “We are the 99%,” prominent during the US Occupy movement, for example, would have previously been marginalized and dismissed as appeals to class warfare rather than being taken seriously by a majority of the population. Instead, the slogan acquired a powerful resonance that continues to hold appeal. Indeed, the use of the “Occupy” nomenclature during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong attests to the potential transnational power of language and the importance of framing in communicating the nature and importance of protest. It is fair to question though, in retrospect, whether this analysis was somewhat oversimplistic and if it requires reevaluation. This is an exercise that will be pursued in the following pages of this chapter. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that there are obvious themes that Butler and the social scientists writing about social movements highlight, that speak to the core principles of affect theory that have been emphasized throughout this project. They include the nature of assemblage as incorporating intensity of encounter (or in Butler’s terms, embodied encounters), its relational essence, the use of contentious strategies and tactics that symbolically articulate a shared cause, and the articulation of meaning-making with which their participants engage, through their framing of social movement events.

Chile in 2018 In 2011 and 2012, mass student protests in Chile erupted as a result of government scandal, higher education financing schemes that favored wealthy and middleclass students over their poorer counterparts, and a general dissatisfaction with an educational system that had only marginally been reformed since its construction during the Pinochet regime. From a demographic perspective, the increased number of youth seeking to attend university fueled the growth of private and for profit institutions, which charged higher interest rates on student loans than did their more prestigious public and private counterparts that catered to wealthier students. In truth, the higher education inequities that most directly affected students resulted from an even more expansive privatization mandate that characterized the country’s entire educational system. A  system whereby

156

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

municipal governments would operate free public primary and secondary schools created stark inequalities given the disparate funding resources available within the differing municipalities. These schools were thus placed at the bottom of the educational ladder, with private schools receiving government aid and independent private schools constituting the middle and apex of the country’s educational pyramid. Given the disparate degree of educational quality offered within the differing sectors, and an entrance examination system that favored wealthier students from better financed schools, the expansion of higher education to account for increased demand in ways that exacerbated inequality was an inevitability. After initial protests began, the scandal that erupted when it was discovered that tuition funds collected at a for-profit university were used for property investment rather than for educational expenses ensnarled a former Presidential candidate and the then Minister of Education, who served on the Board of Directors of the institution. At the same time, Chile not only had a strong history of student protest but many of the university students who protested in 2011 and 2012 had previously participated in the “Penguin Revolution” of 2006, where high school students aligned with teachers staged mass protests against exorbitant university entrance examination fees while also demanding increased subsidies to compensate for the use of public transportation to and from their high schools. Certainly, the opportunity structures were in place for a successful social movement to germinate (Epstein 2015c: 84–9). Students demanded extensive educational reform throughout the system along with specific higher education reforms that spoke to their immediate concerns. They argued that the country’s constitution needed to be reformed, that education be formally acknowledged as a public good, and that the right to an education be affirmed as fundamental. Their additional demands included a termination of municipal school governance, a new educational funding system, more funding for teacher training and professional development, free transportation to schools, increased investment in educational infrastructure and technical and vocational education, and the suspension of funds to newer institutions until guidelines for their operation were developed by the Superintendent of Education (Epstein 2015c:  89). Students also stipulated that a number of higher education reforms be specifically implemented. They included increasing socioeconomic diversity with regard to admission to the country’s traditional universities, constructing a revised financial aid system to eliminate household debt, eliminating government assistance to for profit higher education institutions, developing a new accreditation system for all institutions



Global Youth Protest

157

receiving government funding whereby these institutions would closely adhere to academic freedom principles, and creating a series of new vocational and technical institutes. Finally, the students called for increased efforts to address the needs of indigenous students in the areas of financial aid, curricular reform, and the creation of a public, intercultural state university (Epstein 2015c: 89). What has changed in the seven years since the 2011 student protests began? To begin with, the country has become more socially liberal, with the passage of a law permitting same sex civil unions in 2015, a law eliminating a total ban on abortion and allowing its practice in limited circumstances in 2017, and the passage of a transgender rights bill in the Chilean House of Deputies in 2018. Given the traditionally strong influence of the country’s Catholic Church, these initiatives, although comparatively modest within some national environments, are significant. Politically, the conservative Piñera government, in power in 2011, was replaced by a more left-of-center Michelle Bachelet presidency (March 2014–18). The second Bachelet presidency was less successful than her first term (2006–10) as it was plagued by internal infighting within her political alliance resulting in a record of mixed accomplishment. In running for the presidency a second time, her political platform with regard to educational reform reflected a number of concerns voiced in the student movement of 2011–12. Although the Piñera government lowered student loan interest rates slightly, most of the students’ demands remained unmet. Thus, Bachelet called for broad educational reform that would end support for for-profit educational institutions, institute universal free education, and address persistent issues regarding a lack of educational quality (Benedikter and Ziosilo 2017). The 2015 Law for School Inclusion attempted to address some of these concerns. First, it was designed to eventually end a co-payment system whereby parents whose children attended private schools receiving state aid were additionally required to pay additional fees to the primary or secondary school. Second, it insured that over time, such schools would not be allowed to operate on a for-profit basis. Third, it phased out autonomously constructed student selection policies that these schools had independently developed. A National System for Teachers Development Law, passed in 2016, attempted to improve teacher training, professional development, working conditions, and teacher pay (Valenzuela and Montecinos 2017). In 2017, a Public Education Act was signed into law that would over time centralize the administration and funding of municipal schools to address the structural inequalities noted above. However, efforts to reform the higher education sector, which of course was the principal focus of student concerns, were only modestly successful. In 2016,

158

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the Chilean government adopted a tuition-free policy for students attending its higher education institutions, known as “gratuidad.” Even after the student demonstrations of 2011–12, the advertised tuition costs for attending Chilean higher education institutions have become among the highest in the world, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom in price. The initiation of “gratuidad” was aimed at addressing student concerns and was a major campaign promise during Bachelet’s second presidential campaign. It should be noted that until the law was enacted, scholarships to low-income students, which covered 63–70 percent of tuition costs and government loans, were also available (although not for cost of living expenses). Financial assistance was also tied to performance on the country’s Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU) or national entrance examination. Thus, about half of all undergraduates received financial assistance prior to 2016 (Delisle and Bernasconi 2018). Originally designed to offer free college education to all students, the second Bachelet government backtracked when confronted with budgetary realities, exacerbated by declining copper revenues and a less-than robust economic performance. As a result, a series of limitations was enacted with the hope that the dream of free college education for all Chilean students would gradually be phased in. Initially, free tuition was available only to the student population that fell within the lower 50 percent range of family income levels, not the 70 percent that was originally planned. It was hoped that gradually eligibility would be increased to cover the lower 60 percent in 2018. However, students were only eligible to take advantage of the plan if they attended non-profit institutions and their institutions agreed to cap rising tuition expenses. In addition, enrollment was still merit-based and participating universities were still able to use the PSU in determining who was eligible for admission. A number of factors have contributed to the modest results of the law since its implementation. First, one’s PSU results strongly correlate with one’s socioeconomic status making its continued usage problematic if one’s aim is to reduce systematic inequity. Second, a large number of students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds were attending for profit technical and vocational institutes, restricting their eligibility to receive financial assistance. Third, some private universities don’t meet the government accreditation standards necessary for program participation eligibility. Finally, other private universities decided not to participate in the program given the tuition restrictions imposed upon them. The Ministry of Education thus estimated that 15 percent of those enrolled in the program would have not have done so if it had not been implemented. However, untethering financial assistance to national examination test results within the



Global Youth Protest

159

previously existing government scholarship programs may have had the same effect (Delisle and Bernasconi 2018). With the ascension of the Piñera government in 2017, the focus has been one of providing free education to those students attending technical and vocational institutes. In addition, a constitutional court ruling in March 2018 struck down a law that placed some restrictions on the ways in which for-profit institutions could operate resulting in student protests. For student critics, the “gratuidad” was inherently flawed because it failed to address the structural educational inequalities that continue to characterize Chilean education, particularly within the higher education sector. The Constitutional Court ruling highlighted their argument and protests ensued. At the same time, even if the impact of the enacted reforms in all educational sectors has been limited, it is clear that the framing of educational inequality as part of a larger indices of the country’s pervasive socioeconomic disparities has taken resonance to the point of being a regular part of the country’s political discourse, regardless of the political party in power. Beginning in April 2018, students throughout the country protested against rampant sexism within the country’s higher education system, and for only the third time in its history, the Pontificia Universidad Católica, one of the country’s preeminent institutions was shut down by student activists (Dessi 2018; Ramasantry 2018). Their actions, along with those protesting earlier regarding for-profit higher education policies, indicate that the legacy of the 2011–12 protests endures and at least within the Chilean context, the power of affect is difficult to permanently repress.

Spain in 2018 Participants in the Indignados Movement of 2011 raised a number of issues that have had recurring salience within the Spanish political landscape. While their dissatisfaction with government corruption and political paralysis was pervasive, and their rejection of neoliberal policies reflexive, there were numerous policy reforms that were embraced. A number of these suggestions involved reform of housing, greater taxation upon banks and corporations to support a diminished social safety net, a concerted effort to remedy youth unemployment, rejection of efforts to control internet usage, and a rejection of Bologna prescriptions that affected the length of students’ higher education residency and part-time status (Epstein 2015c: 95–8). Although educational policy reform was only one of numerous concerns articulated by movement followers, its presence was indicative of larger goals aimed at reducing socioeconomic inequality.

160

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

This being said, the head of the conservative People’s Party, Mariano Rajoy, held office from 2011 to 2018, overseeing the country’s financial crisis and recovery while largely embracing neoliberal economic policies. In 2015, a general election was called resulting in the inability of any political party to form a government for six months. Afterward, Rajoy crafted a coalition with the Citizens Party (a newly formed center-right party) and held office until a corruption scandal forced him from office after a vote of no confidence in 2018, when he was replaced by Pedro Sanchez, long-time leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers party. Spain’s financial recovery was evident in educational sectors. From 2013 to 2016, there were notable decreases in the percentage of early school leavers (23.6– 19 percent) and increases in employment rates for graduates (59.9–68 percent) (European Commission 2017). At the same time, there was a falling enrollment in higher education, 31 percent of all students were forced into repeating a grade, and there have been significant regional gaps with regard to general educational performance across the country (European Commission 2017). Nonetheless, national educational policy since 2011 has reflected the goals and priorities of Rajoy’s People’s Party, most notably in the passage of the “Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality” (LOMCE) in 2013, an initiative of the then Minister of Education, José Ignacio Wert. Wert left office in 2015, but most of the provisions of LOMCE have remained controversial, with the current Sanchez government having pledged to eliminate or revise its least popular aspects. Those policies include a mandated increase in class size, additional required instructional time prescribed for teachers, raising the profile of religion as a course of study while also emphasizing core subject mastery, emphasizing vocational education opportunities at earlier points within the educational ladder, and creating external compulsory examinations (reválidas) necessary for graduation at the conclusion of the ESO (compulsory secondary education) and bachillerato (upper secondary) levels. The reválidas were meant to supplement regular internal assessments required in these tracts. Large student protests were held in 2013 and 2017 after the passage and implementation of the LOMCE (ICEF Monitor 2015). With a socialist government now in power, changes to the largely unpopular law are now more likely with particular regard to the issue of the religion course, and the permanent replacement of the reválidas with diagnostic testing at the fourth year of primary school and the second year at the secondary level (Edukia Euskaraz Ikusi 2018). Efforts to confront the most negative effects of LOMCE are only part of a larger political context whereby the consequences of the Indignados Movement



Global Youth Protest

161

are clearly in evidence. One of those results was the creation of a new national political party (Podemos), founded in 2014 by political scientist Pablo Iglasias, with an expressed mission of addressing the socioeconomic inequalities that fueled the Indignados Movement. After the 2016 elections, Podemos became the third leading party in the country but in fact did not do as well as had been expected. In spite of controversies involving its leadership and strategy, it is a strong political force, having led the anti-austerity response at the national level to the policies of the People’s Party. A second political force that was influenced by the Indignados Movement is the Catalan Independence Movement, not necessarily with regard to its specific goals, but with respect to its basic questioning of the authority of the Spanish government and the 1978 constitution under which it governs. Participants in the Indignados Movement were the first to question the legitimacy of national rule on the part of entrenched elites; leaders of the Catalan Independence Movement raised the stakes in sponsoring the successful referendum that called for Catalan secession (Muñoz 2018). A third effort created in the aftermath of the 2011 protests is the municipalism movement, with many of the dwellers within Spain’s major cities voting in governments that have rejected traditional party affiliations in an effort to more directly create local participatory democratic governance. Spanish cities including Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Cádiz, and Santiago have all elected officials with platforms embracing municipalism, Barcelona’s En Comú and Madrid’s Ahora being the most prominent. Under the leadership of mayor Ada Colau, Barcelona’s En Comú has pledged to improve the quality of public education by increasing human and material resources for schools, end school segregation, improve music and physical education, and reduce privatization of nursery schools. Its noneducational agenda items include providing residents with adequate housing and health care, while attending to environmental concerns, and replacing the tourist model as a means to local economic development (Barcelona En Comú 2018). Under Manuela Carmena’s mayoral leadership in Madrid, residents have engaged in collective budget decisionmaking, creating local councils and decentralizing administration, and using neighborhood assemblies and online platforms to craft programmatic priorities (Rubio-Pueyo 2018). As Vicente Rubio-Pueyo notes, Against the backdrop of this organizational approach, an interesting phenomenon termed desborde (overflow) began to emerge in Spanish politics in 2011. The term refers to people organizing themselves in spontaneous

162

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

initiatives. Indeed, a defining characteristic of the mobilizations since the 15M movement has been their ability to transcend the usual channels and spaces utilized by established social and political interlocutors (parties, unions, etc.). The actions of the 15M—the occupations of public spaces and, later, the protests of the PAH and the mareas (tides) in defense of public education and healthcare rights—were based in forms of self-organization and carried by anonymous yet personal contributions. (2018)

It is clear that the youth protests of 2011 in Spain have had an enduring impact upon the country’s politics in subsequent years even though at the national level the country’s governments have not reflected Indignados Movement sensibilities. One does see the power of framing, in the creation of the Podemos Party, the municipalism movement, and to a lesser extent, the Catalan Secession Movement, and at least within the municipalism movement, many of the repertoires of contention that were utilized in 2011 have been refined and reused. Indeed, the municipalism movement represents a form of participatory democracy that Butler had in mind when she discussed the nature of and possibilities for a politics based upon assemblage. Others have additionally recognized that the anti-immigrant, far right tendencies that have swept through Europe in recent years have had less salience in Spain. This is due to the country’s painful history of dictatorship under Franco but can also be attributed at least in part to the enduring sentiments first voiced within the Indignados Movement, and later the Podemos Movement, and their rejection of nationalist ideologies (Galindo 2018).

