Comparative and International Education (Re)Assembled: Examining a Scholarly Field through an Assemblage Theory Lens 9781350286825, 9781350286856, 9781350286832

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Comparative and International Education (Re)Assembled

Also Available from Bloomsbury Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse, Irving Epstein Educational Transitions in Post-Revolutionary Spaces, tavis d. jules and Teresa Barton Education in Radical Uncertainty, Stephen Carney and Ulla Ambrosius Madsen Ecopedagogy, Greg William Misiaszek Global-National Networks in Education Policy, Rino Wiseman Adhikary, Bob Lingard and Ian Hardy International Schooling, Lucy Bailey Critical Education in International Perspective, Peter Mayo and Paolo Vittoria Internationalization of Higher Education for Development, Susanne Ress Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education, edited by Mary Drinkwater, Fazal Rizvi and Karen Edge The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education, tavis d. jules, Robin Shields and Matthew A.M. Thomas

Comparative and International Education (Re)Assembled Examining a Scholarly Field through an Assemblage Theory Lens Edited by Florin D. Salajan and tavis d. jules

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Florin D. Salajan and tavis d. jules and contributors, 2023 Florin D. Salajan and tavis d. jules and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Grace Ridge Cover image: Assemblage vision of Louvre Abu Dhabi, photography by tavis d. jules 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: 978-1-3502-8682-5 ePDF: 978-1-3502-8683-2 eBook: 978-1-3502-8684-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­Contents List of Figures List of Table About the Cover Image Foreword Land Acknowledgment Statements of the Editors

vii viii ix xi xiv

Part 1  Introduction 1

(Re)Assembling Comparative and International Education: New Frontiers and Directions in an Interdisciplinary Field  Florin D. Salajan and tavis d. jules

3

Part 2  Engaging with Assemblage in Emerging Comparative Conceptualizations 2 3 4 5

6

Assemblage, Affect, and Covid-19: Implications for Comparative and International Education  Irving Epstein Fathoming the Unexplored Education in Comparative and International Education  Charl C. Wolhuter An Actor-Network Theory Approach to Comparative and International Education: The Politics of a Flat Ontology  Paolo Landri and Radhika Gorur Melding Assemblage Theory and Critical Realism to Research Comparative and International Education: Toward an Interrogative Framework  David Martyn and Conor Galvin The Identity of Comparative and International Education (CIE): Perspectives from CIE Theories across Times and Contexts  Linli Zhou, Crystal Green, and Andrew Swindell

23 41 57

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Part 3 Redrawing Spaces, Geographies, and Regions of Comparison via Assemblage Paradigms 7

(Re)territorializing the Field of Comparative and International Education in Malaysia: Adventures in Cartography through the Fisher, the Weaver, and the Shadow-Puppeteer  Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar and Pravindharan Balakrishnan

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Contents

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The European Area of Higher Education as a Complex Educational Assemblage: Prospects for Comparative Approaches  Florin D. Salajan The Vibrating Plateau of Caribbean Historiographies: Re/dis/assembling Regional Educational Assemblages  tavis d. jules

127 145

Part 4  Assembling Practice and Profession in CIE 10 Educational Leaders Becoming: A Virtual Community of Practice as Assemblage(s)  Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker 11 Assembled Teaching: A Sensitized Conceptualization of Didactics  Elin Sundström Sjödin and Ninni Wahlström

167 183

Part 5  Epilogue 12 Quo Vadis Comparative and International Education? The Cultural Turn and the (Re)Assembled Contours of a Metamorphosing Field  tavis d. jules and Florin D. Salajan List of Contributors Subject Index

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201 219 223

Figures 3.1 The three-in-one perspective of comparative education: 1. education system perspective; 2. contextual perspective; 3. comparative perspective (Wolhuter, 2021) 5.1 A critical realist assemblage framework 6.1 Timeline of approaches and concerns in international comparative education 8.1 Members of the European Higher Education Area with stages of enlargement. Source: Olds, K., & Robertson, S. (2011). Mapping the expansion of Bologna Process membership (1999–2011). https:// globalhighered.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/mapping-bologna-processmembership/ 8.2 An illustration of a European complex assemblage. Source: Wikipedia. (2010). Euler diagram of supranational European bodies. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bodies-en.svg#file 8.3 A geographical representation of the EHEA complex educational assemblage. Source: European University Association (2019). https:// era.gv.at/public/documents/4105/wk14377_en19.pdf 10.1 Critical thinking questions as a guide to one case study. Source: Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker. “Case study: Diversity—Engaged leadership,” CELL. http://globalleadershipineducation.com/migration/ 10.2 The CELL landing page. Source: Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker. “Educational leadership: Capturing global knowledge,” CELL. http:// globalleadershipineducation.com 10.3 The CELL’s conceptualization as an assemblage in continuous action. Source: Microsoft PowerPoint Design Ideas. Powered by Office Intelligent Services. 2021 11.1 The classic didactic triangle (modified figure after Hudson & Meyer, 2011, p. 18) 11.2 The extended didactic triangle (modified figure after Hudson & Meyer, 2011, p. 19) 11.3 The missing didactic roles 11.4 Place and time outside school influencing the didactic situations 11.5 Didactical assemblage

43 86 94

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170

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178 186 187 190 192 194

­Table 6.1

Historical approaches and theories in comparative and international education

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­About the Cover Image If every book has a story to tell, so does the image or graphic adorning its cover … and our cover image is no different. Upon relaying the story about the cover image during our panel session at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) 2022 Annual Conference, April 18–22, our contributors encouraged us to add a note about it in this volume. We gladly complied, and here is how the story goes … When the publisher asked us to select an image for the book cover, we were not quite sure where to begin our search for the “perfect picture” that would be expressive of assemblage(s), especially fitting the theme of comparative and international education. We were not easily pleased with just selecting one from a stock image supplier or landing on one through an internet search engine. Then, one day in late October 2021, we were messaging each other over this seemingly challenging task across several time zones. It was well past midnight in Fargo, North Dakota, where Florin was sitting at his computer, and early morning in Abu Dhabi, UAE, where tavis was taking a stroll in the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum. And so we went back and forth for a while, sharing candidate images retrieved from the internet, none of which appeared to meet our still evolving expectations and visualizations of what an image representing an assemblage should entail. Then, in a moment of inspiration, tavis started taking pictures from the museum’s interior halls, and sending them over the messaging app to Florin for him to view. It took three or four exchanges for us to agree these were fit for the cover image, but which one was to be the one, was still a more difficult proposition. We wanted the picture on the cover to include people, to echo the human element of assemblages, but all the versions we had were in enclosed spaces. We finally chose the image seen on the cover because it evokes the assemblages’ heterogeneous nature through the various elements melding together into a harmonious arrangement. The ceiling, or the dome, in itself, resembles to an extent the rhizome in an abstract/mechanistic form. The other materials—an interior wall with a window that partly sustains the dome; the concrete platforms in the middle of the pond forming an incomplete bridge between the walking promenade on the side and the opposite wall; the water filling what would be a void between them—all form part of the assemblage, marked by contingent and fluid liaisons, as they do not seem, at first glance and seen separately, to be connected to one another. The fragility, but also the strength, of this assemblage, is underscored by the “line of flight” and, at the same time, “line of segmentarity,” visible in the background, which has the potential to (de)terrirorialize this temporary arrangement. This blue horizon is both an extension of the interior water and an essential element conferring the assemblage its luminosity through the front opening and the light penetrating from above through the dome’s rhizomatic latticework.

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­About the Cover Imag

Although humans are visually absent from the image, their latent presence can be intuited in all its aspects. The arrangement appears so surreal that the uninformed observer may assume it is a figment of someone’s imagination. Therein lies the tension of this assemblage, which must have emerged first in its abstract, envisioned form in the “plane of consistency” before it translated into its physical form in the “plane of organization,” which visitors of this space experience in person. Therefore, human wisdom, imagination, hand, and desire are omnipresent in this assemblage, in a symbiotic arrangement that expresses the creative nature of this space. In our intense search for this image, we were unwittingly bound into an impromptu assemblage. Across time and space, we were composing and manipulating a symbolic representation of assemblage in real-time through the aethereal connectivity afforded by our modern communication systems, each of us attached to a device that acted in those moments as extensions of our imagined constructions of this fleeting arrangement. As a space of contemplation, learning, and an extension of a recognizable global brand, we found the assemblage in this image expressive and evocative, a perfect visual metaphor of the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and connectivity inherent in comparative and international education. As such, in our minds, the image captures the premise of the book with a high degree of fidelity.

F ­ oreword Comparative and international education is many things, attempting perhaps to be conscious of all things as it explores educational phenomena through the lens of time and place, history and culture, identity and subjectivity, space and mobility. There is no one comparative and international education, nor could there be. Indeed, if one was to consider what binds this field together, it would become apparent that healthy reflexivity, even doubt, sits somewhere close to its core. Doubt about our theories and methods, our orientations to the world and our motives. Never far from the surface has been a tendency to challenge dominant paradigms in the search for more rigor, greater explanatory power, or deeper commitments to justice. Like all fields, intellectual debate in comparative and international education has had its winners and losers. The language and imagery I use here is deliberate. Because the terms of debate have been framed around matters of “science” and politics, theories, and their accompanying methods have been fought over with a zeal that might actually be unique to the practitioners of our deeply moral craft. Familiar to most will be the long period devoted to constructing a scientific approach to comparison, often entangled with racist empire and nation-building projects. Over time, the hubris on which this comparative education rested has been steadily undermined by critiques of cold-war geo-politics; the embrace of feminist and post-colonial counter-movements; and, more recently, by educational visions that question the types of outcomes that are possible from within the prevailing selfish, and suicidal, liberal capitalist order. My own relation to this field has been framed by such “big picture” matters, and I have brought them to life through the lens of what has been termed the spatial or mobilities “turn” in the social sciences. This perspective came somewhat belatedly to comparative and international education and built upon nascent attempts by some key figures in the field to open a line of communication to post-structural, post-modern and performative scholarship. To a beginning scholar, looking for a place to belong, comparative and international education in the wake of the Cold War, was a site of great excitement and renewed energy. Established notions of history, context, culture and place were being challenged by an awareness that the world was constituted by what Arjun Appadurai referred to as large-scale circulatory processes of people, things, and ideas. Some advocated for a “world” perspective on culture. Others resisted that, holding on to the possibility and promise of grounding intellectual endeavor in some refashioned understanding of the “local.” Some, like myself, were arguing that we needed to fundamentally rethink our units of analysis, the methods most appropriate to examining a world in motion and, most importantly, the very possibilities for science at what felt like the twilight of an intellectual episteme. It is significant that the language of spatiality—scales, scapes, networks, rhizomes, and assemblages—has entered our vocabulary and conceptual frameworks, assuming

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a taken-for-grantedness that, for me at least, renders traditional anthropology and the qualitative research perspective it spawned, very dated. The notion that “good science” can only emerge from extended time in one place, as well as via deep cultural (and language) competence, no longer seems adequate to catch objects and ideas that are on the move, constantly morphing and increasingly disconnected from stable linguistic and temporal referents. Instead, the call is that we radically reimagine where we situate our study, what we look at, how we record and represent that and, finally, how we as researchers with impossible-to-suppress-biographies bring to life, if not create, the very objects we are trying to study. Whilst anthropology has responded to these movements—ones that have their origins in the work of social geographers and political scientists—I am proud to say that we in comparative and international education have been at the vanguard of applying this new thinking, exploring the contours of spatial thinking in multiple theoretical and empirical directions. And this volume continues that movement. The contributions here make clear that the focus on assemblages is dynamic, shifting, open to interpretation and demanding of conceptual flexibility. As the editors note, even the terminology of assemblage is open to contest when interrogated through different language communities. And as they add, an embrace of assemblage thought leads, necessarily, to a scholarship of problematization that may well be the greatest gift we can give to our otherwise narrowing and reductionist academic present. Surely, the language of nuance, multiplicity, reformulation, intensities, and affects, and what they call “schemes of intelligibility,” is a more fitting way to approach a deeply uncertain if not indeterminate future. Equally, the language of cartography; of lines, flows, planes, and dimensions, is an invitation to an imaginative science that seeks not divisions and categories, nor binaries and opposites but, rather, a saturated and saturating space that makes urgent the ancient, pre-scientific necessity of viewing things as fields of connectivity. If we are to find a way out of our current politico-ecological mess, it must first come through acts of recognition that we as humans do not stand before or apart from one another or, for that matter, from more-than-human others. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the volume takes us through the world of pandemics, communities of comparative theorizing, the logics of largescale assessment, scientific performativity, geo-political and educational regions, leadership and through virtual learning, teaching, and didactics. That is a comparative and international education of the future: at once grounded and everywhere, seeking lines of flight and potentialities rather than delimitations and closures. Always open to the possible. Never closing doors. In their important epilogue, the editors invoke the notion of a “cultural turn” as the terrain for the next moves. In many ways, this was always likely to be the consequence of a spatial orientation, especially one inspired by theory from beyond the Anglo-American mainstream. Perhaps the greatest promise of assemblage thinking is the insistence that it reach out beyond that mainstream. Some of the contributions to the volume note the call for pluriversal thought: perspectives that draw upon, but reach beyond, the non-Western ontological and epistemological comfort zone. For much of its history, comparative and international education has delivered what de Sousa Santos has termed a “sociology of absences” that, at best, has offered the marginalized non-Western world a presence only as the object of study

­Forewor

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and thus object for Western disciplining. That is changing with a new generation of scholars, led by the authors of this volume, insisting on a broadening of definitions and practices of comparison. It is my view that those efforts will ultimately succeed, and the promotion of an assemblage perspective will play an important role in facilitating that success. Stephen Carney Roskilde University

­Land Acknowledgment Statements of the Editors We collectively acknowledge that we gather at North Dakota State University, a land grant institution, on the traditional lands of the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota, Lakota, Nakoda) and Anishinaabe Peoples in addition to many diverse Indigenous Peoples still connected to these lands. We honor with gratitude Mother Earth and the Indigenous Peoples who have walked with her throughout generations. We will continue to learn how to live in unity with Mother Earth and build strong, mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with Indigenous Peoples of our region. The Loyola University Chicago community acknowledges its location on the ancestral homelands of the Council of the Three Fires (the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi tribes) and a place of trade with other tribes, including the Ho-Chunk, Miami, Menominee, Sauk, and Meskwaki. We recognize that descendants of these and other North American tribes continue to live and work on this land with us. We recognize the tragic legacy of colonization, genocide, and oppression that still impacts Native American lives today. As a Jesuit university, we affirm our commitment to issues of social responsibility and justice. We further recognize our responsibility to understand, teach, and respect the past and present realities of local Native Americans and their continued connection to this land.

­Part One

­Introduction

2

1

(Re)Assembling Comparative and International Education: New Frontiers and Directions in an Interdisciplinary Field Florin D. Salajan and tavis d. jules

Assemblage Paradigm as a New Frontier in CIE The intent and scope of this volume is to put assemblage theory or assemblage thinking firmly on the map of new epistemological orientations in comparative and international education (CIE). Using an assemblage paradigm as an analytical tool to examine CIE nuances, our understanding of this continuously metamorphosing field, which allows us to contend with the fact that, moving forward, the field and its intellectual underpinnings are prone to constant (re)configurations that do not diminish its importance and stature as a stand-alone scholarly field. In putting together this volume, we conceived CIE as an assemblage, both in its professional-institutional configuration and scholarly construction. This examination is meant to recast the conversation on the (re)configuration of the field on heretofore timidly explored terms and open a new front in the discussion on its distinctive adaptability and elasticity that constitute its strengths rather than weaknesses. There is little disagreement that a vigorous debate has been taking place within and, perhaps to some extent, outside CIE, from its very inception as a field. The notion that CIE may be categorized, conceived of, or labeled as a scholarly field has been challenged and deconstructed over time. Robust dialogues or monologues on the constitutive elements of CIE as a field represent constant fixtures in the academic literature in search of concrete explications defining its contours, with no signs of this preoccupation with its existential purpose abating. For much of its history, the field’s epistemological orientations discourse has centered on a positivist-relativist dichotomy. Although an extensive examination of the field’s development is beyond the purpose of this volume, it is worth noting that, in attempting to “identify the normative epistemological boundaries of comparative education,” Epstein (2008, p. 383) added a third orientation to these core traditions, namely historical functionalism. Epstein (2008) argues that, in trying to establish connections between education and the societies they serve, historical functionalism relies on generalizations that draw to a

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CIE (Re)Assembled

lesser extent on cross-national sampling of populations using inferential statistics than positivism does less on national characteristics of certain populations than relativism. As such, he contends that historical functionalism constitutes a “mainstream epistemology” rather than the other two dominant traditions in the field. Nonetheless, he cautions that the field’s evolution should not be perceived as a process characterized by distinct stages by which these traditions have succeeded one another, but should rather be viewed as coterminous and codependent from the very inception of the field as we currently conceive it. In problematizing the evolutionary thinking on the development of CIE, Manzon (2018) has interrogated the field’s history as conventionally formulated over time and proposed that there exist multiple histories of comparative education. These are generated through the sustained academic contestation in which scholars are engaged to continuously define, refine, and categorize the field’s purposes at the intersection or tension between the sociological and epistemological currents shaping it. However, these initial challenges to broad assumptions about the epistemological evolution of the field have been nuanced and further elaborated on as the gradual institutionalization of the field has resulted in paradigmatic shifts in the last couple of decades that translated in an embrace of an eclectic mix of theoretical approaches. Consequently, as jules (2021) notes, later theoretical approaches, including structuralfunctionalism, modernization theory, neo-Marxism, world systems theory, postand neo-colonialism, feminism, critical theories, or social movements have shaken the canonical wisdom and assumptions about the epistemological foundations of CIE. In this light, the emerging post-foundational approaches represent one of the newest scholarly currents infiltrating and invigorating CIE, as it brings into its fold considerations of post-structural thinking on social theories drawing on the seminal work of scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Giles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Paul Foucault, Felix Guattari, Achille Mbembe, and others. Within this relatively novel paradigm, this volume seeks to contribute to CIE scholarship by closely examining, applying, and interpreting the work on assemblage theory or thinking developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In this sense, the collection of works contributed by the authors offers not only a glimpse into how we might rethink the construction or reconceptualization of the field, but also advance new frameworks or methodological approaches to examining educational problems by using assemblage thinking in its various guises. Although we acknowledge the merits of a sustained engagement with (re)defining the boundaries of CIE as a field, it is not in the scope of this volume to definitively settle the debate nor to offer a resolution to what appears to remain a healthy intellectual and generative reflection on the fundamentally complex character of the field. Ostensibly, this continuing rational dialogue is here to stay (Brends & Trakas, 2016), especially as CIE expands its epistemological vibrancy, incorporating as of late post-foundational theories, orientations, philosophies, and ideologies that are reshaping conventional approaches to comparative studies. In our previous work, we proposed and developed what we consider a more fluid and malleable conceptualization of CIE, by parsing it through an assemblage thinking lens (Salajan & jules, 2020). We revisit some of that work here primarily to provide the conceptual framing for the collection of works in this

(Re)Assembling an Interdisciplinary Field

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volume. In this regard, our intellectual commitment to assemblage theory as applied to CIE is that we view the field as a complex assemblage of associated and interwoven assemblages exerting influence on one another by establishing relational patterns that serve their perpetuation in a mutually reinforcing mechanism that legitimates their individual purpose and functional co-existence. Below we offer a succinct reiteration of the core tenets of assemblage thinking and their inroads into CIE to infuse it with new thinking about the scholarly foundations and organization of the field.

Rethinking CIE through Assemblage Theory Why and What Is Assemblage? Assemblage theory is an “anti-atomistic theory of reality” (Harman, 2014) in that it allows us to focus, in principle, on human and non-human actors, given that each component of the assemblage, in its own right, is already an assemblage. An assemblage is vulnerable to both exogenous and endogenous components, given that it is both materialist and relational, and the system is not closed. As Harman (2014) reminds us, we live in a “flat ontology” consisting of a world that contains nothing but assemblages “in which neither humans, nor capital, nor society is a dominant entity devouring all other” (p. 121). In other words, we need to account for domains such as institutions, schooling, and the nation-state in precisely the same terms. Thus, “assemblage thinking tends to push for the problematization of the ordinary and the deconstruction of wholes and totalities such as the ‘global’ into contingent realities where society is, even if temporarily, stabilized in networks, institutions and routines” (Acuto & Curtis, 2014, p. 10) as assemblages are often locked in dialogue. Although the meaning of assemblage theory shifts based on which model one takes, assemblage thinking privileges change over solidity, becoming over stability, and interactions over substances. As Bueger (2014) reminds us, “assemblage thinking is an invitation for empirical work, not for contemplating ontological concepts and metaphors” (p. 65). Here, we aim to render more concrete some of the abstract concepts that have come to describe assemblage thinking and apply these to CIE. But first, we must accept that translating philosophical concepts into workable ideas in the social and human sciences is imprecise and fragmented. Deleuze and Guattari’s original term in French is agencement, which holds a narrow semiotic similitude with the English term assemblage. Conversely, as Buchanan (2021) cogently explained, agencement also bears a subtle semantic difference from the term assemblage as chosen by social theorist Brian Massumi in his translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, with the root word agencer meaning “to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together,” while assemblage being defined as “to join, to gather, to assemble” (p.  20). Thus, Buchanan (2021) would have favored that the term remained untranslated, as agencement retains closer fidelity to the original intent in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. This is because the term “encompasses a range of meanings that include ‘to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order’” and considers that “it could therefore just as appropriately be

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translated as arrangement, in the sense of a ‘working arrangement,’ provided it was kept clear that it described an ongoing process rather than a static situation” (p. 20). In addition, a critical nuance is lost in this artifact of translation, as the term assemblage “obscures the fact that ‘agency’ is at its core” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 20), which signals that both the assemblage and the constituent units, whether human or non-human actors coalescing in its formation, continuously negotiate the emergence, articulation and reformulation of the arrangement that brings them together. Indeed, as Manzon (2018) points out, the intellectual discourses reconfiguring CIE draw on the sociological and epistemological power of academics to define the organizational, structural, institutional, and professional attributes of the field. In this nexus of and tensions between academic interests, “agency by the comparativist is crucial” (Manzon, 2018, p. 3). Extending this argument further to the epistemological reorientations within the CIE complex assemblage, therefore, agencement allows us to move beyond a (modernist) dichotomizing understanding of (social, political and economic) realities, by which the either/or logics (religion or secularism, state or society, masculine or feminine, security or freedom, and so on) and the oppositional forms of politics that go with it are taken for granted, but also to move beyond binary logics as an universalizable scheme of intelligibility. (Guillaume, 2014, p. 109)

In other words, a mobilization of agencement necessitates the implementation of schemes of intelligibility that do not diminish the analytics of an event, phenomenon, set of observations to either a specific state of affairs or to the statements we can make about this state of affairs (Guillaume, 2014). In this way, education is the connection, the ordering, that is the agencement, between events and statements, and this agencement can be made in relation not only to schools but also to curriculum, teachers, books, students, parents, and so forth. Thus, an assemblage lens invites deconstructing heretofore accepted assumptions about what constitutes a comparative paradigm in education, and compels both the field and those (re)constructing it to closely examine the interactions among individual and institutional actors in CIE.

Assemblage Inroads into CIE Assemblage theory or assemblage thinking has been on an ascendent trajectory as an analytical tool, explanatory device, or conceptual framework in the social sciences and educational research (Savage, 2019). Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) seminal work on assemblages, and the dynamic forces of (re)territorialization and deterritorialization defining them, has generated a strong following among educational researchers from a range of disciplinary domains. For instance, Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory shares a genealogical connection with and draws on assemblage theory. Similarly, DeLanda (2006, 2016) built upon assemblage thinking even more directly by supplementing it with notions of relationships of exteriority and part-whole relationships in assemblages. Both of these relatively more recent ventures into expanding on assemblage thinking

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have raised the profile of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) original work. Concomitantly with the theory’s rapid and widespread acceptance among social and educational scholars, multiple epistemologies and theoretical applications of the term assemblage itself have resulted in a surge of confounding and ambiguous meanings over a vast array of cross- and inter-disciplinary entries in the academic published record (Buchanan, 2015). Granted, this conflation of denotations prompts competing, contradicting, and conflicting interpretations of assemblage, potentially impeding its crystallization into as cohesive an analytical and expository term as possible. In its generic meaning, assemblage has long been part of academic discourse in CIE. As such, it has been employed as a semantic proxy to problematize conventional examinations of comparison in education, but not necessarily to examine the intricacies of the field itself. For example, in their analysis of the dominant methodologies in CIE in the context of globalization, Dale and Robertson (2009) use assemblages as a descriptor for clusters, networks, hubs, or hotspots in the imaginary representations of educational systems. While not explicitly employing an assemblage theory lens and only tangentially referencing assemblage in their work, Larsen and Beech (2014) construct an argument for a departure from the binary of space and place in CIE, and call for the adoption of “relational conceptions of space, through the analysis of networks, connections, and flows” (p. 192). Conversely, turning to assemblage thinking, Gorur (2011) regards policy work in education as assemblages, particularly in the context of the pervasive and potent instruments of commensuration and comparison deployed by international intergovernmental agencies for creating policy-steering mechanisms and policy development. Sobe and Kowalczyck (2018) advance a reconceptualization of contexts as sites of academic inquiry in CIE as “assemblages of multiple discourses, practices, techniques, objects, and propositions that come together in particular places at particular times” (p. 11). As a derivative of assemblage theory, assemblage has most recently been associated with a post-foundational orientation in the field. In the latest and most notable contribution to assemblage thinking in CIE, Epstein (2019) engages with and employs an assemblage lens in an in-depth examination of the ways in which affect theory can critique conventional notions of policymaking centered on modernist approaches to educational institutions and its implications for CIE. In scrutinizing the complexities of profoundly individualized, but shared, social interactions, Epstein (2019) offers an eloquent critique of the cannons of CIE by proposing a novel affect theory prism for interrogating the field. In that process, he pushes the boundaries of post-foundational epistemologies currently trending in the field into new territories and, therefore, positions affect theory at the forefront of the act of comparison in educational research. Through his intertwined stories of fear and loathing induced by the shortcomings of bureaucratized politics and policymaking in educational apparatuses at global level, Epstein (2019) repurposes four principles from Deleuze and Guattari’s work to comparatively make sense of inefficacies and failures of educational establishments around the world: intensity of encounter, meaning-making, assemblage, and contingency. He underscores that, as components of affect in illuminating humanistic stories of educational readaptations, these principles are co-dependent in carefully informing the human condition and lived experiences in the context of CIE.

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It appears that these emerging incursions into reconsiderations of comparison in CIE through elements of assemblage theory point toward the recognition of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work as applicable to more holistic explications and analyses of an interrelated and interconnected world of education. These pioneering conceptualizations of comparison represent a promising beginning in alleviating the “cost of bifurcation” Steiner-Khamsi (2010) observed a decade ago in the methodological approaches in the field of CIE under the pressure of expansion and institutionalization. However, further analysis is needed in reconfiguring and equipping CIE as a field with a vision for comparison that, like these new reappraisals of the field, goes beyond the conventional catechisms of the comparative method. In this chapter and volume, we conceive of CIE as a complex assemblage, both in its professional-institutional configuration and in its scholarly construction.

Repurposing Assemblage Principles in CIE In adopting an assemblage paradigm to reappraise the substructure of CIE, we followed Buchanan’s (2021) wise admonition to “return to the original source material,” so we may avoid treating assemblage as a “received idea” (p. 3). Consequently, we deemed it appropriate to re-engage with assemblage on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) terms to examine the principles informing the rhizomatic nature of assemblages and how these can help in framing CIE as an assemblage. The principles of connection and heterogeneity state that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). In this view, an assemblage constantly creates new connections among states, meanings, power relations, organizational structures, and social circumstances in what amounts to “an essentially heterogeneous reality” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). Opposing singularity as a subjective or objective formulation of an imagined or tangible world, the next principle postulates that by lacking a subject or object, a multiplicity is immutable only insofar as the “determinations, magnitudes and dimensions” it contains remain constant. Following this principle, in an assemblage, it is “this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). Next, the principle of asignifying rupture acknowledges that, as with any malleable construction, there is a probability of fractures appearing in the rhizome. Offsetting this inevitable pattern is the rhizome’s extraordinary ability to form new connections along fracture points and lines of discontinuity. It is this constructive-destructive dyad that gives rise to the notions of (re)territorialization and deterritorialization occurring on “lines of segmentarity” and “lines of flight” characterizing an assemblage. Finally, the principle of cartography establishes the rhizomatic structure as a map subject to constant modification, furnished with “multiple entryways” allowing it to be reversed or reworked by a variety of social actors or groups into limitless permutations of representations. Continuing the rhizome metaphor to bring together these principles, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) capture the essential nature of assemblages in a cogent summary, stating that ­ nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, u and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is

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reducible neither to the One nor the multiple … It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21)

Transposing this reasoning to CIE as a socio-human domain endowed with professional, institutional, academic, and even socio-cultural interconnected norms and values may be instrumental in reexamining and questioning assumptions about its contours as an assemblage. Before doing so, it is also necessary to situate these principles in the fundamental condition defined by the tension between what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) term the plane of consistency or immanence and the plane of organization. That is, the antithetical distinction and codependency between the abstract instance of the assemblage characterized by the multiplicity of its relational dimensions that constantly reconfigure it and the actual representation of the assemblage, which territorializes the imagined instantiation of the multiplicity. Furthermore, following Buchanan’s (2015) interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the abstract rendering of the assemblage a priori to its actualization is contained in an ongoing working arrangement. Hence, the assemblage is constituted of individual coterminous elements linked together by the strength of their relationships with any number of units entering quasilimitless permutations of connections with other units by virtue of their mutually sustaining compatibilities, interests, purposes, or needs. Though the arrangement is fixed, its total value is given by the strength of the relations forged among the contained units. To better underline this generative function of assemblages as co-dependent actors (be they human/non-human, individual/institutional, subject/object, etc.), it is worth turning again to Deleuze and Guattari’s more refined thinking on the nature of assemblage. As they surmised in their later work, [assemblage is] … a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns— the different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, cited in DeLanda, 2006, p. 121, note 9)

Following this line of thought, then, units may enter the assemblage along any particularly defined “lines of segmentarity,” thereby territorializing the assemblage or can exit at “lines of flight” and, conversely, rejoin the assemblage, consequently deterritorializing then, potentially, reterritorializing it. Extending this logic further, by applying DeLanda’s (2006) property of scalability in assemblage thinking, and observing that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) allow for this possibility, we advance the notion that multiple assemblages, or interassemblages as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) proposed, may form within the arrangement, thus producing a complex assemblage. It is in this image that we conceive of the CIE as a complex field.