The United States in 2018 In my analysis of the Occupy movement in the United States, I  viewed it as incorporating aspects of both Chilean and Spanish protests. As was true of the Chilean protests, the initial organizers of the Occupy movement included experienced political activists. At the same time, a number of the repertoires of contention that were popularized during the Indignados Movement—the assembly, the encampment, the webcam regularly chronicling daily events in Zucotti Park—were tactics borrowed from the Spanish experience. Indeed, some of the initial online organizers of the Occupy movement also directly participated in the Indignados Movement (Epstein 2015c: 100). It is also true that while the Occupy movement focused generally upon socioeconomic disparity and inequality in the United States, educational issues were always



Global Youth Protest

163

a part of their general discussion and rose to the forefront as protests spread across the United States. Protestations against Wall Street greed not only invoked anger toward those who justified their success on the basis of their efforts, but protesters also noted how they viewed their lofty social position as having resulted from their comparative talent, intelligence, and education in relation to the general public. The association of education with exploitative elitism and privilege was clear and compelling to the protesters (Epstein 2015c:  101–2). When the Occupy movement expanded across the country from its New York City origins, protesters in California embraced the cause of higher education reform, a natural consequence of their New York counterparts’ efforts. Students in this case specifically called out the negative effects of drastic budget cutting within the state higher education system, resulting in loss of faculty positions, increased class size, an inability to take classes needed for graduation, while tuition increases and student financial debt grew dramatically. A key proposal that received attention asked that student loan financing be replaced with a payback system upon graduation, tied to the graduate’s income and earnings (Epstein 2015c: 103). In the immediate aftermath of the Occupy movement, it became clear that much of its messaging was co-opted by mainstream politics. Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 was due in no small part to the portrayal of his opponent as a wealthy elitist who lacked empathy for the country’s working and middle classes. And with specific regard to higher education financing reform, a proposal to guarantee free community college tuition was promoted by the Obama administration while the notion of free college tuition for all four undergraduate years was circulated among Democratic Party presidential candidates in 2016. In 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the College for All Act in 2017, which would eliminate tuition and fees for students attending all four-year undergraduate public universities with family incomes below $125,000 while making two-year community college tuition free for everyone (Zornick 2017). There were certainly broader Occupy movement resonances as well. In its aftermath, the Black Lives Matter Movement (protesting racial injustice within law enforcement and the criminal justice system) and the #MeToo Movement (protesting sexual harassment and abuse in the media, corporations, and political institutions) have gained large followings. In 2018, teacher strikes in the states of West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, highlighting poor pay and working conditions, received widespread local support; and in the aftermath of a mass shooting at the Stoneman Douglas high school, in Parkland, Florida, high school students staged a series of protests that received national attention

164

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

in their call for gun control reform. The impetus to engage in strikes, walkouts, and protests certainly can be tied to some extent to the examples made visible within the Occupy movement. Nonetheless, as powerful as its framing messaging may have been, the country’s turn to the political right, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump provides a significant counter-narrative. To be clear, the populism that the Occupy movement tapped into did not occur in a vacuum but was proceeded by the growth of the Tea Party Movement, formed in reaction to the recession of 2007–8 and ensuing government bailout assistance to the financial industry. The Occupy movement and its successors all arose within a context where right-wing populism had already proven to be successful and in effect continued to coexist with its ideological opposite. As Snow and Bernatzky (2018) note, the difference between the two “populisms” lies in the exclusionary nature of the right-wing alternative. Trumpism, if seen as the natural evolution of right-wing populism, depends upon its demonization of “otherness” as a means of generating support. The social movements we have chronicled including the Occupy movement focused populist anger on conventional political institutions and the elites they served rather than embracing exclusionism as a framing mechanism. The discourses with which they are associated also demonstrate a remarkable degree of resiliency in spite of the counter-narratives that gained potency in the intervening years. There are thus two differing conclusions that one can draw in examining the success of these youth protest case studies. One might argue that the turn to the political right, which occurred in Chile, Spain, and the United States (not to mention global trends toward greater authoritarianism in the Middle East and Eastern Europe) offer evidence for the exacerbation of political cleavages made more extreme through social media usage, as individuals find safety in communicating with, and even assembling with like-minded counterparts (Sunstein 2017). In spite of inclusivity of their messaging, these social movements have had the effect of further dividing populations, rather than bringing their disparate elements together. The alternative conclusion one might draw is that the persistence of the recursive power of the messaging in spite of changing political cross-currents is what is truly impressive. The ability of such messaging to repeatedly recapture the public imagination speaks to Massumi’s main belief with regard to the power of affect: that it exists on a level for which we may not be conscious but is crucial to our understanding of human experience. It is also clear that the vocabulary of assemblage, as articulated among participants in these cases, has global resonance.



Global Youth Protest

165

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong On September 28, 2014, Hong Kong protesters engaged in massive civil disobedience demonstrations, calling for universal suffrage with regard to the election of the Special Autonomous Region’s chief executive in 2017 elections, and 2020 elections of the Legislative Council. Issues regarding the implementation of representative democratic governance in Hong Kong were not new. Prior to and after its official return to China in 1997, Hong Kong residents lacked the right to universal suffrage. As the Basic Law or the constitutional statement of the region was crafted and then implemented, political compromises were put into place that guaranteed that appointed elites loyal to China would play a determinative role in future governance. Given the existence of some ambiguity written into the Basic Law, there was always hope that election procedures might be reformed to include more direct participation on the part of Hong Kong residents. Nonetheless, the contradiction of creating an election committee (a type of electoral college), composed of constituency representatives that largely favored business elites, for the purpose of nominating a few candidates to run for the popular election of the chief executive, was a glaring but fundamental component of the Basic Law. In 2007, the Standing Committee of the National Congress of the People’s Republic of China raised the prospect of allowing for a direct election of the region’s chief executive in 2017. The creation of “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” in March 2013 represented an effort to attain this aspiration. Led by law professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting, sociology professor Chan Kinman, and the Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, their campaign called upon electoral reform so that the process would satisfy international standards of universal suffrage and the future electoral system would be decided by a democratic process involving the deliberation and authorization by citizens. In addition, any act of civil disobedience in support of these principles would be nonviolent (Bush 2016:  106–7). They called for a series of deliberation days whereby residents would gather, discuss the best methods of reforming the electoral process, and then put pressure upon Beijing to meet their demands. By the end of 2013, the Hong Kong government responded in a way that reaffirmed its support for a strict and narrow selection mechanism nominating the eligible candidates for whom Hong Kong citizens could vote for the position of Chief Executive, subject to the consent of the Chinese National People’s Party Standing Committee. On August 31, 2014, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee reiterated

166

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

its stance that the election of a 2017 executive be based upon a one-person onevote election, but that the candidates for election would be selected solely by a nominating committee (corresponding to the previous election committee) that itself was stacked in favor of pro-Chinese government forces, in essence reaffirming the legitimacy of past practices. After a week of boycotting classes, students preempted plans by the Occupy Central leaders to hold a demonstration on October 1 by holding their own rally on September 26 in front of government offices. The Occupy Central leaders then called for a large demonstration on September 28 that resulted in the police using tear gas to disperse the crowd. Reacting with continued outrage, protesters continued to block traffic junctions, paralyzing the city for the next week. As a result, protest camps were established in major sites. For much of October, protesters were attacked by forces loyal to the police, some of whom were affiliated with Triads (gangs), particularly in the Mong Kok neighborhood. However, the protesters were not forcibly removed from their camps. At the same time, protest leaders and government officials periodically held negotiations only to witness the negotiations break down, and then resume. On November 18, the Admiralty camp, situated near major government and office buildings was initially cleared in a peaceful manner; on November 26, the Mong Kok camp was violently cleared, and on December 11, the Admiralty camp was finally cleared for a second time (British Broadcasting Corporation 2014). The final site at Causeway Bay, where only a few hundred protesters remained, was cleared on December 15. All told, the protests lasted for over two and a half months. The fact that student leaders captured the momentum from Occupy organizers and became an important political force in their own right should not have been totally surprising. In 2011, Hong Kong’s chief executive proposed implementing a compulsory course in “Moral and National Education,” as part of a revised national curriculum. Led by Joshua Wong, secondary-level students created an organization they titled “Scholarism,” where they held public demonstrations against the course. They viewed the course as an effort to legitimize subservience to the Chinese government. By 2012, the force of their demonstrations resulted in the proposed course being cancelled. The other student organization that was directly involved in leading the Umbrella Movement was the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), led by Alex Chow and Nathan Law. Originally formed in 1958 as a left-wing organization sympathetic to the aims of the Chinese government, by 2010, the HKFS focused upon protesting civil rights violations and government corruption (Wong and Chung 2016: 870). Its members were particularly active



Global Youth Protest

167

in supporting the Occupy movement aims, and naturally assumed leadership roles when mass demonstrations were organized. Although the organizational structure of “Scholarism” was more organic and spontaneous than the HKFS, as was true of Chilean secondary-level students protesting during the Penguin Revolution, students from both organizations learned from their previous political experiences. They became the real leaders of the Umbrella Movement because they were able to capture the attention of the majority of Movement participants. There were other influential factors as well. After 1989, Hong Kong higher education expanded rapidly to the point where there currently are twenty degree-awarding institutions. Eight receive designated funding from the University Grants Committee and eleven are self-funded including one statutory university (Open University of Hong Kong); there are ten institutes that are allowed to offer a bachelor’s degree and use the term university in their title, and there is one publicly funded statutory institution (the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts). The institutions funded by the University Grants Committee represent the apex of the higher education system. In 2018– 19, there were 15,000 allocated seats for first degree students in addition to 5,000 senior undergraduate places. At the other extreme, self-funded institutions offer many sub-degree level programs (Education Bureau of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2018). As is true of the Chilean case, enrollees in sub-degree-level programs tend to be less affluent, pay more for their education, and have a restricted earning potential (Yip and Peng 2018). Thus, expansion of educational opportunities has raised expectations among members of a growing postsecondary-level student population that had not always been realized. In addition to higher education expansion, broader systemic educational reform was enacted with an effort to eliminate British influences in the educational system, while lessening pressures for student achievement exacerbated by high stakes testing. Beginning in 2009, a seventh year at the secondary level was eliminated and a four-year bachelor degree for university matriculates was created. Lower and upper secondary levels were combined into one sixyear secondary level, and entrance testing into the upper secondary levels was also eliminated. Accompanying the structural change was an emphasis upon incorporating a general education, liberal studies curricular orientation at the secondary level. Critics in China have criticized the liberal studies curriculum, made fully operational in 2012, as having encouraged student protest, as a result of its emphasis upon the importance of civic engagement (Tsoi 2014), although

168

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

there is little concrete evidence to support the direct connection (Fung and Su 2016). In examining the Hong Kong case, it is clear that there are unique levels of precarity that affect all of the parties in the region. From a student perspective, the competition for educational advancement is severe, and the reforms that have been mentioned have done little to assuage the pressures to which they are regularly subjected. At the same time, the tremendous costs of living, particularly with regard to housing, to which all residents are subjected, as well as an economy whose productivity is closely tied to the vicissitudes of global finance, portend a future defined by risk for youth and young adults. Cognizant of their geopolitical precarity with reference to the power and influence of the Chinese government over the region, business elites are wary of actions that would jeopardize the status quo. Chinese government leaders also are concerned about provocative challenges to their authority that they feel Hong Kong activists encourage. Unlike the Chinese government or the business elites, Hong Kong students did not respond to their circumstances by trying to preserve the status quo; they viewed their future in challenging it as was true of all of the protest movements we have discussed in this chapter. Yet, as was also true for the other movements, the short-term consequences of the 2014 protests were not affirming of movement goals, as Hong Kong’s 2017 elections, whose candidates were nominated in ways that were as prescriptive and narrow as those of their predecessors, resulted in establishment candidate Carrie Lam assuming the position of chief executive.

Conclusion In the beginning of this chapter, we made a distinction between protest that symbolically reaffirmed the legitimacy of institutional authority (the high school graduation armband scenario), and protest whose purpose was to directly question and indeed attack existing authority. The four cases that have been summarized may contain elements of both categories, but the depth of their popular appeal as well as duration lead us to conclude that they most often can be described as frontal assaults upon political (and in certain cases educational) institutions that are associated with preserving status quo order. We also noted that in all of these examples, participants actively engaged in acts of assemblage; they came together in public spaces in order to discuss, communicate, and express shared viewpoints. For theorists who focus upon the centrality of



Global Youth Protest

169

meaning-making as the drive that centers expressions of affect, there can be no greater evidence of this conviction than the demonstrations of assemblage that characterized youth protests in Chile, Spain, the United States, and Hong Kong. Yet we have made a conscious decision to categorize these cases as offering evidence of “loathing.” In so doing, we have also noted that the examples of youth protest we have examined should not be associated with the most extreme incidences of global school and school-related violence discussed in Chapter 4. Nor have we argued that the “loathing” described in this chapter be viewed as comparable to the right-wing populism as evidenced within Trumpism or the 2016 Brexit vote. In those instances, there was a visceral demonization of the “other” based upon a sense of dependency that assists in the creation of distinctive identity-marking. One’s identity was formed by separating self from the other. In the process, one became dependent upon such distancing in order to fully position and define oneself. The examples of youth protest we have examined do not offer evidence of such dependency. Instead, as Charles Tilly noted, their efforts were ones of deliberate contentious interaction with authorities as opposed to acts of self-separation. Their efforts were ones of engagement rather than separation. However, the loathing protest participants expressed was nonetheless palpable. It represented their contempt for the privileging of stability and complacency. It was indicative of their dissatisfaction with policies they viewed as hypocritical in their exclusionism and favoritism. And, their loathing was tied to a view of their future that was defined by its precariousness, clearly understood when comparisons with present and future were entertained. If youth protest can be associated in affective terms with the process of assemblage, the other quality of affect that is relevant here is contingency. Contingency was present in all aspects of social movement theory when applied to the cases under examination:  the use of strategy, tactics, and repertoires of contention, the changing structural conditions that offered opportunities for movements to coalesce, and the differing abilities involved in mobilizing resources, allowing actors to be convinced that their participation in social action mirrored personal identity expression. Above all, the power of framing messaging, which was most highly emphasized in my original study of these movements, was also over time inconsistently employed. The policy reforms that resulted as a result of protest agendas were often modest, certainly in comparison to the vehemence of the protests themselves. In addition, the growth of other social movements and countermovements since 2011 raised questions about the enduring power of the framing mechanism, so clearly present when these social movements were at their maximum strength.

170

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

Nonetheless, although palpable expressions of anger that were captured by social movement frames may have receded in time, popular acceptance of the logic of the frames remains intact, years after the original social movements have subsided. Framing, and meaning-making more broadly, when viewed as a component of social interaction, is recursive rather than linear. Many of the fundamental conditions that contributed to youth protest in these venues have not significantly changed. Issues of inequality and affordability with regard to higher education access remain significant in all of the cases surveyed. Even as new issues and social causes have arisen, the logic that gave these movements their initial legitimacy remains intact, with the possibilities of their reconceptualization ever present. In the introduction to this book, the tradition of identifying the act of comparative inquiry with modernism and progress was duly noted. Conceiving of comparative engagement as including elements that are generically destructive (global school violence) or as an expression of anger against status quo educational and social inequality (youth protest) seems counterintuitive to those who have so closely associated acts of comparison with the impetus for educational reform. Yet, it is our view that such passion is very much a part of the comparative experience and cannot be excused as ephemeral. We further explore the destructive nature of the comparative metaphor more directly in Chapter  6, when the examination of data-driven higher education rankings systems is pursued.

6

Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems: Self-Loathing and the Devastation of the University and the Professoriate

Introduction One of the many ironies of my professional life that I am forced to perpetually confront is the fact that the number of readers who have read the sum total of my published work over a forty-year period is significantly dwarfed by the number of readers who have read my restaurant and hotel reviews for the website  Tripadvisor.com. Such consternation is probably deserved, given my willingness to participate in a review process that incentivizes participation through promoting competition, with a token reward system that offers badges to prolific reviewers. One might think that the power of such incentive systems declines noticeably after one graduates from primary school. However, the attempt to measure and verify the results of even the mundane actions of everyday life is a pretention to which many of us had sadly been forced to become accustomed, and to which I  have proven painfully susceptible. As Michael Power notes in The Audit Society, the fixation with verification is testimony to much more than an articulated need to legitimize the trust one has in the other: the use of data in support of auditing is itself a way of categorizing and dictating the terms of various social relationships. He states, “The idea of audit shapes public conceptions of the problems for which it is the solution; it is constitutive of a certain regulatory or control style which reflects deeply held commitments to checking and trust” (1997:  7). The style of regulation and control to which Power refers, in a global context, relies upon neoliberal managerial techniques that have intruded into public policy decision-making at national, regional, and local levels. And, while as noted in the introductory

172

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

chapter, the use of international educational testing to create data that is used for the purpose of broad comparison has existed since the 1960s, the application of similar techniques with the intention of creating world university rankings is a newer phenomenon. The world university rankings craze is one symptom of a larger problem— the reconstruction of academic life in ways that oversimplify complexity, flatten, marginalize, and eliminate recognition of creative difference, and substitute technique for substance. The “loathing” that we seek to explore in this chapter is the “loathing” that occurs in reaction to a perceived failure to understand the meaning of knowledge production in an era of information explosion. It is a “loathing” that is fueled by the fear of losing the status recognition sought by individuals and institutions and/or their perceived need to manufacture such recognition. And, the “loathing” of which we speak is a “loathing” that in the service of attempting to accomplish all of the above has the effect of homogenizing comparison to the point whereby it represents little positive epistemological function. Analyses of university world ranking systems have proliferated within the comparative higher education literature. Many focus upon the inadequacies of measurement criteria and the questionable methodological assumptions that govern their implementation. What is of even greater interest to me is, why when confronted with such damning negative evidence of their failings, the ranking findings continue to be influential? In addressing this question, I return to writings of Jean Baudrillard, whose work was used to frame the discussion of Chilean responses to mass atrocity in Chapter 1. But as the world rankings process has been part of an even more comprehensive effort to define the meaning of professional work within the academy, it is to the issues raised by the use of data and data analytics in this area, to which I first turn.