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The CIE Complex Assemblage Perhaps more than any other academic field, CIE can be parsed and understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) principles. Connections, connective patterns, and linkages are continuously formed not only at formally established institutional or organizational levels, but also along professional and disciplinary boundaries across socio-cultural environments as heterogeneous as they are related. Societies, associations, and groups operating at the intersection of academic disciplines ranging from sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and education, to name just a few, constantly enter into relational commitments or interactions, forging alliances based on the strength of their mutual interests. They do so along “lines of segmentarity” or nodes in a mesh of clusters, each unit an assemblage in the CIE complex assemblage. Far from diminishing the field, this seeming disciplinary dissonance paradoxically crystallizes and solidifies the CIE complex assemblage. In support of this counterintuitive reasoning, it is useful to echo Latour (1996), who borrows from assemblage theory to reinforce his assertion that the network’s: “strength does not come from concentration, purity and unity, but from dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties” (p. 370). Through its associations, societies, or common working groups, conjoined at the intersection of disciplinary affinities binding multiple lines of scholarly inquiry, CIE is a multiplicity of assemblages in associations that work not on clearly defined hierarchical levels, but in what Ball (2016) terms “heterarchical flexible relationships” (p. 560). As would be expected in this variable geometry, the coextensive assemblages coalesce on soft lines of intersection, connecting or reconnecting as immaterial and material values of academic interests accrete into associations that reconfigure the CIE complex assemblage. In other words, by its variety and richness of disciplinary orientations, institutional cultures, social environment, and individual interactions, the world of CIE lends itself to the amorphous character of the complex assemblage, rather than to a carefully orchestrated and rigidly systematized infrastructure of predictable transactions. With each association or collective, whether forming around epistemological doctrines on, methodological approaches to or praxiologies of comparison, the CIE complex assemblage reorganizes its inter-relational dynamics and scalar variability. It follows that the generative forces that enter into these relational associations by virtue of mutual attraction or common interests, territorialize the adjoined assemblages as long as those binding energies continue to act in unison for the survival of the collective benefits. By the same token, disintegrating associations within and between these assemblages, as when competing or conflictual ideals of comparison split the collective interest, necessarily create disruptions in the relational dynamics of the CIE complex assemblage, consequently deterritorializing it. Nonetheless, since the fundamental property of an assemblage is its perpetual state of flux, dissociations occurring along lines of ideological-philosophical rupture can reform into new collective interests about comparison, creating novel relationships and assemblages, hence reterritorializing the complex assemblage. These (re)configurations of relations and associations can be and usually are formulated and reformulated, on an immaterial

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dimension before they materialize into the “planes of organization.” Ultimately, the multiplicity of contiguous assemblages outlined above manifest themselves in cartographies of CIE, as professional and scholarly associations in the field give rise to dense geospatial, and disciplinary representations mapped out on intermeshed lines of scholarship. Viewed as a complex assemblage, CIE may be relieved of the dilemma of transdisciplinarity in comparative research (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014), as the contextual extensions of multiple disciplines can overlap and reframe a problem on multiple connected dimensions.

Directions on the Horizon for Assemblage Thinking in CIE Methodological Promises of Assemblage in CIE Viewed through the kaleidoscope of assemblage thinking, this conceptualization of CIE is unbound, to a certain extent, from narrow disciplinary encumbrances that give rise to vexing questions about its purpose, methodological assumptions, institutionalization and professionalization processes, or developmental dilemmas (Turner, 2019). Instead, though it comes with its own limitations, it provides for a more fluid and elastic interpretation of the field, opening the conversation to its “potentiality” as an imaginary of a multiplicity of interconnected scholarly representations. This generates no better or no more comprehensive definition for the field, but it allows for the CIE complex assemblage to project an array of intellectual dimensions, patterns, and combinations for explicating the interconnectedness of the field and the conduct of comparative research. The use of assemblage thinking in CIE is not focused on the “applicationism” (Walters, 2012) of the subject/object debate but rather on recalibrating a critical ethos of engagement that allows researchers to refute the hierarchies found in established research methods. As Lisle (2014) contends, assemblage thinking “… disrupts and reworks established methodological rules and conventions” (p.  71) as we identify the multiple human and non-human actors involved in an assemblage. Assemblage thinking allows us to excavate the educational registers of global politics by affording agency to all actors (human and non-human) that constitute the inquiry and pay attention to these actors’ relationality and what propels them to act. Following Collier (2006), educational assemblages in CIE might be seen as political figurations as well as critical knowledge mechanisms that go beyond the predominant social science methods. In this way, instead of the orthodox liberal binaries—subject/object, inside/ outside, national/global—“the politics of assemblages is not concerned with power and structures, organizational strategy or with theoretical clarification, but with asserting an alternative virtual ontology of creativity and resistance based on the fragility of objects and meaning rather than their fixity” (Chandler, 2014, p. 100). If we accept that agency has been radically distributed across human and nonhuman actors, we might ask how to interrogate assemblages that are continually emerging, dispersing, and recombining. Assemblage thinking does not accept the subject/object distinction and redistributes “agency so that ‘objects’ have vitality

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and capacity; assemblage thinking forces researchers to think in conjunction with our research topics rather than seek to ‘explain’ or ‘understand’ them” (Lisle, 2014, p.  70, emphasis original). Thus, conventional thinking cannot always account for the rampant mobility, flexibility, and contingency of assemblages, and therefore, in education, assemblage thinking explores how the intermingling of human and nonhuman actors coalesce into fragile hegemonies that are later dispersed and recombined again differently. In this way, assemblage thinking on CIE is about unbinding rational ideas about the Anthropocene and its ensuing objectives, and exploring how the entanglement between human and non-human actors come together into tenuous hegemonies that span the global topography before disbanding and recombining again contrarily. Marked by extraordinary elasticity, assemblage thinking morphs into a methodological device that frees CIE scholarly examination of educational issues in societal contexts from the rigid and constraining constructions of conventional units of analysis. Beyond the cardinal purpose of detecting similarities and differences in the act of comparison (Bereday, 1964; Edwards, 1970), comparative education studies have relied on defining distinct and comparable units of analysis in order to draw valid inferences about educational phenomena, structures, or organizations across temporal and geographic spaces. The CIE literature has long acknowledged and problematized the penchant for scholarship in the field to focus on discretely, orderly, and neatly expressed units of analysis typically confined to easily identifiable geopolitical territorial structures, such as nation-states or national systems of education (Arnove, 1980, Arnove et al., 2013; Larsen, 2010; Little, 2000; Wirt, 1980). Influential works in CIE, such as that of Bray, Adamson, and Mason (2016) or Philips and Schweisfurth (2014), have provided much clarity and direction for researchers in establishing comparable units of analysis by expanding them to various scales and dimensions. Perhaps these recent attempts at diversifying approaches to treating this matter illustrate what Cowen (1996) observes as a “rebalancing of the unit of analysis” (p. 154) and its shifting nature over time in CIE. In this light, assemblage thinking confers an opportunity to de-center the analytical perspective from a narrow focus on finite and discretely manipulable units of comparison. It challenges common assumptions of what a unit of analysis or comparison means and how these should be formulated, particularly when educational problems are viewed in less precisely bounded spaces, such as nation-states, regions, or continents. In comparisons of culturally circumscribed realms, where sociocultural groups share a common space straddling and intersecting conventional territorial units or national borders, an assemblage perspective allows for conceiving of units of analysis or comparison, for instance, as cross-border, ethnic, expatriate, or diasporic assemblages. Although these are not fitting in the distinct territorial confines of a nation-state, they nonetheless constitute an arrangement connected by common linkages and interests that exist primarily on a plane of immanence (i.e., in the abstract, the collective imagination or memory of the individuals forming that assemblage) that transcends any fleeting and artificially imposed state or regional boundaries. Arguably, the tension between diasporas and nation-states (Welch, 2010) manifests itself in the attempt on part of the latter to subsume the former into its plane

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of organization, that is, in the concrete organization and fixity of a cohesive, controlling nation-state apparatus. Thus, diasporas or expatriate communities that extend across national borders of multiple nation-states become assemblages both because they are heterogeneous (as subjects of the states in which they reside), as well as connected, codependent, and co-functional (as members of a cultural arrangement sharing ancestral histories, traditions, or affinities). By the same token, with the emergence and consolidation of intergovernmental and regional organizations, the last decade has generated new CIE scholarship employing regime, regionalism, and regionalization theories (Parreira do Amaral, 2021) to explain educational policy, provision, and development in these relatively new interlinked governing structures. However, an assemblage paradigm can reshape comparisons of regional arrangements, such as the African Union, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), to name just a few examples. A comparative regionalist perspective operates on the otherwise valid assumption that regions are comprised of distinct units in the guise of nation-states. At its core, a regionalist approach continues to reify the state(s), bringing the region(s) into being. However, sub-regional arrangements can be formed among infranational entities from adjacent or contiguous nation-states, which escape the conventional regionalist paradigms. These could be aptly studied through an assemblage logic and conceived as regional assemblages, given their contingent and less formalized nature, yet territorialized along commonalities that bind them, even if momentarily, in fragile and codependent relationships. Conversely, this lens can be applied to the larger regional arrangements mentioned earlier, particularly in the context of CIE, where they can be examined as “complex educational assemblages” (Salajan & jules, 2021). Viewed through an assemblage lens, this “rebalancing” of the unit of analysis in CIE contradicts positivist thinking on the rather restrictive definition of units of analysis and, to some extent, relativist assumptions of defining national or cultural characteristics in territorially defined spaces.

Emerging Opportunities for Engaging with Assemblage in CIE In the final examination, the application of an assemblage thinking paradigm to CIE research raises some intriguing questions for further inquiry that may move this conversation forward. We offer three promising themes that may expand on the lines of examination attempted in this chapter. Thus, one research direction may involve the way in which assemblage thinking may inform methodologies of comparison in the investigation of CIE as a complex assemblage. That is, what particular methods can elucidate the comparative impact-value of scholarly communities in CIE through an assemblage thinking lens? Conversely, another research track may revolve around the question of how can the application of assemblage thinking be studied from a comparative perspective to tease out its effects on the CIE complex assemblage? Lastly, deriving from the complex assemblage paradigm, how do complex, comparable educational assemblages relate to one another across spatial dimensions as they are subjected to (re)territorializing and deterritorializing dynamics?

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In engaging with assemblage thinking at this level, scholars may be able to unpack these questions to the fullest extent to advance new theorizations using the complex assemblage paradigm as an examination tool for redefining CIE beyond the conventional, traditional, or foundational canons of the field. We consider that CIE scholars may explore new avenues for formulating theoretical and/or conceptual frameworks that engage scholars with assemblage as an analytical tool for the comparative method in education. As an extension of this endeavor, then, theoretical frameworks founded on assemblage thinking would naturally necessitate designing innovative research methods that align with, adapt, expand on, and/or retool assemblage thinking for the purpose of conducting comparative education studies. Hence, designing analytical frameworks rooted in assemblage thinking could interrogate educational policy formulation, development, and implementation resulting from such comparative studies. In turn, generating theoretical or conceptual frameworks informed by assemblage thinking could stimulate novel approaches to examining the role that intersecting institutionalization and professionalization pathways play in the emergence of the CIE complex assemblage, ostensibly leading to new understandings about the territorialization and reterritorialization of CIE as a field. Finally, studying the implications of the evolving and fluid nature of CIE as a complex assemblage may lead to new explanatory models for educational governance mechanisms.

Structure of and Contributions to This Volume In keeping with the premise for novel orientations and the promises of assemblage theory in CIE outlined above, this volume brings together an eclectic mix of emergent scholarly inquiry on and engagement with assemblage. The chapters included in the volume are authored by both established and rising scholars active in and/or with an interest in CIE, broadly conceived, on a range of themes intended to expand the (re)conceptualization of the field through the multifaceted lens of assemblage thinking. They hail from various (inter)disciplinary orientations, regions, and academic/ professional affiliations, all having in common a commitment to CIE scholarship. In a sense, they represent an assemblage of both heterogeneous modes of thinking about assemblage, but are bound by a “sympathy,” as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, for diving into and exploring this fertile terrain for transformative and regenerative thinking in CIE. Extending the assemblage metaphor we embraced in this volume a bit further, the connectivity of their mutually reinforcing creative energies and inspiring agency yield this arrangement that, in itself, constitutes another assemblage, a microverse of scholarship to put it another way, in the ever-expanding CIE complex assemblage. In what follows, we summarize our contributors’ chapters to illustrate and capture the co-dependencies and functional relationships they built, perhaps inadvertently and in contingent ways, through each of their unique contributions. In his chapter, contextualizing the CIE field in the nexus of assemblage, affect, and the Covid-19 pandemic, Irving Epstein delivers a superbly articulated and powerful critique of the tumultuous and disruptive effects of the pandemic on the

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fabric of educational and human experience. Through the three metaphors of exile, displacement, and death exacerbated and painfully brought to the fore by the devastating, depredating, and hollowing effects of the pandemic, Epstein wonderfully constructed a cogent narrative about the deleterious impact of the pandemic, which enlightens, informs, and engenders new considerations for comparative approaches in CIE. It weaves brief insights and/or ramifications of devices of comparison into each of the metaphors. These eloquently tie into his summary of the potential of assemblage, affect, contingency, and intensity of encounter to unleash creative thinking on and within CIE. In the next chapter, Charl Wolhuter provides an informative analysis and survey of the various modes of education that comparativists can contemplate in the act of comparison. His argument that education as an aim has been rather de-emphasized in CIE studies is salient, relevant, and merits further examination, a matter to which CIE scholars could devote more attention in CIE scholarship. Wolhuter further offers an insightful journey into the connections and inter-relations between educational fields and/or its cognate fields, as well as the intricacies of comparison across myriad levels of analysis, formulating additional units of analysis beyond ones common in CIE. In their chapter, Paolo Landri and Radhika Gorur problematize the use of instruments of commensuration in education for comparative advantage as deployed in the still predominantly positivistic and modernist conception of educational attainment. The intimate ties and consequential connections between these instruments and their handlers, on the one hand, and the subjects of their application, on the other hand, lends itself to the relational precepts and explications of actor-network theory (ANT) which the authors embrace as the epistemological foundation for their inquiry. They cogently point to a need to more closely scrutinize the connection between micro- and macrolevels in education, and posit that ANT presents the analytical devices to accomplish such examinations, as it is premised on a flat ontology of the social and society. Cast in this paradigm, the act of comparison takes into account the relational interactions, patterns formed, and the translation process occurring between the human actors and the socio-material tools that “perform” in tandem to enact social (and, by extension, educational) realities. The chapter opens a window into the potential uses of ANT as an analytical lens for such associations and their ramifications for CIE scholarship. In the following chapter, David Martyn and Conor Galvin construct and carefully articulate a compelling argument for the use of the critical realist assemblage analytical approach to CIE studies. They eloquently unpack two theoretical paradigms, that is, assemblage theory or thinking and critical realism, then fuse elements of both to deliver a powerful analytical device for critiquing policy actions in CIE. While maintaining fidelity with the Deleuzoguattarian original thinking on the function of assemblages as social formations driven by the interaction between material and expression, characterized by the dichotomous nature of territorializing and deterritorializing forces, and endowed with agency that move them from the plane of immanence to that of organization, Martyn and Galvin meaningfully expand this fundamental premise with the notion of assemblages as production sites for causality of actions among and between actors of the assemblage. The application of this confluence of dynamic factors to the PISA-D case-study in Cambodia further

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illustrates the utility, as well as the explanatory and analytical capacity inherent in this novel melding of the two theoretical approaches, with important implications for CIE research and practice. Next, Linli Zhou, Crystal Greene, and Andrew Swindell articulate a robust survey of the major theoretical paradigms in CIE and their partially overlapping co-evolutions over time. Their classification of these theories into nomothetic, idiographic, and critical serves as a useful illustrative device to compartmentalize theoretical approaches in CIE, while at the same time nuancing this classification with the need to carefully balance their contributions across disciplinary lines of scholarship in the field. Transitioning into the section of the book devoted to an examination of educational spaces as assemblages, in their part autobiographical, part exploratory account of the emergence of CIE in Malaysia, Aizzudin Mohamed Anuar, and Pravindharan Balakrishnan open a creative and innovative window into conceptualizing the construction of assemblages in CIE through the agency of multiple actors, whether individual or institutional, embedded at various interconnected levels. The narrative built on the metaphors of the fisherman, as the one identifying and seeking out potentially interested actors to join the assemblage, the weaver, as the one carefully and meticulously forging alliances, and the shadow-puppeteer, as the one orchestrating, mediating, and balancing the myriad connections/components into a coordinated assembly, is not only illustrative of the power of these metaphors, but also convert them into explanatory devices for the territorialization of the CIE assemblage. As a piece of the CIE complex assemblage, the CIE in Malaysia project may be construed as a mechanism for coalescing not only scholars as individual promoters of CIE, but also scholarship, institutional policies, and practices, as well as disciplinary group interests into a coherent assemblage. Following this, Florin Salajan employs an assemblage paradigm to interrogate the emergence, expansion, and relational attributes of intertwined educational polities, systems, and mechanisms constituting polymorphic and symbiotic arrangements named complex educational assemblages. He presents the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) as an illustrative case in applying the principles of assemblage thinking to explain the amorphous, heterogeneous, and emerging nature of this variable geometry of interrelated educational apparatuses bound by commonalities and affinities serving their individual and collective interests. From its ideation as a desideratum among several members to its growth into the multifaceted collaborative mechanism of convergence and coordination of educational systems in the Euro-Asiatic space, Salajan argues this assemblage of assemblages provides comparativists with a case study for the empirical utilization of an assemblage lens to explain the coalescence of educational polities for their common good. Concurrently, the assemblage thinking approach he exemplifies via the EHEA offers analytical tools to consider in expanding epistemological boundaries in the act of comparison. In a similar vein, tavis jules conceives of the amalgamation of the integrated educational systems in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as a regional

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educational assemblage that emerged over time through negotiation and contestation of vested interests throughout the various stages in this assemblage’s transition from old, to open, then what he terms as mature regionalism. In examining the historiography of the Caribbean assemblage, jules adeptly focuses on the affect and desire of the actants in the assemblage, whether individuals, mechanisms they set up for the steering of educational policies, and the materialism embodied in the governance instruments in bringing about the assemblage, rather than on their rational choices to establish it. As such, jules employs a core tenet in Deleuzoguattarian thinking that considers desire as an inherent and pervasive force that drives the assemblage, that hinges on a dyad consisting of constructive or destructive effects. In the case of the CARICOM regional educational assemblage, it would appear that the desire of the actors and actants upholding it were motivated mainly by constructive ideals. Moving into the assemblage-via-practice section of the book, Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker-Cavallin’s astutely apply an assemblage lens to unpack the functionalities, uses and interconnectivities of the Comparative Educational Leadership Lab delivers a vivid illustration of the multifaceted opportunities and possibilities for human and non-human actors (one could argue the sociomaterialities with which humans interact) in a community of practice inhabiting a virtual space. The malleability and flexibility of this space, with the entryways it allows, forms the premise upon which its components, whether country case studies, learning modules, expertise sharing, etc., come together in a mosaic-like fashion, but with a defined and concerted purpose: that of becoming a communal space for collaborative thinking and creation. It is an eloquent example of how a pragmatic assemblage can be conceived of in promoting CIE scholarship and practice. In the next chapter, Elin Sundström Sjödin and Ninni Wahlström offer a creative and innovative conceptualization of didactics embedded in assemblage thinking, delivering a compelling illustration of the contingency and fluidity of teaching and learning across encapsulated relational spaces in which these processes occur. They eloquently problematize, then challenge the assumptions inherent in the didactic triangle consisting of teacher, student, and content, unpacking them iteratively into evolving and shifting didactic assemblages. They convincingly argue that these assemblages, once established, do not conform to conventional or axiomatic thinking about didactics, as the actors entering the assemblage, whether human or nonhuman, are endowed with agency that shape the relationships within the assemblage in unpredictable ways. The comparative perspective on the three scenarios they constructed can inform comparative perspectives in education, lending itself as an examination tool for didactics and education, in general, across boundaries and constrained units of analysis. Finally, tavis jules and Florin Salajan conclude this voyage into the CIE assemblage both by summarizing this vibrant and varied mosaic of erudition on assemblage in education and by proposing incursions into novel, urgent and necessary themes CIE scholars could contemplate in expanding scholarship in CIE and, by extension, the field itself in inordinate directions fitting with its rhizomatic nature.

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­Epstein, E.H. (2008). Setting the normative boundaries: Crucial epistemological benchmarks in comparative education. Comparative Education, 44(4), 373–86. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0305006080248140 Epstein, I. (2019). Affect theory and comparative education discourse: Essays on fear and loathing in response to global educational policy and practice. Bloomsbury. Gorur, R. (2011). Policy as assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611–22. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.611 Guillaume, X. (2014). Agencement and traces: A politics of ephemeral theorizing. In M. Acuto & S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 106–12). Palgrave Macmillan. Harman, G. (2014). Conclusions: Assemblage theory and the future. In M. Acuto & S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 67–74). Palgrave Macmillan. jules, t.d. (2021). Introduction: New directions in comparative and international education In t.d. jules, R. Shields & M.A.M. Thomas (Eds.), The Bloomsbury handbook of theory in Comparative and International Education (pp. 1–17). Bloomsbury. Landri, P. (2018). Digital governance of education: Technology, standards and Europeanization of education. Bloomsbury. Larsen, M.A. (2010). New thinking in comparative education. In M.A. Larsen (Ed.), New thinking in comparative education: Honoring Robert Cowen (pp. 1–14). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460913051_002 Larsen, M.A. & Beech, J. (2014). Spatial theorizing in comparative and international education research. Comparative Education Review, 58(2), 191–214. https://doi. org/10.1086/675499 Latour, B. (1996). On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus more than a few complications. Soziale Welt, 47(4). 369–81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40878163 Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor–network theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lisle, D. (2014). Energizing the international. In M. Acuto & S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 67–74). Palgrave Macmillan. Little, A. (2000). Development studies and comparative education: Context, content, comparison and contributors. Comparative Education, 36(3), 279–96. https://doi. org/10.1080/713656612 Manzon, M. (2011). Comparative education: The construction of a field. Springer. Manzon, M. (2018). Origins and traditions in comparative education: Challenging some assumptions. Comparative Education, 54(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.20 17.1416820 Marcus, G.E. & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 101–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406062573 Parreira Do Amaral, M. (2021). Regimes and regionalism in comparative and international education. In t.d. jules, R. Shields & M.A.M. Thomas (Eds.), The Bloomsbury handbook of theory in comparative and international education (pp. 265–80). Bloomsbury. Phillips, D. & Schweisfurth, M. (2014). Comparative and international education: An introduction to theory, method, and practice. A&C Black. Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2019). Educational intelligence in the era of Big Data: The rise of the educational intelligent economy. In t.d. jules & F.D. Salajan (Eds.), The

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educational intelligent economy: Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things in education (pp. 1–11). Emerald Publishers. http://doi. org/10.1108/S1479-367920190000038001 Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a complex assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (pp. 133–51). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920200000039014 Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2021). Regulated and unregulated big data analytics as (re)makers of complex educational assemblages in the EU and the CARICOM. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2020 (pp. 149–70). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920210000040010 Savage, G.C. (2019). What is policy assemblage? Territory, politics, governance. https://doi. org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1559760 Sobe, N.W. & Kowalczyk, J. (2018). Context, entanglement and assemblage as matters of concern in Comparative Education research. In J. McLeod, N.W. Sobe & T. Seddon (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2018: Uneven space-times of education: Historical sociologies of concepts, methods and practices (pp. 197–204). Routledge. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2010). The politics and economics of comparison. Comparative Education Review, 54(3), 323–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/653047 Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2014). Comparison and context: The interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study of education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 16(2), 34–42. Turner, D. (2019). Comparative and international education: Development of a field and its method and theory. In C. Wolhuter and A. Wiseman (Eds.), Comparative and international education: Survey of an infinite field (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 36) (pp. 11–28). Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920190000036002 Walters, W. (2012). Governmentality: Critical encounters. Routledge. Welch, A.R. (2010). Nation-state, diaspora and comparative education: The place of place in comparative education. In D. Mattheou (Ed.), Changing educational landscapes. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8534-4_16 Wirt, F.M. (1980). Comparing educational policies: Theory, units of analysis, and research strategies. Comparative Education Review, 24(2), 174–91. https://doi. org/10.1086/446114

­Part Two

­ ngaging with Assemblage E in Emerging Comparative Conceptualizations

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Assemblage, Affect, and Covid-19: Implications for Comparative and International Education Irving Epstein

Throughout this volume, authors have argued in favor of a reconceptualization of comparative and international education (CIE) that would affirm its potential dynamism and continued importance in promoting deep intellectual engagement. As initiators of this project, the volume editors have posited the concept of “assemblage” as a useful device in furthering this aim. Focusing upon the initial work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and enhanced as a result of theoretical refinements articulated by Latour (2007) and DeLanda (2006, 2016), social science proponents of assemblage theory view its embrace as allowing for a more sophisticated analysis of complex social phenomena. It is argued that through the use of assemblage theory, the interaction of various entities can more easily be unpacked, the contingency inherent in their interrelationships respected, and the fluidity that marks their creation and dissolution acknowledged. As a result, a compelling argument can be made for dismissing the broad categorizations that ossify conceptual understandings and legitimize reductionism (DeLanda, 2016), so common within conventional social science paradigms not to mention mappings of the CIE field. Proponents further view assemblage theory as a tool for appreciating the emergent qualities of social phenomena, offering a more realistic lens for deciphering how humans interact with one another and their surrounding environments, which include living and non-living entities. In my own work, I have attributed the importance of assemblage to social movement formation and development, and have analyzed its importance within the realm of interpersonal connection (Epstein, 2019). In doing so, I have emphasized its significance as a central component within theories of affect, and believe that it can best be appreciated through assessing its role in support of those theories. In this chapter, I will summarize what I view as the historical strengths and contemporary challenges of CIE as an academic field, and will make the case that assemblage theory can indeed promote CIE scholarship, teaching, and practice in important ways, as long as its importance is understood as supporting the broader tenets of theories of affect. In support of this proposition, I will then examine what assemblage theory specifically, and theories of affect more broadly, can contribute to our understanding of Covid-19 and education within global contexts, using the educational responses to the pandemic as a case study that exemplifies CIE’s potential significance.

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­Assemblage Theory and the Social Sciences Proponents view assemblage theory as a necessary corrective to social science paradigms that fail to accurately represent our interactions with institutions, one another, and the natural world (Butler, 2015; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006; DeLanda, 2016; Latour, 2007). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), conventional representations of human encounters have inappropriately fixated upon creating hierarchical classifications of a vertical nature, skewing and ignoring interconnections that are horizontal and indeterminate but nonetheless equally consequential. Following in their footsteps, other critics, such as DeLanda (2006, 2016) and Latour (2007), bemoan the ways in which theoretical social constructs are created to juxtapose binary claims upon our imagination. Structure versus agency, individualism in contrast to communitarianism, thought versus action, the nomothetic as opposed to the idiographic, movement versus stasis, conflict as opposed to consensus, and rational choice in contrast to irrational or unconscious decision-making, are all examples of the binary representations that have defined and perhaps imposed artificial parameters within social science discourse. It is not surprising that in recent decades, the embrace of alternative possibilities has been most clearly evident in the fields of anthropology and geography. In the former case, the traditional emic versus etic dichotomy, which superimposed internal and external boundaries that defined one’s relationship to the social groups being studied, dictated the terms under which much comparative research within that field was defined. Thankfully, the meaning of such categorization has now been effectively contested as the nature and importance of global flows and transnational relationships have been affirmed (Clifford, 1997; Marcus, 1995; Tsing, 2017). With regard to the field of geography, stationary and static conceptions of place have similarly been rejected in recognition of the fluidity with which we negotiate our relationships with the natural world. Indeed, as the post-humanist lens has encouraged a reassessment of what it means to be human (Braidotti, 2018), the ease with which these fields have incorporated concepts originating within the social sciences as well as the humanities speaks to their capacity for reinvention while the focus upon assemblage speaks directly to these concerns through its emphasis upon complexity and contingency. Assemblage theory represents but one of the more recent directional turns within the social sciences and humanities that speak to contemporary sensibilities. For example, the framing of coloniality as an enduring characteristic of modernity, a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of indigeneity and indigenous knowledge forms as encapsulated within Southern theory (Connell, 2017), and a recognition of the ramifications of Anthropocene as a dominating geological as well as cultural time period (Crutzen & Schwagerl, 2011), all offer trenchant critiques of Enlightenment-derived, modernist thought. However, while notions of complexity and contingency are embedded in all of these intellectual formulations, their presence is most clearly apparent within the writings of assemblage theory proponents.