The Changing Meaning of Academic Work On November 11, 1997, UNESCO published its “Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel,” a statement that has served as a benchmark in defining the expectations and responsibilities of the professoriate. Article III section 4 of the Recommendation enumerates some of its most important principles. Institutions of higher education, and more particularly universities, are communities of scholars preserving, disseminating and expressing freely their



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

173

opinions on traditional knowledge and culture, and pursuing new knowledge without constriction by prescribed doctrines. The pursuit of new knowledge and its application lie at the heart of the mandate of such institutions of higher education. In higher education institutions where original research is not required, higher-education teaching personnel should maintain and develop knowledge of their subject through scholarship and improved pedagogical skills. (UNESCO 1997)

In this section, there is the explicit recognition of the importance of one’s professional community in helping to define how one’s work is to be conducted and valued. It is a curious acknowledgment, for unlike other forms of work that require their participants to engage in creative endeavors independently, doing so within the academy implies that one’s efforts are not simply constructed as a result of individual choice, but are subject to the evaluation of the larger community of which one is a part. Subjecting one’s work to the scrutiny of peer review in some form is a foundational concept, and it governs the ways in which all of one’s professional activities, including scholarship and teaching, are assessed. As a result, one’s personal identity is very much associated with the communities with whom one is a part: the community of scholars who share disciplinary expertise and interest and the community of colleagues who as teachers collectively act to encourage students to learn. In the twenty-odd years since the UNESCO document was published, the state of global higher education has changed significantly, influenced by increased massification with many more students aspiring to and enrolling in universities. At the same time, and in partial response to the demand for increased access to university education, privatization of the higher education sector has also expanded (Welch 2005). Finally, as has been previously noted, as access to information has become easier, the opportunities to generate new forms of knowledge and share them with wider audiences have correspondingly been enhanced. All of these trends have had a transformative effect upon the way in which faculty work is constructed and assessed. To be clear, there have always been tensions in assessing the value of scholarship and teaching, particularly within the concept of peer review, but those tensions have been exacerbated during the information age. With regard to the valuing of scholarship, there is ample evidence that the mechanisms employed for determining such value have been influenced by specific social norms. The weight and prestige given to the first discovery of phenomena, as one is in perpetual competition with others, for example, does not logically

174

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

correspond to the inherent intellectual merit of the discovery act. There are numerous examples of researchers discovering phenomena independent of one another, yet the creative process leading to the achievement is the same, regardless of the order in which the discovery occurs. Assigning credit for coauthorship creates additional conundrums. Credit for authorship can be dependent upon criteria as varied as one’s serving as an advisor for the graduate student even when her efforts receive no support during the mentorship process, to the role of directing the laboratory where the research in question is conducted even if one’s role in the actual research project that produces new knowledge is minimal. The rank ordering of coauthored publications is in itself another social construction that is difficult to defend on rational grounds. Not only do the criteria involved in assigning rank to coauthorship vary considerably, but ranking itself assumes that collaborative efforts can be discretely quantified segmentally, a problematic assumption that narrowly defines the very nature of the collaborative process. In all of these cases, the social norms that define the terms for achieving peer recognition for one’s scholarship cannot be defended as being consistent. To be clear, in addition to its lack of consistency, the peer review process has been subjected to additional criticism, particularly with regard to its inability to protect against bias, and its innate conservatism (Kelly, Sadeghieh, and Adeli 2014). Such criticism reaches the level of the sensational when successful attempts are made to submit for publication studies with falsified data, screening filters fail to detect the faulty information, and the authors report their success in beating the system (Nasi-Calo 2013). To be clear, the very definition as to what constitutes objectivity in the conduct of research has always been ambiguous. Theodore Porter has argued, for example, that there are two forms of objectivity in question: disciplinary objectivity, derived from the consensus expertise of those trained in the academic disciplines, and mechanical objectivity, which he defines as “following the rules” (Porter 1995:  4). Mechanical objectivity, which has come to rely upon quantification and the use of statistical and algorithmic techniques for the framing of information, presents itself as rigorous and rule governed. It speaks to those who challenge the social authority of disciplinary experts, particularly when consensus within the discipline is difficult to achieve, and it appeals to a sense of fairness by narrowly prescribing the set of rules under which research can/should be conducted in seemingly uniform terms (5). In so doing, it has been employed to support of the authority of



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

175

expertise, but it also reshapes how we think of the research process. Porter states: This ideal of mechanical objectivity, knowledge based completely on explicit rules, is never fully attainable. Even with regard to purely scientific matters, the importance of tacit knowledge is now widely recognized. In efforts to solve problems posed from outside the scientific community, informed intuition is all the more crucial. The public rhetoric of scientific expertise, however, studiously ignores this aspect of science. Objectivity derives not mainly from the wisdom acquired through a long career, but from the application of sanctioned methods, or perhaps the mythical, unitary “scientific method,” to presumably neutral facts. There should be no room for the biases of the researcher to corrupt the results. It is, of course, possible for investigators or officials to be impartial as a result of their inherent fairmindedness, or perhaps their utter indifference to the outcome, but how can we know? In a political culture that idealizes the rule of law, it seems bad policy to rely on mere judgment, however seasoned. (7–8)

More importantly, the use of mechanical objectivity has ramifications for teaching and mentorship practices, practices that intrinsically rely upon spontaneity, intuition, and creative decision-making, but include the cultivation of interpersonal connection. Proponents of actor network theory argue that as ideas circulate within the scientific (and for our purposes academic) community, some gain currency as they are adopted to differing circumstances where they are replicated, and then reified. A  black box in the areas of scholarship and teaching results whereby those ideas and the practices that receive consensus support are rarely contested or challenged (Espeland and Sauder 2016:  230). Appeals to mechanical objectivity intensify this trend. The use of bibliometric data to assess the quality and productivity of faculty work has further expedited efforts to define and regulate how that work is valued. Originally designed to assist librarians in deciding which professional journals to purchase, keep, or unsubscribe from, bibliometric approaches use algorithms to rank which journals include articles that are most frequently cited, and therefore supposedly have the highest impact within academic disciplines and fields. The assumptions behind the utility in assigning journals impact factor rankings have been strongly criticized, but the use of impact factors has been expanded to influence assessments of individuals’ scholarly ability, especially important when used as evidence for or against tenure and promotion. Why is the compilation of citation frequencies an inadequate measure for determining impact? First, such compilations don’t account for citation manipulation including repeated

176

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

self-citation and the citation of friends and acquaintances. They don’t account for citation error or misapplication of particular citations, and they don’t distinguish between the use of cursory citation (one of many citations referring to the same point) and the citation that intrinsically supports the argument that is being posed. Second, the frequency of a journal’s publication, the size of its general audience readership, and the employment of disciplinary-specific protocols with regard to the citation process create very uneven results that resist accurate comparison for purposes of standardization. For example, among physicists, the publication Physics Letters is much more frequently cited than the journal Physical Review, yet that discrepancy does not reflect upon the comparative prestige of the two journals, the former accepting shorter articles for a dissemination that occurs more frequently than that of the latter. Most importantly, the number of times an article is cited does not necessarily reflect upon its seminal importance to a discipline or field. Frequently cited articles often review existing literature or summarize findings from a number of sources that have been previously published, without breaking new ground (Werner 2015). It is for all of these reasons that the American Society of Cell Biology in 2012 created the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, arguing against the application of bibliometric data in the evaluation of scholarly work (DORA 2013). What we see here is an effort to use comparison for the purpose of destroying creativity and divergence. The use of impact factors to rank journal worthiness but more importantly, to assess the value of one’s scholarship, at first glance, argues against each of the four principles we have ascribed to affect theory. It denies the importance of intensity of encounter by privileging output as opposed to the process of engagement, in defining one’s relationship to fellow scholars. It fails to acknowledge the dynamics of assemblage (collaboration) as part of the testing of ideas. Indeed, its aim is to eliminate rather than acknowledge contingency as a part of the discovery process, and in doing all of the above, it marginalizes meaning-making. Yet, at another level, the embrace of mechanical objectivity as a defining part of one’s work and professional identity very much comports to other aspects of affect, including the notion of self-loathing. What are the dynamics that engender such a high level of mistrust that acts of intuition and reflection, so essential to the pursuit of scholarship and teaching, are so easily compromised through the invocation of uniform procedure and explicitly prescribed rule-governing behavior? It is here that Jean Baudrillard’s insights have particular salience. In his early and important work, Symbolic Action and Death, Baudrillard discusses the striptease as the ultimate masturbatory fantasy, with the female performer acting



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

177

as the male’s symbolic phallus that he, through his gaze, dreams he can manipulate (Baudrillard 1993: 107–10). Is the use of mechanical objectivity to define scholarship and teaching any different from Baudrillard’s striptease example? Do the rules that have been invoked to define peer review, or the use of bibliometric data to evaluate the quality of one’s work, perform a social function other than to support the fantasy that one can gain control of one’s work product and professional identity, by adhering to their dictates? And is the illusion that one’s professional status can be not only affirmed but guaranteed if one does so any less compelling? In point of fact, for much of the global professoriate, discussions of impact factors, scholarly citations, and peer review procedures are the stuff of fantasy. The expanding number of global faculty who have contingent status threatens the preservation of tenure systems designed to offer the necessary protection that allows for concerted research and teaching engagement. The effects of low salary remuneration have historically forced faculty employed in resourcepoor institutions to augment their base compensation by soliciting additional teaching opportunities in multiple settings. Discrepancies in resource allocation among the global faculty also impact their ability to pursue opportunities with colleagues in other countries, including the chance to travel, to attend, and present at academic conferences, or engage in lengthy, time-consuming research. The degree to which the global professoriate is afforded academic freedom, the extent to which their independence from external governmental and political pressure is protected, is an additional factor that varies considerably institutionally, and from country to country. Nonetheless, in spite of these considerations, the use of mechanical objectivity in support of scholarly work remains extremely compelling to much of the global professoriate. The generalizability with which mechanical objectivity is employed creates a sense of inclusivity, a belief that there is a discrete roadmap that, if followed, will lead to professional recognition, regardless of one’s current status. In addition, the fixation with calculating the value of one’s teaching and research as professional products assists in the commodification of that work. When one’s work is assigned numerical value for the purpose of expediting its global circulation, the question that arises is at what point does the representation of the work deviate from its meaning? Baudrillard (1993) strongly asserts that the rupture of the correspondence between object and its signifier is a condition of postmodernity. Is this not the case with regard to the ways in which scholarship and teaching are being valued? One interesting effort to encourage participation in the self-commodification of one’s work involves the creation of academic social networks such as

178

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

ResearchGate. Much like the tripadvisor.com example cited at the beginning of this chapter, ResearchGate gives an “RG” score to its members based upon bibliometric information, including citation frequency and journal impact factors, and it is intended to reflect the strength of one’s overall professional profile. One submits biographical information as well as a listing of one’s publications, and is invited to upload the publications themselves, offering access to others in the social network. One is further invited to comment upon one’s own ongoing research projects, while initiating dialogue with other colleagues in the network. A job listing is also provided. Started in 2008, today it is reported to include over fifteen million members and has received funding from venture capitalists including Bill Gates. Critics have noted that the assigned “RG” scores lack transparency, and that there is little indication that their value is widely shared outside of this particular social network (Kraker, Jordan, and Lex 2015). Nonetheless, its popularity attests to the desire to quantify one’s professional status within an artificially constructed community of colleagues. The destructive impact of these trends is even more apparent when we examine efforts to construct global rankings of university quality.

The World University Ranking Craze Ellen Hazelcorn has argued that interest in ranking universities according to their presumed quality evolved historically in three phases: subnational/elite rankings, national rankings, global rankings, and more recently, supra-national rankings (including the European Union’s U-Multirank and the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes Feasibility Study [Hazelcorn 2015]). Many have commented that this evolution paralleled the emphasis placed upon creating knowledge-based economies, as the assumption that enhanced higher education quality would intrinsically generate economic strength became more pronounced (Davis 2016: 216–17). Others point to the impact of higher education massification, including greater numbers of students attending higher education institutions, and the subsequent increased competition for advanced higher education training as having created consumerist pressure for defining institutional quality in accessible terms (218–19). Although there has been an explosion in the number of organizations that engage in the global university rankings business, the ones that have been most prominent include the Academic Rankings of World Universities (formerly known as the Shanghai Ranking and the first to widely disseminate its findings



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

179

in 2003), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) Rankings, as well as U-Multirank (Yudkevich, Altbach and Rumbley 2016: 2; Shahjahan, Ramirez, and Andriotti 2017: S51). A career and advice company QS originally published its rankings in conjunction with Times Higher Education, but in 2009, the two entities split, with the latter creating its own methodology in conjunction with Thomson Publishing. As such corporate sponsorship indicates, publishing global university rankings has become commercially profitable with the US News and World Report magazine having led the way. It enhanced its circulation dramatically when it first began publishing its rankings of US universities in 1983 and has subsequently expanded its rankings coverage to include graduate programs in the United States, hospitals and medical centers, and more recently, has used Clarivate Analytics InCites to rank what it considers to be the top 1,250 institutions in the world (US News and World Report Education 2018). The blatant commercialism that frames the rankings process raises questions regarding the purpose of the endeavor and the audience for whom the rankings is addressed. But numerous critics have additionally objected to the criteria employed in these exercises, for their ineffectiveness and lack of objectivity. In addition to criticisms focusing upon their reliance upon bibliometric impact factors whose weaknesses we have emphasized, critics note that the rankings organizations heavily weigh reputation, a notoriously unstable factor that is difficult to measure in its calculation of institutional value. It is also clear that the criteria that are most often employed privilege those universities that have abundant resource capacity and mimic the organizational structure of Global North institutions. Criteria that are deemed worthy of measurement, such as the number of full-time faculty who possess earned doctorates, the number of international students who enroll in the university, the number of studyabroad opportunities available to students at the university in question, or the employment and income levels attained by the institution’s graduates, skew the results in favor of those universities that not only have the resources to fund such initiatives, but have already profited from the global connections that expedite investment in these areas. The research university model is the structure that is clearly viewed as most worthy of comparison, and its Global North iteration is the one that is most often emulated. Because publications originating in the Global North generally receive the greatest degree of international circulation, and as English has become a kind of global lingua franca, the rankings’ emphasis upon impact factors as measurements of faculty productivity and influence additionally serve to discriminate against Global South institutions