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­CIE and Its Relationship to the Social Sciences Comparative and international education was constructed from its origins according to mainstreamed modernist assumptions. In doing so, it borrowed heavily from popularly accepted social science and humanistic principles, and has continued to do so throughout its evolution. Its early proponents, such as Marc Antoine Jullien, Friedrich Hecht, Christian Heynes, and Michael Sadler, shared an uncritical faith in the importance of education as a public good and viewed the process of engaging in comparison as a vehicle for perpetuating reform within their own societies. At the same time, in seeking to gather and analyze data from a wide range of sources, including formal legislation, diaries, memoranda, speeches, and surveys, they thought of themselves as being committed to scientific investigation rather than mechanically borrowing and implementing practices emanating within one social context and reflexively placing them into another. The positivism undergirding their work was clear, even if a formal application of scientific method to their research projects was lacking (Epstein, 2013, 2017, 2019; Phillips, 2006). There are three themes that are apparent when one reviews the early CIE literature. First, CIE was always viewed as a practical academic field. As respect for educational practice was embedded in initial CIE scholarship, it is somewhat of a misnomer to categorize the comparative education emphasis as distinguishing itself from its international education complement (Epstein, 2017; Phillips, 2006). Second, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship very much reflected prevalent if evolving social science assumptions at the time. Educational provision was uncritically associated with the nation-state, while vague generalities involving cultural disposition, historical predilection, and national character were invoked to explain the characteristics of specific educational systems (Epstein, 2013). Finally, as was true of a number of the more established social science disciplines of the time period, the “othering” of research subjects invited a colonialist perspective that replicated some of the worst attributes of modernism, with aspersions of primitivism or even savagery characterizing the descriptive categorizations of peoples whose backgrounds failed to comport with Eurocentric values (Takayama, Sriprakash & Connell, 2017). CIE scholarship was never solely complicit in perpetuating these perspectives, but it did follow and never really challenged existing norms that defined mainstream academic research. It is my view that modern, post-Second World War CIE scholarship has continued to be reflective of dominant trends within mainstream educational research as well as within the social sciences and international development literature. In the former case, the conflicting humanistic and behaviorist emphases within educational research, first articulated in the United States during the progressive era, but subject to further evolution and widespread global adaptation since then, have been clearly apparent within CIE. For example, although subject to many different influences, the emphasis upon praxis, student-centered pedagogy, and social reform, so evident in Paolo Freire’s work, broadly represented a humanistic orientation shared with early-twentieth-century progressives. But among those who so self-identified as early progressives, there were some who gave great importance to the measurement of learning in opposition to the humanist perspective

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(Labaree, 2005), and we see the emphasis upon international testing and the comparative achievement scores such testing engenders as reflective of that latter influence as well. Within the social sciences, it is clear that the growth of the public policy field, which in turn then influenced post-Second World War social science research, can be attributed to academics who worked in government during the war and viewed such research as supporting what they viewed as necessary political and social reform. Given their war-time experiences, they believed that it was important to apply the principles of scientific method to gather and analyze data objectively, so that policymaking would occur void of overt political bias (Epstein, 2019). The positivism they embraced carried over into the social science disciplines and marked their development throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The ensuing methodological individualism that became popular in the 1950s, further reflected Cold War ideological proclivities as expressed by beneficiaries of Global North capitalism, and were expressed within the theoretical constructs of structural functionalism, human capital theory, and modernization theory. World systems analysis and dependency theory, which became popular in the early 1970s, represented critical theoretical correctives to these mainstreamed views. More recently, the effects of global capitalism and neo-liberalism have influenced discussions regarding the nature of globalization and the ascendance of information capitalism (Jessop,  2016), although globalization itself involves an expansive set of processes that extend beyond economic practices per se. Through the years, CIE scholars have cherry-picked many of these constructs and have used them as theoretical frames that give shape to specific research investigations. However, their employment has come with significant costs. Although a commitment to theoretical diversity can encourage vibrancy, in this case, CIE has been plagued with inelasticity and an inability to reconcile competing methodologies and approaches. The resulting fragmentation perpetuates incoherence. More significantly, the tendency to apply theory to practice without also exploring its limits or pursuing its reimagining leaves little room for systematically expanding upon the different perspectives that have been invoked. CIE is a generalist field that has always confronted dominant pressures that privilege academic specialization. The tendency to territorialize is one manifestation of those pressures. Perhaps more importantly, CIE scholars have failed to address questions involving audience, not to mention the researcher/research subject relationship. With regard to audience, the privileging of English as a global lingua franca and the inequitable distribution of publication venues and the resources needed to promote such venues have created a CIE audience that is skewed within Global North confines (Altbach, 1980). With respect to the researcher/research subject relationship, traditionalists have repeatedly assumed that geographical and social distance is intrinsic to the comparative process, and that such distance offers the researcher a degree of objectivity that makes comparative research compelling. The globalization forces to which we have previously alluded that mark contemporary educational practice belies such a presumption, while the post-humanist turn within the social sciences and humanities offers a substantive critique of the claim. CIE scholars are quite familiar with these criticisms but the quest to craft compelling alternative approaches that gain wide support has remained elusive. One such effort relied upon Pierre Bourdieu’s post-structuralist approach to analyze CIE as an academic field,

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noting the habitus its proponents experience in their efforts to design its contours and produce valuable cultural and social capital (Epstein, 1995). In another vein, the work of Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) has been influential in its advocacy for a heterogeneity of scale, where linkages between local, national, and transnational practices are comprehensively chronicled and analyzed as part of case study frameworks. Finally, Rolland Paulston and his associates invoked the use of social cartography to map various intellectual currents in the field along with their interrelationships, in a systematic effort to appeal to our visual imagination as a means of appreciating the flows and interconnections among adapted CIE theories (Paulston & Leibman, 1994). Although these efforts argued in favor of increased reflexivity in analyzing the ways in which social theories were appropriated for CIE purposes, and although they emphasized the importance of conceptual interconnection within the field, they have failed to offer a robust path for moving CIE forward on its own terms. I believe this to be the case because simply tracing patterns of interconnection between ideas, practices, and policies is insufficient to capture these relationships’ dynamism and unpredictability. As such experiences are never unidirectional or linear, any approach that adequately addresses the nature of CIE must account for their emergent qualities, which is why notions of assemblage as formulated within Actor Network Theory hold promise.

Assemblage, Actor Network Theory, and CIE Bruno Latour is the individual most closely associated with Actor Network Theory (ANT), a perspective that has embraced the importance of assemblage, defined as association through movement. For Latour, … the question of the social emerges when the ties in which one is entangled begin to unravel; the social is further detected through the surprising movements from one association to the next; those movements can either be suspended or resumed; when they are prematurely suspended, the social as normally construed is bound together with already accepted participants called ‘social actors’ who are members of a ‘society’; when the movement toward collection is resumed, it traces the social as associations through many non-social entities which might become participants later; if pursued systematically, this tracking may end up in a shared definition of a common world, what I have called a collective; but if there are no procedures to render it common, it may fail to be assembled; and lastly, sociology is best defined as a discipline where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective. (Latour, 2007, p. 247)

I­ nterestingly, Latour further employs ANT to critique bounded conceptions of the nature of group formation, the independent agency of the social actor, the degree to which objects express their own agency, the assumption that a clear distinction can be made between fact and belief, and the view that text should be conceived

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of as a defined entity. He thus argues that insofar as what we perceive to be the social involves continuous processes of assemblage and disassembling, it is useful to employ ANT as a way of tracing the patterns through which the social involves repeated interconnection and dissolution (Latour, 2007). One critique of ANT argues that merely tracing the ways in which social assemblages are formed and dissolved is an inadequate exercise for appreciating how entities actually interact. What is missing is an acknowledgment of the importance of affect. It is noteworthy, for example, that for Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage becomes a meaningful concept only when paired with what they identify as intensities of encounter, sensibilities that can extend beyond the rational. As they state, 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 & Guattari, 1987, p. 257)

For other theorists, a recognition of the importance of sensibility should be coupled with an appreciation for deliberate efforts to engage in meaning making (Wetherell, 2012), and in my own work, I have listed intensity of encounter, assemblage, meaning making, and contingency as four domains critical to an appreciation of affect (Epstein, 2019). We know, for example, that teaching includes numerous polymorphous activities, some of which are planned, some of which are not consciously pursued. But in their totality, they cannot be adequately evaluated without recognizing the overriding intention of the teacher to connect with students and engage in meaning making, an intention crafted through experiencing sensation as well as demonstration of deliberate effort. In a different vein, when we analyze twenty-first-century social movements and student protest, we see that these movements are marked by their proliferation, intensity, and limited duration in contrast to social movements of the 1950s and 1960s (Epstein, 2015). These qualities also speak to the efforts of participants to meaningfully engage with one another as well as their propensity to viscerally participate in fluid political environments. I believe that the actions, events, procedures, processes, plans, behaviors, associations, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that comprise the DNA of comparative and international education, can best be understood by also acknowledging the importance of affect in influencing their construction, development, and dissolution. I believe the creative dynamism, with which we associate classroom interaction or collective political expression, is present within many CIE domains, and a focused emphasis upon how assemblage, through the use of affect, brings collective CIE experiences to life is a worthwhile intellectual endeavor. The case which examines educational practice during the Covid-19 pandemic elucidates many of the issues germane to CIE, given the global spread of the pandemic, its differential if destructive effects on different population groups, the widespread sense of contingency it has fostered, and its perpetuation of old and new

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forms of assemblage and disassembling. Those issues include but are not limited to the effects of changing pedagogical styles and modes of delivery, a blurring of the roles of teacher, student, and parent, a broad questioning of institutional legitimacy and scientific authority, and countervailing mobilizations calling in favor of social justice reform or authoritarian nationalism. To some extent, Covid-19 has heightened awareness of educational inequality with regard to access and delivery, the tenuous nature of school/family/community relationships, and the broader effects of educational provision upon the economy. In other ways, the pandemic has forced us to confront the randomness and uncertainty of life, illness, and death, and the limited effects education can provide during a time of global crisis. Because all of these issues constitute what CIE scholars regularly investigate, it is thus appropriate to take a deeper look at education during the Covid-19 pandemic, with specific reference to affect and assemblage.

Assemblage, Affect, and Covid-19 I am composing this text one year after Covid-19 was recognized as a dangerous global pandemic that was in the process of spreading quickly in the United States and Europe. During this entire time period, I have not physically set foot on my university campus; I have not seen any students or colleagues in person; I have interacted on a physical basis with very few individuals outside of my immediate family and have severely restricted my public space encounters out of fear of contagion. I have been able to maintain employment and a reasonably comfortable life style while working at home; I have not physically suffered through exposure to the virus and have been able to manage chronic pre-existing health challenges without significant difficulty. This is the picture of a person of privilege in the Covid-19 era. My experiences with the pain, suffering, and uncertainty that are affecting the world’s population are not comparable with the challenges so many global citizens have confronted. Nonetheless, the questions that I am forced to address with regard to the nature of the work I perform as a teacher, the identities to which I subscribe and are prescribed to me, my role as a husband, brother, and family member, my understanding of how I should interact with others, what information I can trust, and more broadly, how I can engage in meaning making in a time of extreme uncertainty, are questions that have acquired global resonance, albeit in radically different contexts. They are questions that touch upon assemblage and affect.

­Exile, Displacement, Death: Three Covid-19 Metaphors Exile Metaphor represents one of the more effective ways in which we evoke comparison, and in the Covid-19 era, the metaphors of exile, displacement, and death hold particular significance as terms that illustrate the nature of assemblage and affect. Typically, the

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term “exile” connotes forced separation from place. We assume that such separation is permanent as long as the condition of exile is applicable; we acknowledge that while one can choose to subject oneself to self-exile, the state of being in exile is neither natural nor pleasant. With regard to the Covid-19 era, we have experienced exile in many forms. Home confinement has meant exile from place of work; travel restrictions have created forced exile from family, friends, colleagues, associates. Insofar as the school has served as a potentially important community space, exile has under some circumstances implied community as well as public separation and disengagement. Exile is experienced in other ways too. The elderly, confined to nursing homes, assisted living institutions, and hospitals, have died in exile, unable to spend their final days with loved ones. More fortunate virus victims have confronted the exile of the quarantine, while restrictions limiting hospital access to ill patients have created new conditions of medical exile as well. For generations, patients of color have been subjected to medical exile through a lack of access to medical facilities and limited medical service provision. In the Covid-19 era, unsurprisingly, medical exile for them has meant a lack of access to testing, vaccine distribution, as well as hospital care. Their plight is, of course, shared with millions living in the Global South. Similarly, school children have experienced enforced educational exile from the school site on the basis of their age and/or their health status, and their exposure to the digital divide, with one-third of the world’s children have been unable to engage in remote learning of any type (UNICEF, 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic has, of course, encouraged self-exile. Admittedly, distinctions between compulsion and personal choice have become muddied in environments where the degree of state intervention to secure public health and safety has been inconsistent on national and global levels. But the mental health challenges that include self-isolation, depression, suicidal thoughts, and a general fear of recommitting to social engagement after its enforced absence are noticeable for children as well as adults (Kar et al., 2020).

Displacement Displacement has occurred in many forms and at many levels. In the broadest sense, the Covid-19 pandemic has challenged deeply ingrained notions of human exceptionalism, as the assertion of human domination and control over the environment, climate, and other living and non-living entities is now contested. Human co-mingling with other species, resulting from an intrusion into their space that has become increasingly frequent during the Anthropocene, created the non-human force that has not only inflicted intense global suffering but has also prevented efficacious human response. It is the virus, this quintessential non-human entity, that has dictated our behavioral reactions, not the other way around. In so doing, the unquestioned faith in the primacy of humanity’s role in governing the planet has now been displaced. In a less generic context, displacement is evident in the many ways in which our social world has been disrupted, with particular reference to conventionally assigned institutional and social roles. Over the past year, we have demanded that parents act as teachers, while teachers have been forced into delivering instruction from their homes,

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as they simultaneously provide caregiving support to their own children. Children have experienced a similar blending of roles, performing the role of student while at the same time asserting childhood family member status, as they engage in remote learning. The bedroom displaces the classroom as a primary learning site. Displacement is graphically evident when examining modes of instruction in the Covid-19 era. The restrictions that have become acceptable instructional norms as students and teachers participate in teaching and learning experiences serve as their own displacement catalysts. For those lucky enough to experience in-person instruction, the obligatory mask has not only disrupted non-verbal communication between teachers and students, and among students themselves, but it has also changed the nature of the relationship by mediating affect in prescriptive terms. Similarly, required social distancing has limited the possibilities for engaging students in cooperative sharing, paired and small group work, role play, simulation, oral presentation, and project work. When one’s identity as a student or an instructor becomes tied to the mask one is wearing, or the social distancing that is being monitored and externally enforced, not only do the possibilities for interpersonal communication become limited, but one’s performative identity changes, as the customary social script with which one is associated becomes irrelevant (Epstein, 2021). Remote learning presents its own form of instructional displacement. The structured nature of synchronous and asynchronous modes of instructional delivery mitigate against authentic interactions between teacher and student. The posing of teacher questions and prompts, followed by written student responses, so clearly evident within asynchronous delivery modes, is only marginally more artificial than the synchronous zoom chats that are constructed with the students’ mute button being the ticket for entry into the electronic classroom. Not only have we become comfortable with the muting of student voice serving as the default condition for learning, but we make accommodations for transmission difficulties by allowing students to participate without their being compelled to share their video presence. The disembodied voice accompanies the mute button as supposedly positive indications of classroom interaction and engagement. Appadurai and Alexander (2019) have noted that a broad cultural shift has developed with regard to our tolerance for failure, perpetuated by expanding electronic media engagement. They argue that our acceptance of transmission interruptions and errors as common occurrences in cyberspace belies a broader social tolerance, if not an embrace of failure without consequence. Similar attitudes are evident within the digital classroom. In this instance, we become anesthetized to the probability that students may only be partially “present,” or that their commitment to the course will dramatically fluctuate from the straightforward to the ephemeral. An even larger question involves the artificiality that becomes embedded in the teacher/student relationship when teaching occurs under these circumstances. When we speak of remote teaching and learning, when does our reference point for what constitutes authentic interaction move from the real to the fantastical? How do we ascertain whether we are actually promoting productive educational experiences? The alternative possibility, which cannot be easily dismissed, is that we have, in Baudrillarian terms, become complicit in creating simulacra, unsatisfactory representations of what we pretend to be real (Epstein, 2021).

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Interestingly, displacement is evident in other educational venues as well, one of the more prominent being the example of standardized testing. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, A level exams were being designed by teachers and conducted in schools rather than being designed by an external exam board (Roberts & Danechi, 2021). In the United States, numerous colleges suspended the admissions requirement that college-bound applicants complete SAT and ACT exams as a part of their application process (Vigdor & Diaz, 2020). School districts across the country, by necessity, also suspended state-mandated standardized assessments at the elementary and middle school levels. The long-term consequences of testing suspension remain to be seen, but at least in the United States at the higher education level, there is significant sentiment for making testing optional on a permanent basis. Looking beyond the contexts of instructional delivery and standardized testing, one of the fascinating conundrums of the Covid-19 era is that displacement has occurred in ways that conflate skepticism and disbelief with hope and optimism. Contradictory attitudes toward science, scientific research, and scientifically influenced policies and guidelines exemplify the degree of displacement articulated through such extremes. The speed with which vaccines have been developed has been acknowledged and applauded by many, some of whom view these vaccines as panaceas that will allow the virus to be conquered. However, the scientific basis for government policy has been repeatedly challenged since the spread of the pandemic began and vaccine skepticism remains significant. Broader questions involving the trust of scientific investigation proliferate. Is the virus really deadly? Does social distancing and mask wearing really prevent the spread of the illness? Is testing effective? Will virus variants destroy progress in combatting virus expansion? Why is one vaccine supposedly more effective than its alternatives? All of these questions are representative of the deep popular skepticism of scientific and epidemiological research that was articulated in response to the pandemic’s spread. To be clear, as Latour and others have demonstrated, the scientific community has frequently invited legitimate skepticism for asserting its unquestioned authority on the basis of the supposedly predictive value of the research it has produced, without reconciling abuses in method or ambiguous outcomes. But in the Covid-19 era, popular rejection of scientific investigation has been especially pronounced, as contradictory and discomforting evidence has been overtly politicized and then dismissed according to partisan ideological grounds. Popular disillusionment with government has spawned feelings of personal displacement for years prior to the advent of the pandemic. But its presence intensified as the virus spread, expanding beyond government institutions per se to include educational, health, and caregiving organizations viewed as complicit in legitimizing the science that has been disparaged (Epstein, 2021).

Death As of the writing of this chapter, there have been approximately 127 million reported cases of Covid-19, with over 2.78  million deaths worldwide (Center for Systems Science and Engineering, 2021). Over 20  million years of life have been lost to inhabitants of over eighty-one countries, with an average of life lost per death being sixteen (Pifarré i Arolas et al., 2021). Its seemingly random occurrence has made its

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presence even more terrifying. However, one cannot associate death with Covid-19 in literal terms, as it is the metaphor of death that more fully illustrates its influence upon social behavior and the social imagination. Therefore, to give due appreciation for the power of the death metaphor, it is necessary to examine its broader application to our educational, political, and social institutions, and the values they encapsulate. Twenty percent of all higher-education institutions in the United States are in danger of permanently closing, many of which are small liberal arts institutions (Wescott, 2020). As over half the number of highereducation institutions around the world are private and also depend upon tuition enrollment as a primary source of revenue, the dangers of institutional closure are indeed evident on a global scale (Altbach & deWitt, 2020). In the United States, academic programs have been eliminated or suspended, and tenured and tenure line faculty have been dismissed, due to the budget pressures exacerbated by Covid-19. The elimination of liberal arts majors such as anthropology, religion, sociology, French, and German to name a few, represents more than a narrowing of curriculum, or a recalibration of resources in favor of careerist popular majors. Their closure represents the erasure of cultural meaning and social memory. In a similar vein, those who have lost their academic positions suffer from more than the vulgarity of unemployment; their professional identity having been irreparably compromised. The deliberate loosening and, in certain cases, elimination of tenure guarantees further represents a frontal assault upon academic freedom principles (Belkin, 2020). It is thus not an exaggeration to argue that the academy is not simply undergoing transformation in stressful times. More significantly, the values that support its basic functioning are being systematically eliminated. Much of the academy as we know it is dying. These attacks on higher education, along with the previously noted pressures toward educational institutional displacement and rejection of scientific authority, do not arise in a vacuum. Their presence underscores the existence of a deep religious and secular millennialism that has percolated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whether one believes in impending religious apocalypse or inevitable social, political, and economic destruction, the popular forecast of forthcoming doom is a phenomenon that was present during the Black Death, the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, and more recently was in evidence in the aftermath of 9/11. Its current iterations reflect a belief in the need to transcend a present made more unbearable through the social isolation the pandemic has forced us to experience (Dein, 2020). But the promise of ushering in a radically new future that will erase current difficulties is accompanied by a belief in the legitimacy of destroying current social institutions and the protocols they support. It is also supplemented by popular moral panic that castigates those institutions and those who work within their confines. We see these sentiments at play with regard to perceptions of children and the school classrooms they inhabit. At least during the early months of the pandemic, children were viewed as potential spreaders, contaminants rather than innocents, disrupters of the social order, rather than those whose development augured well for society’s future. Their classrooms were similarly viewed as contamination sites, rather than as safe spaces, protective of children’s social and emotional needs.

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At an even deeper and broader level, we see the effects of millennialism in the surge of white nationalism, evident in the United States as well as globally, and expressed in terms of anti-democratic, racist, and authoritarian tendencies, expressed by groups as well as by the machinery of the state (Bieber, 2020). Death in the Covid-19 era has thus also meant the murder of innocent people of color on the part of police and state officials acting with impunity. It has meant the destruction and/or death of democracy and nascent democratic tendencies in Hong Kong, Belarus, and Myanmar. And, death has asserted itself through an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the United States presidential election of 2020, with a significant portion of the electorate continuing to believe that a fairly administrated national election was fraudulent. For these individuals, trust in the peaceful succession of power, a prerequisite for allegiance to democratic governance, has been eviscerated.

An Alternative View: Assemblage, Affect, and Possibility The power of metaphor lies in its usefulness in facilitating our appreciation for the interconnection of ideas. However, because metaphors still observe conceptual boundaries, they do not always encapsulate an appropriate diversity of meaning. The metaphors of exile, displacement, and death, that we have employed to describe the Covid-19 era, evoke a pessimism that while authentic, still illustrates an incomplete picture of our social relationships. A positive framing of the power of assemblage through affect presents a useful corrective. In future years, historians will note that the expansion of the Black Lives Matter into a global movement occurred during the pandemic. They will additionally recognize that the repression instigated by authoritarian governments to which we previously referred was met by courageous resistance on the part of ordinary citizens, some of whom gave their lives defending the ideals of democracy and human rights. With regard to the education sector, those academicians who have fought to preserve academic freedom will similarly be remembered, as will those educators and teachers who fought for creating safe classrooms and extended themselves beyond the classroom to assist students in need. The alienation that resulted from the social restrictions placed upon individuals in an effort to contain the virus may certainly have contributed to some of the destructive political impulses that percolated during the pandemic. But an appreciation of how the virus unfairly endangered people of color, health care givers, the elderly, and others, also led to broader calls for social and racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a call that had world-wide resonance. It is instructive to note not only how Covid-19 will be framed in the future, but what future historians and social scientists may fail to appreciate about the present. With time, what may be lost to social memory may not only include a full appreciation for the fear and suffering that the global population confronted, but the many instances of resiliency that its members expressed. I would argue that is an understanding of the power of assemblage through affect that draws both extremes together. Even those who have expressed their fears through the anger of right-wing populism tacitly

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depend upon the demonized “other” to assert and define their own identity. Although the consequences of their efforts have been quite destructive, they nonetheless have engaged in behaviors that demonstrate that they are aware of their connection to the objects of their scorn. And those who have come together to demonstrate faith in the possibility of social reform, do so with the tacit understanding that acts of assemblage demand a commitment to meaning making. Certainly, a focus upon assemblage as framed through affect highlights the precarity that characterizes the Covid-19 era. Contingency is embedded in the notion of assemblage, and its presence has marked our daily lives on a rather consistent basis. But agency, even if limited in scope, is also present in the concept of assemblage, particularly when it is paired with theories of affect. The intensities of encounter that form the glue of social relations and the drive to find meaning while enduring the randomness of pain and suffering, find their concrete expression in acts of assemblage. It thus is the lens through which we can most completely appreciate the tensions and contradictions that characterize the Covid-19 era.

Covid-19, Assemblage, and Comparative and International Education A basic premise of this chapter is that an analysis of Covid-19 based upon theories of affect and assemblage has resonance for the comparative and international education field. How so? First, the metaphors of exile, displacement, and death hold specific relevance to CIE independent of their usefulness in framing the Covid-19 experience. Pursuing CIE scholarship demands forced exile as part of one’s intellectual journey, especially when a distancing from the intimacy of context-specific, daily, habitual educational (and social) practice is equated with the necessity of articulating methodological rigor. The black box methodologies that record inputs and outputs only, or fixate upon quantifiable or observable results without offering due attention to process, randomness, and surprise, demand a distancing from those experiences that contribute to our formulative educational identities. Many of them have been employed to buttress the positivist strain within the field. At the same time, the horror of being forcibly trained in methodologies and theoretical constructs deemed “acceptable” by virtue of their having been crafted in global north settings, in order that one’s voice within the CIE scholarly community be acknowledged, creates an emotional and intellectual exile that many scholars in the field, particularly those coming from global south, are compelled to experience. Engagement in CIE, certainly involves physical and cultural displacement, as the training centers of CIE scholarship, let alone employment opportunities, concentrated largely within the Global North and to a lesser extent East Asia, are not universally available and require considerable personal sacrifice, including the willingness to engage in movement and relocation, in order to be accessed. As has been previously noted, the reliance upon English, as the global lingua franca, utilized for conference presentation and scholarly publication, creates further conditions of displacement.

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Some have viewed such displacement as diasporic, opening up possibilities for reinvention in spite of the requisite disassociation that is encountered (Kim, 2020; Shirazi, 2019; Welch, 2010). Others view conditions of imposed displacement as being suffocating, creating a predicate for cultural erasure, or in de Sosa Santos’ (2015) terms, epistemicide. Under such circumstances, the metaphor of death is also applicable. The CIE field is not simply one where powerful voices marginalize and mute those who are less visible. The consequences can be more extreme, as the lack of recognition results in the permanent erasure of voices emanating from disparate knowledge traditions. When these voices remain unrecognized, the consequences not only result in the creation of general academic sclerosis, but in their elimination. Second, it is clear that many of the specific responses to the pandemic mirror conventional approaches apparent within CIE scholarship and educational practice which we have previously critiqued. In both instances, rigid categorizations are formulated to prioritize those policy areas that are viewed as deserving of focused attention, many of which appeal to privileged audiences and constituencies. With regard to Covid-19, this is particularly true of discussions involving the potential efficacy of remote teaching and learning without fully acknowledging the ramifications of the digital divide (Vegas & Winthrop, 2020). In addition, case studies are circulated as models that should be emulated without elaborate analysis as to what is and what is not generalizable to other audiences. In the early days of the pandemic, for example, New Zealand’s and South Korea’s rigorous testing regiments were juxtaposed with the concerted decision to ignore mass testing in Sweden, in an effort to articulate best practices, as if the lessons learned in these particular environments could be definitively extrapolated and successfully applied to larger contexts. More recently, regional experiences with various vaccines have been highlighted in ways that purport to unquestionably demonstrate their broader global effectiveness. Third, we see within the educational sector, a focus upon institutionalism that ignores the ways in which “the educational” is related to larger social practice. Discussions of schools reopening have been conducted without focused reference to what it is they will be teaching, how their curricula need to change, or what enhanced civic responsibilities they are ethically obligated to perform (Zhao, 2020). In light of the enhanced global visibility of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the increasing awareness of the ramifications of global climate change, such omissions are striking. Finally, there is a fixation with educational reform as a collective panacea, coupled with an obsession with prediction that would make even the most dedicated futurists blush. As the educational inequalities that we have all known of for generations are graphically exposed during the pandemic, it is asserted that we are now compelled to work toward their elimination. Such thinking, while well-intentioned, fails to come to terms with the historic intractability of educational inequity, the relationships, attitudes, and policies that guarantee its perpetuation, and the reasons why successive generations have failed to confront its pernicious effects. What occurs instead are rally cries to acknowledge education as a basic human right and to do better in combatting inequity (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2020) or prognostications

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regarding what will and will not change with regard to teaching practice in the future with calls for enhanced institutional flexibility (Vegas & Winthrop, 2020). We have argued that a focus that accentuates the importance of assemblage through affect can create a more intellectually satisfying analysis. This approach recognizes the pervasive nature of contingency rather than ignoring its consequences. This approach affirms the collective need to pursue meaning through interpersonal connection, although it acknowledges the role ambiguity and disconnect play in also shaping human experience. Finally, this approach embraces the ways in which intensities of encounter continually form our thoughts and actions. In so doing, it offers the possibility of fine tuning our understandings of the messy, contradictory, but life-affirming qualities that shape educational interactions, allowing for a necessary reconsideration of possibility within the comparative and international education field.

References Altbach, P.G. (1980). Servitude of the mind: Education, dependency, and neo-colonialism. In P.G. Altbach, G.P. Kelly & R.F. Arnove (Eds.), Comparative education (pp. 469–84). Macmillan. Altbach, P.G. & De Witt, H. (2020). Post-pandemic outlook bleakest for the poor. International Higher Education, 102, 3–5. https://www.internationalhighereducation. net/api-v1/article/!/action/getPdfOfArticle/articleID/2922/productID/29/filename/ article-id-2922.pdf Appadurai, A. & Alexander, N. (2019). Failure. John Wiley. Bartlett, L. & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Belkin, D. (2020). Hit by COVID-19, colleges do the unthinkable and cut tenure. Wall Street Journal, December 6. https://www.wsj.com/articles/hit-by-covid-19-colleges-dothe-unthinkable-and-cut-tenure-11607250780 Bieber, F. (2020). Global nationalism in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationalities Papers, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2020.35 Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, culture, and society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press. ­Center for Systems Science and Engineering (2021). COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins University. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: Social science and the global dynamics of knowledge. Wiley. Crutzen, P. & Schwagerl, C. (2011). Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a new global ethos. Yale Environment 360, January 24. https://e360.yale.edu/features/living_in_the_ anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos Dein, S. (2020). Covid-19 and the Apocalypse: Religious and secular perspectives. Journal of Religion and Health, 60(2021), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01100-w

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DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. Bloomsbury Academic. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage Theory. University of Edinburgh Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. University of Minnesota Press. Epstein I. (1995). Comparative education in North America: The search for other through the escape from self? Compare, 25(1), 5–16. Epstein, E. (2013). Crucial benchmarks in the professionalization of comparative education. In C. Wolhuter, N. Popov, B. Leutwyler & E. Skubic (Eds.), Comparative education at universities world-wide (pp. 11–28). Bulgarian Comparative Education Society and Ljubljana University Press. Epstein, I. (2015). Introduction. In I. Epstein (Ed.), The whole world is texting: youth protest in the information age (pp. 1–24). Sense Publishing. Epstein, E. (2017). Is Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris the “Father” of comparative education? Compare, 47(3), 317–31. Epstein, I. (2019). Affect theory and comparative education discourse: Essays on fear and loathing in response to global educational policy and practice. Bloomsbury Academic. Epstein, I. (2021). Education and Covid-19 through the lens of affect. States of emergency: Education in the time of Covid-19, NORRAG Special Issue 06, September. International Commission on the Futures of Education (2020). Education in a postCOVID world: Nine ideas for public action. UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/sites/ default/files/education_in_a_post-covid_world-nine_ideas_for_public_action.pdf Jessop, B. (2016). Putting higher education in its place in (East Asian) political economy. Comparative Education, 52(1), 8–25. Kar, S.K., Yasir Arafat, S.M., Kabir, R., Sharma, P. & Saxena, S.K. (2020). Coping with mental health challenges during COVID-19. In S.K. Saxena (Ed.), Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): Medical virology from pathogenesis to disease control (pp. 199–213). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4814-7_16 Kim, T. (2020). Diasporic comparative education: An initial tribute to anxiety and hope. Comparative Education, 56(1), 111–26. http://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2020.1714328 Labaree, D.F. (2005). Progressivism, schools, and schools of education: An American romance. Pedagogica Historica, 41(1–2), 275–88. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford University Press. Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. ­Paulston, R. & Liebman, M. (1994). An invitation to post-modern social cartography. Comparative Education Review, 38(2), 215–32. Phillips, D. (2006). Michael Sadler and comparative education. Oxford Review of Education, 32(1), 39–54. Pifarré I Arolas, H., Acosta, E., López-Casasnovas, G., Lo, A., Nicodemo, C., Riffe, T., Myrskylä, M. (2021). Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries. Sci Rep, 11(3504). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-83040-3 Roberts, N. & Danechi, S. (2021). Coronavirus: GCSEs, A levels, and equivalents in 2021, Briefing Paper no. 094045, March 2. House of Commons, Library. https:// researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9045/CBP-9045.pdf Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Books. Shirazi, R. (2019). Somewhere we can breathe: Diasporic counterspaces of education as sites of epistemological possibility. Comparative Education Review, 63(4), 480–501.