180

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

where English is less likely to be used, relegating their worthiness into lower tiers. The impact factor emphasis further serves to promote scientific research at the expense of research in the humanities and social sciences, the former being much more expensive to produce given laboratory and equipment costs. For all of these reasons, it is thus not surprising that North American and European universities dominate the “top one hundred” institutions listed within the various rankings; South American universities, by way of comparison, rarely are mentioned within the top few hundred (Beresconi and Véliz 2016: 39). The rankings have received due criticism for their methodological imperfections, the lack of consistency with regard to what factors they deem important in measuring, and the disparate results among their various iterations. What is of additional interest is what they fail to measure or neglect to include as being important in their consideration of institutional academic quality. For example, few, if any, of these systems purport to measure some of the most important indicators of academic freedom, outlined within the 1997 UNESCO “Statement on Higher Education Personnel.” Little emphasis is put on whether or not attempts are made to ensure that hiring, promotion, and faculty evaluation systems are fair, that one has the right to appeal career-influencing decisions. There is scant attention paid to whether student enrollment and retention procedures are equitable, whether discrimination exists in student admissions processes, or whether the costs of attending a higher education institution are affordable for all qualified candidates. The ranking systems say little with regard to issues of institutional and professional autonomy: guarantees to faculty for their right to travel, to conduct research free of governmental and/or political interference, or the protection for faculty themselves to be in control of curricular content and are able to make pedagogical decisions based solely upon their professional expertise. The absence of any effort to measure these issues speaks volumes with regard to the values that the ranking systems promote and the ones that they ignore. For some critics, the creation of world university rankings systems is little more than an exercise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century colonialism, where the global imposition of the modernist university structure is reified. To be clear, the colonial project is deeply rooted in the history of university formation and expansion outside of Europe and North America. But authors are speaking of a different form of colonialism, when they analyze the neoliberal influences of twenty-first-century higher education policy and governance. In his seminal work, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha analyzed the meaning of imitation and mimicry in an effort to understand the dynamic nature of the colonizer/ colonized relationship. It is Bhabha’s contention that in spite of all efforts to



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

181

imitate the master’s presence, one is consigned to failure in the attempts at replication. For Bhabha, what it means to be colonized is to never be accepted on an equal basis with one’s colonizer (Bhabha 1994: 85–92). We see this quite clearly in the ways in which universities in the Global South historically have attempted to copy the curricula and organizational structures of elitist European and North American institutions. These efforts extended far beyond linguistic use of the colonizer language but even included the employment of external reviewers from the Global North to certify the rigor and value of candidates’ graduate work. Yet such initiatives, crafted with the purpose of gaining external academic respect, were always doomed to failure. It was Bhabha’s insight that the act of mimicry in itself presumes a separation between colonizer and the colonized that is unbridgeable, as the mimic can never authentically reproduce the original in its totality. To again reference the higher education example, in spite of efforts to the contrary, attempts to recreate Oxbridge or Ivy League university facsimiles in the Global South will always fail as their influence is based upon the predicate that, for reasons of history and precedent, they are deserving of their unique status. On the other hand, Bhabha further argued that the power relationships implicit in colonial relationships were never totally fixed, and could best be understood by examining occurrences of cultural hybridity, whereby the colonized crafted their identities in ways that reshaped the dynamics of their interactions with their colonizers (1994: 38). Thus, when applied to the higher education sector, there are numerous expressions of cultural hybridity that demonstrate the fluidity with which indigeneity interacted with exogenous forces, complicating the colonizer/colonized relationship. For example, the 1918 Cordoba higher education reforms in Argentina created the context for a strong student role in university governance that became common in many Latin American higher education institutions. The social importance afforded the university entrance examination system as a determinative feature in an entire education system, so strongly in evidence within East Asian societies, demonstrates historic and cultural resonance with the neo-Confucian Chinese examination system, even though contemporary elements are different from their predecessors. One can also point to the merging of theological and academic study as a foundational component within many Middle Eastern institutions, as demonstrated longstanding religious and cultural continuities. None of these examples represent efforts to replicate Euro-North American university values. Nonetheless, the university rankings systems have encouraged institutions to compete for, maintain, and acquire global influence in ways that differ

182

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

significantly from past precedent, and it is for this reason that Baudrillard’s insights are so important. First, Baudrillard’s understanding of the ways in which power relationships are expressed within cultural contexts emphasizes the importance of simulacra (copies without originals) and simulation, rather than the linear pursuit of mimicry per se. We have previously noted Baudrillard’s view that our postmodern era is distinctive because there has been a rupture between the meaning of objects and the ways in which we represent them. For Baudrillard, we live in an era of hyperreality, where fiction and realism are intertwined, and where the simulacrum (imitation) of code governs our meaningmaking. He specifically refers to the significance granted to DNA coding as well as binary coding systems that influence computing processes as evidence for the construction of such hyperrealism. We use these models to create life-affecting simulations that assert social control through testing regiments that reify binary question/response structures of interpersonal interaction. In so doing, we mix fiction and reality. Regulation on the model of the genetic code is in no way limited to effects in the laboratory or the exalted visions of theoreticians:  these models invest life at its most banal level. Digitality is among us. It haunts all the messages and signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most concrete forms in the test, the question/answer, the stimulus/response. All content is neutralized by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations, verdicts, and ultimatums to be decoded, which this time no longer come from the depths of the genetic code but still possess the same tactile indeterminacy—the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the cycles of the question/answer, the bit or the return of a miniscule quantity of energy/information to the point of departure. . . . The test is everywhere the fundamental social form of control, which works by infinitely dividing practices and responses. (1993: 61–2)

Although he wrote Symbolic Exchange and Death years before world rankings systems became popularized, his analysis of polling as a social device that perpetuates the simulacrum of code that he depicts—the binary between winning and losing, the perpetual horserace regarding who is ahead and who is behind in a political contest, the oversized value of competition the contest provokes, and the ways in which such preoccupations, expressed through quantification, crowd out substantive discussion—can certainly be applied to the world university rankings craze. Yudkevich, Altbach, and Rumbley (2016: 1–11) view global university rankings as an allegory for Olympic Games exercises, both of which create mechanisms



Bibliometric Data and World University Rankings Systems

183

for inducing ephemeral spaces that allow certain participants to capture global recognition. Baudrillard’s critique is far more serious, as he views such efforts not only as mechanisms for marginalizing meaning-making, but for eliminating an understanding of the past. In Chapter 1 we referenced Baudrillard’s view that the failure to distinguish between life and death, to be replaced by a view of life merely as survival, is evident in the superficiality which accompanies the memorialization of the holocaust and other forms of mass atrocity. But it is also evident in the ways in which universities are reconceived as mechanical agents of production. World rankings systems eliminate their historical legacies, their articulated sense of mission, or broader social purpose. It has been noted that scientific knowledge production occurs in many venues apart from the university setting—research laboratories sponsored by private corporations, governmentsponsored research institutes, and so on. But such entities don’t replicate the organic forms of knowledge production with which universities are associated, nor do they necessarily feel compelled to honor the academic freedom principles enunciated within the UNESCO “Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Personnel.”

Conclusion It is quite clear that the use of bibliometric data to define faculty work and the embrace of world university ranking systems cannot be rationally justified. The criticisms that have been expressed in response to their expanded use are widespread and well publicized. What is of greater interest is why their popularity continues in spite of such criticism? Some authors have referenced the willingness to succumb to the assertion of governmentality on a global level, or the promise of obtaining social capital, as explanations for the rankings obsession (Shahjahan, Blanco Ramirez, and Andreotti 2017:  S56). But such explanations fail to account for the positive dispositions that those who have previously obtained elite status continue to express toward bibliometrics and institutional ranking. Why expose oneself and/or the institution with which one is affiliated to the simulated code that Baudrillard describes when the results will inevitably diminish the meaning of one’s work and the importance of one’s university? Why do so when one’s social positioning within the academy has already been largely ascribed, at least for those situated at the apex of the academic pyramid? It is my contention that participation in world university

184

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

rankings which is dependent upon the use of bibliometric data for purposes of competition and comparison represents a form of self-loathing. In Chapter 4, we discussed the loathing that occurs as a result of the violence that school climates encourage or allow, as well as the loathing that results from external sources who project their anger onto the school population they intend to destroy. In Chapter 5, we noted how the loathing of status quo institutions unresponsive to the needs of youth led to political protest through the exercise of assemblage. The self-loathing that we have described with regard to the rankings craze differs from the other cases because the rankings and the bibliometric data that legitimize their usage are artificial constructions. To be clear, the use of rankings systems has had deleterious effects upon higher education policies globally, effects which have had real-life consequences for those associated with the academy. But unlike the other examples of loathing that have been noted, there is no meaningful correspondence between what the rankings are imagined to represent and what they in actuality demonstrate. Instead, their existence forces us to question the inherent value of the comparative process, for, in this case, comparison has become a vehicle for self-destruction rather than affirming the creative possibilities we have associated with engagement with affect— intensity of encounter, meaning-making, and assemblage.

7

Concluding Remarks: The Case for Affect Theory

Making the Case This project began with the premise that the uncritical embrace of educational modernism on the part of comparative education scholars has restricted the field’s relevance and importance. The paradox of the modernist perspective is that in the name of social progress, it presents a very limited view of human experience that it views as ideologically unimpeachable. The field is not alone in promoting such inconsistency for one can observe similar contradictions in the areas of public policy, international development, and educational research more broadly. The areas of public policy and international development, for example, were created with the positivist belief that it was only through the application of scientific method to social problems that meaningful solutions to those problems could be constructed. Its employment was viewed as guaranteeing that bias involved in political decision-making could be prevented and, as a result, social reform expedited. An inability to reconcile the desire to quantify measurable results with the need to present educational interaction as an essentially creative process without discernable boundaries and limits has presented a separate conundrum confounding educational scholars for generations. Not surprisingly, little consensus has emerged regarding what substantial learning entails or what constitutes significant human development and growth. Instead, researchers gravitate to one of the two camps, favoring either educational humanism or social efficiency but not both. Mainstream scholarship in the field of comparative education is not only derivative of the research their peers in these fields pursue, but it replicates their inconsistencies. When the act of comparison is defined in terms that promote the role of formal education as a catalyst for social progress in whatever its inundation, alternative perspectives are ignored or marginalized, and conflicting methodological approaches become irreconcilable. The state of

186

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

the comparative education field thus is marked by competing territorial claims that cherry pick from the broader social science research, but fail to generate new and better ideas for understanding the organic nature of educational interaction as a quintessential form of human experience. The conceit of this work is the proposition that using theories of affect to frame future research questions can play a role in moving the field forward. To be clear, there are many theories defining what affect means as a framing concept, some of which are in opposition to one another. Indeed, there is no one theory of affect whose legitimacy is universally accepted. But for the purposes of this exercise, four basic principles that characterize much of the literature in this area of cultural studies have been identified: intensity of encounter, assemblage, meaning-making, and contingency. Through using the categories of “fear” and “loathing,” all of the four principles have been addressed in the discussion of the six case studies presented in the book. The term “intensity of encounter” borrows heavily from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, and is reinforced in the work of Brian Massumi. It has particular salience precisely because there are many examples where comparison is invoked for the purpose of denying the existence or importance of the shared experience that intensity of encounter presumes. In Chapter  1, for example, Agamben’s admonition regarding the power of the state to decide whose life is worth recognizing, coupled with Baudrillard’s claim that the meaning of the holocaust has been irretrievably lost in an age where death is not recognized, force us to confront the inadequacies of official knowledge, generated within public schooling, as well as the limited understandings produced from acts of memorization in post-Pinochet Chile. The popularity of activities promoting memorization, in spite of their limitations, speaks in our view to the failure of the formal knowledge produced in school settings to address the existential questions that define contemporary Chilean identity. Such knowledge not only suffers from the biases of omission and political manipulation, but is constructed to be inert rather than vibrant. The turn toward alternative ways of embracing music and sports away from traditional school settings, chronicled in Chapters 2 and 3, similarly demonstrates popular investment in activities that are seemingly freed from their excessive didacticism and marginalization within the formal school curricula. The writings of Jacques Rancière frame Chapter 2, both with regard to his view of the dynamic nature of knowledge acquisition through self-discovery, and with regard to the relationship between artistic expression and personal liberation. In Chapter 3, the Foucaultian frame helps us to understand why control of the



Concluding Remarks

187

body is heavily contested inside and outside of formal school premises, but it additionally becomes clear why the sport for development movement capitalizes upon the myth of sport as character building without feeling compelled to rely upon the institutional legitimacy of the school in order to do so. There are many other examples of “intensities of encounter” throughout the book, but collectively, they affirm the importance of conceiving of educational processes as energetic and interrelational, qualities that have been underappreciated within much of the comparative education literature. In my view, an understanding of affect must include emphasis on the importance of meaning-making, and in this regard, Margaret Wetherell’s work has been extremely influential. Wetherell, who argues vociferously against the view that discourse should be categorized simply as a form of textual analysis and expression isolated from practice, positions meaning-making as naturally complementing intensity of encounter as an active force in our daily lives. The drive to recognize and preserve social memory and the desire to affirm artistic and kinesthetic self-expression as part of the collective embrace of our humanity speak to the ways in which its importance has been highlighted within these pages. At the same time, meaning-making does not necessarily produce positive outcomes. In Baudrillard’s view, the disassociation between the nature of an object and its representation allows for the creation of simulacra and simulations at the expense of authentic engagement. Evidence for his criticism is presented in Chapter 1, where the limitations of memorialized cultural objects are discussed, as well as in Chapter  6, where the popular acceptance of bibliometric data and world universities rankings is noted in spite of their material irrelevance. In Judith Butler’s view, much of the violence directed toward school subjects, discussed in Chapter 5, can be viewed within the context of one’s inadequacy in performing a heteronormative social script. The ensuing frustration in the perception of one’s meaning-making ability under those terms then fuels violent manifestations. But whether meaning-making results in positive or negative outcomes, its centrality to the expression of affect is quite clear. The writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, and Butler have been cited in the discussion of assemblage, also crucial to the understanding of theories of affect. The power of assemblage is most dramatically illustrated in the discussion of youth protest movements, made visible through the use of tactics such as the encampment during the Occupy, Indignados, and Umbrella Movements. But the importance of the concept is also present in the cosmopolitan universalism espoused within the promise of aesthetic engagement, as evidenced by the music programs profiled in Chapter 2 and similar parallels were noted in the

188

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

global invocation of human rights concepts detailed in Chapter 1. In Chapter 3, the pressure to create artificial assemblage through the use of sport as global spectacle was also discussed. The impact of globalization and neoliberal trends upon conventional understandings of community, and their negative impact upon the possibility of pursuing constructive assemblage, is daunting. Yet, in the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Jeremy Gilbert, the opportunity to reconceive of what communal relations might entail is explored, and the efforts to address questions of human rights and social memory, aesthetics and social responsibility, and sport for the purposes of promoting upward mobility, speak to a profound faith in power of assemblage. Even when the evidence for the success of the programs we highlighted is at best mixed, they received popular support, a further indication of the power and importance of this aspect of affect. The fourth principle of affect that we highlighted was contingency. Judith Butler eloquently defined contingency through her term “precarity,” associating a recognition of the need to assemble with others in pursuit of a greater cause with a recognition of the precariousness of our lived experiences. But contingency frames the other aspects of affect as well. The limitations it forces us to acknowledge are apparent when we investigated intensities of encounter with particular respect to the conditions that promote lack of recognition of and separation from the other. With regard to processes of meaning-making, we observed real limits upon the possibilities for engaging in authentic free expression, contaminated by our use of globally circulated commodified cultural objects (such as memorials, sports, or musical artifacts). Andrews and Ritzer’s notion of grobalization, or the overpowering of the glocal by global practices, with reference to sport, was particularly instructive in this regard. Furthermore, Baudrillard’s admonition, regarding the invocation of code as a simulation for real experience, which we applied to the world university rankings craze, offered a salient corrective to the view that meaning-making is always inherently productive or successful. How could the principles of affect we have discussed, and the case studies that illustrate their application, advance the field of comparative education? First, adherence to affect theory would de-emphasize the importance of black box research models, where direct analyses of educational processes is minimized or ignored in favor of the measurement of outputs, matched with preselected inputs. Second, the artificial categorizations that separate thought and action and rationality and emotion into distinct entities would be eliminated or at the very least deconstructed. Third, the privileging of autonomy and the positing



Concluding Remarks

189

of decision-making as a generically individual activity would be rejected. An adherence to the principles of affect theory would further constrain the broader claims for comparative education research with regard to assertions involving the generalizability of research findings. It would encourage the exploration of areas of human experience that are underrepresented in the literature:  the relationship between knowledge acquisition and spirituality, the role of indigenous knowledge in promoting learning, and the ways in which we interact with living and nonliving entities on the planet. The case studies that are presented here are illustrative of some of these possibilities. They assume that educational issues should be explored in ways that draw attention to the space they occupy within larger social contexts. They demonstrate how education affirms the wonder and complexity of human experience rather than being portrayed as existing in separation from it. The case studies also have been selected for their eclecticism; they are geographically diverse, but inclusive of local, regional, national, and cross-national trends. Information has been gathered from a number of differing sources, without any particular methodological tool or orientation being privileged. In addition, the cases are framed in ways that bring together theory derived from the field of cultural studies as well as social theory more broadly. Finally, the cases present some subjects that are not always given robust attention within the comparative education literature. The relationship between memorialization and education, education and aesthetics, the sport for development movement, and the dynamics of global school violence, for example, are topics that some comparative educators may have previously explored, but it would be a stretch to conclude that are part of the mainstream literature in the field.