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Takayama, K., Sriprakash, A. & Connell, R. (2017). Toward a postcolonial comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S1–24. Tsing, A. (2017). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton University Press. UNICEF (2020). COVID-19: Are children able to continue learning during school closures? UNICEF, August. https://data.unicef.org/resources/remote-learningreachability-factsheet/ Vegas, E. & Winthrop, R. (2020). Beyond reopening schools: How education can emerge stronger than before. Brookings Institution, September 8. https://www.brookings. edu/research/beyond-reopening-schools-how-education-can-emerge-stronger-thanbefore-covid-19/ Vigdor, N. & Diaz, J. (2020). More colleges are waiving SAT and ACT requirements. New York Times, May 21. https://www.nytimes.com/article/sat-act-test-optionalcolleges-coronavirus.html Welch, A.R. (2010). Nation-state, diaspora and comparative education: The place of place in comparative education. In D. Mattheou (Ed.), Changing educational landscapes. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8534-4_16 Wescott, D. (2020). Will coronavirus close your college for good? Chronicle of Higher Education, March 25. https://www.chronicle.com/article/will-coronavirus-close-yourcollege-for-good/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in&cid2=gen_login_refresh Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Sage Publications. Zhao, Y. (2020). COVID-19 as a catalyst for educational change. Prospects, 49, 29–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09477-y

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Fathoming the Unexplored Education in Comparative and International Education Charl C. Wolhuter

Introduction Comparative and international education (CIE) has been described as an infinite field (see Wolhuter & Wiseman, 2019), testing ever new boundaries as it moves ahead with development and changing times. This testifies to a dynamic scholarly field and, indeed, in tune with unprecedented societal contextual and scientific developments. However, eminent scholar in the field, Nordtveit (2016), remarks that comparativists in education have been struggling with understanding the field of CIE for over 60 years—sounding strange for the community expected to be authorities on comparative education. To be more specific, what is lacking in the field, according to Nordtveit (2016), is not only a common definition (i.e., accepted by all scholars in the field), but also a clear demarcation of the field; a conceptualizing of what constitutes the field in terms of themes and nodes, which can also be used to code new knowledge that is produced. It, therefore, appears apt that a re-assembly of the field be considered. “Assembly” is used here as explicated by Deleuze and Guattari (1980). Deleuze and Guattari (1980) draw from dynamic systems theory in their construction of assemblage theory regarding social, linguistic, and philosophical systems. In assemblage theory, assemblages (or relationships) are formed by means of coding, stratification, and territorialization. An assembly, then, is a constellation that consists of contingent articulations among heterogeneous elements. This process of ordering matter around a body is called coding. The very definition of comparative and international education is problematic, as is the name of the field. While the term “comparative” in the name has been subjected to robust interrogation (most notably by Epstein, 1992), and the many meanings attached to comparative education and/versus international education have been teased out in David Wilson’s 1994 Comparative and International Education Society Presidential Address (Wilson, 1994), the “education” part of the name and identity of the field has thus far escaped attention. The aim of this chapter is to explore and to interrogate the “education” part in the name of the field. Education as explicated is then suggested as the central object of study and the fixed node around which the field of comparative

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and international education could be re-assembled, its themes could be ordered as they articulate with this central node of education. The chapter commences with a clarification of the term “comparative and international education.” The second part of the chapter then zooms in on the “education” part of the term. In subsequent sections, modes of education and the manifestation of education in the world are explored. The transcendental and contextual contingency of education is then explicated. The contextual contingency of education has been a basic theorem in the field of comparative and international education ever since the epoch-making Guildford lecture of Michael Sadler in 1900. The salience of context in education and the field of CIE has been highlighted once again in the recent publication of Epstein (2019). Using affect theory, Epstein (2019) offers an explanation of the resistance and rejection of schools in many communities, particularly communities in the Global South, resisting or rejecting schools constructed on the models of schools in the Global North. Affect theory seeks to understand human interaction in dynamic terms, and regards feelings and emotions as the prime motives for human behavior. The thesis of affect theory is, further, that people desire to maximize their positive feelings and minimize their negative ones. Another premise of affect theory is that we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, that is, what the effects are on another body. In contrast to what world culture theory—to which many scholars in the field subscribe—states, many communities in the world reject and even resist schooling, and illustrated for a selection of such cases, Epstein (2019) uses affect theory as counter-balance to world culture theory, to explain such rejection and resistance. In the conclusion, the implications of all the teasing out of the concept of “education,” as presented in this chapter for the reassembly of the field of comparative and international education, are spelled out.

What Is Comparative and International Education? The term comparative and international education as a scholarly field of inquiry defies attempts at an easy, simple, or commonly agreed definition. In her publication constructing the field of CIE, Manzon (2011) enumerates a wide array of definitions proffered by scholars in the field. Some definitions are based on a proclaimed unique object of study, others on methodology, and still others on the purpose or use of the field. One reason for the absence of a uniform, widely subscribed definition is that it is a dynamic field ever exploring new territories, as was explained earlier. So wide and divergent a territory of scholarship is subsumed under the name “comparative and international education” the leading comparativist Cowen (2000) claims that there is no single “comparative education,” but that it is more accurate to refer to it in the plural form, that is, “comparative educations.” In the writings of at least two other leading theoreticians in the field, Cowen’s sentiment as to the futility to search for a definition demarcating a single, unique object of study, common to all comparativists, is echoed. Epstein (2008) contends that comparative education is nothing but an applied study: the conceptual and methodological instrumentarium

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of the total spectrum of social sciences, applied to solve education problems or challenges. According to Turner (2019), it is a fruitless exercise to attempt to derive at a definition of comparative education; in order to glean what comparative education is all about, it is better to turn to, and to analyze the discourse taking place within the field. When Erwin Epstein, at the 2011 Comparative Education World Conference in Chungbuk, Korea, asked an audience of eminent comparativists, “what is comparative education?”, his question drew blank stares (Wolhuter, 2008). What is therefore here tabled now as a working definition carries no claim of universal subscription by comparativists. Comparative education can be defined as having a three-in-one perspective on education: ●● ●● ●●

an education system perspective a contextual perspective a comparative perspective (Wolhuter, 2021).

This can diagrammatically be portrayed as in Figure 3.1. Comparative education, in the first place, studies the education system. While national education systems are the most common unit of analysis in comparative education scholarship, both higher and lower levels of analyses, qualifying as comparative education scholarship, are also possible (very well explained in, for example, the much-cited Bray and Thomas’s (1995) cube. The focus of comparative education is, however, broader than just the education system per se. The education system is studied within its societal context and is regarded as being shaped by or as being the outcome of societal forces (geographic,

Figure  3.1  The three-in-one perspective of comparative education: 1. education system perspective; 2. contextual perspective; 3. comparative perspective (Wolhuter, 2021).

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demographic, social, economic, cultural, political, and religious), a feature of the field once again highlighted by, for example, Michael Crossley’s recent BAICE, British Association of International and Comparative Education Presidential Address (Crossley, 2019). Finally, comparative education does not contend with studying one education system in its societal context in isolation. Various education systems, shaped by their societal contexts, are compared; hence the comparative perspective. While definitions as to what CIE is are divergent, and many comparativists will take issue with the above description of the field, the author will venture that this description covers much or all of what is published and accepted under the banner of CIE. In this definition, the constituent elements are “comparative,” “international education,” and “education.” Much discussion has taken place within CIE around the term “comparison” in the name of the field, and much has been published in this regard. Perhaps the best known and oft-cited is the chapter titled “The problematic meaning of ‘comparison’ in comparative education,” written by comparative education doyen Epstein (1992). Epstein (1992) distinguishes between three major theoretical orientations in comparative education, each with its own conceptualization of the comparison part in the name. The first orientation is a positivistic orientation, reaching back to MarcAntoine Jullien de Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth-century but coming to the fore during the 1960s in the writings of C. Arnold Anderson, Brian Holmes, Harold Noah, and Max Eckstein. Scholars in this camp attempted to derive laws regarding societal-education relations, as they calculated correlation coefficients between the size of national education efforts and societal dividends such as economic growth. It can surely be stated that the emergence of mass databases (such as those that resulted from the International Program of Student Assessment, or PISA tests), giving rise to a new round of correlation studies (this time also, in times of the neo-liberal economic revolution, looking for causal factors in academic performance of students), gave this orientation a new lease on life. Besides this positivistic understanding of the term “comparison,” there are also two relativistic conceptualizations of the term running strong among scholars in the field. The first dates from the time of Michael Sadler’s 1900 Guildford lecture, in which he stressed that every (national) education system is the outcome of a set of unique (national) contextual factors. Comparativists customarily take these factors to include geography, demography, social factors, economy, politics, and religion and life and world view. This view of the field set the theoretical frame within which comparative education scholarship was practiced in the mid-twentieth century by the triumvirate or big three of the field: Isaac Kandel, Nicholas Hans, and Friedrich Schneider, but is still very strong in the field (see Wolhuter, 2008). Such a scheme leaves no space for general statements regarding education-societal interrelationships, but comparison means comparing an education system with its societal context to identify relationships of society shaping education. But then there is a further, even more radical, relativistic strand detectable in the field, held by protagonists of phenomenology (and related paradigms such as phenomenography), micro-paradigms (such as ethnomethodology), and above all of post-modernism. These scholars object to the positivist view of social facts as

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“things” embodied in the form of prior hypotheses and that phenomenologists want to direct their scholarly inquiry at the “internal” logic of conditions under study, that is, the rules used by participants themselves; their experience and, above all, their lived-experience, rather than occupying themselves with operational definitions of variables and statistical tests of significance (Epstein, 1992). In the working definition of the field proffered above, and in the explication of the term “education” in this chapter and its implications for the re-assembly of the field, there is space for all three of these conceptualizations. It should be added that “comparison” in the term “comparative education” also has an additional meaning with currency and valence, and which is significant for the re-assembly of the field. This too will be unpacked in this chapter. In the course of time, in tuition programs and in the names of professional societies, the name “international education” has been added to that of “comparative education.” In his 1994 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Presidential Address, Wilson (2014) surveys the various meanings that have, over time, been attached to this term. Although no simple universally accepted definition exists, historically, the term had connotations of, firstly, the knowledge of comparative education used to study and to understand foreign education systems, and, secondly, of an applied field (with comparative education then the corresponding basic field), referring to the planning of education, especially in work related to foreign education systems, and the work of an international aid kind, and the type of work done by organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Wilson, 1994). For the purposes of this chapter, however, “international education” is used in the meaning ascribed to the term in more recent times by Phillips and Schweisfurth (2014), namely that international education refers to scholarship studying education through a lens bringing a global or an international perspective. With the scholarly field of comparative education then evolving into CIE, the idea is that single/limited area studies and comparisons then eventually feed into the all-encompassing, global study of the international education project (Wolhuter, 2021). This wide-angle lens study of the global education panorama is also what Baker (2014), in his 2014 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Presidential Address, has suggested as the most promising way forward for the field. While the above then have unpacked the “comparative” and the “international” components of the name of the field, what remains then is the “education” part. That will be the focus of the next section.

What Is Education? The lexical definition of “education” is typically the one contained in the Cambridge Dictionary (2021), namely that education is “the process of teaching or learning, especially in a school or college, or the knowledge that you get from this.” While this definition probably tallies with the conceptualization people (whether the scholarly

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community, policymakers, or the public at large) generally have of “education,” and is also the meaning with which the term is usually used in the public as well as the scholarly discourse on “education,” it has a number of problematic features. The first of these problematic features is the “especially school or college” part, that is the, at times exclusive, association with organized, formal institutions, or institutional settings. An almost undisputed theorem is that a child learns in the first five years of life, more than in any other stage. Yet this stage (at least for many children, and for most of history all children) is spent out of school where the parents or family and other community structures assume the assignment of being educators. On this point, in many other languages there is more than one word, that is translated into English with the word “education.” Furthermore, these words carry meanings not generally subsumed in English when the word “education” is used. German, for example, has two words: “erziehen” (“Erziehung,” an abstract noun, the deverbative form of “erziehen”) and “bilden” (the last also a verb, but more often used as “Bildung,” an abstract noun, a deverbative of “bilden”). “Erziehung” is a term difficult to translate into English, referring to child-raising, but has strong, essential nuances of manners, norms, values, and character cultivation, never as strongly and indissolubly present in the use of “child-raising” (see The Free Dictionary, 2021–2). “Bilden” or “Bildung” then refers to organized activities in formal institutions, but besides referring to cognitive or intellectual development, it also has strong connotations for the cultivation of personality or character, and personal development in the fullest sense of the word (The Free Dictionary, 2021). The problem with the very narrow meaning customarily attached to the word “education” in English, when doing research in education, and in CIE in particular, is evident in the work of Thomsen et al. (2013). For example, when reporting on Danish students’ lived experience of higher education, Thomsen and co-authors reached to the term “Bildung” when they felt that the translation “education” would not reflect the connotations of personal growth students referred to. In his recently published volume, Educational research: An unorthodox introduction, education philosopher Biesta (2020) devotes an entire chapter to what he terms the “configuration of education research,” i.e., how knowledge produced by research in education is organized or packaged in various parts of the world. He traces the exceptionally (compared to other fields of knowledge) divergent ways in which educational knowledge is organized in various parts of the world back to these linguistic differences. This has also resulted in two major epistemological and theoretical orientations in the field of education, namely, firstly, education as one of the humanities, with its theoretical and ontological roots in the humanities, and, secondly, education as a full-blown social science, and a positivistic science at that. For the purposes of this chapter, the following definition proffered by UNESCO will be used, stating that education represents “deliberate activities involving some form of communication intended to bring about learning” (UNESCO, 2011, p. 1). CIE, as an organized scholarly community, through the World Council of Comparative Education Societies, has a strong relationship with UNESCO. The above definition takes care of the problem of education being usually associated only with education

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in formal institutions. However, in order to be streamlined for use in the field of CIE, the following components of the concept of education need to be further unpacked: – The various modes of education – The patent or latent presence of an education system and the context in which education is always embedded, and the complexity of such systems cum intertwined contexts – The different geographic levels of such systems – The issue of the normative or axiological superstructure of education, as reflected in the many false cognates of the term in other languages – The indeterminacy of education – “Education” denoting, at the same time, an act and a field of study – The dual nature of “comparative education,” signifying at the same time both an object of study and a method of study.

Modes of Education Moving then away from the narrow colloquial conceptualization of education as that taking place in institutions of education only to the more encompassing definition of UNESCO, it was a leading scholar in the field, Coombs (1985), who distinguished between formal, non-formal, and informal education. In contrast to formal learning or formal education—which refers to the structured, authorized courses and workshops that take place in dedicated educational institutions such as schools, colleges, and training departments, and which typically include assessments, such as examinations, and lead to certificates, degrees, or qualifications—non-formal education is any organized, systematic, educational activity carried on outside the framework of the formal system to provide selected types of learning to particular subgroups in the population, adults as well as children. Informal education is the lifelong process by which every individual acquires and accumulates knowledge, skills, attitudes, and insights from daily experiences and exposure to the environment—at home, at work, at play: from the example and attitude of families and friends; from travel, reading newspapers, and books; or by listening to the radio or viewing films or television. Generally, informal education is unorganized, unsystematic, and even unintentional at times, yet accounts for the great bulk of any person’s total lifetime learning, including that of a highly “schooled” person (Coombs, 1985). These three are supplemented by a fourth mode, named pre-formal education (Wolhuter, 2008). Pre-formal refers to what children learn from family, especially parental influences, particularly in the years before formal schooling commences (Wolhuter, 2008). It is possible to add a fifth mode, the systems of private tutoring, what Bray (1999) calls the “shadow education system,” and which assumes extensive proportions in some parts of the world, notably East Asia. The problem is that, currently, scholars in the field concentrate on the formal mode (see Wolhuter, 2008). This despite that: firstly, as was stated above, it is commonly accepted that a child learns the first five years (i.e., pre-school years) more than the rest of his/her life; secondly that in times of a fast changing society and knowledge

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economy, and lifelong learning programs assuming ever larger importance, nonformal education is clearly on the rise; and thirdly, that in times of omnipresent social media (and fake news) (Strohmaier, 2014) informal learning too is on the rise, can have grave consequences, and therefore it too needs to be brought into the scope of a re-assembled field of CIE—with assembled then here meant as explained earlier, namely a node used to code new, as well as existing, knowledge in the field, a node articulated or connected to other nodes forming the basic structure of the field.

The Patent or Latent Manifestation of Education as a System and within a Context Education always exists—patently or latently—as a system, embedded in a societal context. While the education system is most visibly at the level of the national education system, and while correspondingly, the societal context at the national level has received the most attention from scholars in the field of CIE, these contexts figure at a variety of levels (this aspect will be elaborated upon in the next section). Steyn and Wolhuter (2021) assert education as a system is “a structure or framework for education, to provide in the education needs of a target group” (p.  2). The first keyword in this definition is “structure.” This concept of a “structure” refers to a set of interrelated components, each with its function. Steyn et al. (2015) have reconstructed the structure of an education system, whereby the four components of an education system are the education system policy component, the administration sub-system component, the sub-system of learning and teaching component, and the education support services component. Each of these components, in turn, consists of a number of elements. The elements of the education policy component are the vision, the mission, the goals and objective of the education system, and the format of education policy (Steyn et  al., 2015). The structure for teaching and learning consists of the following elements: education levels, education institutions, education programs, learners or students, educators or teachers, curricula, methods of teaching, methods of learning, language of learning and teaching, physical facilities, and assessment. The component education system administration consists of the following three elements: the organizational structure, the liaison structure, and the financial structure. The support services component of the education system comprises three elements: support services to teachers, support services to learners, and support services instrumental to accomplishing effective teaching and learning (Steyn et  al., 2015). The sanitized, technocratic, clinical image of the education system, as portrayed by Steyn et  al. (2015) and which is also evident in CIE studies from especially the “factors and forces” paradigm, is balanced by a number of critical perspectives. Mary Archer, in her book Social origins of educational systems: Take Off, Inflation and Growth (1984) depicts the education system as quickly (after formation) becoming a self-serving monster, caring for no other interests, and stifling the agency of the populace. This view ties in with the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1651), who, in his book Leviathan or the matter, forme and power of a commonwealth ecclesiasticall and civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan (1651), points out to the danger of the state expanding its reach to become an all-devouring monster, decimating all autonomy of civil society

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as well as all individual liberties and agency. An illustration of how ineffectual and counter-productive a colossal bureaucratic monster can be is contained in the book Implementation: How great expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oaklands by Pressman and Wildavsky (1984). Taking the by no means atypical example of a simple project authorized in Washington and destined to be implemented in Oakland, California, requiring thirty decisions by seventy committees of thirty people each, and assuming an 80 percent probability of agreement on each clearance point, a statistical calculation put the chances of completion to one in a million. There is also the threat of organizational hypocrisy: disjunctures or “decoupling” that emerge between stated values, plans, and operational practices within organizations. In education systems, this problem has been explicated, for example, by Mundy and Menashy (2014). In unwieldy organizations, there is always the danger of doublespeak too. In education systems, this problem has been demonstrated by, for instance, Yemini et al. (2014) in their study on curriculum policy in schools in Israel. But for all its discontents and dangers—and scholars in CIE should be aware of, point out and fight these—the system is, patently or latently, present and of significance where education takes place. It is the distinguishing feature of the field of CIE that it occupies itself with the system, with offering a system-wide portrayal and interpretation of education taking place. Eminent CIE scholars Bray and Jiang (2014) are against the employment of this term as a key concept in CIE. Against their problems with the term system and their desire to rid CIE of the term, can be pitted Easton’s (2014) problem of defining and delimiting the field when constructing a bibliography of comparative education literature: is all literature reporting on whatever aspect of education in a foreign country comparative education? Obviously not, and the argument presented in this chapter is that, for instance, an article on the curriculum of schools in a foreign country, or of any other element of education, will not qualify as CIE, but if the system and contextual perspectives are present in the publication it can qualify as CIE.

(Geographic) Levels of Education Systems While education systems are most salient at the national level and while national education systems have enjoyed the most attention from CIE scholars, education systems occur at various levels, nested in each other. Bray and Thomas’s (1995) much cited cube distinguishes between the following levels: level 1: world regions/ continents; level 2: countries; level 3: states/provinces; level 4: districts; level 5: schools; level 6: classrooms; and level 7: individuals. This chapter extends that classification and employs the following categories: world; super-continent; continent; supra-country; country; sub-country (i.e., state/province, city or category of the population of the country); institution; class; and individual (derived from Wolhuter (2008). While, with justification, CIE scholars have concentrated on the national level, there is a need to broaden their optic to include other levels as well (Wolhuter, 2008). To complicate matters even more, the above simplistic, Euclidean conceptualization of space appears to be more and more oversimplistic and outdated in the modern world. In the 1980s, Foucault (1980, 1986) and Lefebvre (1976, 1991) heralded the

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“spatial turn in the social sciences” (Larsen & Beech, 2014). They, first of all, criticize the privileging of time over space in the social sciences over the past centuries and plead for a reversal. In practicing social science, the idea of contiguous, linear space, of spatial blocks should be supplemented (supplanted may be too strong a word) by the conceptualization of space in terms of relationships, connections, and nodes. Larsen and Beech (2014) have belabored the implications of this new conceptualization of space for CIE in their article “Spatial theorizing in comparative and international education research.”

Education (systems) Contextually Intertwined and Transcendentally Anchored As these manifest themselves in the world, the next feature of education systems is that education systems do not exist in a vacuum, but are inextricably intertwined with societal contexts and are transcendentally anchored. The first, the societal contextual embeddedness of education systems, are well present in the consciousness of scholars of the field of CIE, as they occupy themselves with contextual shaping forces of education systems and the societal outcomes of education systems. This is evident from the well-known 1900 Guildford Lecture of Michael Sadler, and his oft-cited statement that “things outside the school matter more than things inside the school,” to the “factors and forces” phase in the historical development of the field, with exponents including the triumvirate or big three of the field: Isaac Kandel, Nicholas Hans, and Friedrich Schneider, right to contemporary times (see Heng & Song, 2021). Current examples include Turner’s (2019) publication explaining what comparative education is, Alexander (2001) investigating pedagogy from a comparative perspective, the publications of Columbia University comparativist Steiner-Khamsi (2006, 2016), and the recent BAICE Presidential Address by Crossley (2019). Even a feature on the education scene, such as multicultural education, is in its manifestation and conditions for success found to be very context-contingent (see Moland, 2015). On the transcendental anchor of education, scholars of the field have been rather oblivious or have willfully ignored this pivotal part of any education project. Given the UNESCO definition of education cited earlier as “deliberate activities involving some form of communication intended to bring about learning,” one can ask, as Biesta (2020) does, is any learning education? And is any knowledge acquisition education? Very few would answer these questions in the positive. Which begs the next question, namely what kind of knowledge or learning can qualify as education? The answer lies in what the respondent will regard as the objectives or goals or desired end result of education. And to take here the instinctive answer that comes into a comparativist’s mind, namely that these objectives are contextually contingent (and implying that the scholar dare not venture into any questioning or discussion), is no easy cop-out, as Epstein and Carroll (2005) remind the comparative education scholar that “if all values are relative, then cannibalism is a matter of taste” (p. 62). To this can be added any distasteful aberration: child pornography, homicide, slavery, human trafficking, etc.

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At times, scholars and publications in the field give cursory attention to the importance of education goals or aims. In his 2014 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Presidential Address, David Baker, for example, remarks that the globalized, institutionalized culture of schooling entails that schools are expected to attend to the personal, emotional, and cognitive development of the educand, in contrast to the more vocational aim of some time ago. In its seminal publication Learning for all, the World Bank (2011) mentions that education is or should not only be about the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is, literacy and numeracy) and vocational training, but in the twenty-first century social, communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills are invaluable for people to function well at home, in their communities, and at work as well. However, over the past forty years, CIE scholars have eschewed education’s aims. This may be related to a number of factors. The positivist turn of the field (which predates the past forty years by at least two decades), as the general turn of fields of education scholarship in the extra-Anglophone, continental parts of Western scholarship, are interested in “what is” only, rather than in “what should be,” and this may well be part of the explanation of the lack of attention to educational objectives. Likewise, the postmodern turn in the field from about 1990, with its anything goes and negation of the notion of one universal truth (Epstein & Caroll, 2005; Rust, 1995), is a force promoting this avoidance of educational aims in CIE scholarship. At the same time, care should be taken that a scholarly field of enquiry such as CIE, where freedom of investigation and openness to what the empirical reveals, should not degenerate into a preaching of a particular dogma. In view of what has been stated in this chapter, a case can be made for the inclusion of educational aims in a full, complete accommodation of the “education” part in a new, re-assembled CIE. Schema, such as the three global commons of Carlos Torres (according to Torres, 2015, the three interests that all human beings share, namely that all have one planet, that all desire peace, and that all have a right to pursue life, prosperity, and happiness), the creed of human rights (Human Rights Education, as summarized by the United Nations, 2011, as education about human rights, education through human rights, and education for human rights), capabilities theory and the ideas of social justice—or synthesis of some of these, or if possible a united field theory of all these—may well provide a basis for a discussion about educational aims in CIE. In a recently published article on the prospects of the field, where a selection of eminent CIE scholars table their thoughts on the prospects of the field in a post-Covid-19 world, Oleksiyenko et al. (2021) write about the spiritual aims of education, and the role of CIE in realizing them.

The Indeterminacy of Education Another feature of the education operation is that any attempt to re-assemble CIE should take account of the indeterminacy of education. This feature has been explained by education philosopher Biesta (2020). In the act of education, at least two actors are involved (educator and educand), each with its own freedom of choice, own volition, and own agency. On top of the infinite complexity and myriad of forms each education system and societal context can take on, which already makes impossible

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the formulation of universally valid laws (sought by at least the positivist school in the field) regarding education system-society, the open possibility of educand and educator adds another indeterminate factor in the equation. Despite the widely proclaimed, virtually undisputed dictum that the current age is one where the economy is driven by highly- and well-educated human resources, Kamens (2015), for example, has done an extensive statistical exercise, calculating the correlation between countries’ student achievement scores in national test series (TIMSS and PISA) on the one hand and, on the other hand, growth in per capita gross domestic product. For the period 1960 to 1990 he found a weak overall correlation of 0.15, and for the period 1990 to 2012 no correlation. There are too many other mitigating contextual factors (such as economic policy environment, for example) affecting the interrelationship between the two at the national level. And to drill down to the individual level is even more complicated as individual variations then also come into play.

The Dual Meaning of Education When reassembling the field of CIE, care should also be taken to acknowledge the dual meaning of the term education. While “education” refers to an act or operation, as defined earlier, the term also refers to a field of scholarship or, more exactly, a set of cognate fields of scholarship. In this respect, the English word illustrates the point better than many other languages, where there are two different words for the act of education and the field(s) of scholarship. Although CIE faculty are mostly located within Schools or Faculties of Education worldwide, and despite the fact that many scholars publishing in CIE journals are from these cognate fields (such as sociology of education, education administration, education leadership, philosophy of education, or educational psychology), the interrelationship between CIE, on the one hand, and these cognates fields of education, on the other, have never been explicitly explicated by CIE scholars. Emile Durkheim, considered the founder of sociology as a scholarly field, calls comparisons between societies, and learning from the experiences of other nations, as indirect experimentation (Li, 2017), and one value or significance of the field of CIE lies in revealing the objects of study of these cognate fields, in various contexts. With regard to the philosophy of education, for example, from the scholarly labor of CIE, the manifestations, implications, and track records of various philosophies of education as these appear and have appeared in diverse contexts can be made known.

Comparative Education: Dual Nature of a Field as Well as a Method As in physics, it is taught that light has a dual nature, that of matter (particles) as well as that of waves, comparative education has a dual nature as well. It is both an object of study (as was explicated earlier), but it is also a method. In an age when graduate education programs, and even when in initial teacher education programs, more and more value is placed on research training, in a recently published volume on the teaching of CIE, Crossley (2016) rightfully pointed out the value of the field in teaching students the comparative method of research. Also, in an age where ethical

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clearance is becoming ever more difficult in carrying out any empirical research (be it experimenting, measurement, or even pure survey research involving questionnaires, focus group discussions, or interviews), the value of the comparative method, in the sense of investigating the comparative experiences or track record of education systems, is becoming correspondingly more valuable. As Tilly (1984) writes on comparing complicated structures, the aim is to reconstruct the different configurations of both societal contexts and education systems, which will make possible the analysis and identification of the ways in which the different components are shaped and are interrelated. An interesting extension of this line of thought is in Chen’s (2010) book Asia as method, in which the author explores the idea of Asia as discursive strategy, using the context of Asia as a referential framework in Asian studies, countering Western hegemony in such scholarship, where the Western world is taken as referential framework. In a re-assembling of the field of CIE, therefore, comparative education as a method should be duly articulated.

Conclusion CIE has rightfully been typified as an ever-expanding field. While the “comparative” and “international” parts of its name have been the subject of much discussion (and controversy), the “education” component has escaped serious attention by scholars in the field. Despite the impressive growth (as measured in, for example, the volume of publications) and expansion (in terms of, for example, research foci) of CIE scholarship, the exploration of the “education” part offered in this chapter has revealed firstly new vistas beckoning that should be occupied and, secondly, a number of parameters that should be acknowledged in a new conceptualization and assembly of the field almost one-quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. These pertain to the broadening of the field from its focus on the formal mode of education to other modes of education as well; a broadening from its focus on the national level to both larger and smaller geographical levels; a greater awareness of the education system (as well as the discontents or potential discontents of that system); a positive recognition of the axiological superstructure of education; a recognition of the field as being part of a family of fields of education scholarship; and recognizing that comparative and international education encompasses both a field with a distinct object of study and a particular method.

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Larsen, M. & Beech, J. (2014). Spatial theorizing in comparative and international education research. Comparative Education Review, 58(2), 191–214. Lefebvre, H. (1976). Reflections on the politics of space. Antipodes, 8, 30–7. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Li, Y. (2017). International education comparison: An intellectual tradition and its contemporary considerations. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(6), 955–63. Manzon, M. (2011). Comparative education: The construction of a field. Springer. Moland, N.A. (2015). Can multiculturalism be exported? Dilemmas of diversity on Nigeria’s sesame square. Comparative Education Review, 59(1), 1–23. Mundy, K. & Menashy, F. (2014). The World Bank and private provision of schooling: A look through the lens of sociological theories of organizational hypocrisy. Comparative Education Review, 58(1), 401–27. Nordtveit, B.H. (2016). Trends in comparative and international education: Perspectives from the comparative education Review. Annual review of comparative and international education. http://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920160000030001 Oleksiyenko, A., Blanco, G., Hayhoe, R., Jackson, L., Lee, J., Metcalfe, A., Sivasubramaniam, M. & Zha, Q. (2020). Comparative and international higher education in a new key? Thoughts on the post-pandemic prospects of scholarship. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. http://doi.org/10.1080 /03057925.2020.1838121 Phillips, D.P. & Schweisfurth, M. (2014). Comparative and international education: An introduction to theory, method and practice (2nd edition). Bloomsbury. Pressman, J. & Wildavsky, A. (1984). Implementation: How great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oaklands, third edition. University of California Press. Rust, V.D. (1996). From modern to postmodern ways of seeing social and educational change. In R.G. Paulston (Ed.), Social Cartography: mapping ways of seeing social and educational change. Garland. ­Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2006). The economics of policy borrowing and lending: A study of late adopters. Oxford Review of Education, 32(5), 665–78. http://doi. org/10.1080/03054980600976353. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2016). New directions in policy borrowing research. Asia Pacific Education Review, 17(3), 381–90. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-016-9442-9. Strohmaier, L. (2014). Mode 3 knowledge production, or the difference between a blog post and a scientific article. https://mstrohm.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/mode-3knowledge-production-or-the-differences-between-a-blog-post-and-a-scientificarticle/ Steyn H., Van der Walt, H. & Wolhuter, C. (2015). A generic model of “the” education system for the purposes of making critical comparisons of policy. Croatian Journal of Education, 17(4), 1131–58. Steyn, H.J. & Wolhuter, C.C. (2021). The education system and compelling societal trends of the early twenty-first century. In C.C. Wolhuter & H.J. Steyn (Eds.), World Education Systems Entering the Twenty-First Century (pp. 3–24). Keurkopie. The Free Dictionary. (2021–1). Bildung. https://de.thefreedictionary.com/Bildung The Free Dictionary. (2021–2). Erziehung. https://de.thefreedictionary.com/erziehung Thomsen, J.P., Munk, M.D., Eiberg-Madsen, M. & Hansen, G.I. (2013). The educational strategies of Danish university students from professional and working-class backgrounds. Comparative Education Review, 57(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/670806 Tilly, C. (1984). Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons. Russell.

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Torres, C.A. (2015). Neoliberalism, globalization agendas and banking educational policy (Paper prepared for a keynote at the University of British Columbia Research Week, May 12). http://yre-dev.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2015/04/Dr-Carlos-A-Torres-Power-PointPresentation.pdf Turner, D.A. (2019). What is comparative education? In A.W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education. 2018 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 37) (pp. 99–114). Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920190000037011 UNESCO. (2011). ISCED: International standard classification of education. http://uis. unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/international-standardclassification-ofeducation-isced-2011-en.pdf United Nations. (2011). United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/715039?ln=en. Wilson, D.N. (1994). Comparative and international education: Fraternal or Siamese twins: A preliminary genealogy of our twin fields. Comparative Education Review, 38, 449–86. Wolhuter, C.C. (2008). Review of the review: Constructing the identity of comparative education. Research in Comparative and International Education, 3(4), 323–44. Wolhuter, C.C. (2021). Comparative and international education: Historical evolution, present state and future scope of the field. In C.C. Wolhuter & L. Jacobs (Eds.), Reflecting about education systems from an African perspective (pp. 1–20). Keurkopie. Wolhuter, C.C. & Wiseman, A.W. (2019). Comparative and international education: Survey of an infinite field. Emerald. World Bank. (2011). Learning for all: Investing in people’s skills and knowledge to promote development. The World Bank. Yemini, M., Bar-Nissan, H. & Shavit, Y. (2014). Cosmopolitanism versus nationalism in Israeli education. Comparative Education Review, 58(4), 708–25.

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An Actor-Network Theory Approach to Comparative and International Education: The Politics of a Flat Ontology Paolo Landri and Radhika Gorur

Introduction What does it mean to do research in comparative education? What are the “matters of concern” in the field, and what philosophical and methodological resources have been brought to bear to understand education systems comparatively? What are the issues that define this moment in history, and how might comparative education respond usefully? The field of comparative and international education (CIE) has been pondering these issues for several decades. Very early on, there was a desire to make the study of education systems “scientific.” Nicholas Hans, himself a key figure in comparative education, credits Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris with developing “the first comprehensive scheme of comparative study of educational systems” in 1817 (Hans, 2011, p. 1). de Paris’s scheme involved each nation developing tables of data that would enable them to compare themselves with other nations to adapt and modify their own systems as relevant. His scientific and analytical approach is described as follows: education, as other sciences, is based on facts and observations, which should be ranged in analytical tables, easily compared, in order to deduce principles and definite rules. Education should become a positive science instead of being ruled by narrow and limited opinions, by whims and arbitrary decisions of administrators, to be turned away from the direct line which it should follow, either by the prejudice of a blind routine or by the spirit of some system and innovation. (Rosello, 1943, as cited in Hans, 2011, p. 1)

But the lack of standardization, so essential for comparison, was a major barrier. For decades, all that was possible was the juxtaposition of descriptive accounts of education systems in different nations, and these abounded. Hans (2011) details a range of individuals and publications from the early 1800s and into the early 1900s that undertook such efforts, including: John Griscom’s A year in Europe describing

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European education systems; Horace Mann’s 1843 Seventh Report, also on European systems, which focused on school organization and instruction methods, and included an assessment of educational values; Henry Barnard’s initiative, The American journal of education; The special reports on educational subjects edited by Michael Sadler; and various encyclopedias and Yearbooks that characterized this period. Hans (2011) argues that the main purpose of these comparisons was to explore what could be usefully learned to inform reforms in the United States. Absent in these accounts, argues Hans (2011), was any significant account of the “principles underlying the development of national systems” (p. 2). Kandel’s (1933) Studies in comparative education foreshadowed what was to follow once standardization became possible. He predicted that statistical standardization might permit comparisons of a range of factors, such as expenditure on education, number of school buildings, enrollment, and attendance details, as well as of ostensible effects of education, such as national welfare and progress, which would include statistics of illiteracy, wealth, crime, poverty, etc. Kandel anticipated that perhaps even a comparative study of education quality would eventually become possible (Hans, 2011). Absent from these instruments of measurement, Kandel took account of the socio-political and cultural aspects as determinants of the national character of education systems and argued that the comparative approach demands first an appreciation of the intangible, impalpable spiritual and cultural forces which underlie an educational system; the factors and forces outside the school matter even more than what goes on inside it. (Kandel, 1933, p. xix)

The idea that a range of issues outside schools matter to education systems was also echoed in early attempts in Europe to produce descriptive comparative accounts. For example, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) compiled data on “the principal manifestations of intellectual life in different countries” (Smyth, 2008, p. 8) that included research institutes, museums, historic monuments, theatres, cinema, publishing houses, etc. Later, the International Bureau of Education (IBE)  surveys included issues such as school administration and teacher education (Gorur, 2018). It was with the development of post-war global institutions such as the UN and its various bodies, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that interest in large-scale comparisons and mapping began to truly take off. To better plan and monitor mass education programs in nations it dubbed as “underdeveloped,” UNESCO established a statistical office in 1950 and tasked it with developing a database of available national statistics, and to devise ways to standardize data across nations. These efforts yielded the World handbook of educational organization and statistics and progress of literacy in various countries in the early 1950s. Standardized definitions for terms such as “student,” “teacher,” “school,” and “class” were developed. A couple of decades later, the International Standards Classification of Education (ISCED), which created standardized categories for different levels of education, was finally developed and accepted in 1978 at the UNESCO General Assembly.

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Today, almost all nations of the world have adopted ISCED, and they routinely collect data on the basis of this artificial grid that serves to tame the diversity of school systems globally (Gorur, 2018). These standardized statistics articulate across a range of other data, such as labor, health, and nutrition data, to enable complex correlations and calculations. This has been accompanied by the rise of comparative performance measures through international surveys, such as Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) and Program for International Student Assessments (PISA), which now also report on the quality of education. Moreover, a variety of systems rank universities and use GDP, employment data, etc., to compare nations’ education systems. This abundance of data is combined now with the ease of access—large education databases can be accessed easily from a computer or mobile phone from any part of the world. Comparative data generated by UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS) and Global Education Monitoring’s (GEM) reports presenting data on progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, as well as national data of most nations, are freely available. The generation of a large amount of data has also enabled large programs such as Education for All, the Millennium Development Goals, and now the Sustainable Development Goals to imagine global campaigns of reform with detailed, standardized data to monitor progress in detail. Digitization and a range of software to aid analysis have made all manner of analyses possible. The incredible advances in the generation of education data have provided a huge impetus to statistical forms of comparison, which are now widely used by development agencies and national and provincial governments. The partial legibility provided by the increasingly large volumes of data has significantly influenced education systems’ policy and administration (Gorur, 2016). These developments in education have occurred in parallel with the rise of datafication, the popularity of evidence-based policy, the spread of neo-liberalism, and the uptake of new public management approaches in many parts of the world, fueled by, and fueling, globalization. However, the rise of large-scale, comparative, statistical data has not necessarily enriched comparisons of education systems. On the contrary, scholars have argued that comparison, and indeed education itself, have narrowed in the wake of statistical comparisons and statistics-informed practices. Large-scale data inevitably involves a loss of rich contextual understandings (Gorur, 2016; Scott, 1998). The social, political, cultural, and economic factors that make up the fabric of societies, and which give meaning to data, are absent in these accounts. Even though the performative nature of data has meant that in many ways the world itself is beginning to imitate the flatness of the statistical accounts of the world (Gorur, 2016; Scott, 1998), vernacular granularity continues to matter, and it continues to elude these measures. At the same time, a division appears to be deepening between two types of studies. On the one hand, there are those engaged in comparative education from a macro perspective using large-scale data and theories and methodologies drawn from economics and statistics. Such technical studies are critiqued for their reductionism, structural determinism and the eliding of context—in other words, they ignore the social. On the other hand, we have those engaged in ethnographic studies of local

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situations which are deeply contextualized and focused on the social—but these studies often fail to consider macro influences and to account adequately for either the durability of situations or for change. In this chapter, we argue that the post-foundational Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its concept of “assemblage” offers a socio-technical approach that carries the promise of advancing the field of CIE. Developing fine-grained investigations of the circuits of knowledge and expertise in the worlds of education, ANT studies draw attention to the delicate balance of the mechanisms of the ordering of these fields, where unfinished (re)assemblages of educational knowledge unfold (Landri, 2012). ANT’s potential contribution is twofold: (1) it enables the illustration of the conditions of production of comparative and international education, and notably, the mechanisms of fabrication of spaces of commensurability at the global and regional levels that are so influential in the current regimes of accountability in education, and (2) it helps to rethink the question of context that is a recurring and unsettled issue in comparative research, one that is reprised now and again in the present era of datafication of education. Of course, like any theory, ANT presents not only gains but also limitations that are important to consider. Various debates and criticisms have led to updates of its vocabulary that have been captured in terms of new turns (like After ANT, Near ANT), enriching already lively discussions and inspiring further investigations. The chapter will address the ongoing developments of ANT research by illustrating the fruitfulness of moving near ANT to engage more explicitly with the theory of assemblage (Blok, Farias, & Roberts, 2020). This engagement may help consider the affective dimension that appears poorly developed in the original ANT vocabulary (Thrift, 2007). The chapter will illustrate how moving near ANT would expand the empirical possibilities of ANT and enrich the research on actor-networks in comparative education that often ends with an impoverished and flat rendering of human and non-human relations. In the next section, we explore some of the key epistemological, empirical, and ontological debates within comparative education. Following that, we explore how ANT can address these issues and resolve many of the dissatisfactions that have been emphasized by scholars in the field.

Key Theoretical and Methodological Debates The relationship between education and society has long been emphasized. Especially in the post-war reconstruction era, and later, following the independence from colonial rule of several nations in the 1960s, education was seen as the critical strategy for improving society’s economic, social, political, and cultural aspects. Indeed, education became the answer to every kind of social ill. Today this narrative is continued with the Sustainable Development Goals, which sees attaining SDG 4, the education goal, as central to the attainment of all the other SDGs, from eradicating poverty globally to building a sustainable planet. But this relationship is not one way—it is also

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recognized that education systems are affected by the political, economic, social, and cultural milieu in which they operate—often resulting in the perpetuation of social stratification through differences in the opportunities afforded, the resources available and the privilege accorded to different groups. It is clear, then, that studying and comparing education systems requires understanding the “social contexts” of these education systems. Accordingly, providing an account of an education system entails not just information about the system itself, but also of the society in which that system operates (Cowen, 2018). As Kandel (1933) has explained the comparative study of education must be founded on an analysis of the social and political ideas which the school reflects, for the school epitomizes these for transmission and for progress. In order to understand, appreciate and evaluate the real meaning of education system of a nation, it is essential to know something of its history and traditions, of the forces and attitudes governing its social organizations, of the political and economic conditions that determine its development. (p. xix)

One of the most important criticisms of large-scale surveys such as PISA is that it fails to provide adequate information about the “social context”—and this can lead to erroneous conclusions. Reporting on Korea’s expenditure on education, for example, without including information about the enormous amounts parents spend on private tutoring outside of the school system, the shame associated with not excelling in education, the rock-star status of some private tutors, and a raft of other historical, economic, cultural, and social details, provides a highly distorted account of the Korean system. Moreover, it is not enough for a comparative account to provide a description of the “context” and a description of the “education system”—it needs to explain the relationship between the two (Cowen, 2018). Understanding this relationship is not a trivial matter—especially since these relationships are not uniform even within a nation or province, and many of the ways in which these relationships are effected are inscribed into a range of taken-for-granted practices. Turner (2019) makes a related argument. He posits that comparative education deals with such a range of issues that scholars necessarily must connect the micro to the macro—for example, linking what happens in a school to policymaking. However, he finds that different approaches tend to over determine the macro or the micro, and that studies that bring the macro and the micro together are rare. In his view, most empirical research is focused on microlevel ethnographies of classrooms or the practices of specific institutions, without attention to the macro contexts in which these institutions operate, while macro studies fail to explain how micro-level practices produce, support, or challenge macro power structures. Moreover, these relationships are not static—they are constantly formed and reformed (Cowen, 2009). Europeanization, for example, created major shifts in the way higher education operated in Europe. More broadly, globalization and the spread

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of neoliberal approaches to governance have been shifting global geopolitics in significant ways, placing new pressures on education systems as well as societies. Even before the intensification of globalization that we have witnessed over the last thirty or forty years, comparative education scholars have also been interested in how ideas and practices in education policy, governance, curriculum, assessment, the structure of the system, etc., traveled. How and under what circumstances do policies come to be “borrowed” and “lent”? What are the power dynamics that provoke these borrowings and lendings? Which societies get to serve as “reference societies” to which others might aspire? What are the politics of such relations? More recently, the notion of “best practices” has taken hold—mostly based on context-light if not context-free measurements of performance. comparative education scholars must also account for how ideas come to be assembled as ideal or desirable in disparate contexts. The requirements of providing a relational account of education systems and the society in which these systems operate, as well as account for the emergent and shifting nature of these dynamics pose theoretical, methodological, and analytical challenges to scholars in the field. Reflecting on the deeply negative influence of such simplistic comparisons offered by large-scale comparative exercises such as OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Turner (2019) argues we need to recognize and analyze two important connections between the micro and the macro. We need to recognize that individuals’ choices will be shaped and restricted by their background, their experiences, and the resources they can control, while never being fully determined by those background elements … At the same time, we need to recognize that those individual actions and choices are actually what construct social structures—institutions, classes, nations and so on—but not in the way that means that social structures are merely the sum of individual actions. (pp. 25–6)

Here, Turner (2019) appears to be arguing for a social theory which recognizes that individuals and societies compose each other—or, as ANT scholars would say, that actors and their networks are relationally co-produced. Every individual embodies and is composed of the society which shapes him or her. At the same time, society is composed of individuals who shape society. As we elaborate in the next section, the assemblage approach of Actor-Network Theory rises to the ontological and methodological challenges posed by comparative education.

The Imaginary of the Social in Assemblage Thinking In Reassembling the social, Bruno Latour provocatively reprises Margaret Thatcher’s statement that “society does not exist” (Latour, 2005). While he is not an advocate of the neo-liberal agenda and does not share the related reductionist social imaginary,

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Latour (2005) nevertheless concurs with many ANT researchers on the need to trouble our assumptions and knowledge about “the social” and “society.” What is the imaginary of the social in ANT? Is there, in this complex intellectual enterprise, an overall idea about society? What is the position of the social sciences as it relates to “the social” and to “society”? In seeking answers to these questions, it is useful to remind ourselves that ANT originated in the development of the social studies of science and technology. During the 1970s, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) illustrated how the sciences related to societies, how scientific knowledge was related to the contexts of its production, and how social explanations of science could be offered. These new understandings argued that the vocabularies of the social sciences would enrich the understanding of the dynamics of science and technology, by relating these dynamics to issues of ideologies, professions, organizations, social classes, etc. This “test” of the studies of science and technology appeared quite challenging for both the scientists in science and technology, as well as the scientists in the social sciences. And although these perspectives challenged the orthodoxies of both science and social science, they were not completely satisfactory, according to the emergent ANT scholars, since it left untouched the coordinates of social theory, notably, the notion of “the social,” and more generally the idea of “society.” Moreover, SSK attributed to social sciences an untenable privilege over the other sciences. To counter these shortcomings and to provoke a more complex understanding of the social, ANT scholars assumed a “flat ontology” which adopted an analytical symmetry that treated, initially, all objects in the same way. ANT resisted defining objects in advance as if their differences could be related to different ontologies (Harman, 2018). The principle of “flat ontology” is a way out of modernistic thinking (shared by Descartes and until today by modern thinkers), which is predicated on the division between human thought and everything else. A flat ontology implied the generalization of the principle of symmetry, already proposed by Bloor (1991), and it predictably raised heated discussion and harsh debate. The extension of the notion of flat ontology to the rejection of all binaries (human-non-human, nature-society, big-small, etc.) was seen as a backward step by the proponents of SSK: as a return of technological determinism (Callon & Latour, 2010; Collins & Yearley, 2010). Further, it was seen as a dead end without a clear epistemological direction; as an exercise that merely sought to gain visibility and prestige in the scientific field. This interpretation, however, was quite limited. In generalizing the principle of symmetry, ANT scholars encourage the social sciences to reconsider their adherence to the nature/culture divide, arguing that this divide, and the taken-for-granted idea of “society” in the dominant model of “science,” is the basis of the modernizing project. ANT’s “flat ontology” pushes social theory to move beyond its modernistic root to: (1) conceive of the social as an association; (2) challenge the configuration of the social as a container; and (3) consider the performativity of the social sciences. In so doing, it departs from a tradition that treats the social as a substance—that is, as a separate realm from other domains (economic, juridical, biological, etc.). Likewise, it moves from an epistemological position whereby the social can be a factor of explanation of something else. Instead, it adds

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to a tradition in social science (Garfinkel, 2002; Tarde, 2010) that underlines that the social is a process that is continuous accomplishment. Rather than a metaphenomenon that can act as an explanation for other phenomena, “the social” itself is regarded as something that needs explaining. This set of ontological and epistemological commitments has a set of entailments for the empirical and for the consideration of issues in CIE, which we elaborate below.

The Social as Association In ANT, the social is not a substance; it is, rather, an association: an effect of a continuing assemblage among heterogeneous elements. Although some other contemporary social theories also no longer limit “the social” to humans-to-humans relationships, ANT gives a proper place to non-humans in shaping, influencing, and conditioning the fabrication of contemporary societies. In the classic sociological accounts, objects, technologies, etc., are present, but they play a marginal role: they are treated as tools, or considered as an undifferentiated background for action, or treated as mere intermediaries. Analysis is dominated by an anthropocentric hierarchy, where humans are above the non-humans. In contrast, in ANT, the capacity to act is distributed. Objects can be full-blown actors, that is, they are no longer mere intermediaries, but can be mediators. Once the action does not depend on a single human, or on the force of a non-human, i.e., when action is redistributed, the social appears hybrid and reticular. This distributed nature of agency that makes up “the social” has been demonstrated in a range of studies, including the investigation on the scallops, the fishermen, and the researchers in St. Brieuc Bay (Callon, 1984); the historical inquiry on Portuguese vessels (Law, 1989); the research on Pasteur (Latour, 1993); and so on. These studies have described the social as a contingent network between many disparate items, like people, technologies, scallops, vessels, winds, navigation tools, etc. They have underlined, at the same, the reticular character of the entities composing an assemblage, where these entities themselves are stabilized as hybrid “actor-networks.” In Turner’s (2019) discussions about the relationship between individual agency and the power of structures, a question that is not raised is how—through what practices—individuals and structures influence each other. In all the discussion about the theoretical influences in the field and the inadequacy of the theories to explain the empirical, the issue of the power of non-humans does not come up at all. But ANT’s view of the social has stimulated many investigations to describe the “missing masses” (Latour, 1992) of education and to pay attention the dynamics of innovation in educational policy and practice. They have underlined how education is not just limited to human-human relationships, but includes assemblages of people, things, and technologies. In her research on educational assessment in Russia, Piattoeva (2016) describes how a video surveillance technology became a fundamental actor in the standardized testing for admission to tertiary education. Since its introduction in 2009, data from the test called USE were considered unreliable. A regime of high-stakes accountability for regional administration of education in Russia led to the systematic distortion of

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the outcomes. Wider investment in video-surveillance and policy recommendations for using it in the examination halls, storerooms, and test development and evaluation venues led to the consideration of video technology an essential actor for guaranteeing the objectivity of the test. At the same time, it spread dynamics of mistrust among the actors involved in this educational assessment. The study described the enacted network and the increasing involvement of new commercial partners needed for the workings of video surveillance. In his work on the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), O’Keeffe (2016) focuses on Blaise, a software and a computing language that has the task of selecting test respondents. Here, Blaise is considered more reliable than humans in the task as it follows more strictly the envisaged rule. Blaise performs other tasks as well, such as sending reminders to the interviewers and checking the respondents so that he/she can be on track. In so doing, Blaise is delegated the task of assuring compliance to the rule and high-quality gathering of information. ANT has enabled a better understanding of the complex socio-materiality of learning, teaching, and leading in schools. These practices unfold in specially equipped places and draw on many non-human mediators. Interaction in education would not last long without the agency of non-humans. Some occasions, such as the dramatic lockdowns and social distancing prompted by Covid-19, have permitted the development of forms of “emergency education.” Where video conferencing systems, educational platforms, broadband connections, etc., are available, the continuity of schooling was maintained to a large extent. However, in low-income nations where even electricity cannot be taken for granted, schooling has been severely affected. For example, in Kenya, the government simply canceled the entire school year in 2020 when it was unable to carry on schooling safely or through remote means. The acceleration of digitalization has given further impulse to complex rethinking of the form of the schooling and the working activities of teachers and headteachers. Notably, the work of giving directions school administration is becoming a paperdigital-human assemblage (Grimaldi, Landri, & Taglietti, 2021). Governments are also adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help with governing. In India, AI is being used to determine which students should get study loans, scholarships, and so on. In stressing the importance of the objects and technology, ANT does not fall into the trap of technological determinism. Neither does it support transhumanist scenarios, welcoming dystopian education futures. Rather, it suggests that attention is paid to the delicate and fragile processes of assembling. In focusing on the multiplicity of agencies, ANT warns that the social is an ongoing accomplishment. It does not deny the asymmetries, the inequalities, the mechanisms of domination and power in education: it directs attention to the practical means to achieve them without attributing any a priori causality. It is, then, an invitation to appreciate the surprise of the educational agency. In CIE, “resources” are traditionally accounted for in terms of “input,” which include school buildings, textbooks, toys, and so on. However, the agency of these artifacts, and their mediating roles in combination with humans and other non-humans is not recognized. Early comparativists had recognized the value of factors outside schools and the social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of the “context.” However, the

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empirical examination of the role of non-humans in forging or challenging associations that make up the “social” would greatly enrich the narratives and descriptions in comparative education.

Beyond the Container Thinking Because the social is not a substance or a thing in ANT but an ongoing process, it is not pre-formatted. Usually, the standard sociological discourse starts with a given vocabulary, made of groups, classes, institutions, organizations, and society. Social explanations are composed by statements in which social facts are accounted for by social facts, as suggested by Durkheim. This methodological principle draws on the presuppositions of a given geographical configuration of the social that is the stage on which social dynamics are enacted. While it would be silly to discard this vocabulary, ANT suggests that researchers should not assume the role of legislators by fixing once and for all what are the building blocks and the landscape of society. In a more philosophical way, an ostensive definition that underlines the stability of the social is discarded, and a performative definition is taken, stressing the movement, the processual, and the emergent character of the social. By following a performative definition, the micro-macro, global-local divisions are troubled and not assumed a priori. The nested scale configuration, in which wider classification (macro, global, society, etc.) rules smaller scales (micro, local, community, etc.) is eschewed in ANT. The nested scale introduces an asymmetry between macro/global/society and micro/ local/community that, ANT suggests, should be carefully scrutinized. The sociological imagination is mostly constrained in a container metaphor so that societies are enclosed in nation-states, and the exercises of comparison are entrapped in comparisons between nation-states. In traditional accounts in comparative education, we have therefore a space made of regions with clear boundaries where those living in the same container share the same identity and the geography is aligned with a fixed Westphalian arrangement. ANT, here, proposes an enrichment of the sociological imagination of space. Scales are not differences in kind. “Global” and “local” are historical categories that emerge in the project of modernity. Rather than assume these to be explanations, the idea is to understand how they are made, and how their size and scale are achieved. In education policy, many ideas have become big things, like global metrics, standardized testing, new public management, global competencies that affect the curriculum policies of many countries, educational standards. In analyzing the machinery of PISA, for example, it is possible to understand how a global space of commensurability is fabricated (see, e.g., Gorur, 2014), how it reinforces national configurations (Gorur & Wu, 2015), and whether they have paved the way to complex post-national scenarios. Likewise, ANT invites us to escape from the possible nostalgia for the “local.” Micro scales are not more concrete than macro configurations. While the global should be localized, that is brought “down to earth,” according to ANT scholars, even the local

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should be the object of inquiry with the aim of understanding how it is generated. “Local interaction” is often carefully prepared in other spaces and times. What happens in a classroom would have been anticipated by the architect who designed the technical specifications of the school, or the university some years before and some miles away from the actual place of the local interaction, which may have influenced the curriculum, or the pedagogy enacted in that classroom. The work of the architect is still on the scene thanks to the presence of non-humans, like chairs, desks, corridors, walls, etc. that have been placed in a way that is likely aligned to the possible scripts of action. While these scripts, and the non-humans in this interplay, in no way determine the action, they nonetheless prepare the scene, and have a capacity to act and help accomplish educational objectives. To the inter-subjective relation between you and your students, one should add the inter-objectivity that has dislocated actions so much that someone else, from some other place and some other time, is still acting in it through indirect but fully traceable connections.’ (Latour, 2005, p. 196)

The notion of “inscription” that is invoked in ANT (whereby the possibility of action is baked into objects/structures), the notion of “translation” by which actors enroll each other into their agendas and programs of action, and the idea of “configuring the user” (Woolgar, 1991; see also Gorur & Dey, 2021) address the issues raised by Turner (2019) with regard to mutual influence that does not amount to determinism. The criticism of the standard configuration has led ANT to see social space topologically. Accordingly, space is not defined only in terms of Euclidian geometry but is seen as a relational formation that depends on other coordinates than metric distance and having many instantiations. In an often-quoted article by Mol and Law (1994), such spaces can include: regions (well-defined spaces surrounding separate identities), networks (connected elements), and flows (changing patterns with recognizable identities). This typology is a further contribution to the challenge posed to the dominant patterns of social space (global/local, etc.), and it acknowledges the presence of alternative spaces that exist alongside standard configurations. In proposing a departure from “context as container,” ANT addresses Turner’s (2019) proposal that the macro and the micro should be brought together in comparative education. Turner (2019) is skeptical of Archer’s (2000) chronological explanation in which she posits that first structural issues constrain the possibilities of human agency, and then human agency may influence structures. ANTs’ relational model of co-production, which requires ongoing maintenance and work, solves this issue. At the same time, “context” itself is redefined and becomes not an explanation for other phenomena, but part of the object of study. Moreover, ANT’s insistence on empirical work and its focus on studying the specific practices through which the “global” is locally performed addresses the call by Wolhuter and Wiseman (2019), which urges scholars in CIE to focus on practices and listen to the people on the ground.

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­The Performativity of Social Science The ANT imaginary of the social is not “negative,” as we hope is becoming clearer. It intends to foster the process of reassembling the social, not merely disassembling (or deconstructing) it (Latour, 2005). However, it is a bearer of a cautionary tale. Standard sociological accounts have often unintentionally shared modernistic preoccupations. They have silenced the voices of the actors under investigation, leading also to an incapacity to see the multiplicities of agencies, and ignoring, in particular, the role of non-humans. They have mostly agreed to a Kantian epistemology and imitated natural sciences for increasing their academic legitimacy. As a result, their knowledge aspires to a form of objectivity where there is a separation between the subject and the object of inquiry. In practice, there are many examples demonstrating that this division is false, and that the research we do is also implicated in adding to accounts and to bringing about new worlds. For instance, sociological vocabularies spread quite quickly, and some notions have become common sense. The verb “labeling” introduced to understand the process of marginalization in deviance theory has helped to design policymaking to avoid effects of stigmatization. Social sciences, therefore, are performative, they enact realities. They do not just describe; they help to bring into being what they discover. With other theories, ANT concludes there is no innocence in research. Social sciences help mostly to reproduce modernistic categories and tend to perform social space in a Euclidian mode (Law & Urry, 2004). The widely reported influence of large-scale assessments and standardized testing and comparisons illustrates this very starkly. Scholars have noted the extent of the influence of PISA, for example, on national policies. They have also noted how national, high stakes standardized testing results in the narrowing of the curriculum, “gaming the system,” and other practices. As Jasanoff (2004) argues, how we study the world and what kind of a world we want to live in are closely interlinked. In education research, Biesta (2010) has illustrated how the field is split between two cultures: (1) a technological approach that considers education in terms of causeeffect relationships; and (2) an interpretative approach that resists the cause-effect reasoning and proposes that we see education merely as a human communication relationship. These cultures place different expectations on education, and mirror diverse normative and political approaches. By acknowledging the performativity of social science, we may open the floor to considering the multiple enactments of educational research. While educational research may have different effects (conceptual, instrumental, and legitimizing), it is enacted through nonlinear complex assemblages with different effects (Landri, 2012). There is clearly a dominance of an approach via the theory of human capital and school effectiveness that privilege cause-effect relationships. Other more local projects develop with the liberty of performing other knowledges, intersecting with other educational realities. The idea of performativity helps researchers to become attentive to the realities enacted by social science. It feeds reflexivity on social research to constantly revise the theoretical and methodological apparatuses to make it more attuned to societal changes.

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It helps also to understand that the dominance of some vocabularies may lead to an impoverishment of the ecology of knowledge and of the worlds under scrutiny. In following this line of reasoning, some researchers closer to ANT have proposed a move from performativity to inventive methods. By developing intersections with art and design practices, a new way of representing and intervening in the social can be possible. Inventive methods imply an escape from the narrow cage of scientific experimentalism drawing on the creativity of social life. The critique of representationalism, here, is combined with an effort to engage with social life in a way that recognizes that there are no passive objects of knowledge to be controlled and manipulated (Marres, Gugghenheim, & Wilkie, 2018). Social science should then put aside the social engineering of communities, cities, and societies, and develop efforts to let creative collectives emerge. The focus on performativity in CIE enables us to raise moral and ethical questions about the consequences of instruments of comparison, including definition, measurement, classification, standardization, and so on. Making explicit the ontological or performative politics of such practices imbues both comparison, and the critique of comparison, with an ethical and moral purpose (Gorur, 2018).