Criticisms and Rejoinders It seems to me that this project can be criticized for a number of reasons, and it is important to both note the objections and offer considered responses. Given the fact that there are admittedly differing theories of affect, some of which are in contradiction to one another, it is fair to question whether it is satisfactory to pick some of the concepts underlying these theories and not others without resolving the contradictions implicit among those concepts that have been highlighted for their importance. Does this project inadvertently benefit from the same “cherrypicking” process for which we criticized comparative education researchers? And can the questions that were raised with regard to the lack of internal

190

Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse

consistency within the comparative education field be suitably addressed if the same concerns can be applied to the enunciation of affect theory principles? A second set of issues involve the choice of affect principles and more broadly the field of cultural studies from which they emanate. Given their Eurocentric origins, do they not represent another version of the colonial project that has so limited conventional comparative education inquiry? Aside from their origins, does their enunciation assert a foundationalism that is reminiscent of the ways in which modernist principles have been framed? One can also question whether the entities selected for comparison in this study significantly differ from those highlighted within conventional comparative education research. Localism, regionalism, and globalization are addressed to differing degrees within these cases but the boundaries that define their space are never really contested. Similarly, in spite of the previously mentioned efforts to address themes that have not been highly emphasized within the comparative education literature, their analysis is anchored by a recognition of the prevailing institutionalism that has also defined comparative education orthodoxy. Even when alternative possibilities to formal schooling practices and educational policies are noted, the practices and policies with which we are so familiar establish the context from which those alternatives are evaluated. A complete escape from the “modernism” which is decried is seemingly impossible. In response to these critiques, it is important to reiterate that the affect theory principles which were chosen for case study application include a degree of elasticity that is uncommon among tenets that one might describe as foundational. While one may quibble with what the terms “intensity of encounter,” “meaning-making,” and “assemblage” connote, the breadth with which they can be defined allows for a flexibility not readily apparent within more rigid categorizations. The sacrifice of internal consistency for the preservation of flexibility may be a cost that is borne through the embrace of these principles, but this should not detract from their relevance. Their subsequent fine-tuning, or even reconsideration, will inevitably occur, but such processes can only be pursued after the implicit value of these affective terms has been recognized. One should also emphasize that an acceptance of the importance of contingency, as part of the conceptualization of affect, forces advocates to limit the expansive nature of their claims when applying theory to practice. It certainly is a fair criticism to suggest that this project does not systematically confront the institutionalism or geographic boundedness that categorizes much of educational modernism. But it does call a number of the assumptions that accompany those categorizations into question, and I  view this as useful first



Concluding Remarks

191

start. Finally, there is no doubt that affect theory and more generally the field of cultural studies have Eurocentric origins. But the invocation of affect theory principles in this study is made under the assumption that when faithfully adapted, they can speak to a variety of human experiences that transcend the geography of their origination. It is for this reason that the case studies presented are not exclusively situated in the Global North.

Next Steps The aim of this project has been to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. Its success can be assessed according to the possibilities for future scholarly work that it promotes. In whatever form that work is displayed, it is hoped that authors scrutinize their research according to a few of the insights expressed in this project. Those insights include the acknowledgment that the act of comparison can be as destructive as it is affirming, particularly when the tendency to generalize overshadows a respect for difference. They involve the recognition that conceptions of autonomy and individualism, as applied to formative educational experiences, should never be employed in ways that obfuscate the importance of the role of social encounter in the expression of identity and the shaping of perspective. Finally, it would be useful for future scholars to acknowledge that meaning-making in educational contexts involves a mixture of the affective and the rational, the material and the spiritual, the artificial and the natural, the constant and the contingent. Efforts to deconstruct these binaries through acknowledging the importance of complexity, fluidity, and interconnection should not only be encouraged but applauded in future work.

References Introduction Ahmed, S. (2015), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge. Albrecht-Crane, C., and Slack, J. D. (2003), “Toward a Pedagogy of Affect,” in J. D. Slack (ed.), Animations [of Deleuze and Guattari], 191–216, New York: Peter Lang. Allison, G., and Zekilow, P. (1999), Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edition, London: Pearson. Altbach, P. G. (1980), “Servitude of the Mind: Education, Dependency, and Neocolonialism,” in P. G. Altbach, G. P. Kelly, and R. F. Arnove (eds.), Comparative Education, 469–84, New York: Macmillan. Anderson-Leavitt, K. (2012), “Introduction,” in K. Anderson-Leavitt (ed.), Anthropologies of Education, 1–28, New York: Berghahn. Andreotti, V. (2011), “(Towards) Decoloniality and Diversality in Global Citizenship Education,” Globalization, Societies and Education, 9(3–4), 381–97. Andreotti, V. (2016), “The Educational Challenges of Imagining the World Differently,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 37(1), 101–12. Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Apple, M. (1982), Education and Power, Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Arnove, R. F. (1980), “Comparative Education and World Systems Analysis,” in P. G. Altbach, G. P. Kelly, and R. F. Arnove (eds.), Comparative Education, 453–68, New York: Macmillan. Arnove, R. (1986), Education and Revolution in Nicaragua, New York: Praeger. Barrett, L. (2018), How Emotions are Made, Boston, MA: Mariner Books. Bartlett, L., and Vavrus, F. (2016), Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach, New York: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2002), “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity,” in C. Calhoun, J. Gerteis, J. Moody, S. Pfaff, and I. Virk (eds.), Contemporary Sociological Theory, 429–40, West Sussex: Blackwell. BBC (2011), “Chile recognises 9,800 more victims of Pinochet’s rule,” BBC, August 18. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-14584095. Accessed June 30, 2018. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, London: Sage. Berlant, L. (2010), “Cruel Optimism,” in M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, 93–117, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, B. (1975), Class, Codes, and Control, Vol. 3, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bjork, C. (2005), Indonesian Education, New York: Routledge.

194

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bowles, S., and Gintis, H. (1976), Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1997), Pascalian Meditations, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., and Passeron, J. C. (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Broadfoot, P. (1999), “Not So Much a Context: More a Way of Life? Comparative Education in the 1990s,” in R. Alexander, P. Broadfoot, and D. Phillips (eds.), Learning from Comparing: New Directions in Comparative Educational Research, 21–32, Oxford: Symposium Books. Brown, E., and McCowan, T. (2018), “Buen Vivir: Reimagining Education and Shifting Paradigms,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 48(2), 317–23. Campbell, J. L. (2002), “Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy,” Annual Review of Sociology, 28(1), 21–38. Campbell, J. L., and Pederson, O. K. (2015), “Policy Ideas, Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy,” Socio-Economic Review, 13(4), 679–701. Carney, S. (2009), “Negotiating Policy in an Age of Globalization: Exploring Educational ‘Policyscapes’ in Denmark, Nepal, and China,” Comparative Education Review, 53(1), 63–88. Carney, S. (2010), “Reading the Global: Comparative Education at the End of an Era,” in M. Larsen (ed.), New Thinking in Comparative Education, Honoring Robert Cowan, 125–42, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Carney, S. (2016), “Global Education Policy and the Postmodern Challenge,” in K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard, and A. Verger (eds.), The Handbook of Global Education Policy, 504–18, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Carney, S, Rappleye, J., and Silova, S. (2012), “Between Faith and Science: World Culture Theory and Comparative Education,” Comparative Education Review, 56(3), 366–93. Carnoy, M. (1974), Education as Cultural Imperialism, New York: David McKay. Coleman, J. S. (ed.) (1965), Education and Political Development, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Colmenares, Erica. (2017), “El Chavo del 8 as an ‘Intimate ‘Public’ in Venezuela: What Happened to the Good Life?” in D. Friedrich and E. Colmenares (eds.), Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies, 111–27, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Colmenares, E. (2018), “Affecting the Theory-Practice Gap in Social Justice Teacher Education: Exploring Student Teachers’ Stuck Moments,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, New York: Teachers’ College, Columbia University. Cooper, F., and Stoler, A. L. (eds.) (1997), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley: University of California Press.

References

195

Cowan, R. (2014a), “Comparative Education: Stones, Silences and Siren Songs,” Comparative Education, 50(2), 3–14. Cowan, R. (2014b), “Ways of Knowing, Outcomes and ‘Comparative Education’: Be Careful What You Pray For.” Comparative Education, 50(3), 282–301. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demerath, P. (1999), “The Cultural Production of Educational Utility in Pere Village, Papua New Guinea,” Comparative Education Review, 43(2), 162–92. Dimaggio, P. J., and Powell, W. W. (1983), “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review, 48(20), 147–60. Dore, R. P. (1976), The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification, and Development, London: Allen and Unwin. Dutro, E. (2013), “Towards a Pedagogy of the Incomprehensible: Trauma and the Imperative of Critical Witness in Literacy Classrooms,” Pedagogies: An International Journal, 8(4), 301–15. Epstein, E. (2013), “Crucial Benchmarks in the Professionalization of Comparative Education,” in C. Wolhuter, N. Popov, B. Leutwyler, and E. Skubic (eds.), Comparative Education at Universities World-wide, 11–28, Sofia: Bulgarian Comparative Education Society and Ljubljana University Press. Epstein, E. (2016), “Why Comparative and International Education? Reflections on a Conflation of Names,” in P. K. Kubow and A. Blosser (eds.), Teaching Comparative Education: Trends and Issues Informing Practice, 57–74, Oxford: Symposium Books. Epstein, E. (2017), “Is Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris the ‘Father’ of Comparative Education?” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(3), 317–31. Epstein, I. (1995), “Comparative Education in North America: The Search for Other through the Escape from Self?” Compare, 25(1), 5–16. Epstein, I. (2015), “Introduction,” in I. Epstein (ed.), The Whole World Is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age, 1–24, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Foley, D. (2011), “The Rise of Class Culture Theory in Educational Anthropology,” in B. A. Levinson and M. Pollack (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, 81–91, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Foster, P. (1965), “The Vocational School Fallacy in Development Planning,” in C. A. Anderson and M. J. Bowman (eds.), Education and Economic Development, 142–67, Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Foucault, M. (1984), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon. Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum Press. Gilbert, J. (2014a), Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, London: Pluto Press. Gilbert, J. (2014b), Sexuality in Schools: The Limits of Education, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

196

References

Haraway, D. J. (1985), “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” Socialist Review, 80, 65–108. Haraway, D. J. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016), Staying with Trouble: Making Kin the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey, D. (2007), A Brief History of Neo-liberalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Hecht, T. (1998), At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heijden, J. V., and Kuhlmann, J. (2016), “Studying Incremental Institutional Change: A Systematic and Critical Meta-Review of the Literature from 2005 to 2015,” Policy Studies Journal, 45(3), 535–54. Hofstetter, R., and Schneuwly, B. (2013), “International Bureau of Education (1925– 1968): A Platform for Designing a ‘chart of world aspirations for education’,” European Educational Research Journal, 12(2), 215–30. Holmes, B. (1981), Comparative Education: Some Considerations of Method, London: Allen and Unwin. Huntington, S. P. (1971), “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics, 3(3), 283–322. IEA (2018), “Fifty Years of Educational Research,” International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Available online: http://www.iea.nl/. Accessed July 2, 2018. Jessop. B. (2016a), “Putting Higher Education in its Place in (East Asian) Political Economy,” Comparative Education, 52(1), 8–25. Jessop, B. (2016b), The State: Past, Present, Future, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kauko, J., and Wermke, W. (2018), “The Contingent Sense-Making of Contingency: Epistemologies of Change in Comparative Education,” Comparative Education Review, 62(2), 157–77. Kipnis, A. (2011), Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. King, E. (1958), Other Schools and Ours, New York: Rinehart. Klees, S. J. (2017), “Beyond neoliberalism: Reflections on capitalism and education,” Policy Futures in Education. Available online: https://doi. org/10.1177/1478210317715814. Accessed July 2, 2018. Klees, S. (2008), “Reflections on Theory, Method and Practice in Comparative and International Education,” Comparative Education Review 52(3), 301–28. Kliebard, H. (2004), The Struggle for the American Curriculum, New York: Routledge. Labaree, D. F. (2005), “Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance,” Paedagogica Historica, 41(1 and 2), 275–88. Lagemann, E. (2000), An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Larsen. M. (2009), “Comparative Education, Postmodernity and Historical Research: Honouring Ancestors,” in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds.),

References

197

International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1045–59. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Larsen, M. A., and Beech, J. (2014), “Spatial Theorizing in Comparative and International Education Research,” Comparative Education Review, 58(2), 191–214. Leander, K., and Boldt, G. (2013), “Rereading ‘a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’ Bodies, Texts, and Emergence,” Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Lesko, N. (2010), “Feeling Abstinent? Feeling Comprehensive? Touching the Affects of Sexuality Curricula,” Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 10(3), 233–7. Lesko, N., and Talburt, S. (eds.) (2012), Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges. New York: Routledge. Levinson, B. (2001), We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Levinson, B. (2011), “Toward an Anthropology of (Democratic) Citizenship Education,” in B. Levinson, and M. Pollack (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, 279–98. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Lewis, C. (1995), Educating Hearts and Minds: Reflections on Japanese Preschool and Elementary Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewkovich, D. (2010), “The Possibilities for a Pedagogy of Boredom: Rethinking the Opportunities of Elusive Learning,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(1), 129–43. Leys, R. (2011), “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–72. Lipset, S. M. (1959), “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, 53(1), 69–105. Liu, J, Ross, H., and Kelly, D. (2000), The Ethnographic Eye: Interpretive Studies of Education in China, New York: Garland. Lord, C. G., Ross., L., and Lepper, M. R. (1979), “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098–109. Luhmann, N. (2012), Introduction to Systems Theory, London: Polity Press. Makel, M. C., and Plucker, J. A. (2014), “Facts are More Important than Novelty: Replication in the Educational Sciences,” Educational Researcher, 43(6), 304–16. MacLeod, J. (1987), Ain’t No Makin’ It, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Manzon, M. (2011), Comparative Education: The Construction of a Field, Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Center, University of Hong Kong. Manzon, M. (2017), “Comparative Education as a Field in Asia: Retrospect and Prospect,” Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 37(3), 283–98. Masemann, V. L. (1982), “Critical Ethnography in the Study of Comparative Education,” Comparative Education Review, 26(1), 1–15. Massumi, B. (1987), “Translator’s Forward: Pleasures of Philosophy,” in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (eds.), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ix–xix, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Massumi, B. (2015), The Power at the End of the Economy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

198

References

Meyer, J., Bromley, P., and Ramirez, F. O. (2010), “Human Rights in Social Science Textbooks: Cross-National Analysis, 1970–2008,” Sociology of Education, 83(2), 111–34. Meyer, J., and Rowan, B. (1977), “Institutional Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–63. Mignolo, W. D. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D., and Walsh, C. E. (2018), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morrell, R. (ed.) (2001), Changing Men in Southern Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Zed Books. Niccolini, A. (2016), “Animate Affects: Censorship, Reckless Pedagogies, and Beautiful Feelings,” Gender and Education, 28(2), 230–49. Ninnes, P., and Mehta, S. (eds.) (2004), Re-imagining Comparative Education: PostFoundational Ideas and Applications for Critical Times, New York: Routledge. Noah, H. J., and Eckstein, M. A. (1969), Toward a Science of Comparative Education, London: Macmillan. Novoa A., and Yariv-Mashal, T. (2003), “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?” Comparative Education, 39(4), 423–38. Nussbaum, M. (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuttall, S. (2008), “Youth Cultures of Consumption in Johannesburg,” in N. Dolby and F. Rizvi (eds.), Youth Moves: Identities and Education in Global Perspective, 151–78, New York: Routledge. Ouzgane, L., and Morell, R. (eds.) (2005), African Masculinities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paulston, R., and Liebman, M. (1996), “Social Carography: A New Metaphor/Tool for Comparative Studies,” in R. G. Paulston (ed.), Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, 7–28, New York: Garland. Phillips, D. (2006), “Michael Sadler and Comparative Education,” Oxford Review of Education, 32(1), 39–54. Programme for International Student Assessment (2018), “What is PISA?” Programme for International Student Assessment. Available online: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ aboutpisa/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Rappleye, J., and Kamatsu, H. (2016), “Living on Borrowed Time: Rethinking Temporality, Self, Nihilism and Schooling,” Comparative Education, 52(2), 177–201. Rohlen, T. (1983), Japan’s High Schools. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ross, H. (2002), “The Space between Us: The Relevance of Relational Theories to Comparative and International Education,” Comparative Education Review, 46(4), 407–32. Rostow, W. W. (1960), The Five Stages of Economic Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

199

Rust, V. D. (1991), “Postmodernism and Its Comparative Education Implications,” Comparative Education Review, 35(4), 610–26. Santos. B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Schriewer, J. (2011), “Comparative Education Methodology in Transition: Towards the Study of Complexity?” in J. Schriewer (ed.), Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, 3–52. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Schweisfurth, M. (2014), “Among the Comparativists: Ethnographic Observations,” Comparative Education, 50(3), 102–11. Sedgwick, E. K., and Frank. A. (2003), “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in E. K Sedgwick (ed.), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sellar, S. (2009), “The Responsible Uncertainty of Pedagogy,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(3), 347–60. Sellar, S. (2012), “‘It’s all about relationships’: Hesitation, Friendship and Pedagogical Assemblage,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 61–74. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, New York: Oxford. Sikking, K. (2017), Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, K. B., and Larimer, C. W. (2017), The Public Policy Theory Primer, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sobe, N. W. (2016), “Comparative Education, Globalization and Teaching with/against the Nation-State,” in P. Kubow and A. Blosser (eds.), Teaching Comparative Education: Trends and Issues Informing Practice, 151–62, Oxford: Symposium Books. Sobe, N. W. (2018), “Problematizing Comparison in a Post-Exploration Age: Big Data, Educational Knowledge, and the Art of Criss-Crossing,” Comparative Education Review, 62(3), 325–43. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2004), “Conclusion,” in G. Steiner-Khamsi (ed.), The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, 201–20, New York: Teachers College Press. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2017), “Focusing on the Local to Understand Why the Global Resonates and How Governments Appropriate ILSAs for National Agenda Setting,” Compare, 47(3), 443–6. Stewart, K. (2007), Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Swartz, S. (2009), The Moral Ecology of South Africa’s Township Youth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Takayama, K, Arathi Sriprakash, A., and Connell R. (2017), “Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education,” Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S1–24. Thelen, K. (2008), How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, H. S. (1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, New York: Vintage.

200

References

Thompson, H. S. (1973), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. Tikly, L., and Barrett, A. M. (2013), “Education Quality and Social Justice in the Global South: Towards a Conceptual Framework,” in L. Tikly and A. M. Barrett (eds.), Education Quality and Social Justice in the Global South, 11–24, Abingdon: Routledge. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y., and Karasawa, M. (2011), Preschools in Three Cultures Revisited, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Torres, C. A. (1994), “Paulo Freire as Secretary of Education in the Municipality of São Paulo,” Comparative Education Review, 38(2), 181–214. Tyack, D. (1974), The One Best System. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. UNESCO (2017), “Global Education Monitoring Report 2017–2018.” Available online: https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Unterhalter, E. (2014), “Thinking about Gender in Comparative Education,” Comparative Education, 50(1), 112–26. DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2013.872321. Van Wyk, B., and Adeniji-Neill, D. (eds.) (2014), Indigenous Concepts of Education: Toward Elevating Humanity for All Learners, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Wetherell, M., Taylor, S., and Yates, S. J. (eds.) (2004), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, London: Sage. White, M. (1994), The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Willis, P. (1977), Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, New York: Columbia University Press. World Inequality Lab (2018), “World Inequality Report 2018.” Available online: http:// wir2018.wid.world/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Wright, E. O. (1978), Class, Crisis and the State, London: Verso. Zembylas, M. (2015), Emotion and Traumatic Conflict Reclaiming Healing in Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zilversmit, A. (1993), Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930–1960, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 1 Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arnold-de Simine, S. (2013), Mediating Memory in the Museum: Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baudrillard, J. (1976), Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage.

References

201

Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bourdieu, P., and Passeron, J. C. (1970), Reproduction and Education in Society and Culture, Beverly Hills: Sage. BBC (2012), “Pinochet ‘dictatorship’ textbook row erupts in Chile,” BBC, January 5. Available online: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-16420413. Accessed June 30, 2018. Carrier, P. Fuchs, and Messinger. T. (2015), The International Status of Education about the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula, Paris: UNESCO. CBS News (2013), “Chile Marks Forty Years Since Pinochet Coup,” CBS, September 11. Available online: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chile-marks-40-years-sincepinochet-coup/. Accessed June 30, 2018. Connell, R. (2013), “The neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and Its Consequences,” Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99–112. Ebergenyi, I. (2011), “Former Chilean President Allende Remains Buried for Third Time in Private Ceremony,” Santiago Times as reprinted in Merco Press, September 12. Available online: http://en.mercpress.com/2011/09/12/former-chilean-presidentallende-remains-buried-for-third-time-in-private-ceremony. Accessed June 30, 2018. Farrell, J. P. (1986), The National Unified School in Allende’s Chile: The Role of Education in the Destruction of a Revolution, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Hayner, P. B. (2011), Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge. Hite, K (2004). “Chile’s National Stadium As Monument, as Memorial,” Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America. Available online: https://revista.drclas.harvard. edu/book/chiles-national-stadium. Accessed June 30, 2018. Hite, K. (2007), “Resurrecting Allende,” North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Available online: https://nacla.org/article/resurrecting-allende. Accessed June 30, 2018. Huyssen, A. (2003), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (2017), “International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.” Available online: http://www.sitesofconscience.org/. Accessed June 30, 2018. Kirchik, J. (2017), “‘Yolocaust’: New Web Site Satirizes the Misuse of one of the Most Iconic Holocaust Memorials,” Tablet, January 19. Available online: http://www. tabletmag.com/scroll/222564/yolocaust-new-web-site-satirizes-the-misuse-of-oneof-the-most-iconic-holocaust-memorials. Accessed June 30, 2018. Korstanje, M. (2016), The Rise of Thana-Capitalism and Tourism, Abingdon: Routledge. Levy, D., and Sznaider, N. (2010), Human Rights and Memory, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lennon, J., and Foley, M. (2004), Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, London: Thompson.

202

References

Marengo, G. (2015), “Chile: Amnesty Law Keeps Pinochet’s Legacy Alive,” Amnesty International, September. Available online: https://www.amn,sty.org/en/latest/ news/2015/09/chile-amnesty-law-keeps-pinochet-s-legacy-alive/. Accessed June 30, 2018. Meyer, J. W., Bromley, P., and Ramirez F. O. (2010), “Human Rights in Social Science Textbooks,” Sociology of Education, 83(2), 111–34. Minte, A. R. (2014), “Recent Historiographical Work on Chilean Textbooks,” Eckert.Beiträge 2014/1. Available online: http://www.edumeres.net/urn/ urn:nbn:de:0220-2014-00157. Accessed June 30, 2018. Museo de La Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (2011), Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos: Santiago: Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos. Olick J. K., and Robbins J. (1998), “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–40. Oteíza, T. (2003), “How Contemporary History is Presented in Chilean Middle School Textbooks,” Discourse and Society, 14(5), 639–60. Oteíza, T., and Pinto, D. (2008), “Agency, Responsibility and Silence in the Construction of Contemporary History in Chile and Spain,” Discourse & Society, 19(3), 333–58. Pastrana, J. P. (2007), “Subtle Tortures of the Neo-liberal Age: Teachers, Students, and the Political Economy of Schooling in Chile,” The Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies, 5(2). Available online: http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageID=artic le&articleID=102. Accessed June 30, 2018. Read, P., and Wyndham, M. (2016), Narrow but Endlessly Deep: The Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy, Acton: ANU Press. Rojas Corral, H. (2015), “Biopolitics and Homo Sacer in a Torture Center in Chile,” Revista Direito GV, 11(1). Available online: http://www.scielo.br/scielo. php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1808-24322015000100257. Accessed June 30, 2018. Stern, S. J. (2010), Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Telegraph (2013), “Push to Have Pinochet’s Dictatorship Written into Chile’s School Textbooks,” Telegraph, October 5. Available online: https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/chile/10357687/Push-to-have-Pinochetsdictatorship-written-into-Chiles-school-textbooks.html. Accessed June 30, 2018. United Nations (2017), “Millennium Development Goals and Beyond 2015,” United Nations. Available online: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/ pdf/MDG%202015%20rev%20(July%201).pdf. Accessed June 30, 2018. Waldstein, D. (2015), “In Chile’s National Stadium, Dark Past Shadows Copa América,” New York Times, June 17. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/ sports/soccer/in-chiles-national-stadium-dark-past-shadows-copa-americamatches.html. Accessed June 30, 2018. Williams, P. (2007), Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg.

References

203

Wright, K. (2016), “Portraits of Pinochet: Historical Narratives in Chilean Schools,” unpublished honors thesis. August, Oxford: University of Mississippi, Available online: http://thesis.honors.olemiss.edu/643/1/Portrayals%20of%20Pinochet.pdf. Accessed June 30, 2018. Young, J. E. (1993), The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zaldivar, C. (2013), Museo de la Solidaridad Chile: Donacion de los Artistas al Gobierno Popular: Fraternidad Arte Politica, 1971–1973, Santiago: Comite Internacional de Solidaridad Artistica Con Chile. Zembylas, M. (2018), “Understanding the Emotional Regimes of Reconciliation in Engagements with ‘Difficult’ Heritage,” in L. Smith, M. Wetherell, and G. Campbell (eds.), Emotion, Affective Practices and The Past in the Present, Abingdon: Routledge.

Chapter 2 Adorno, T. (2007a), “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” in T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, and G. Lukacs (eds), Aesthetics and Politics, 110–33, Verso: London. Adorno, T. (2007b), “Reconciliation under Duress,” in T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, and G. Lukacs (eds), Aesthetics and Politics, 151–76, Verso: London. Adorno, T., Benjamin, W., Bloch, E., Brecht, B., and Lukacs, G. (2007), Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso. Appadurai, A. (2010), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K. A. (2007), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: Norton. Arendt. H. (2007), “Introduction,” in W. Benjamin (ed.), Illuminations, 1–55, New York: Schocken. Baker, G. (2014), El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, New York: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. (2002), “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity,” in C. Calhoun, J. Gerteis, J. Moody, S. Pfaff, and I. Virk (eds.), Contemporary Sociological Theory, 429–40, West Sussex: Blackwell. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society:Towards a New Modernity, Beverley Hills: Sage. Benjamin, W. (2002), The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bernstein, J. (2017), “An Adventure in Caracas.” Available online: http://jamiebernstein. net/adventure_in_caracas.html. Accessed June 9, 2017. Blues Kids Foundation (2017), “Blues Kids Foundation.” Available online: http://www. blueskids.com/. Accessed June 10, 2017. El Sistema USA (2018), “About Us,” El Sistema USA. Available online: https:// elsistemausa.org/about/. Accessed May 28, 2017.

204

References

Fraser, N. (2010), Social Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York: Columbia University Press. Gilbert, J. (2014), Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, Cambridge: Pluto Press. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Jones, Fernando (2009a), I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot: The Importance of the Blues: From Sociological &Historical perspective with a Focus on the Future, Chicago, IL: F. Jones. Jones, Fernando (2009b), “Teaching the Blues Effectively,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 21(1), 108–12. Jones, Fernando (2017), Interview with Irving Epstein, Chicago, IL, June 3, 2017. Karki, Thea (2017), Interview with Irving Epstein, January 23, 2017. Lipman, P. (2011), The New Political Economy of Urban Education, New York: Routledge. Lukacs, G. (2007), “Realism in the Balance,” in T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, and G. Lukacs (eds), Aesthetics and Politics, 28–59, Verso: London. Playing for Change Foundation (2017), “Playing for Change: Connecting the World through Music.” Available online: https://playingforchange.org/. Accessed June 10, 2017. Rancière, J., and Rockhill, G. (2015), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Bloomsbury. Rancière, J. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sennett, R., and Cobb, J. (1993), The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York: W.W. Norton. Sistema Global (2018), “El Sistema in Venzuela,” Sistema Global. Available online: http://sistemaglobal.org/about/. Accessed May 28, 2017. The Conversation (2017), “No, Venezuela’s Much-Hyped El Sistema Music Program is not a Hotbed of Political Resistance,” The Conversation, July 7. Available online: https://theconversation.com/no-venezuelas-much-hyped-el-sistema-musicprogramme-is-not-a-hotbed-of-political-resistance-80500. Accessed May 28, 2018. Tunstall, T., and Booth, E. (2016), Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change through Music, New York: W.W. Norton.