Assemblage and Its Possibilities As detailed above, the notion of assemblage that is the basis of ANT, and more generally, the larger field of Science, Technology and Society (STS), offers key theoretical underpinnings to address some of the issues in comparative education—namely how to explain the relationship between the macro and the micro, how to understand the relationship between a phenomenon and its context, how to understand the dynamics of power in relation to individual agency and the structures within which individuals are caught up. By committing to a flat ontology, admitting non-humans into the social and giving them credit for their part in forging associations and holding them in place, and by recognizing the performativity of practices of comparison, the assemblage approach of ANT provides useful resources to address the issues raised by Turner, which we detailed above. While ANT offers these very useful resources to the field of CIE, it is also useful to consider some of the critiques of this theoretical approach. A key issue with ANT’s radical emergence (i.e., its argument that actors or networks do not precede the other but are co-produced) is that traditional sociological structures of power— race, class, gender, etc.—are not taken for granted as part of a pre-existing context. This has been criticized as a blind spot in ANT. However, the practice of delaying judgment on what influences whom and how, a tradition that is emphasized by Latour, means that stereotypical and ready-made explanations and presuppositions about how and to what extent these structures influence particular actors are avoided, and there is an opportunity to be surprised. Furthermore, an emphasis on practices means that the actual workings of how power is exerted emerges in ANT descriptions.

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A related criticism of ANT is that ANT does not make its politics explicit. This is not, in our view, a valid criticism, particularly as the ANT diaspora has feminist scholars, decolonial scholars, environmental scholars, and so on, whose politics are quite explicit. However, one of the key contributions of ANT is that it pays attention, through the empirical, to the performative politics of such practices as classification, standardization, etc., through which humankinds are produced (Hacking, 2007). The creation of the divide between a rational science on the one hand and an emotional politics on the other, for example, is seen as ontological politics enacted by the contemporary practices of science. ANT thus provides powerful descriptions of the production of power through mundane activities that are not necessarily located in parliaments, public arenas, or other designated seats of power. These make assemblage accounts rich and lively. Recent theorizing in CIE has floated the idea of “meta-assemblage” to denote how a range of different assemblages come together in the field of comparative education. However, to our thinking, the notion of meta-assemblage is antithetical to the flat ontology that is a key ontological commitment of assemblage thinking. “Meta” implies a hierarchy—a kind of super-layer that sits above the other assemblages. It is not clear in this theorization how an assemblage manages to gain the power to be a “metaassemblage” and how it maintains this power. The foundational idea of emergence and co-production are lost when the notion of “meta-assemblage” is introduced. Indeed, the juxtaposition of “meta” with “assemblage” produces an oxymoron. Two recent papers provide more detailed explanations of how the socio-technical approach of assemblage thinking in ANT and STS provide productive critique which can contribute to contemporary research in CIE. In their introduction to a Special Issue of Discourse called Politics by other means? STS and research in education, Gorur et al. (2019) explore how assemblage thinking can contribute to CIE. And in a Special Issue of Critical Studies in Education, Gorur (2017) argues that STS/ANT assemblage thinking leads us toward productive critique that seeks not merely to deconstruct, but build, not merely to subtract, but add. New, interesting directions of research are also developing “Near ANT” (Blok, Farias, & Roberts, 2020), where ANT is taken as a “companion” with other theories, like new materialisms, feminist studies, and post-structuralism, to confront significant issues concerning bodies, affects, and subjectivity. This move may help to understand how the dominant forms of CIE can be analyzed as affective assemblages, that is, as concatenations of desires. This would enable the exploration of whether such affective assemblages are fed by dreams of control or a logic of care for the complex and patient composition of the multitude of differences that make up the worlds of education. However, moving “Near ANT” involves a partial transgression of the politics of flat ontology, paving the way for a new trajectory of investigation (like in the new, more ecological work of Latour and in the use of the notion of “modes of existence”) where the criticism of the modern constitution can lead to new positive impulses for rethinking CIE. The field of CIE is highly reflexive, and there have been several histories that have outlined the emergence of ideas as well as their contributions to the field. Similarly, ANT scholars also produce handbooks and reflexive accounts which examine the key issues and dilemmas as well as the contributions and the possibilities afforded by

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this approach. It will be interesting to see what will be written about the contribution of ANT to comparative education in another ten or twenty years, especially as the field of education is increasingly digitized and as the non-humans engaged in the field become more pervasive, working invisibly in the background.

References Archer, M.S. (2000). Being human: The problem of agency. Cambridge University Press. Biesta, G. (2010). Pragmatism and the philosophical foundations of mixed methods research. In A. Tashakkori & C. Teddlie (Eds.), Sage handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research, 2nd ed. (pp. 95–118). Sage Publishing. Blok, A., Farias, I. & Roberts, C. (2020). The Routledge companion to actor-network theory. Routledge. Bloor, D. (1991). Knowledge and social imagery. University of Chicago Press. Callon, M. (1984). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review, 32(1_suppl), 196–233. Callon, M. & Latour, B. (2010). 12. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath school! A reply to Collins and Yearley. In A. Pickering (Ed.), Science as practice and culture (pp. 343–68). University of Chicago Press. Collins, H.M. & Yearley, S. (2010). Epistemological chicken. In A. Pickering (Ed.), Science as practice and culture (pp. 343–68). University of Chicago Press. Cowen, R. (2009). On history and on the creation of comparative education. In R. Cowen & A. M. Kazamias (Eds.), International handbook of comparative education (pp. 7–10). Springer. Cowen, R. (2018). Reflections on comparative education: Telling tales in honor of Andreas Kazamias. European Education, 50(2), 201–15. Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Gorur, R. (2014). Towards a sociology of measurement in education policy. European Educational Research Journal, 13(1), 58–72. Gorur, R. (2017). Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education. Critical Studies in Education, 58(3), 341–55. Gorur, R. (2018). Standards: normative, interpretative, and performative. In S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson & S.T. Popkewitz (Eds.), Education by the numbers and the making of society (pp. 92–109). Routledge. Gorur, R. & Dey, J. (2021). Making the user friendly: the ontological politics of digital data platforms. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 67–81. Gorur, R. & Wu, M. (2015). Leaning too far? PISA, policy and Australia’s “top five” ambitions. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 647–64. Gorur, R., Hamilton, M., Lundahl, C. & Sundström Sjödin, E. (2019). Politics by other means? STS and research in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1), 1–15. Grimaldi, E., Landri, P. & Taglietti, D. (2020). Una sociologia pubblica del digitale a scuola. Scuola Democratica. Hacking, I. (2007). Kinds of people: Moving targets. In Proceedings of the British Academy, volume 151, 2006 lectures (pp. 285–318). Oxford University Press.

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­Hans, N.A. (2011). Comparative education: A study of educational factors and traditions. Routledge. Harman, G. (2018). Object-oriented ontology: A new theory of everything. Penguin. Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of knowledge: The co-production of science and the social order. Routledge. Kandel, I.L. (1933). Studies in comparative education. Houghton and Mifflin. Landri, P. (2012). Multiple enactments of educational research. European Educational Research Journal, 11(1), 62–7. Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W.E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225–58). MIT Press. Latour, B. (1993). The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford University Press. Law, J. (1989). Technology and heterogeneous engineering: The case of the Portuguese expansion. In W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems. New directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 111–34). The MIT Press. Law, J. & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy and Society, 33(3), 390–410. Marres, N., Guggenheim, M. & Wilkie, A. (2018). Inventing the social. Mattering Press. Mol, A. & Law, J. (1994). Regions, networks and fluids: Anaemia and social topology, Social Studies of Science, 24(4), 641–71. O’Keeffe, C. (2016). Producing data through e-assessment: A trace ethnographic investigation into e-assessment events. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 99–116. Piattoeva, N. (2016). The imperative to protect data and the rise of surveillance cameras in administering national testing in Russia. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 82–98. Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press. Smyth, J.A. (2008). The origins of the international standard classification of education. Peabody Journal of Education, 83(1), 5–40. Taglietti, D., Landri, P. & Grimaldi, E. (2021). The big acceleration in digital education in Italy: The COVID-19 pandemic and the blended-school form. European Educational Research Journal, 20(4), 423–41. Tarde, G. (2010). Gabriel Tarde on communication and social influence: Selected papers. University of Chicago Press. Thrift, N. (2007). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge. Turner, D.A. (2019). What is comparative education? In A.W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2018 (pp. 99–114). Emerald Publishing Limited. Wolhuter, C.C. & Wiseman, A.W. (2019). Prelims. In C.C. Wolhuter & A.W. Wiseman (Eds.), Comparative and international education: Survey of an Infinite Field (pp. i–xxi). Emerald Publishing Limited. Woolgar, S. (1991). Beyond the citation debate: Towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy. Science and Public Policy, 18(5), 319–26.

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Melding Assemblage Theory and Critical Realism to Research Comparative and International Education: Toward an Interrogative Framework David Martyn and Conor Galvin

Introduction Assemblage theory/thinking has gained increasing interest among social scientists, including international education policy scholars, over the past two decades. There remains, however, a limited number of explorations on assemblage as methodological practice (Baker & McGuirk, 2017). At the same time, a small number of scholars are exploring the possibilities afforded by merging critical realism with assemblage theory (e.g., Decoteau, 2018; Little, 2016; Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019). This is driven by the belief that both areas, while having distinctive geneses, can be coherently brought together in ways that the strengths of one can help address the perceived weaknesses of the other. The merging of these two traditions offers intriguing possibilities for addressing the lacuna in methodological explications of assemblage theory, with particular regard to international education policy. We propose to meld the traditions of critical realism with assemblage theory to open up possibilities for real-world applications of what might be termed critical realist assemblage analysis of policy and policy work. This chapter will build on the foundations provided by Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019), who create a holistic ontology through critical realism’s focus on stable structures and assemblage theory’s focus on fluidity. They claim critical realism’s strong understanding of causation and assemblage theory’s focus on origins will help formulate both “causation stories” and “formation stories.” In the vein of Baker and McGuirk (2017), we provide some epistemological commitments that follow from such a merging. However, we introduce some alterations and extensions to Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) interpretation of assemblage theory, through recourse to the work of Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017). We provide a worked example of how this critical realist assemblage analysis can aid in research through application to the case of PISA for Development (PISA-D) in Cambodia and briefly explore implications for conceptualizing the wider field of comparative and international education (CIE). The chapter proceeds in the following manner. Firstly, it will provide a brief overview of both critical realism and assemblage theory. Secondly, Rutzou and

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Elder-Vass’s (2019) ontological melding of critical realism and assemblage theory will be explored. Thirdly, it will provide some critical alterations and extensions to their understanding of assemblage theory. Fourthly, we develop the idea that critical realist assemblage analysis embodies key epistemological commitments that can usefully be applied to an international education policy case study. This is presented as an interrogative framework, bringing together the concerns outlined above, which is applied to the case setting. Finally, building on the work of Salajan and jules (2020), we briefly provide two implications arising from our framework for CIE research and scholarship.

Assemblage Theory and Critical Realism This section will provide a brief overview of both assemblage theory and critical realism in order to act as a primer for the analysis that follows.

Assemblage Theory Assemblage theory is an analytical methodology developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, chiefly through their works Anti-Oedipus (1972/1983) and A thousand plateaus (1980/1987). They saw the development of a “general logic” of assemblages as a critical aspect of their work. It is a way of theorizing, conceptualizing, and analyzing the productive nature of social formations and entities and understanding how change occurs or how certain effects/situations are realized. Deleuze and Parnet (2007) offer the following definition of assemblage: It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns— different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances,  alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (p. 69)

Assemblages are commonly thought of as mobile, fluid, heterogeneous, contingent, shifting social forms. Nail (2017) informs us that assemblages share three features that define their structure: their abstract machine, their concrete assemblage, and their personae. The abstract machine is the conditioning set of relations that defines the assemblage. It plays a “piloting role” in setting out the conditions for how the components are arranged. The concrete assemblage is the elements that populate the assemblage, in relations set out by the abstract machine. They are forms of either material (content) or expression (Buchanan, 2021). The personae are autonomous rational subjects that are immanent to the assemblage. They bring the assemblage into being by connecting the abstract machine with the concrete assemblage (Nail, 2017).

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C ­ ritical Realism Critical realism was originally developed by Roy Bhaskar in his 1975 work, A realist theory of science. Bhaskar and others (including Archer, 1995; Collier, 1999; Hartwig, 2007; Norrie, 2010; Sayer, 1992, 2000) have since continued its development. Critical realism is, first and foremost, an ontology. It is often posited as a counterpoint to both positivism and relativism, where epistemology is primary (Bhaskar, 2016; Gorski, 2013). There are three main elements of critical realism: a realist ontology, an interpretivist or relativist epistemology, and judgmental rationality. In terms of ontology, it perceives reality as consisting of three strata: the empirical (that which we can observe and sense), the actual (objects and events that exist but are often outside of our perceptions or knowledge), and the real (the deepest lying structures and causal mechanisms that generate the preceding two) (Tikly, 2015). Therefore, there is depth to the ontology; it is not flat. Because of the prioritization of ontology, critical realism entails a degree of separation between ontology on the one hand and epistemology and interpretation on the other (Archer et al., 2016). In relation to epistemology, critical realism places importance on realizing that knowledge is dependent on various factors, including context, concept, and activity (Archer et al., 2016). Therefore, epistemological relativism is “the handmaiden of ontological realism” (Bhaskar, 2008, p.  241). The degree of separation means that a functional relationship between ontology and epistemology is necessary (Parker et al., 2003). This means critical realist scholars are generally not prescriptive in how knowledge is produced and place emphasis on methodological pluralism tailored to the context of the research at hand. Critical realism entails a form of judgmental rationality: a way to distinguish between the reliability of different accounts of the world based on how they are produced, thus being able to decide that one is more powerful than another (Moore, 2013). It also helps to avoid the conflating of what is known with who knows, a pitfall that relativist, interpretivist approaches can fall into (Moore, 2013). Ackroyd and Karlsson (2014) note that the aim of critical realist research is to shed light on formative processes that cause particular outcomes. The following section provides an overview of Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) attempt to marry critical realism with assemblage theory at the ontological level.

Formation and Causation Stories: Rutzou and Elder-Vass We focus on Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) article as it provides a sustained and thorough analysis of how critical realism and assemblage theory can be hybridized. They situate their analysis in the tension between process-focused and objectfocused ontologies. They see assemblage theory as a process-focused ontology, driven by “the problematic of origins, which forefront explanations of how things come to be the way they are” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, p. 402). Critical realism, on the other hand, “is a structure-oriented ontology driven by the problematic of causal powers, which forefronts explanations of how things have the capacity to influence the world” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, p. 402, emphasis in original). Despite these differences, they emphasize some important points of conjunction: both philosophies are concerned with the empirical analysis of actual situations; they are both focused

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on the interaction of elements to produce a certain outcome; they both reject causal laws; they both place emphasis on a “dialectical” and “relational” approach to social ontology; and they are both concerned with the examination of open systems. They see the most signal point of departure between the two approaches as the issue of how structures should be explained and understood. For them, assemblage theory sees structures as fluid and heterogeneous compositions that are characterized by “an unstable set of interior and exterior relations between parts and wholes” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, pp. 405–6). Critical realism emphasizes the stability and durability of social structure and sees the process as secondary. They see assemblage theory as being about “formation stories,” while critical realism is concerned with “causation stories” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, p. 411). How do they deal with the aforementioned task of hybridizing these disparate approaches? This is mainly achieved through recourse to the work of DeLanda (2006, 2016) with some critical realist inspired alterations. DeLanda is one of the most prominent current assemblage theorists. He consciously positions his work as a development of Deleuze and Guattari’s original formulation. His work can be seen as an attempt to develop an ontology that takes account of “the uniqueness and contingency of fleeting things and causal configurations but also for the existence of systematic similarities between the features and causal capacities of things, some of which are persistent or stable” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, pp.  410–11, citing Delanda & Harman, 2017, p.  20). DeLanda’s (2016) understanding of the assemblage is one of contingent, but nevertheless continuing entities with partwhole structures that are the results of historical processes. Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) highlight DeLanda’s understanding of the Deleuzean concept of strata as being particularly relevant. DeLanda (2016) argues that strata exist on a continuum where they, as the most stabilized entities, exist at one end and assemblages, as the most fluid, exist at the other. There is a degree of ordering on this continuum which is achieved through parameters of territorialization and coding. He terms this conceptualization of the assemblage as “a concept with knobs” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 3) because these parameters can be set to the most territorialized and coded at one end (strata) and the least at the other (assemblages). The parameter of territorialization stabilizes or destabilizes the identity of an assemblage by increasing or decreasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the level of sharpness of its boundaries, while the parameter of coding works on stabilization and destabilization through the expressive components of an assemblage’s identity (DeLanda, 2016). Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) state that these two parameters could be termed regulatory processes or mechanisms as they help to ensure a certain form and explain levels of persistence over time. They help to incorporate notions of stability and fluidity into one ontology, without dividing the world into two distinct sectors and in a reasonably accessible way. However, Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) see three substantial problems in DeLanda’s re-working. Firstly, they consider that DeLanda’s (2002) rejection of the need for types or classes in a realist ontology creates problems. He sees assemblages as unique historical instances and any resemblance between two or more is happenstance. Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) see this as a result of a focus on formation processes,

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whereas they state ontology is also concerned with the capacities and powers that objects have once they are formed. The second problem relates to the lack of ontological clarity of parameters. They state that his parameters idea brings them to two conclusions: that parameters are descriptive of individual assemblages rather than types or classes of assemblage; and that they “relate to actual external causal influences that affect the assemblage concerned and thus elements in the assemblage’s causal history” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, p. 413). The first conclusion limits the usefulness of the parameters idea as it negates the possibility that types of assemblages could also have parameters. The second conclusion limits the possibility of difference in internal structures of assemblages by ascribing difference only to external causal factors, particularly given the case that variation in structure can be more significant than variation in causal history when we are inquiring into the causal capacities of objects. The third problem relates to the actual parameters themselves, specifically with regard to their generality and their specific form. They cite the coding parameter as an example, stating its usefulness is limited when non-social assemblages are considered, as it potentially anthropomorphizes a different kind of assemblage. In order to overcome these problems, Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) offer a synthesis that re-works DeLanda’s (2016) concept of parameters, positioned in a more critical realism influenced ontology. Firstly, they offer a typology of assemblages based on their perceived level of stability, transience, and anchoring: conjunctural assemblages (characterized by the uniqueness of forces to produce an event), ephemeral assemblages (transient and unstable wholes that are separate from their environment), and persistent assemblages (characterized by relative stability and tendency to recur). Secondly, they develop the notion of parameters by essentially replacing it with a critical realist understanding of regulatory mechanisms. This means examining beneath the stratum of the empirical, both the regulatory mechanisms that produce or stabilize structures, and the generative mechanisms that produce their causal powers. This notion, they claim, is more generalizable than the parameters of territorialization and coding because there can be more than these two forces at play when it comes to stabilization. The final piece of the synthesis is a further abstraction from the typology that will help to analyze and explain how certain assemblages in a structural range have a “tendency to persist and recur (TPAR)” (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019, p. 417). This addresses an apparent weakness of assemblage theory, in that it does not help explain how certain structures persist over time (see Decoteau, 2018). The TPAR is a product of the regulatory mechanisms, which vary depending on the type of assemblage (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019), but nonetheless, remain formative when contexts are comparable. It also addresses a key concern of critical realism: the transposability of causal explanations between cases that bear similarities.

­Ontological Alterations and Extensions Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) rendering of assemblage theory and critical realism is powerful and holds great potential. Here, we aim to build on and extend their work. This will be achieved by introducing expansions drawing primarily from the work

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of Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017). As noted above, Rutzou and ElderVass (2019) turn to the assemblage theory developments of DeLanda to construct their ontology. The work of Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021), in particular, can be seen as a response to the developments of DeLanda (2006, 2016), as well as how assemblage theory has been implemented by social scientists since its growth in interest and usage. Buchanan feels that it has strayed too far from the original developments of Deleuze and Guattari, which have stripped the concept of its unique analytical utility. Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017) provide comprehensive overviews and frameworks of assemblage theory that pay closer fidelity to Deleuze and Guattari. Applying Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017), as well as recourse to Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), led us to identify four primary areas of alteration and extension. These are: (1) the lack of attention given to desire; (2) the related misrecognition of a possibility of a singular logic in an assemblage; (3) the lack of attention given to assemblage types; and (4) the lack of emphasis on material and expression as the main components of assemblages. These areas will now be explored further.

Desire and Singular Logic Desire is fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and to their understanding of the assemblage. Considering this, Buchanan (2021) notes it is particularly misguided that it has been omitted from post-Deleuze and Guattari conceptualizations of assemblages. Its marginalization or exclusion can also be seen in Rutzou and ElderVass’s (2019) work. They list it as a form of expression, a possible component of an assemblage. Its centrality can be seen in how Deleuze and Guattari (1983) define it. Holland (2011) tells us that Deleuze and Guattari (1983) define desire simply as the production of reality. It is defined not by its opposition to a “lack” but by its capacity to produce. It is the basis of all behavior and the producer of all aspects of human society (Buchanan, 2021). For assemblage theory, assemblages are desire in its machinic modality (Buchanan, 2021). Essentially, desire creates by creating assemblages through the selection of materials and inculcation of properties that they display in the assemblage (Buchanan, 2021). The misrecognition of the creative role of desire in assemblages has led to an important oversight, one which has significant implications for research: the notion of a singular logic, idea, or operational logic that undergirds an assemblage (Buchanan, 2017). This is not recognized by most theorists and was not attended to by Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019). There are two important consequences that follow from this. Firstly, assemblages are often described as a multiplicity and, thus, as multiply determined (see Venn, 2006). While assemblages are multiplicities, a singular logic does not entail that an assemblage must be multiply determined (Buchanan, 2017). This refers to its state of being and not how it came together. Secondly, there is a failure to reverse the actual and virtual in the components of an assemblage. Buchanan’s (2015) critique of DeLanda’s (2006) description of the formation of the state helps to illustrate these points. DeLanda (2006) describes the creation of the bureaucratic state in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as one without a deliberate plan, rather it was through the “slow replacement over two centuries of one set of daily routines by another’ which

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are “causally redundant to explain the outcome” (p. 41). This conception negates the notion that some form of logic or idea is at play in the formation of the state. This is the exact opposite of how Deleuze and Guattari (1983) conceived of the formation of the state. They see the state as an “eternal model,” something that was not formed in progressive stages but was, rather, the basic formation that dwelt “on the horizon throughout history” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 217). As Buchanan (2015) states, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) proceed from the abstract to the concrete, from the state as an idea to a functional structure of authority, rather than the other way around, as propounded by DeLanda (2006). The implication for assemblages is that the idea (abstract) is prior. Thus, DeLanda (2006) reverses the actual-virtual relation by assuming that the concrete components are the actual (Buchanan, 2015). On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) state the opposite and maintain that it is the abstract, the structure of authority in the case of the state, that are the actual and the components that are virtual. Only the actual elements, the abstract or relational, can be causal (Buchanan, 2015). Taking on the notion that an idea is prior raises the prospect that relations within an assemblage are suffused with the idea of singular or operating logic. As a result, there is both a power of selection and a principle of unity at work in an assemblage (Buchanan, 2021).

Typology As noted above, Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) criticize the unwillingness to allow for causal types in DeLanda’s (2006) version of assemblage theory and propose their own typology of assemblages. Indeed, DeLanda’s (2006) thinking is in contrast to that of Deleuze and Guattari (1983). Nail (2017) puts forward a typology of assemblages derived from Deleuze and Guattari (1983). He identifies four types: territorial, state, capitalist, and nomadic. The type can also be seen as a way of arranging the components of an assemblage and a guide for understanding that arrangement. Territorial assemblages are based on essentialist meaning; state assemblages are based on centralized command; capitalist assemblages are based on globally exchanged generic quantities; and nomadic assemblages are based on direct participation without representation or mediation (Nail, 2017). Assemblages are never pure but are composed of a mixture of these four types to different degrees. Each of the typologies can be explained by the primacy of one of the arranging elements, apart from the nomadic assemblage. So territorial assemblages are defined by a restricted arrangement of their concrete elements. In state assemblages, the conditioning relations are important in that they attempt to unify or totalize the elements and agents in the assemblage through its particular arrangement. Capitalist assemblages are marked by the agents, in that they become disengaged from the assemblage and try to “force unqualified concrete elements into strictly quantitative relations” (Nail, 2017, p. 31). Nomadic assemblages are ones where any of the component parts can provoke change, none have primacy, and they are the ones that can produce something new or revolutionary. It is also interesting to note that Nail’s (2017) typology provides a possibility for arranging assemblage types in terms of relative stability from concrete assemblages

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(the most stable) to nomadic assemblages (the least stable). However, this would obscure the differences in change that each type would permit, especially with regard to the middle two. State assemblages, for instance, could permit change (overcoding) through their capture in a parastatal organization. Capitalist assemblages could permit change through their capture and conversion to quantitative and commodification measures.

Material and Expression Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) provide a list of the possible components of an assemblage: material forms, practices, knowledge, social organizations, and forms of expression. This is a change from how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) consider the material of an assemblage. For them, the components of an assemblage are categorized into two segments: one of material and one of expression (1987). Buchanan (2021) places heavy emphasis on the importance of forms of material and forms of expression in assemblage thinking, so much so that he coins the term “expressive materialism” to describe the assemblage theory approach. Material and expression are the component parts of strata. Strata, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and in contradistinction to how DeLanda (2006) understands the concept, are the layers of life, that forms the basis for the organization and development of the social and the natural. Within strata, material, and expression are subject to articulation processes of selection, ordering, and stabilizing. Indeed, they are transposed from the strata to the assemblage via the abstract machine. Therefore, material and expression are the working parts of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, the basic mechanism (Buchanan, 2021). Clarifying the relationship between the two forms is important. There is, or should be, a “hard distinction” (Buchanan, 2021) between interacting material on the one hand and forms of expression on the other. Buchanan (2021) terms forms of expression as “incorporeal transformations.” However, this distinction does not mean that movement between them cannot occur, but it does mean that we should delude ourselves of any notion that one represents the other, that a form of parallelism exists. Expression intervenes in bodies (material) rather than represents them (Buchanan, 2021). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call this a “speech act,” confirmed by the intervention into the material in order to “anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed up, separate to combine them, delimit them in a different way” (p. 86). It is this movement, this articulation, between the two forms that is the assemblage (Buchanan, 2021). This understanding of the relationship between material and expression has significance for epistemology.

­Summary—Ontological Alterations and Extensions To summarize, we propose two ontological alterations to strengthen the value of critical realist assemblage analysis, which will have an effect on Rutzou and ElderVass’s (2019) ontological project and on developing an epistemological approach

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from the merging of critical realism and assemblage theory. These premise that: (1) assemblages are productive, and 2) assemblages are not pre-supposed. Doing this, we suggest, means de-emphasizing certain aspects of assemblages that are often emphasized too heavily: their heterogeneity, multiplicity, complexity, and contingency. While these characteristics of assemblage are important, they produce a myopia that overlooks the essential productive aspect of assemblages—the fact that they can have a singular logic, effectuating desire through the abstract machine. To some degree, the account of assemblages provided by Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) displays this myopia. Proceeding from DeLanda (2006), they view assemblages as something other than what Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) initially proposed them to be. They see them as fluid social structures, distinct from strata. However, as Buchanan (2021) is at pains to point out, assemblages are something different. They are social structures but not in the way that Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) describe them. They are particular and productive, constituted by, possibly, other social structures, actors, relations, and piloted by an abstract machine. This would point to the notion that not all fluid social structures are assemblages, in the Deleuze and Guattari sense. This may raise more problems rather than provide solutions to Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) original aim: to account for stable and fluid social structures.1 We do not see assemblages as always being unstable or tending toward instability. This is more so a contingency of individual assemblages based on their circumstances. Because of this, we believe that an assemblage approach is better positioned to provide “production stories” rather than “formation stories.” By viewing assemblages as productive means, we start with what they produce. This means we do not presume that an assemblage is pre-supposed, like some other, more easily identifiable, forms of social organization. It has to be revealed through our investigations. Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) types presuppose that we know which social entity of which we are speaking, e.g., we have an organization of the type of school, which could also be a nested type (public school). However, assemblage theory does not presuppose the structure or entity of which we are researching. One of the investigative questions to answer, as Buchanan (2017) points out, is: what assemblage produced this outcome? So, if we presume that a particular social entity produced this outcome, then we may be limiting and misdirecting our analysis. However, if we approach it from the point of view that this social entity is a part of an assemblage rather than an assemblage in itself, we may be less likely to miss something. This is why Nail’s typology makes sense, as it provides an investigative guide to the analysis of assemblages, focusing on their forms of arrangement. The emphasis on productivity is important for epistemology as it draws attention away from a focus on process or “assembling” social things, such as policy. It provides an orientation for how research should proceed. In fact, we view these two ontological statements as those that most define the analytical utility of assemblage theory. The next section will apply these alterations and extensions to the formulation of some guiding principles to be utilized when studying international education policy.

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Epistemological Commitments Baker and McGuirk (2017) provide four “epistemological commitments” for undertaking an assemblage theory inspired methodology. These are: commitments to revealing multiplicity, processuality, labor, and uncertainty. In this vein, we develop our own commitments. Based on our analysis, they are: interrogating coherence and production, articulations, and change and capture. They are formulated to act as guidance for an “interrogative orientation toward the world” (Baker & McGuirk, 2017, p. 430). It should be pointed out that we believe that assemblages should only be applied in the social world. Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019), following from DeLanda (2006), apply the notion of assemblage to forms such as clouds, birds, rivers, and hydrogen atoms. Buchanan (2021) states that the majority of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 1987) work on the topic relates only to the social world, the anthropomorphic strata. As Little (2016) states, there is a recognition that the natural and social realms display very different ontological properties. The interrogative orientation can be identified through the intentions of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 1987) conceptualization of the assemblage. According to Buchanan (2021), they aimed to interrogate the circumstances in which things happen, encompassing “how?”, “where?”, “why?”, “when?” and not just “what?” questions. This is the starting point, with the goal to aid in the development of research that produces “credible, believable results” (Becker, 1996). Of course, we are adopting not just an assemblage approach but also a critical realist approach. With this in mind, we should be clear in what we are adopting and adapting from Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) approach and what we are rejecting. We advocate adopting and adapting their notion of TPAR as an additional tool for understanding change, or its lack thereof, in assemblages. We also adopt the idea of causal types but keep Nail’s (2017) typology rather than Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019). We reject their idea of regulatory mechanisms because it advocates an infinite type of stabilizing force in assemblages beyond coding and territorialization. Coding and territorialization are intimately tied with the idea that all assemblages are formed out of material and expression. Therefore, an understanding of stabilizing forces that strays beyond this cannot be adopted by our understanding. We also re-orient the understanding of what an assemblage is and, more importantly, what it does away from that of DeLanda (2006, 2016) and toward that of Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017). This is summarized in the ontological alterations and extensions above and means a shift toward seeing assemblages as production machines rather than fluid social entities. We will now provide an explication of our epistemological commitments.