Chapter 3 Alegi, P. (2010), African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World Game, Athens: Ohio University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996), “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Cricket,” in A. Appadurai (ed.), Modernity at Large, 89–113, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

References

205

Andrews, D., and Ritzer G. (2007), “The Grobal in the Sporting Glocal,” in R. Giulianotti and R. Robertson (eds.), Globalization and Sport, 28–45, London: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (2004), “A Sociological Theory of Post-modernity,” in C. Calhoun, J. J. Gerteis, J. Moody, S. Pfaff, and I. Virk (eds.), Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd edition, 429–40, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Bhana, D. (2005), “Violence and the Gendered Negotiation of Masculinity among Young Black School Boys in South Africa,” in L. Ouzgane and R. Morell (eds.), African Masculinities, 205–20, New York: Palgrave Macmillan and the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Booth, D. (1998), The Race Game: Sport and Politics in South Africa, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1997), Pascalian Meditations, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., and Passeron, J. C. (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Burnett, C. (2001), “Social Impact Assessment and Sport Development: Social Spin-offs of the Australia-South Africa Junior Sport Program,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 36(1), 41–57. Burnett, C. (2013), “GIZ/YDF and Youth as Drivers of Sport for Development in the African context,” Journal of Sport for Development 1(1), 4–15. Byrnes, R. M. (1996), “South Africa: A Country Study,” Library of Congress. Available online: http://countrystudies.us/south-africa/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Coalter, F. (2013), Sport for Development: What game Are We Playing? London: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (2005), Masculinities, 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2nd edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Department of Sport and Recreation South Africa (2010), Meet the Heroes of the Sport Struggle: Remembering Sport in the Struggle, a Human Rights Perspective Exhibition, Pretoria: Department of Sport and Recreation, Republic of South Africa. Domingos, N. (2007), “Football and Colonialism, Domination and Appropriation: The Mozambique Case,” Soccer and Society 8(4), 478–94. Domingos, N. (2017), Football and Colonialism: Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique, Athens: Ohio University Press. Eberle, S. (2014), “The Elements of Play: Toward a Philosophy and Definition of Play,” Journal of Play, 6(2), 214–33. Available online: http://www.journalofplay.org/sites/ www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/6-2-article-elements-of-play.pdf. Accessed July 1, 2018. Epstein, I. (2011), “Sports as a Metaphor for Comparative Inquiry,” in J. C. Weidman and W. J. Jacob (eds.), Beyond the Comparative: Advancing Theory and Its Applications to Practice, 93–112, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

206

References

Ferguson, J., and Gupta, A. (2002), “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist, 29(4), 981–1002. Forde, S. (2008), Playing by Their Rules: Coastal Teenage Girls in Kenya on Life, Love and Football, Kilifi, Kenya: Moving the Goalposts. Foucault, M. (1988), Madness and Civilization, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M., and Hurley, R. (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, New York: Vintage. Giulianotti, R. (2016), Sport: A Critical Sociology, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press. Guha, R. (1992), Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History. New York: Oxford University Press (India). Graeber, D. (2016), The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Hardman, K. (2008), “Physical Education in Schools: A Global Perspective,” Kinesiology 40(1), 5–28. Harvey, D. (2007), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Jansen, J. (2010), “Jonathan Jansen: The Enduring Legacy of OBE,” Times Live, July 22. Available online: https://www.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2010-07-21-jonathan-jansenthe-enduring-legacy-of-obe/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Kallaway, P., and Swartz, R. (2016), “Introduction,” in P. Kallaway and R. Swartz (eds.), Empire and Education in Africa, 1–28, New York: Peter Lang. Mathare Youth Sports Association (n.d.), “Mathare Youth Sports Association: Giving Youth a Sporting Chance on and off the Field.” Available online: http://www. mysakenya.org. Accessed July 1, 2018. Motola, S. (2013), “Equity, Quality, and Access in South African Education: A Work Still Very Much in Progress,” in J. Daniel, P. Naidoo, D. Pillay, and R. Southhall (eds.), New South African Review 3: The Second Phase-Tragedy or Farce? 221–38, Johannesburg: Witts University Press. Moving the Goal Posts (n.d.), “Moving the Goalposts.” Available online: http://mtgk. org/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Mwisukha, A., Rintaughu, E., Kamenju, J., and Mwangi, P. (2014), “Shaping the Future of Physical Education in Kenya,” in M. Chin and C. R. Edginton (eds.), Physical Education and Health: Global Perspectives and Best Practice, 269–78, Urbana, IL: Sagamore Publishing. New World Encyclopedia (n.d.), “Physical Education.” Available online: http://www. newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Physical_education. Accessed July 1, 2018. Ngware, M., Benta, A. K., Admassu, M. M., Musyoka, P., and Oketch, M. (2013), Quality and Access to Education in Urban Informal Settlements in Kenya. A Research Report, Nairobi: African Population and Health Research Center. Available online: aphrc.org. Accessed July 1, 2018. Norman, B. (2009), “Sport and Development Issues in South Africa,” Sportanddev.org, June 3. Available online: https://www.sportanddev.org/en/article/news/sport-anddevelopment-issues-south-africa. Accessed July 1, 2018.

References

207

Oduro, G. Y., Swartz, S., and Arnot, M. (2012), “Gender-based Violence: Young Women’s Experiences in the Slums and Streets of Three African Cities.” Theory and Research in Education, 10(3), 275–94. Peachey, J. W., Cohen A., Shin, N., and Fasaro, B. (2018), “Challenges and Strategies of Building and Sustaining Inter-organizational Partnerships in Sport for Development and Peace,” Sport Management Review, 21(2), 160–75. Available online: https:// ac.els-cdn.com/S1441352317300438/1-s2.0-S1441352317300438-main.pdf?_ tid=fdb45c96-c97f-11e7-bd54-00000aab0f27&acdnat=1510693901_a781f9855b1489 bb298624fc7314adf8. Accessed July 1, 2018. Republic of Kenya (2013), “Sports Act, no. 25 of 2013.” National Council for Law Reporting with the Authority of the Attorney General. Available online: http:// www.kenyalaw.org/lex//actview.xql?actid=No.%2025%20of%202013. Accessed July 1, 2018. Spaaij, R., Magee, J., and Jeanes, R. (2014), Sport and Social Exclusion in Global Society, London: Routledge. Spaul, N. (2013), “Poverty and Privilege: Primary School Inequality in South Africa,” International Journal of Educational Development, 33(5), 436–47. Soudien, C., and Baxen, J. (1997), “Transformation and Outcomes-based Education in South Africa: Opportunities and challenges,” Journal of Negro Education, 66(4), 449–59. Sporting Chance (n.d.) “About Us; Sporting Chance Foundation.” Available online: http://www.sportingchance.co.za/. Accessed July 1, 2018. Stoler, A. L. (2001), “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” The Journal of American History, 88(3), 829–65. Svenssen, P. G. (2017), “Organizational Hybridity: A Conceptualization of How Sport for Development and Peace Organizations Respond to Divergent Institutional Demands,” Sport Management Review, 20(5), 443–54. Available online: https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1441352317300347. Accessed July 1, 2018. Svenssen, P. G., and Hambrick, M. (2016), “Pick and Choose Our Battles— Understanding Organizational Capacity in a Sport for Development and Peace Organization,” Sport Management Review, 19(2), 120–32. Swartz, S. (2009), The Moral Ecology of South Africa’s Township Youth, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan and University of Kwasulu-Natal Press. The Economist (2017), “South Africa Has One of the World’s Worst Education Systems: Why it is at the Bottom of the Class,” The Economist, July 7. Available online: https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21713858-why-itbottom-class-south-africa-has-one-worlds-worst-education. Accessed July 1, 2018. Thompson, E. P. (1967), “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38, 56–97. UNESCO (n.d.a), “International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity, and Sport,” UNESCO. Available online: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/

208

References

social-and-human-sciences/themes/physical-education-and-sport/sport-charter). Accessed July 1, 2018. UNESCO (n.d.b), “Intergovernmental Committee for Physical Education and Sport,” UNESCO. Available online: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-humansciences/themes/physical-education-and-sport/cigeps/. Accessed July 1, 2018. UNESCO (1978), “International Charter of Physical Education and Sport,” UNESCO. Available online: http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/SPORT_E.PDF. Accessed, July 1, 2018. UNICEF South Africa (n.d.), “Sport for Development.” Available online: https://www. unicef.org/southafrica/support_4707.html. Accessed July 1, 2018.

Chapter 4 Ahmed. S. (2015), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge. Akiba, M., Letendre, G. K., Baker, D. P., and Goesling, B. (2002), “Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations,” American Educational Research Journal, 39(4), 829–53. Benbenishty, R., and Avi Astor, R. (2005), School Violence in Context: Culture, Neighborhood, Family, School, and Gender, New York: Oxford. Bloom, P. (2017), “The Root of All Cruelty?” The New Yorker, November 27. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-root-of-all-cruelty. Accessed June 27, 2018. Bloom, P. (2018), Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, New York: Ecco publishing. Bourdieu, P. (2004), “Gender and Symbolic Violence,” in N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds.), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, 339–42, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Buller, A. M. (2015), “Young Men and Structural, Symbolic and Everyday Violence in Peru,” in J. Parkes (ed.), Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts, 118–34, London: Routledge. Burton, P., and Leoschut, L. (2013), School Violence in South Africa: Results of the 2012 National School Violence Study, Cape Town: Center for Justice and Crime Prevention. Available online: http://www.cjcp.org.za/uploads/2/7/8/4/27845461/ monograph12-school-violence-in-south_africa.pdf. Accessed June 28, 2018. Butler, J. (2003), “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in C. R. McCann and S.-K. Kim (eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 415–27, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2006), Gender Trouble, London: Routledge. Committee on the Rights of the Child (2006), General Comment no. 8. New York: United Nations.

References

209

Connell, R. W. (2005), Masculinities, 2nd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W., and Messerchmidt, J. W. (2005), “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society, 19(6), 829–59. Cornell, D., and Cole, J. C. M. (2012), “Assessment of Bullying,” in S. R. Jimerson, A. B. Nickerson, M. J. Mayer, and M. Furlong (eds.), Handbook of School Violence and School Safety, 289–303, New York: Routledge. Cremin, H., and Guilherme, A. (2018), “Violence and Peace in Schools: Some Philosophical Reflections,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions, 559–76, Medford, MA: Wiley. Donaldson, M. (1993), “What is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society, 22(5), 643–57. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657988?seq=1#page_scan_ tab_contents. Accessed June 28, 2018. Epstein, I. (1999), “Street Children in Film,” Curriculum Inquiry, 29(3), 375–88. Epstein, I. (2011), “Childhood and Globalization: Some Theoretical Musings,” in M. Balina, V. Bezrogov, and S. Sheridan (eds.), Constructing Childhood: Literature, History, Anthropology (translated from the original Russian), 479–97, St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia. Evans, B., and Giroux, H. (2015), Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Open Media. Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (2018), Education under Attack. Available online: http://eua2018.protectingeducation.org/#attacks-on-highereducation. Accessed June 27, 2018. Global Initiative to End all Corporal Punishment of Children (2018), “What Is Corporal Punishment?” Available online: https://endcorporalpunishment.org. Accessed June 27, 2018. Jessup, B. (2016), The State: Past, Present, Future, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kellner, D. (2008), Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Kellner, D. (2018), “School Shootings, Societal Violence and Gun Culture,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education, 53–68, Medford, MA: Wiley. Kleinman, A. (2000), “The Violence of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence,” in V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphelle, and P. Reynolds (eds.), Violence and Subjectivity, 226–41, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kusché, C. A., and Greenberg, M. T. (2012), “The PATHS Curriculum: Promoting Emotional Literacy, Prosocial Behavior and Caring Classrooms,” in S. R. Jimerson, A. B. Nickerson, M. J. Mayer, and M. Furlong (eds.), Handbook of School Violence and School Safety, 435–46. New York: Routledge.

210

References

Levinson, B. (2011), “Toward an Anthropology of (Democratic) Citizenship Education,” in B. Levinson and M. Pollack (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, 279–98, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. McLouighlin, A. B., Gould, M. S., and Malone, K. M. (2015), “Global Trends in Teenage Suicide: 2003–2014,” QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 108(10), 765–80. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcv026. Accessed June 28, 2018. Morrow, V., and Singh, R. (2016), “Children’s Perceptions of Punishment in Schools in Andhra Pradesh, India,” in J. Parkes (ed.), Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts, 67–83, London: Routledge. Nickerson, A., Guttman, D., and VanHout, S. (2018), “Bullying and Cyberbullying Prevalence as a Form of Violence in Education,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education, 327–58, Medford, MA: Wiley. Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Violence against Children, United Nations (2006), “Report of the Independent Expert for the United Nations on Violence against Children.” Available online: https://documents-dds-ny. un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/491/05/PDF/N0649105.pdf?OpenElement. Accessed June 28, 2018. Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Violence against Children, United Nations (2013), Toward a World Free from Violence: Global Survey on Violence against Children, New York: United Nations. Available online: https:// violenceagainstchildren.un.org/sites/violenceagainstchildren.un.org/files/global_ survey/toward_a_world_free_from_violence_02_23_2016.pdf. Accessed June 27, 2018. Olweus, D. (1991), “Bully/victim Problems among Schoolchildren: Basic Facts and Effects of a School Based Intervention Program,” in D. Pepler and K. Rubin (eds.), The Development and Treatment of Childhood Aggression, 411–48, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Olweus, D. (1993), Bullying at School, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Parkes, J., and Unterhalter, E. (2016), “Hope and History: Education Engagements with Poverty, Inequality, and Gender Violence,” in J. Parkes (ed.), Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts, 11–29, Abingdon: Routledge. Puresight (2018), “Cyberbullying Statistics.” Available online: http://www.puresight. com/Cyberbullying/cyber-bullying-statistics.html. Accessed June 28, 2018. Reyneke, M. (2011), “The Right to Dignity and Restorative Justice in Schools,” Potchefstroom Electric Law Journal, 14(6), 129–76. Available online: https://www.ajol. info/index.php/pelj/article/view/73011. Accessed June 28, 2018. Richardson, D., and Hiu, C. F. (2016), “Global Data on the Bullying of School Aged Children,” in M. S. Pais (ed.), Ending the Torment: Tackling Bullying from the Schoolyard to Cyberspace, 101–13. New York: United Nations Publications. Rodway, C., Tham, S. G., Ibrahim, S., Turnbull, P., Windfuhr, K., Shaw, J., Kapur, N., and Appleby, L. (2016), “Suicide in Children and Young People in England: A Consecutive Case Series,” The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(8), 751–9.

References

211

Scholars at Risk (2018), Free to Think, 2017. Scholars at Risk: New York. Available online: https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/2017/09/free-think-2017-anti-democratictrends-driving-increased-attacks-higher-education-worldwide/. Accessed June 27, 2018. Shapiro, H. (2018), “The Logic of the Exception,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education, 85–101, Medford, MA: Wiley. Shuffelton, A. (2018), “Gender as a Factor in School Violence: Honor and Masculinity,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education, 503–18, Medford, MA: Wiley. Smith, P. K. (2012), “Cyberbullying and Cyber Aggression,” in S. R. Jimerson, A. B. Nickerson, M. J. Mayer, and M. Furlong (eds.), Handbook of School Violence and School Safety, 93–104, New York: Routledge. Sprague, J. R., and Horner. R. H. (2012), “School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports: Proven Practices and Future Directions,” in S. R. Jimerson, A. B. Nickerson, M. J. Mayer, and M. Furlong (eds.), Handbook of School Violence and School Safety, 447–62, New York: Routledge. Swartz, S. (2009), The Moral Ecology of South Africa’s Township Youth, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tao. S. (2016), “Corporal Punishment, Capabilities, and Well-being: Tanzanian Primary School Teachers’ Perspectives,” in J. Parkes (ed.), Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts, 84–99. London: Routledge. UNESCO (2016), Out in the Open: Education Sector Responses to Violence Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity/Expression, Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (2017), School Violence and Bullying: Global Status Report, Paris: UNESCO. Available online: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002469/246970e.pdf. Accessed June 27, 2018. UN News (2016), “Two-thirds of Young People in more than 18 Countries Say They Have Been Bullied-UNICEF Poll.” UN News. Available online: https://news.un.org/ en/story/2016/08/536572-two-thirds-young-people-more-18-countries-say-theyhave-been-bullied-unicef. Accessed June 27, 2018. WHO (2018), “Violence against Children.” Fact Sheet. World Health Organization. Available online: https://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/violence-againstchildren/en/. Accessed June 27, 2018.