­Interrogating Coherence and Production Coherence can be understood in two ways. Firstly, as should be clear by now, assemblages, as we understand them, and in contrast to what Collier and Ong (2005) state, will have a singular operating logic. They are not multiply determined. So, while it may be heterogeneous and complex, it nevertheless should have “cutting

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edges” (Buchanan, 2015), with an abstract machine that acts as a pilot. And because assemblages are productive, there will, therefore, be coherence. We could perhaps understand the singular logic as akin to the operation of an invisible hand arranging the components of the assemblage, according to the logic of the relations of exteriority and connections as set down by the abstract machine. Secondly, assemblages are made coherent through processes of territorialization (Rutzou & Elder-Vass, 2019). This creates a “liveable order” (Buchanan, 2021) and is intrinsic to the capacity of an assemblage, not an emergent property. The notion of coherence provides some interrogative purchase for analysis. It can help address a key assemblage question Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pose: “how does it work?” (p. 109) and a related question: “what can it be used for?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 3). Assemblages produce the “complex forms and objects that populate contemporary society” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 47). This is because, as noted above, desire is productive and assemblages are desire in its machinic modality. Therefore, this necessitates a certain epistemological stance that would lead to an investigation into how assemblages produce a certain outcome or effect. This is perhaps the greatest divergence from Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) account. We see their desire to claim that assemblage theory can help construct “formation stories” as an epistemological commitment, akin to Baker and McGuirk’s (2017) commitment to revealing process. Baker and McGuirk (2017) state this results in a methodology concerned with a “careful genealogical tracing of how past alignments and associations have informed the present” (p. 431). As can be seen in Deleuze and Parnett’s (2007) definition of assemblages cited earlier in this chapter, they are not about genealogies, formation, “successions” or “lines of descent.” Deleuze and Guattari (1983) do not pose the question “What does it mean?” (p. 109) or “Where does it come from?” (Buchanan, 2017, p. 461). A focus on formation arguably misuses the utility of assemblage thinking. The products of an assemblage come from desire. Therefore, the singular logic or coherence and production need to be interrogated together, not separately. They flow from desire.

Interrogating Articulations The assemblage is made up of realms of material and expression. This is the meat of the assemblage, and it is the articulations that occur between the two that gives it its powerful analytical utility. We see the interrogation of articulations as inquiring into what occurs in an assemblage and how it produces. Buchanan (2021) tells us that the assemblage approach orients us to investigate what it takes to bring the two dimensions together in the first place. In terms of investigation, an important point to note is that Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) approach is not materialist, rather the expressive dimension is prior, it “causes matter to matter” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  77). Acting as a function of the assemblage, not the subject, the form of expression precedes the form of material, giving shape to the material form (Buchanan, 2021). It acts as the first gear that connects the other gears in the machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, as cited in Buchanan, 2021). As noted above, there is a hard distinction between the two realms, they are separate and interacting but autonomous without a straight line of

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causality (Buchanan, 2021). Without this distinction, we have a heap of fragments that may be more or less organized than they appear (Buchanan, 2021). It does not help to move beyond an initial description; indeed, what does a heap of fragments produce? Deleuze and Guattari (1987) tell us that content does not determine expression purely by causal action. Without the forms of expression, the material dimension can only be thought of as a “machinic index,” a sign that an assemblage may be in operation and a suggestion toward the nature of the assemblage that might provide unity. Nail’s (2017) typology should be borne in mind as the different types of assemblage will affect the nature of the articulations that occur.

Interrogating Change and Capture Nail (2017) tells us that if we want to know how an assemblage works, we have to find out what type of change is at work. We see this as interrogating what underlies or causes the articulations. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe processes of change as “lines of flight,” and these lines crisscross every assemblage. The concept they use to articulate how lines of flight lead to change is called deterritorialization. Parr (2005) tells us that deterritorialization points toward the creative potential of an assemblage. The notion of capture points to the fact that actions of deterritorialization can be rerouted and stopped, through reterritorialization, thus limiting the creative potential of assemblages. According to Nail (2017), there are four different types of deterritorialization in assemblages. These are as follows: relative negative deterritorialization (where an established assemblage is reproduced); relative positive deterritorialization (an ambiguous change that does not reproduce an assemblage); absolute negative deterritorialization (processes of change that undermine the assemblage and do not produce something new); and absolute positive deterritorialization (where a new assemblage is created). These types essentially mean that assemblages have internal and external limits that cannot be crossed without the assemblage becoming something new (Buchanan, 2021). The internal limit is the total of possible variations it can accommodate, while the external limit is “the restrictions history itself places on the number of possible variations” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 123). Understanding processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, understanding the limits, are key to analyzing with assemblage theory and help to address the “How does it work?” question. It is at this point that Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) notion of TPAR can be added, in altered form. It provides a different way of viewing the forms of deterritorialization Nail (2017) describes. Viewing these types of change as tendencies rather than law-like, as Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) point out, brings to the fore the fact that they are contingent and based on conditional circumstances. It also allows for a level of slippage if Nail’s (2017) forms of deterritorialization are deemed too rigid. However, while Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) focus on stability, their tendencies will have to be expanded to meet this epistemological commitment. Therefore, we propose a tendency to persist, recur and change (TPRAC). While assemblages are not pre-supposed, they can encapsulate more than one social entity. At the same time, we do not conceive of every social entity as an assemblage but, rather, enquire into what is the form of the assemblage that brought about the outcome

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we are investigating. Therefore, this may entail looking into more than one causal type. It is here that the causal types of Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) can be brought in. Firstly, we can combine their notion of causal types with Nail’s (2017) typology. As Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) state, causal properties can be similar across the same type of social entity, and causal explanation is premised on the transposability of explanation between cases. Therefore, for example, the causal mechanisms that can characterize a capitalist assemblage could conceivably be seen in another capitalist assemblage. It also provides a potential basis for investigating causal mechanisms in an assemblage. Secondly, as noted above, while assemblages are not pre-supposed we can likely recognize certain social entities contained within them. Therefore, recognizing these as causal entities means we can transpose causal explanations from other cases to aid in interrogation. Both assemblage theory and critical realism reject a linear cause-and-effect model of causation. Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) state the forms of strata developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) are strongly suggestive of the levels of structure featured in realist ontologies. While they are not exactly the same, they do display a commitment to an ontology of depth. Critical realism contends that “causal mechanisms” or “causal powers” exist at the level of the real. Objects and structures (including humans) hold these mechanisms or powers (Gorski, 2013). When they are triggered or actualized, they produce events. So we can understand these causal mechanisms as those that trigger lines of flight and deterritorialization or reterritorialization. In this way, it helps in the creation of causation stories. We must also bear in mind Buchanan’s (2021) reminder that only the abstract can be causal, not the bits and pieces. In summary, these epistemological commitments show how a melding of critical realism and an understanding of assemblage theory advanced by Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017) can help deliver “causation stories” and “production stories.” The move to production, rather than formation, delivers on the truer promise of assemblage, as an analytical approach to understanding how realities came about, how things occurred. This is in contrast to viewing it as an approach to understanding how fluid entities came to be formed. This focus on production is more in keeping with the original conceptualization of Deleuze and Guattari (1983). In the final section, we will explicate how it can be utilized in a real-world case study.

A Real-World Application Auld et  al. (2019) provide a fascinating case study that details how the OECD and World Bank enrolled Cambodia in the PISA-D initiative from 2013 to 2016. PISA-D is a policy-led initiative designed to encourage and facilitate PISA participation by interested low- and middle-income countries in order to build capacity for managing large-scale student learning assessment and using the results to support policy dialogue and decision-making in participating countries (OECD, 2016). This case is an instance of international organizations (OECD and the World Bank) operating jointly to override the policy priorities of a national government. The Cambodian Education Minister felt that his department had a grasp of the education sector areas that required most attention, the policies to tackle them, and the will to implement

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them (Auld et  al., 2019). There was no national desire to divert resources to a new initiative, despite the OECD’s claims that PISA-D was developed in response to developing countries’ demands and in partnership with them. Auld et  al. (2019) provide a summary of what happened: The arrival of PISA-D in Cambodia was initiated and pushed through by the World Bank and OECD, in ways that by-passed earlier aid coordination mechanisms (ESWG) and largely by-passed the Cambodian government. There was neither local ownership nor demand, let alone genuine partnership (other than between the World Bank and the OECD) and support for the whole policy direction from the beginning. In just under a year, the Cambodian Minister’s priority for implementation and concerns that PISA-D would take vital resources and attention away from National Assessment had been silenced by the partnership of the World Bank and OECD, aided by UNESCO’s (read: UIS) abrupt reversal to satisfy the ‘international community’s’ desire for universal targets.2 (p. 210)

While Auld and colleagues (2019) do not adopt an assemblage theory or critical realism approach, we feel their analysis nevertheless provides useful illustrations of the epistemological commitments detailed previously. Specifically, they describe their research as granular empirical work and identify a multiplicity of drivers for the case. Our brief but illustrative application of critical realist assemblage analysis is set against the following interrogative framework (Figure 5.1). Buchanan (2021) states that a useful starting point for interrogating assemblages is to ask: “what is the class of object we are dealing with?” (p. 31). Reverting to Nail’s (2017) typology is useful in this regard. Reviewing his typology would point to classing this PISA-D assemblage as a capitalist assemblage. In this type of assemblage, the personae become “disengaged from the assemblage” and try to “force unqualified concrete elements into strictly quantitative relations” (Nail, 2017, p.  31). Through

Figure 5.1  A critical realist assemblage framework.

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Auld et al.’s (2019) account, we can see that particular agents of both the OECD and World Bank, the personae, played key roles in driving the process forward against the expressed interests of the Cambodian administration. In terms of quantitative relations, PISA-D can also be viewed as an attempt to capture elements of the Cambodian education system in its assemblage and construct the relations between them in purely quantitative, PISA-developed terms. It also brings it into a larger PISA assemblage of comparative indicators that allow Cambodia to be compared with other nations. It is here that we can see the coherence in the assemblage. While it is a multiplicity of different elements (officials from national and international organizations, testing regimes, schools, students, teachers, administrative apparatus of the ministry, funding, etc.), we can understand the singular logic of the assemblage in terms of governance. In this regard, Auld et al. (2019) place emphasis on the adoption of knowledge capital theory by the OECD and the World Bank. Knowledge capital theory, for them, is an evolution of human capital theory. However, we can abstract further, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) would have it, to further interrogate this. The PISA-D assemblage can be viewed as a form of epistemic governance (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2019), utilizing numbers, statistics, and indicators to produce “calculable worlds” (Gorur, 2015). Porter (1995) shows how the universality and rigidity of quantitative techniques allow them to travel across great distances and, thus, govern at a distance. Of course, further granular investigation would be required to see how this unfolded in the Cambodian case, to see how it produced the observed effect, in short, its articulations. In this regard, we see critical realism’s prioritization of retroduction as an analytic strategy helpful in interrogating production and articulations. Retroduction is a method of inference that seeks to understand what is characteristic and constitutive of a social entity (Danermark et al., 2002). This would mean understanding what is characteristic of the PISA-D assemblage, how its articulations work and how it produces. There are two steps to interrogating articulations. Firstly, we need to determine the conditions under which matter becomes material. Secondly, we need to determine the conditions under which semiotic matter becomes expressive (Buchanan, 2021). There is one particular incident that Auld et al. (2019) describe in their case study that helps to illustrate this issue. During a presentation at a retreat, a Cambodian education official concluded with an appeal to join PISA-D. This was despite the fact the same official in the same presentation provided reasons not to join the initiative and was hostile to the possibility. The reason the appeal was included was due to a World Bank consultant insisting on it. Through its inclusion, the consultant could then raise it with the education minister, as well as attempt to persuade other development partners to support it. This is a point where matter becomes material. The presentation was initially matter, and not necessarily part of the assemblage. The intervention by the consultant altered this matter (the presentation) and turned it into assemblage material. In the policy sense, this form of material was articulated in the expressive realm as it helped advance the adoption of the PISA-D policy. Here, we can see the power of selection at work. A further point to note in relation to articulations is that expression is prior to material; it helps give material form. The Cambodia case provides an example of this. As Auld et al. (2019) point out, Cambodia had been added to the

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shortlist of PISA-D countries before they officially joined in 2016. They cite this as an indication of complications behind the scenes. However, we can see this as an example of expression preceding material. Cambodia was expressed as a PISA-D country, thereby making it materially “matter” to the PISA-D assemblage. This can be viewed as a form of capture. When interrogating change and capture, we view it as an ongoing process in the assemblage, a constant shifting and moving, of negotiation and counter. In terms of Nail’s (2017) typology of change, we can view the capture of Cambodia into the PISA-D assemblage as an example of relative negative deterritorialization, whereby the incorporation of Cambodia maintained and reproduced the capitalist assemblage but with an addition. Further deterritorialization and reterritorialization are ongoing throughout the case. For example, similar to how Holland (1999) describes how the labor-power of peasants was reterritorialized when they became workers in the textile industry, we can view the taking over of Ministry of Education labor by the PISA-D assemblage as a form of capture or reterritorialization. Gorur and Addey (2020) focus on this in their analysis. They view the capacity development of Cambodian officials as an exercise in making them fit for PISA-D. We can bring Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) developments in here. The continual deterritorialization and reterritorialization can be viewed through the TPRAC lens. The overall case can be viewed as an effort in persistence, in order to expand the assemblage and re-produce it with the Cambodian inclusion. The notion of causal types would be useful for investigating the underlying causal or generative mechanisms that led to the changes and capture. How were other nations brought into PISA-D? Are there similarities that can be drawn on for analysis? Are there similar causal or generative mechanisms at play that can aid in analysis? For example, Gorur and Addey (2020) point out that expectations of PISA-D countries would continue long after the PISA-D team left. Therefore, are there similar generative mechanisms that lead to this? Also, we can clearly see specific social entities within the assemblage: e.g., the OECD, the World Bank. Drawing on existing understandings of the generative mechanisms underlying these social entities would further aid in analysis. Here, we can see the transposability of causal explanation at work. In summary, we believe that critical realist assemblage analysis offers possibilities for investigating and viewing cases in a different way, a way that, potentially, offers new insights. The merging of assemblage theory with critical realism offers particular possibilities in engaging with the generative mechanisms that underscore change, articulations, and production in assemblages. Through transposability, we can see that such causal explanations would be useful for the investigation of potentially similar cases. In this way, we see it as a pragmatic framework for investigating both production and causation stories. The following section will briefly explore what this potentially means for CIE as a scholarly field.

Implications for CIE Field Salajan and jules (2020) provide an excellent application of assemblage theory to the contours of the scholarly field of CIE. Perceived as a meta-assemblage with interrelated

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sub-assemblages, they state that the character of the CIE field easily lends itself to an assemblage conceptualization. We find little to take exception to in their analysis and, therefore, we do not provide a critique here. However, based on the inclusion of critical realism into our framework and the emphasis we place on certain aspects of assemblage theory, we offer two propositions in reply. Firstly, critical realism entails that we pay attention to structure and its role in the productive capacities of assemblages in CIE. Secondly, the orientation of our framework places emphasis on asking how the interassemblages of the meta-assemblage produce what they produce. We will briefly explore each proposition here. Structures and their endurance are important for critical realism. They are perceived to be real, existing independently, and often do not conform to the patterns of events (Bhaskar, 2008). In the field of CIE, they include institutions (e.g., universities, government departments, schools, international organizations, and professional bodies), practices such as examinations and assessments; socio-cultural norms and values; and disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary areas (e.g., economics, sociology, politics). This is not an exhaustive list, but the point is that they are real, rooted in the strata and possess generative mechanisms. Our framework, influenced by critical realism, draws attention to the force of endurance of these structures, while, captured in the TPRAC, recognizing that deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes can exert change. We see this reflecting the reality of developments within an academic field. Within a disciplinary rupture, when a new direction for research is being explored, there will usually be at least one voice cautioning against too radical a departure, citing accepted epistemological, ontological, or methodological standards (structures). Our framework places emphasis on the productive capacity of assemblages. As noted above, this means looking at the form and type of an assemblage and inquiring into its processes of production. It entails a focus on the results of an assemblage and working back, with a particular focus on the critical realist notions of causal or generative mechanisms. Within their conceptualization, Salajan and jules (2020) state that “generative forces” are involved in the territorialization of subassemblages within the logic of the meta-assemblage. Our framework would involve interrogating these forces, understanding them as mechanisms, in a critical realist manner. Within CIE, this analytical orientation starts with a result or outcome, something identifiable, for example the formation of a new working group within a professional body, and seeks to draw attention to the productive processes that led to its formation. In summary, while we do not seek to critique or replace the description of meta-assemblages provided by Salajan and jules (2020), we believe our framework can aid its capacity.

Conclusion The melding of assemblage theory and critical realism is complicated because of tensions in how the two traditions view social entities. Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019) have made significant progress and ably demonstrate the degree to which they can be

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successfully merged and the potential benefits such a merging can provide, especially for policy analysis in international education. We see our work as an epistemological development with some important ontological tweaks; as an effort in ground clearing for further development of this approach. We advocate a shift from how assemblages are viewed by Rutzou and Elder-Vass (2019). They should not be seen as transient social entities marked by fluidity, counter-posed to strata. We further advocate a move away from questioning how assemblages are formed to questioning how they work, how they are structured, how they produce what they produce. In this way, we believe that a reversion to Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualization of assemblages, as propounded by Buchanan (2015, 2017, 2021) and Nail (2017), provides more analytical utility. However, we believe that Rutzou and Elder-Vass’s (2019) notions of causal types and tendencies are analytically useful and should be retained. Melding this way provides, we believe, clear value in the approach; it helps to generate both causation and production stories. For critical realism is concerned with causality, while assemblage theory is not so much interested in how assemblages are formed, rather what they do. As noted above, such a view also has implications for the pursuit of CIE research and scholarship. We would like to finish on a note of caution. Before beginning, we should ask ourselves if the policy phenomenon we are studying is best served by assemblage thinking. Assemblages may not always be present; we may be looking at a “heap of fragments” (Buchanan, 2021). Therefore, while we see clear analytical value in this approach, we advise judiciousness in its application.

­Notes 1 Recourse to Little’s (2016) notion of “plasticity” may be helpful in this regard. 2 ESWG refers to Education Sector Working Group, a group of major donor representatives with the power to endorse sector-wide programs. UIS refers to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics.

References Ackroyd, S. & Karlsson, J. C. (2014). Critical realism, research techniques, and research designs. In P.K. Edwards, J. O’Mahoney & S. Vincent (Eds.), Studying organizations using critical realism: A practical guide (pp. 21–45). Oxford University Press. Alasuutari, P. & Qadir, A. (2019). Epistemic governance. Palgrave Macmillan. Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M., Decoteau, C., Gorski, P., Little, D., Porpora, D., Rutzou, T., Smith, C., Steinmetz, G. & Vandenberghe, F. (2016). What is critical realism? Perspectives: A newsletter of the ASA theory section, 38(2), 4–9. Auld, E., Rappleye, J. & Morris, P. (2019). PISA for development: How the OECD and world bank shaped education governance post-2015. Comparative Education, 55(2), 197–219.

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Baker, T. & McGuirk, P. (2017). Assemblage thinking as methodology: Commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5(4), 425–42. Becker, H.S. (1996). The epistemology of qualitative research. In R. Jessor, A. Colby & R.A. Shweder (Eds.), Ethnography and human development: Context and meaning in social inquiry (pp. 53–72). University of Chicago Press. Bhaskar, R. (2008). A realist theory of science. Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (2016). Enlightened common sense: The philosophy of critical realism. Routledge. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–92. Buchanan, I. (2017). Assemblage theory, or, the future of an illusion. Deleuze Studies, 11(3), 457–74. Buchanan, I. (2021). Assemblage theory and method. Bloomsbury Academic. Collier, A. (1999). Being and worth. Routledge. Collier, S.J. & Ong, A. (2005). Global assemblages, anthropological problems. In A. Ong & S.J. Collier (Eds.), Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 3–21). Blackwell. Danermark, B., Ekström, M., Jacobsen, L. & Karlsson, J.C. (2002). Explaining society: Critical realism in the social sciences. Routledge. Decoteau, C.L. (2018). Conjunctures and assemblages: Approaches to multicausal explanation in the human sciences. In T. Rutzou & G. Steinmetz (Eds.), Critical realism, history, and philosophy in the social sciences (pp. 89–118). Emerald. ­Delanda, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press. Delanda, M. & Harman, G. (2017). The rise of realism. Polity Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. H.R. Lane, R. Hurley & M. Seem. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a minor literature, trans. D. Polan. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam. Columbia University Press. Gorski, P.S. (2013). What is critical realism? And why should you care? Contemporary Sociology, 42(5), 658–70. Gorur, R. (2015). Producing calculable worlds: Education at a glance. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 578–95. Gorur, R. & Addey, C. (2020). Capacity building as the “third translation”: The story of PISA-D in Cambodia. In S. Grek, C. Maroy & A. Verger (Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2021 (pp. 94–109). Routledge. Hartwig, M. (2007) Dictionary of critical realism. Routledge. Holland, E.W. (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to schizoanalysis. Routledge. Holland, E.W. (2011). Desire. In C.J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 55–64). Routledge. Little, D. (2016). New directions in the philosophy of social science. Rowman & Littlefield. Moore, R. (2013). Social realism and the problem of the problem of knowledge in the sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(3), 333–53.

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Nail, T. (2017), What is an assemblage? Sub-Stance, 46(1), 21–37. Norrie, A. (2010). Dialectic and difference: Dialectical critical realism and the grounds of justice. Routledge. OECD. (2016). What is PISA for Development? OECD. Parker, J., Mars, L., Ransome, P. & Stanworth, H. (2003). Social theory: A basic tool kit. Palgrave. Parr, A. (2005). Deterritorialisation/reterritorialization. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 66–9). Edinburgh University Press. Porter, T.M. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton University Press. Rutzou, T. & Elder-Vass, D. (2019). On assemblages and things: Fluidity, stability, causation stories, and formation stories. Sociological Theory, 37(4), 401–24. Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a meta-assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A.W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (pp. 133–51). Emerald. Sayer, A. (1992). Method in social science: A realist approach. Routledge. Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. Sage. Tikly, L. (2015). What works, for whom, and in what circumstances? Towards a critical realist understanding of learning in international and comparative education. International Journal of Educational Development, 40, 237–49. Venn, C. (2006). A note on assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 107–8.

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The Identity of Comparative and International Education (CIE): Perspectives from CIE Theories across Times and Contexts Linli Zhou, Crystal Green, and Andrew Swindell

Introduction The identity of comparative and international education (CIE) has generated scholarly discussions since the 1800s. While some scholars argue that it is an independent discipline, which has “a well-substantiated theoretical framework and distinctive concepts of its own” (Noah & Eckstein, 1969, p. 22), other scholars refuted whether CIE has a distinct historical lineage or can be understood as a field of study, which borrows theories and methodologies from various disciplines (Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977; Manzon, 2018). To understand the identity of the field of CIE, this chapter maps out theories and methodologies that have been and continue to be influential for CIE studies and analyzes how these theories and methodologies are contingent on historical time and across social contexts. This chapter speaks to assemblage theory which enables us to understand CIE’s rich interdisciplinary characteristics. Three CIE approaches are compared—the nomothetic approach which represents scholars’ efforts to compare the commonalities of social contexts and the similarities of education problems in different nation-states; the idiographic approach which seeks to understand the differences of social contexts and distinctiveness of education issues across contexts and nation-states (Epstein, 1994; Paulston, 1994); and the critical approach that moves toward assemblage theory and pluriversalism which have more social consideration focusing power and the ethical implications of what and who has been left out of education globally. Figure 6.1 is intended to help trace these approaches over time by displaying each with the corresponding developments that place each in its appropriate historical context. Based on an analysis of the characteristics of the research issues, questions, and goals that CIE is concerned with, the popular theories (e.g., positivism and functionalism under modernization, liberal ideologies, and critical theories), and approaches it embraces (nomothetic approach versus idiographic versus critical approach), this chapter argues that while CIE can be understood as an independent discipline having

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Figure 6.1  Timeline of approaches and concerns in international comparative education.

its own unique focuses on comparing differences and similarities across time and space with a contextual understanding (see also Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977), it also has a unique interdisciplinary characteristic as CIE assembles diverse perspectives, theories, and methodologies from various disciplines with gradual but dramatic evolution across time. This chapter stresses how all our knowledge, knowledge-seeking processes, and techniques of analysis are all historically contingent and social-contextually situated globally and is organized with a focus on the nomothetic, idiographic, and critical approaches, illustrating the evolution of diverse theories in CIE.

The Features of Comparative and International Education CIE, by definition, focuses on understanding and learning from the differences and/or commonalities of education issues in different nation-states (Crossley, 2000). Typical foci are school-centered problems and school-society relationships across countries (Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977). The basic unit for CIE studies historically has been the nation-state (Kandel, 1933) which consists of several types. The political, economic, or geographical nation-states all refer to countries; within the same country, the society shares the same political sovereignty, guided by the same economic policy, or has the same geographic boundary. In the same way, cultural nation-states consist of groups of people who share the same or similar culture. For CIE, a general assumption is that different nation-states have some distinctive or similar social contexts and will thus be affected by dissimilar or shared education problems (Kandel, 1933). This assumption promotes an understanding of how education can be contextually situated, which is one of the most important characteristics of CIE, and which, as this chapter argues, makes it an independent discipline. Apart from its feature of focusing on the differences and/or similarities of education across nation-states, CIE also purposefully incorporates theories and methods from other disciplines. However, being an interdisciplinary subject does not necessarily dismiss its identity. Rather, it becomes a significant characteristic of

Table 6.1  Historical approaches and theories in comparative and international education. Approaches Focus Paradigm

Positivism

Scholar

Nomothetic

Ideographic

Critical

Similarity

Difference

Absence

Functionalism

Critical theory with neoliberal controversy

Globalization, agency theory

Sociology of absences

Jullien Durkheim (systematic, general) (integral, consensus)

Kazamias and Schwartz (conflict, social justice); Kandel (liberal, humanitarian)

Paulston (empowerment, innovation)

Andreotti, Bhambra, Misiaszek, Nişancıoğlu, Takayama, Salajan, and jules (power, decolonial futures, constructivism, metaassemblage)

Context

Economic modernization (Orthodoxy, deterministic, and Euro-centric)

Cultural diversity (controversial, heterogeneous)

Pluriversal assemblage of epistemologies (trans/posthumanism, inclusive, selfreflective)

Method

Macro-level; literature review method; correlations analysis based on large-scale international tests

Macro-micro interaction; qualitative and ethnography

Critical analysis; mixed methods

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CIE. CIE is “characterized by eclecticism” (Ninnes & Burnett, 2003, p. 279)—elective subjects, theories, and techniques of analysis (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). “Comparative Education is not any of these disciplines alone. Rather, it is partly all of them together” (Bereday, 1964, p. 23). Drawing from other disciplines, CIE never loses its contextual understanding of education. The “geographical perspectives of education” (Bereday, 1964, p.  24) and “historical perspectives of education” (Brickman, 1960, p.  7) are always the core emphasis in CIE studies. After building its two core characteristics, namely that CIE is both contextual and interdisciplinary, three concepts in CIE will also be important to introduce before analyzing any CIE theories or methodologies. The first concept is the nomothetic approach which represents scholars’ efforts to compare the commonalities of social contexts and the similarities of education problems in different nation-states. The idiographic approach, on the other hand, seeks to understand the differences in social contexts and the distinctiveness of education issues across contexts (Epstein, 1994; Paulston, 1994). While the nomothetic approach often uses deductive linearmodeling analysis, the idiographic approach often applies inductive empirical research. The critical approach offers alternatives to the binary framings of sameness/ difference, self/other, or west/rest that have characterized both the nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Opening up a pluriversal assemblage onto epistemological bases for CIE research by drawing on posthumanist and decolonial scholarship, the critical approach centers on questions of power, oppression, and exclusion as socially mediated discourses and practices which have material consequences in education. As this chapter will point out, all of these approaches reflect important theoretical and methodological components of CIE and provide an opportunity to compare education issues across countries. Table 6.1 is a visualization of how these approaches are related and is intended to help trace the associated theories, methods, and context of each throughout this chapter.

The Nomothetic Approach of Comparative and International Education: Positivism and Functionalism under Modernization “Tracing one’s history is important to explore its identity” (Epstein, 2017, p. x), so it is important to start our analysis of CIE’s identity by looking at the beginning of CIE research. As many scholars would argue, Marc-Antoine Jullien’s “Esquisse et vues préliminaires d’unouvrage sur l’education comparé (Plan and preliminary views for a work on comparative and international education)” issued in 1817 marked the establishment of the field of CIE (Epstein, 1994, p. 6). Jullien was designated as the “father” of CIE and his work was considered as the founding document in the field of CIE (Epstein, 1994). Jullien was regarded as pre-eminent because of his high capacity for systematically studying education in his work (Epstein, 2017). Jullien used “standard questionnaires” to collect information, and his “scientific methods” helped him to find “the true principles and determined rules” in education across countries (Jullien, 1817, p. x). Jullien was thus considered an outstanding facilitator for “transforming

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education into an almost positive science” (Brickman, 1960, p. 919), which was the goal that scholars of his time pursued and treasured. Scholars’ fondness for systematic inquiry of education research, given its high value in predictability and generalizations, conformed modernization trends, the popular ideology throughout the nineteenth-century in the Western world. Noah and Eckstein (1969) contend that “the academic respectability depends on the ‘hardness’ of its data or the rigor of its methods” (pp. 21–2). With this notion, in order to establish CIE as a discipline and “advance” CIE research to become a “modern scholarly activity” (Noah & Eckstein, 1969), scholars at the time argued CIE must have a well-defined causationseeking method and be able to obtain a law-like research process, including collecting data, making inferences, presenting data and formulating conclusions (Anderson, 1961; Noah & Eckstein, 1969). Guided by the ideology of positivism under the trend of modernization, the nomothetic approach turned out to be largely aligned with these ideologies. This approach was used to conduct systematic research that was intended to be explanatory (Kazamias, 2009), which suggested that CIE uncover common principles, patterns, and factors in education systems across contexts and nationstates. With the nomothetic approach, CIE in the nineteenth century focused on borrowing education models across countries for educational planning and reliable prediction (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). As another symptom of this utilitarianism, CIE studies at the time promoted world harmony education for the mutual improvements of different countries (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). During the mid-twentieth-century in the aftermath of the two world wars, there were concerns about building concordance among countries. Establishing world harmony became one of the most important goals of education (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). As a result, the nomothetic approach was fitting with the “world harmony” agenda. In this context, functionalism, or the functionalist paradigm, surged and was quickly incorporated into the study of CIE in the mid-twentieth century. Functionalist scholars claimed that education was an integral and united system like an organic body in natural science (Welch, 1985). Therefore, scholars have argued that in all countries, education performs a number of similar purposes, for example, teaching students with beliefs and practices that are in accordance with the system in which it operates; and the common goal of contemporary education, as functionalists would claim, is to invest in the future social, political, and economic growth (Poignant, 1969). Moreover, functionalism asserted that nations undergoing similar social movements could have “similar tensions, problems, stresses, or dysfunctions” in their schooling (Beeby, 1966). For example, functionalists found that, under the trend of diminishing elitism and promoting social justice in the mid-twentieth-century, schools tended to reduce selectivity and increase financial support. These functionalist studies, however, were critiqued to be deterministic and Eurocentric, because they often ignored divergent conditions and problems, such as political autonomy and socioeconomic changes, in the educational development in the Third World: they attempted to socialize people into particular norms of social harmony. The main goal of nomothetic adherents was to maintain rationality, objectivity, and a homeostatic system. Consequently, they promoted social control and dismissed the diverse nature of society

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(Welch, 1985). The positivist quantitative and anthropological methods developed in the nomothetic approach are still in use, including international standardized tests of national education systems, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In the contemporary era of big data, the nomothetic approach has evolved with large-scale cross-national studies incorporating computational research methods. The increase of big data has also increased possibilities for investigating the relation between outcomes in education and, for example, health and the labor market.