Chapter 5 Barcelona En Comú (2018), “Municilab: El Poder de la xarxa,” Barcelona En Comú. Available online: https://barcelonaencomu.cat/ca. Accessed September 9, 2018. Benedikter, R., and Ziosilo, M. (2017), “Chile’s 2017 Presidential Election: Evaluating the Second Bachelet Government,” London School of Economics and Political Science Latin America and Caribbean Center blog, November 18. Available

212

References

online: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2017/11/18/chiles-2017-presidentialelection-evaluating-the-second-bachelet-government/. Accessed September 8, 2018. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2014), “Hong Kong Protests: Timeline of the Occupation,” BBC News, December 11. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-asia-china-30390820. Accessed September 9, 2018. Bush, R. C. (2016), Hong Kong in the Shadow of China: Living with the Leviathan, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Butler, J. (2015), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Castells, M. (2012), Networks of Hope and Outrage, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, J. I. (1985), “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research, 52(4), 663–716. Delisle, J., and Bernasconi, A. (2018), “Lessons from Chile’s Transition to Free College,” Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Available online: https://www.brookings. edu/research/lessons-from-chiles-transition-to-free-college/. Accessed September 8, 2018. Dessi, G. (2018), “Occupying against the Patriarchy,” New Internationalist, June 25. Available online: https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2018/06/25/chileanfeminist-student-occupations. Accessed September 8, 2018. Education Bureau of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (2018), “Post-secondary Education Overview,” September 29. Available online: https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/postsecondary/index.html. Accessed September 9, 2018. Edukia Euskaraz Ikusi (2018), “Celaá cambirará la LOMCE para quitar peso a la religión y a los centros concertados,” Edukia Euskaraz Ikusi, July 11. Available online: https://www.eitb.eus/es/noticias/sociedad/detalle/5724910/educacion-celaacambiara-lomce-11-julio-2018/. Accessed September 9, 2018. European Commission (2017), “Education and Training Monitor 2017: Spain,” September 15, Luxembourg: European Union. Available online: https://ec.europa.eu/ education/sites/education/files/monitor2017-es_en.pdf. Accessed September 8, 2018. Epstein, I. (2015a), “Conclusion,” in I. Epstein (ed.), The Whole World Is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age, 215–23, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Epstein, I. (2015b), “Introduction: The Global Dimensions of Youth Protest,” in I. Epstein (ed.), The Whole World Is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age, 1–24, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Epstein, I. (2015c), “No Turning Back, Neoliberalism Exposed: Youth Protest in Chile, Spain, and the U.S.,” in I. Epstein (ed.), The Whole World Is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age, 81–114, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Feigenbaum, A, Frenzel, F., and McCurdy, P. (2013), Protest Camps, London: Zed Books. Feur, L. (1969), Conflict of Generations, New York: Harper Collins. Fung, D., and Su, A. (2016), “The Influence of Liberal Studies on Students’ Participation in Socio-Politico Activities: The Case of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong,”

References

213

Oxford Review of Education, 42(1), 89–107, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2016.1140635. Available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03054985.2016.114 0635?scroll=top&needAccess=true. Accessed September 9, 2018. Galindo, J. (2018), “Why is There No Successful Far Right Party in Spain?” The Economy Journal.Com, September 9. Available online: https://www.theeconomyjournal.eu/ texto-diario/mostrar/1052087/why-is-there-no-successful-far-right-party-in-spain. Accessed September 9, 2018. Goffman, E. (1974), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New York: Harper Colophon. Henly, J. (2014), “How the Umbrella Became a Symbol of the Hong Kong Democracy Protests,” The Guardian, September 29. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/world/2014/sep/29/umbrella-symbol-hong-kong-democracy-protests. Accessed September 9, 2018. Hunt, S. Benford, R. D., and Snow, D. A. (1994), “Identity Talk in the Peace and Justice Movement,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22, 488–517. ICEF Monitor (2015), “Spanish Education at a Crossroads,” ICEF Monitor, March 19. Available online: http://monitor.icef.com/2015/03/spanish-education-at-acrossroads/. Accessed September 9, 2018. Jenkins, J. C. (1983), “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology, 9, 527–53. Available online: https:// www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.so.09.080183.002523. Accessed September 8, 2018. McCarthy, J. D., and Zald, M. N. (1977), “Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology, 82(6), 1212–41. Muñoz, G. (2018), “The Challenge of the Catalan Independence Movement in Spain: An Interview with Enric Juliana,” Public Seminar, April 5. Available online: http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/04/the-challenge-of-the-catalanindependence-movement-in-spain/. Accessed September 9, 2018. Ramasantry, C. (2018), “Uncertainty in Chilean Higher Education: A Tale of Two Cities,” June 11, Washington, DC: Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Available online: http://www.coha.org/uncertainty-in-chilean-higher-education-a-tale-of-twoprotests/. Accessed September 8, 2018. Rubio-Pueyo, V. (2018), “Municipalism in Spain: From Barcelona to Madrid and Beyond,” Transnational Institute of Social Ecology, August 12. Available online: http:// trise.org/2018/08/12/municipalism-in-spain-from-barcelona-to-madrid-andbeyond/. Accessed September 9, 2018. Smelser, N. J. (1962), Theory of Collective Behavior, New York: Free Press. Snow, D. A. (2004), “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields,” in D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, and H. Kreisi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 380–412, Oxford: Blackwell. Snow, D. A. (2013), “Identity Dilemmas, Discursive Fields, Identity Work, and Mobilization: Clarifying the Identity-Movement Nexus,” in J. von Stekelenburg,

214

References

C. Roggeband, and B. Klandermas (eds.), The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, 263–80, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Snow, D. A., and Benford, R. D. (1988), “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research, 1, 197–217. Snow, D. A., and Bernatzky, C. (2018), “The Coterminous Rise of Right-Wing Populism and Superfluous Populations,” in G. Fitzi, J. Mackert, and B. S. Turner (eds.), Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, Volume 1: Concepts and Theory, 130–46, London: Routledge. Sunstein, C. (2017), Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tarrow, S. (1994), Power in Movement, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1993–4), “Social Movements as Historically Specific Clusters of Political Performances,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 38, 1–30. Available online: http:// voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Social-movements-as-historicallyspecific-clusters-of-political-performances-by-Charles-Tilly.pdf. Accessed September 9, 2018. Tsoi, G. (2014), “Did ‘Liberal Studies’ Enable Hong Kong Youth’s Awakening?” Foreign Policy, November 18. Available online: https://foreignpolicy. com/2014/11/18/did-liberal-studies-enable-hong-kongs-youth-awakening/. Accessed September 9, 2018. Valenzuela, J. P., and Montecinos C. (2017), “Structural Reforms and Equity in Chilean Schools,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, July. Available online: https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/318725309_Structural_Reforms_and_Equity_in_ Chilean_Schools. Accessed September 8, 2018. Wong, B., and Chung, S. (2016), “Scholarism and Hong Kong Federation of Students: Comparative Analysis of Their Developments after the Umbrella Movement,” Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, 2(2), 865–84. Yip, P., and Peng, C. (2018), “How Higher Education in Hong Kong Reinforces Social Inequalities,” South China Morning Post, January 21. Available online: https://www. scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2129659/how-higher-education-hongkong-reinforces-social. Accessed September 9, 2018. Zornick, G. (2017), “Bernie Sanders Just Introduced His Free College Tuition Plan,” The Nation, April 3. Available online: https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sandersjust-introduced-his-free-college-tuition-plan/. Accessed September 9, 2018.

Chapter 6 Baudrillard, J. (1993), Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage.

References

215

Beresconi, A., and Véliz, D. (2016), “Global University Rankings From Afar: The Case of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile,” in M. Yudkevich, P. G. Altbach, and L. Rumbley (eds.), The Global Academic Rankings Game: Changing Institutional Policy, Practice, and Academic Life, 38–56, New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Davis, M. (2016), “Can College Rankings Be Believed?” Shi Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation, 2(3), 215–30. Available online: https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S2405872616300570. Accessed October 3, 2018. DORA (2013), “San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment,” May. Available online: https://sfdora.org/read/. Accessed October 3, 2018. Espeland, W. N., and Sauder, M. (2016), Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Hazelcorn, E. (2015), Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Kelly, J., Sadeghieh, T., and Adeli, K. (2014), “Peer Review in Scientific Publications: Benefits, Consequences, and a Survival Guide,” The Journal of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, 25(3), 227–43. Available online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC4975196/. Accessed October 4, 2018. Kraker, P., Jordan, K., and Lex, E. (2015), “The Research Gate Score: A Good Example of a Bad Metric,” LSE Impact Blog, London School of Economics and Political Science, December 9. Available online: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialscien ces/2015/12/09/the-researchgate-score-a-good-example-of-a-bad-metric/. Accessed October 3, 2018. Nasi-Calò, L. (2013), “Controversial Article in the Journal ‘Science’ Exposes the Weaknesses of Peer-Review in a Set of Open Access Journals,” SciElo in Perspective, November 5. Available online: https://blog.scielo.org/en/2013/11/05/controversialarticle-in-the-journal-science-exposes-the-weaknesses-of-peer-review-in-a-set-ofopen-access-journals/#.W7TLqBNKgb1. Accessed October 3, 2018. Porter, T. (1995), Trust in Numbers, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shahjahan, R., Blanco Ramirez, G., and Andreotti, V. (2017), “Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonized Reading of Global Academic Rankings,” Comparative Education Review, 61(s1), s51–73. UNESCO (1997), “Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel,” UNESCO, November 11. Available online: http://portal.unesco. org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13144&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201. html. Accessed October 2, 2018. US News and World Report Education (2018), “Best Global Universities Rankings,” U.S. News and World Report. Available online: https://www.usnews.com/education/bestglobal-universities/rankings. Accessed October 7, 2018.

216

References

Welch, A. (2005), “Challenge and Change: The Academic Profession in Uncertain Times,” in A. Welch (ed.), The Professoriate: Profile of a Profession, 1–20, Dordrecht: Springer. Werner, R. (2015), “The Focus on Bibliometrics Makes Papers Less Useful,” Nature, 517 (7534), January 13. Available online: https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.16706!/ menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/517245a.pdf. Accessed October 4, 2018. Yudkevich, M., Altbach, P. G., and Rumbley, L. (2016), “Global University Rankings as the ‘Olympic Games’ of Higher Education: Citius, Altius, Fortius?” in M. Yudkevich, P. G. Altbach, and L. Rubley (eds.), The Global Academic Rankings Game: Changing Institutional Policy, Practice, and Academic Life, 1–11, New York: Routledge.

Index academic work 172–4 data gathering as a form of social control 171 See also Baudrillard, Jean affect theory 2, 3, 4, 186, 188 aesthetics and 91 Ahmed, Sara 29, 33, 135, 142 applications 31–3, 190 assemblage 36, 40 contingency 36, 40 criticisms of 189–90 Deleuze and Guattari 25–9, 32, 186, 187 emotion 28 intensity of encounter 25–8, 36 Massumi, Brian 25, 29, 30, 36, 164, 186, 187 meaning making 36, 40, 154 ranking and categorization 176 social movements and 155 sport and 94, 143 Stewart, Kathleen 2, 26 Wetherell, Margaret 29–30, 187 Agamben, Giorgio 42–3, 52, 56, 61, 63, 142, 186 Baudrillard, Jean bibliometrics and university rankings 172, 176–7, 182–3, 187, 188 failure to distinguish between life and death 45–6, 183, 186 fantasy 176–7 memorialization 44–6, 56, 61, 62, 64, 186, 187 relationship of symbol and object of representation 44, 177, 182, 187 simulacra and simulation 35, 45, 61, 62, 182, 183 simulated binary code 183, 188 Blues Kids Foundation 68, 79, 86–8, 89, 90, 91, 92

Bourdieu, Pierre educational reproduction 16, 17, 30, 44 influence of May 1968 32 on meaning making 30 relevance to sociology of sport 95, 97 on violence, structural and symbolic 35, 125, 129, 130 Butler, Judith 30 on assemblage 146, 147–8, 150, 153, 154, 155, 162, 187 on gender 35, 124, 130–1 on performativity 30, 93, 124, 131, 147 on precarity 147–8, 168, 188 Chile education and 58–60, 64 mass atrocity 33, 39 memorials 50–8, 61–4 political history 49–50 See also youth protest colonialism education and 139 eurocentrism 190 Hong Kong 151 influence on university structure 180, 181 sport and 87, 97, 98, 99, 100, 112, 113, 116, 117 comparative education 3, 8, 185–90 affect theory and 31–6 capabilities approach 20 critiques 14–16 eurocentric influences 21, 23 Freire, Paolo 15 globalization and 19 ideological and hegemonic characteristics 23–4 origins and evolution of 10–12 post-Second World War 12–13 post-structuralism 16 reproduction 17 sport and 96 systems theory 19, 20

218

Index

use of case study method 17 world culture theory 19, 20, 23 world systems analysis 14, 23 cosmopolitanism aesthetics and 68, 90, 92 memorialization and 43 Deleuze, Gilles. See affect theory discourse human rights 41–2, 43, 57, 64 nature of 3, 10, 17, 29, 33, 59, 60, 109, 187 sociology of the body 94–5 Wetherell, Margaret 3, 33 youth protest 155, 159, 164 educational modernism 1, 23, 117, 118, 138, 170 Foucault, Michel bio-power 42, 95 disciplining of the body 93, 94, 96, 186–7 governmentality 17, 95 influence of May 1968 32 influence on sociology of sport 35 power 17 Frankfurt School 67 Adorno, Theodor 68, 72, 73, 74 Benjamin, Walter 68, 72, 73, 74, 90 Lukacs, Georg 68, 72, 74 Fraser, Nancy 21, 78, 142 Freire, Paolo 7 See also Comparative Education international development 6–8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 24, 34, 94, 99, 101, 185 capabilities approach 7, 20, 21, 23, 77 criticisms of 7, 14–16 human capital theory 6, 7, 12, 14–15, 20, 23, 101 rational choice theory 4, 5, 6, 30 Gilbert, Jeremy 30, 68, 76, 77, 91, 188 globalization 18–19, 23, 75, 124, 190 affect and 27, 33 arts and 68, 74, 88, 90 grobalization and 35, 118, 119, 188 human rights and 40 memorialization and 43, 49, 57

neoliberalism and 18, 145–6, 188 possibilities for community building 68, 90 sport and 100–2 See also Sport for Development Graeber, David 117 Guattari, Felix. See affect theory Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 68, 75–7, 188 hegemonic masculinity 35, 112, 118, 124, 128–31, 141, 142 Jessup, Bob internal conflicts within the State 125, 140–1 knowledge based economies and the state 18 Kenya 34, 94, 105, 112–14, 117–18 See also Sport for Development memorialization 27, 33–4, 40, 61 Chile and 50–8, 61–5 Cemetario General: The Allende Grave and Patio 29, 55–7 Estadio Nacional 54–5 Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos 52–3 Museo de la Solidaridad Chile 53–5 Villa Grimaldi Park of Peace 50–2 collective memory 40 construction of empathy 46–7 cosmopolitanism and 43 education and 43, 44–6 historical memory 39 human rights and 40–1 International Coalition of Sites of Conscience 47–9 social memory 40 Thanatourism 49 See also Agamben, Giorgio; Baudrillard, Jean neoliberalism aesthetics and 74, 76, 77 globalization and 18, 23, 101 human capital theory 7 sport and 117

Index Playing for Change 68, 79, 83–6, 89, 90, 92 policy educational 3, 8–10–14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 32–3, 43, 64, 68, 72,78, 89, 105, 109, 113, 114, 119, 136, 152, 158, 159, 160, 185 international 6–8, 13–14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 101, 185 nature of 4–6, 30, 158–60, 169, 171, 180 postcolonial theory 18, 21, 81 progressive education 8 Rancière, Jacques aesthetics and politics 67, 68, 70–2, 74, 88, 186 pedagogy 35, 67, 68, 69–70, 88, 90, 186 South Africa 34, 47, 94, 97 anti-apartheid protest 149 education 107–9, 117, 119 sport and apartheid 105–7 sport and education 110 violence 112, 128, 136, 137 See also Playing for Change; Sport for Development sport alternative to violence 112 Olympic Movement 98, 100, 101 physical education 97–100, 104–5, 113–14, 117–18 sociology of 94–6 See also colonialism; globalization Sport for Development 34, 93, 94, 102, 104, 105, 118, 187, 189 Evangelism 110, 116 Kenya 114–15, 119 Mathare Youth Sports Association 114 South Africa 110–11, 119 Sporting Chance 111 Thompson, Hunter S. 2, 24

219

violence affect and 135–6 anti-bullying practices 136–8 as a component of everyday life 134 bullying 112, 123, 125–7 corporal punishment 127 cyberbullying 123, 133–4 gender 128–31 higher education and 139–42 restorative practice 137 in school 123–31 school as a State contested site 139–42 sexual orientation 132 structural violence 34, 124, 134, 136, 138 teen suicide 131–2 violence of comparison 142–3 Wetherell, Margaret 3, 27, 29, 30, 33, 187 world systems 7 See also comparative education world university rankings 172, 178–83 mechanical objectivity 174–5 See also Baudrillard, Jean youth protest assemblage. See Butler, Judith Castells, Manuel 153 Chile 150, 152, 153, 154, 155–9 Hong Kong 146, 151 Umbrella Movement 152, 153, 155, 165–8, 187 Occupy Movement 152, 155, 187 aftermath of 162–4 social movement theory evolution of 148–9 framing 154–5 opportunity structures 150–1 repertoires of contention 151–4 resource mobilization 149–50 Spain 146, 150, 153, 154, 159–62 Indignados Movement 151, 152, 159, 160, 161, 162, 187 municipalism 161–2