The Idiographic Approach of Comparative and International Education: Liberal Ideologies and Critical Theories under Cultural Pluralism While each historical period has one dominant theory and methodology, there always exist some counter-perspectives to hegemonic ideologies. In a departure from the nomothetic approach, which was the dominant methodology throughout the nineteenth-century until the late twentieth-century in the Western world, Michael Sadler (1900) termed an “idiographic approach” which emphasized nuances in social and cultural circumstances of different countries and how these nuances can change the performance of general principles of education dramatically. Different from the mainstream of scientific-centered studies of his time, Kandel (1933) focused on the aims and purposes of education, as well as on the spiritual and contextual forces that underlie the educational system. He argued that CIE research should contrast the forces that cause the distinctive features among different national education systems. He felt that factors outside of schools, such as the political and social context, have largely determined schooling dynamics (Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977). These liberal arguments brought humanitarian, interpretative perspectives (Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977) and resisted the hegemonic ideologies of that time—the “value-free, consensusbased, and modernization-oriented” scientific pursuits (e.g., functionalism and the nomothetic approach). Scholars in the late-twentieth century increasingly focused on studying differences, rather than finding generalizable principles during the Cold War period across the First World (European and North American countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the Second World (Eastern socialist republics in the Warsaw Pact), and the Third World (countries that remained non-aligned with either the First or the Second World). The idiographic approach recognized education as a comprehensive system that was interactive with the dynamics in social contexts (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). The emergence of the idiographic approach in CIE studies in the late-twentieth century largely depended on two historical forces. The first was the various social movements in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements) that sought social justice for people of lower social status. The second was the technological revolution, which empowered individuals (Sweeting, 2005). Scholars of the late-twentieth century were inspired to criticize positivism and functionalism, which were the dominant theories of the previous era. They

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pointed out that ideologies in the nineteenth-century distorted personal values and diversity, which was especially unfair for newly independent countries (Beeby, 1966; Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977). These critiques eventually contributed to a recognition of education problems in the developing world. CIE’s major pursuit became an exploration of how to acknowledge and understand the diversity of the post-modernized world. Since the late-twentieth-century, the use of the idiographic approach has become more prevalent; various interpretivist and constructivist theories sought to analyze how education is socially and contextually situated across and within countries in an increasingly globalized world. These theories offered humanist and interpretive perspectives to understand how education reproduces social inequalities (Apple, 1993), with a geographic sensitivity that helped scholars understand the social dynamic both within and across countries. Two representative theories are dependency theory and world-systems analysis, which both successfully juxtaposed the unequal interactions between the Global South and Global North (Arnove, 2009). Similarly, postcolonial and culturalist analysis arose, actively questioning aspects of knowledge and power, particularly between the Global North and Global South (Spring, 2008). Since about 2004, the terms Global South and Global North have been widely used to refer to the grouping of countries that have histories of colonialism which resulted in economic, epistemic, and political power inequalities. This replaced the narrow focus on economic inequality of the terms Developed and the Developing World used during the 1990s and 2000s. World-systems, postcolonial, dependency, and culturalists theories exhibit how certain elements of globalization theory have influenced and been included within idiographic approaches to CIE. We briefly unpack here the major globalization theories with relevance to CIE. In their essay on comparative education during the era of globalization, Bray (2003) argued that the field of CIE is “arguably more closely related to globalization than most other fields of academic inquiry” (p. 220). The two have a reciprocal relationship: CIE scholarship is affected by and shapes globalization theory. Indeed, globalization can be understood in a variety of different ways, ranging from a term that is used in popular discourse to a distinct academic theory and perhaps even field unto itself. There is no universally agreed-upon definition for globalization, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to thoroughly explore them all. We will draw from the most prominent conceptualization put forth by McGrew and David (2007), who assert that globalization is a process that includes a stretching of social relations across space, an intensification of multilateral and multicontinental flows and networks of interaction, the increasing interpenetration of economic and social practices, and finally the emergence of a global institutional infrastructure. Globalization is not a thing, but rather a process of increasing or decreasing network density that imperfectly connects people across time and multicontinental spaces. Within this framing, globalization is also not neutral, per se, but a process that can increase or decrease, occur from multiple directions simultaneously and has implications on how global social, cultural, economic, and political power and norms arise and change over time. In their article considering what globalization would entail at the dawn of the new millennium, globalization theorists Keohane and Nye (2000) argued for what was an

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optimistic and perhaps the most popularly held belief about globalization. They contended that the thickening of these networks, particularly surrounding economic, socio-cultural, and environmental “globalisms” would result in lower military globalism, thus exhibiting the faith scholars had at the time in global economic growth as a model for a better and more prosperous world. However, not all scholars adopted this view of globalization. The rise in the global competition between countries in the past two decades calls into question whether militarism really has decreased (Farrell & Newman, 2019). Given the range of manifestations that can arise from the process of globalization, Held (1999) helps clarify three distinct perspectives that globalization scholars generally take on how globalization is unfolding: (1) the hyperglobalists, whose argument is perhaps closest to the colloquial use of globalization in that global trade and interconnectedness is resulting in the world moving toward one unified political, economic, and even cultural system where nation-states and the local become significantly less important than the new global order; (2) the skeptics, who use recent national and regional based economic activity to argue essentially the opposite and view nation-states and smaller regions as still the most important political, economic, and cultural actors; and 3) the transformationalists, who accept that globalization is the dominant political, economic, and cultural “force,” though the “direction of this “shake-out” remains uncertain, since globalization is conceived as an essentially contingent historical process (Held, 1999). Given these important distinctions, it is apparent how certain elements, particularly nomothetic in nature, have influenced and been included in CIE. The hyperglobalist (and perhaps even skeptics) focuses on economic inquiry, objectivity, and use of metrics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and exports as evidence of global unification in the direction of the West. Within CIE, we can see similarities with the use of global testing data, like PISA, that situate students and countries within a broader and interconnected knowledge economy. Dale (2005) explains how this focus on the global knowledge economy has led to a Eurocentric and “largely unproblematized ‘methodological nationalism’ and an associated ‘embedded statism’” (p. 124). In other words, CIE has borrowed elements of the hyperglobalist perspective that views education in terms of skill promotion for workers in a global marketplace where comparisons are best made between countries using data rooted in economics, all in the name of global progress. Similarly, the controversial world-culture theory, which has similarities to, if not direct roots in globalization theory, has also become one of the most widely used and cited theories within CIE over the past decade (Takayama et al., 2017). Carney et al. (2012) explain that “world culture theorists, using a particular interpretation of neoinstitutionalism, explain the global convergence of educational and cultural worlds as a facet of modernity driven by the logic of technology, science, and the myth of progress that it has engendered” (p.  367). This has led Stromquist (2002) to assert that a “growing integration between economics and schooling is shaping both the knowledge that is considered legitimate and the forms schooling will take” (p. 5). Too often, this has meant a Eurocentric view of education within CIE that over-emphasizes the importance of the nation-state as a unit of analysis and focuses on systems of schooling, education, and knowledge in the West. These approaches based on world-culture theory and the hyperglobalist framing of education have also been scrutinized within CIE for their neutral framing of

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globalization that does not consider the resulting destructive and unequal impact on knowledge and power between the Global North and South. While critical ideas were gaining prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, Marginson and Mollis (2001) problematized the use of the nation-state as the central unit of analysis within CIE while also calling for broader analytical frameworks and views of globalization within CIE scholarship. Similarly, Mignolo (2007) has advocated for epistemologies and practices that decenter scholarship from the Global North and pursue possibilities to delink educational thinking from imposed Western hierarchies and the logics of coloniality. More recently, Takayama et al. (2017) have argued for the use of postcolonial approaches within CIE given the Eurocentric position that earlier CIE scholars like Jullien and Kandel held, as well as more modern world-culture theorists who rely on “socialscientific models of globalization” (p. S4) that Western scholars in CIE have used to push this view on the rest of the world. Specific elements of a postcolonial approach to CIE include indigenous knowledge, actively seeking alternatives to Western hegemony in terms of language, scholarship, research direction, and ideological assumptions, and the onto-epistemic underpinnings of education and research.

The Critical Approach of Comparative and International Education: Power, Exclusion, and Pluriversal Assemblage in De/postcolonialism and Posthumanism If the first two turns in CIE were defined by studies of similarity and difference, the current turn can be characterized as a focus on absence, considering the ethical implications of the historical and contemporary exclusions in CIE scholarship. The critical approach, which includes the post/decolonial, world systems, culturalist, assemblage theory, and dependency theories discussed above, brings into CIE theoretical and empirical studies of how unequal power relations have shaped the current educational landscape globally (Anuar, Habibi, & Mun, 2021). The critical approach sees that similarity and difference are not inherent but are socially constructed interpretations of human variation. Naturalization of categories of difference based on supposed essential biological factors—gender, race, ethnicity, disability—structure educational institutions in ways that preserve certain established social hierarchies (Garland-Thomson & Ojrzyńska, 2020). The social reproduction of a hierarchy of difference has led to absences: absences of people from places and absences of ideas from discourse. These absences have implications for who and what is taught in schools: for social inclusion, for the development of the teaching profession, and for curriculum development. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical approach has focused on several strands, including marginalization, migration, and crisis displacement; posthuman perspectives on the material limitations and degradation of the planet; the narrowing of curricula; epistemic reproduction and epistemicide. Critical scholarship problematizes neutral characterizations of similarity and difference and views it as an ethical commitment with the aim of better understanding the mechanisms which reproduce exclusion and marginalization in education.

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A range of contemporary scholars are working in critical CIE scholarship. Among them are Vanessa De Olivera Andreotti, Ali A. Abdi, Anne Hickling-Hudson, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Nathaniel Adam Tobias, Karen Pashby, Keita Takayama, and Maria Manzon. Importantly, these contributions serve not only to challenge and critique CIE, but also to offer directions for reorienting the field (Manzon, 2018). The critical frameworks developed by critical scholars in CIE are varied, including decolonialism and abolitionism (Andreotti, 2021; Salinas, 2020), posthumanism and eco-pedagogy (Horsthemke, 2020), and assemblage theory (Sobe & Kowalczyk, 2018), which acknowledges CIE’s interdisciplinary features. These scholars share what Cortina (2019) calls “the passion for what is possible,” and radical imagination for (re)envisioning education. A key consideration in recent CIE literature has been investigating students’ exclusion from full participation in education and the ethical implications of school inclusion (Andreotti, 2021). Deeper engagement about the inequitable treatments of girls, students with disabilities, indigenous and racialized populations has considered issues, such as school sanitation for menstruating girls and the policy language used to define minoritized students and their educational provision. In addition to considerations of discrimination in terms of students’ physical absence from schools, as well as the absence of needed services, recent research has emphasized the differential treatment of students (Salinas, 2020). Drawing on the roots of the discipline in both psychology and sociology, CIE scholars have researched how stereotypes, bias, and deficit mindsets shape students’ experiences in schools and the language which is used to talk about minoritized populations (e.g., Hagatun, 2020). Bias and integration are also salient in teacher preparation, where there remains a lack of teachers from minoritized groups, and teacher training programs often do not prepare teachers to address the bias that occurs in classroom interactions or published textbooks (Daid & Nowlan, 2021; UNESCO, 2019). In addition, migrant, immigrant, and refugee education have become increasingly addressed. Questions of who bears the responsibility for educating migrants, to what level, in what system, and in what languages are now taken also from a critical perspective, investigating not only the technical aspects of educational provision but also the discourses which undergird conversations about (im)migrants, (im)migration, and displacement (Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Mendenhall et al., 2021; UNESCO, 2019). These considerations of educational provision for people who may have provisional or no legal status come into existing national conversations about the differential educational provision for citizens and other long-term residents along with class and geographic disparities. Public, private, and NGO providers of education, while offering benefits in some contexts, also map onto elite and segregated school systems, limiting the opportunity structures for students with different legal and economic statuses (Srivastava & Walford, 2016). Over the past year, the existing material inequalities between and within schools have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic; school absence has been compounded by de-schooling and remote learning. The pandemic has raised questions about education in absentia, how learning can be supported when students and teachers are not physically present at school (Green et al., 2020). Although most wealthy countries

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have pivoted to remote web-based learning, many countries experienced de-schooling. For more than 168 million children, schools have been completely closed for over a year (UNICEF, 2021). Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, CIE research had already begun a shift toward the posthuman and transhuman perspectives to address the limitations and absences in discussions of global climate change in education. Education beyond the human, the topic of the 2020 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) conference, brought together scholars to discuss planetary precarity and humans’ role in the Irreversible ecological catastrophe: natural resource depletion, water, and air pollution, human overpopulation, species extinction, and a fundamental breakdown of the ecosystems that have sustained life on Earth for millions of years. Variously called Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene, this new era signals the end of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism—the core concepts of Western philosophy and the foundations of modern political economy—as a single vision for surviving on a damaged Earth (CIES, 2020). This emerging critical discourse in CIE acknowledges that previous educational research focuses on humans and human systems to the exclusion of questions of planetary problems which affect all species and life on Earth (Misiaszek, 2020a). Such discussions have been absent from the core questions in comparative education in the past. It is not without note that the youth climate crisis movement of 2019, inspired by youth activist Greta Thunberg, was organized not only outside of schools but as a school strike. Students globally have been walking out of schools since 2006 to demand global attention from policymakers about climate change. Concern for what is not taught in schools and the disconnect between schooling and broader artistic, environmental, civic, and political participation has also been a growing concern in CIE scholarship. Rutazibwa (2018) has discussed this absence in terms of silence, and the need to de-silence the curriculum in terms of the composition of our syllabi: “Whose voices are presented as authoritative and in what order? Which ideas and theories are presented as worthy of investigation, comparison, and interrogation? Which new themes emerge, which are pushed back or out, when we foreground those voices and insights from a locus of enunciation of those on the imagined receiving end of our solidarity-beyond-borders thinking?” (p.  173). The nomothetic focus on measurement has also spurred the narrowing of curricula globally to basic literacy and numeracy skills at the expense of art, dance, music, outdoor play, gardening, agriculture, finances, dialogue, consent, civic, and citizenship education (Sahlberg & Doyle, 2019). Although UNESCO is making a concerted effort to remedy the narrowing of the curricula, for example by creating metrics for measuring global citizenship education competencies, the larger problem is that anything which cannot be measured finds a very precarious place in the nomothetic approach to CIE. This narrowing of the curricula has, in many schools, foreclosed broader conceptualizations of well-being in education as both aim and method. The trend in narrowing the curriculum has also been taken up in critical scholarship in a broader scope in CIE, investigating the absence of indigenous knowledge in educational curricula and practice. Perhaps of all the considerations of absence that we have presented so far, the most significant gesture in the critical approach is in moving

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CIE toward pluriversal and transversal assemblage of epistemologies. Toward the end of the 1990s, critiques of the Eurocentric nature of knowledge production in CIE have made way for more space to elaborate on what de Sousa Santos (2018) describes as an alternative to alternatives. De Sousa Santos (2018) described a “sociology of absences,” in which the legitimization of epistemologies of the Global North has led to gaps in our understanding. This absence “calls for a ‘sociology of emergence’ from epistemologies of the South” (Misiaszek, 2020b). The (re)birth and rehabilitation of scholarship from the Global South and traditional knowledge in CIE acknowledges how colonization has caused destitution and the need for restitution in our ways of learning and being. In CIE, critical engagement with absence turns to reveal spaces for emergence, border thinking, and thinking otherwise in education. This offers the possibility to reimagine education and the basis of human existence, drawing on the vast onto-epistemic repositories of humanity (Silova, 2020). With the current co-existence of multiple perspectives and pluriversalism in CIE, assemblage theory has a unique contribution to the recent transformation of CIE’s  identity. Assemblage theory provides an epistemological tool to acknowledge CIE’s  rich interdisciplinary features. It also problematizes the conventional theories that have come to dominate CIE and argue for transversal knowledge. For example, Sobe and Kowalczyk (2018) recognize that, instead of having fixed perspectives, CIE assembles different theories together which are interrelated and ever-changing. The fluidity in assemblage theory extends the critical approach as it invites post foundational theories, perspectives, and methodologies into our understanding of CIE.

Conclusion: Toward Heterogeneous Theories and Methodologies As illustrated in assemblage theory, we find it important to recognize that these three approaches articulate with and inform one another as they develop and change over time. Though the idiographic approach existed in the 1930s in the forms of liberal and humanitarian notions in Kandel’s works (1933), the major theories and methodologies under the trend of modernization employed a nomothetic approach throughout the nineteenth century until the late-twentieth-century in the Western world. Positivism—the pursuit of scientific methods, systematic research, and generalized conclusion—was the dominant ideology that was argued to be closely related to modernization. The methods were mainly literature review (Rust, 1999) and linear correlations analysis. Since the late-twentieth-century, scholars started to awaken from the pursuit of modernization and began to honor cultural pluralism. More controversial theories and diverse perspectives, such as critical theory, respond to and contest traditional approaches with new possibilities. Qualitative methods and ethnography have become more prevalent (Rust, 1999). The idiographic approach became the most influential approach, and more inclusive interpretations have appeared in the CIE studies since the late twentieth century (Noah & Eckstein, 1969; Paulston, 1994).

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Reviewing the changing theories and methods and exploring how knowledge is constructed for studies of CIE, this chapter finds that the nomothetic and idiographic, and critical approaches alternate with each other along with historical trends. This could relate back to assemblage theory where we understand CIE’s fluidity and interrelated theories and perspectives to recognize its interdisciplinary characteristic. As discussed, and illustrated earlier in Figure  6.1, this chapter argues that the nomothetic, idiographic, and critical approaches do not necessarily preclude each other. Rather, only taking one over another is incomplete and insufficient to achieve CIE’s goals. Indeed, the varied onto-epistemic assumptions of each of the three approaches facilitate a range of different lines of inquiry and methodologies, the results, and limitations of which can inform the possibilities for future research in each of the other approaches. This cross-fertilization of inquiry within the various streams and approaches can strengthen CIE as a discipline. CIE research should be open to distinctive experiences with the idiographic approach (Noah & Eckstein, 1969), the possibilities presented by critical approaches, and meanwhile, be responsible for showing the general trends and patterns with the nomothetic approach. More recent CIE researchers tend to accommodate different possible interpretations in theories and methodologies (Sweeting, 2005). As Paulston (1999) claimed, “I view all positions in the field as interrelated and perhaps best understood as an intertextual space that allows the negotiation of meanings and values” (p.  439). It turns out that since the late twentieth century, postmodernity, flexibility, and reflexibility have led to the development of a multiplicity of theories. As a result, the more recent paradigms of CIE studies incorporate heterogeneous perspectives and assembles the coexistence of diverse epistemologies. The survey of theoretical approaches presented in this chapter is an invitation to CIE scholars to revisit the history of CIE and (re)consider the legacies of influence that different epistemologies maintain in CIE research. By considering these theories in relation to each other, we hope that future CIE scholars will continue to transform the field in comprehensive and innovative ways of thinking about and theorizing CIE. We also hope that these frameworks will nudge CIE scholars toward more explicit vocabularies for articulating the onto-epistemic frameworks underpinning their work, and as a gesture toward reflection on what types of frameworks are appropriate for their work. These articulations connect CIE not only across time with a historical and contextual view of the development of theories, but also across theoretical approaches and the assemblages of interwoven theories. This chapter argues that CIE has been interdisciplinary, and gestures toward possibilities for recognizing and seeking out perspectives, theories, and languages for articulating perspectives that have been marginalized in the Western discussion of CIE, especially from the Global South. This gesture also recognizes the limits of historical Western interpretations in CIE. We suggest the whole of CIE as a discipline is larger than the sum of its parts. To move the field forward, we have to know what those parts are, and where we came from. By analyzing the changing theories and methods, this chapter reveals the increasingly diverse perspectives that reinforce the unique identity of CIE.

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Nişancıoğlu, K. (Host). (2016, February). Decolonizing the Academy (No. 5) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Dissonance of Things. Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/ dissonanceofthings/decolonising-the-academy Noah, H.J. & Eckstein, M.A. (1969). Toward a science of comparative education. Macmillan. Poignant, R. (1969). Education and development in Western Europe, the United States, and the USSR: A comparative study. Teachers College Press. Paulston, R.G. (1994). Comparative and international education: Paradigms and theories. In T. Husen & T. N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The International encyclopedia of education (pp. 923–33). Pergamon. Paulston, R.G. (1999). Mapping comparative education after postmodernity. Comparative Education Review, 43(4), 438–63. Rust, V., Soumaré, A., Pescador, O. & Shibuya, M. (1999). Research strategies in comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 43(1), 86–109. https://doi. org/10.1086/447546 Rust, V.D. (2003). Editorial: Method and methodology in comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 47(3), iii–vii. https://doi.org/10.1086/378246 Rutazibwa, O.U. (2018). On babies and bathwater: Decolonizing international development studies. In Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning (pp. 158–80). Routledge. Sadler, M. (1900). How far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education? The Surrey Advertiser. Sahlberg, P. & Doyle, W. (2019). Let the children play: How more play will save our schools and help children thrive. Oxford University Press. Salinas, C. (2020). The pedagogy of detachment and decolonial options: Reflections from a “minoritized” point of view. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 4(1), 10–25. Silova, I. (2020). Anticipating other worlds, animating ourselves: An invitation to comparative education. ECNU Review of Education, 3(1), 138–59. Sobe, N.W. & Kowalczyk, J. (2018). Context, entanglement and assemblage as matters of concern in comparative education research. In J. McLeod, N.W. Sobe & T. Seddon (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2018: Uneven space-times of education: Historical sociologies of concepts, methods and practices (pp. 197–204). Routledge. Spring, J. (2008). Research on globalization and education. Review of Educational Research, 78(2), 330–63. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308317846 Srivastava, P. & Walford, G. (2016). Non-state actors in education in the Global South. Oxford Review of Education, 42(5), 491–4. Stromquist, N. (2002). Globalization, the I, and the other. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 4(2), 87–94. ­Takayama, K., Sriprakash, A. & Connell, R. (2017). Toward a postcolonial comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S1–S24. https:// doi.org/10.1086/690455 Tom, M.N., Suárez-Krabbe, J. & Caballero Castro, T. (2017). Pedagogy of absence, conflict, and emergence: Contributions to the decolonization of education from the Native American, Afro-Portuguese, and Romani experiences. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S121–S145. Sweeting, A. (2005). The historical dimension: A contribution to conversation about theory and methodology in comparative education. Comparative Education, 41(1), 25–44.

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Welch, Anthony R. (1985). The functionalist tradition and comparative education. Comparative Education, 21(1), 5–19. UNESCO. (2019). Global education monitoring report 2019: Migration, displacement and education: Building bridges, not walls. UNESCO. UNICEF. (2021, March 2). COVID-19: Schools for more than 168 million children globally have been completely closed for almost a full year, says UNICEF. UNICEF Press Releases. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/schools-more-168-millionchildren-globally-have-been-completely-closed

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(Re)territorializing the Field of Comparative and International Education in Malaysia: Adventures in Cartography through the Fisher, the Weaver, and the Shadow-Puppeteer Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar and Pravindharan Balakrishnan

Introduction Comparative and international education (CIE) as a distinct field in Malaysia remains elusive, though formal development in recent years is promising. Symaco and Chao (2019) highlight the establishment of the Centre for Research and International Education (CRICE) at Universiti Malaya in 2011 as a significant institutional gesture to formalize the field in Malaysia. As emerging scholars of CIE seeking to understand the tradition, practices, and discourses in this field locally, we attempt to orient ourselves and our potential contributions therein. Our collective reading of the education landscape past and present—sharpened by postgraduate training outside of the country—suggests that components of CIE have long been percolating in Malaysia. It has been argued by Salajan and jules (2020) that “CIE as a field is emergent and not merely the summation of the properties of components (sub-assemblages) but its history and visibility of its ‘processes of individuation’ (DeLanda, 2016) is key to its properties” (p.  140). Interested in such processes of individuation, we set out on a public scholarship project titled “Education is a living thing: Comparative and international education (CIE) in Malaysia” (Henceforth referred to as the “CIE in Malaysia” project).1 Through this project, we seek to trace the development of CIE knowledge and practices in Malaysia, while also applying CIE theories and methods to understand contemporary education issues in the country. In this chapter, we chronicle our evolving attempt to map the field of CIE in Malaysia by reflecting on our experience and findings for the “CIE in Malaysia” project. To guide this attempt, we asked: What “makes” the field of CIE in Malaysia? How is it reified locally as meta-assemblage(s) over time? Such questions are posed in dialogue with our own intellectual biographies. In a project that doubles as a learning journey to forge our academic identities in CIE, our personal stories become entangled in the assemblage that we attempt to map. In the process, we also become actors that

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(re)territorialize the field, utilizing the “CIE in Malaysia” project as our vessel. Drawing inspiration from Silova and Auld (2020) within the post-foundational fold of CIE, we foreground the metaphorical and biographical spirit as part of our cartography of the field in the Malaysian context. Prior to this, we had reflected on the progress of the “CIE in Malaysia” project in reference to such metaphors elsewhere (Anuar & Balakrishnan, 2020). This chapter expands on that reflexive exercise. Without a doubt, the map of CIE as a field in Malaysia that we (attempt to) trace and navigate is constantly shifting. Its contours are contingent upon new information, encounters, and discoveries that unfold over time. Thus, our map is “furnished with ‘multiple entryways’ allowing it to be reversed or reworked by a variety of social actors or groups into limitless permutations of representations” (Salajan & jules 2020, p. 137). In this chapter, we take the CIE meta-assemblage to mean the configurations of various actors, scholarships, discourses, and artifacts identified and documented as part of the “CIE in Malaysia” project. While this project and the field of CIE in Malaysia writ-large are, of course, not interchangeable, we present the reflections below as an attempt to sketch a microcosm of an emerging field in Malaysia through an intentional, “meta” project of cartography. In order to represent this dynamic and, at times, dizzying work, we structure this chapter through the metaphor of three vernacular actors: the fisher, the weaver, and the shadow-puppeteer. Weaving in and out of the text, our three actors work in succession and collaboration. The fisher casts the net far and wide, hoping to capture actors, scholarship, discourses, and other artifacts that we speculate to be part of the field of CIE in Malaysia. The weaver transforms what is caught in the fisher’s net into a network, a rhizomatic structure that changes shape and direction with new entries and contingent connections; at times even surprising and evading the weaver. Therefore, CIE as an emerging field in Malaysia remains open to indeterminacy even as we seek to map it through the “CIE in Malaysia” project. Meanwhile, the shadow-puppeteer performs Wayang Kulit (Shadow-Play) from behind a screen. Here, we comment on the project’s dissemination efforts—indicative of scholarship and practice in the field writ large—tied to the realities of political pressure and public (non)consumption of knowledge. Together, we embody these vernacular actors to highlight our own role in the (re)territorialization of CIE in Malaysia, suggesting how this chapter stands as a performance that helps to reify the field of CIE locally, embodied by the microcosm of our “CIE in Malaysia” project.

The Fertile Ground: Contemporary Education Discourses in Malaysia In May 2018, Malaysia underwent its first political transition after democratically ousting the Barisan Nasional (The National Front), a political coalition that had ruled for sixty-one years since Malaysia’s independence in 1957. Understanding that education is a fertile ground to steer the opinion of the public, the new coalition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) appointed Dr. Maszlee Malik, a neophyte

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politician and a former academic, as the Minister of Education (Lee, 2018), driven by the logic that he carried less political baggage to court controversies. Encapsulating the interests of all layers of society, education has always been a highly contested realm. With the political transition of “New Malaysia,” it was subjected to even greater scrutiny. Facing intense pressure and criticisms from the media and the general public, Dr. Maszlee Malik’s appointment as the Minister of Education lasted only twenty months as he was pressured to resign in January 2020. This happened in the aftermath of vocal public debate over issues related to black shoes as part of the school uniform (Abdul Razak, 2020), the race-based quota for pre-university matriculation program (Tho, 2019), as well as the introduction of the Jawi script that stoked racial and religious sentiments as part of the Malay language syllabus (Razali & Aziz, 2019), to name a few. As the furor surrounding the Malaysian education system unfolded with the Ministry of Education (MOE) at the center of each controversy, two Malaysians were on their own intellectual journeys of learning about CIE in two different Western lands. In the autumn of 2017, months before the chaos of Malaysia’s new education landscape unfolded, Aizuddin, a fisherman-in-training, abandons the corporate world and travels to the University of Oxford in the UK. Leading up to this decision, he had noticed interesting tides in the local waters. In 2016, the World Bank had set up its Global Knowledge and Research Hub in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur (World Bank, n.d.). International large-scale assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) became more embedded in Malaysia’s education policymaking in recent years, evidenced by its inclusion as part of targets in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB) 2013–25 (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2013). In the highereducation sector, the minister’s tagline “Soaring Upwards” pointed to the centrality of international university rankings as indicators of quality (Martin, 2018). Yet there was a paucity of CIE discourses relating to these international developments fermenting at home. Five years prior, while completing a Master’s degree in Cognitive Studies in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, he had taken an elective module in comparative education out of curiosity. Convincing himself that returning to graduate school would allow for space to reflect upon years of education work in corporate philanthropy and to make sense of recent education developments at home, he was eager to reacquaint himself with CIE. Although unknown at the time, the connection between CIE at the University of Oxford and Malaysia would prove to be significant to the cartography of the field. We revisit this crucial network in the next section. Meanwhile, Pravindharan, another fisherman-in-training was about to set sail on a new educational experience in the United States of America, having secured the prestigious Fulbright scholarship for a graduate study program. As he tried to read the seas of CIE, and attempted to move away from the field of English language teaching, the fisherman-in-training was excited at the prospects of embarking on this journey in August 2018, just three months after Dr. Maszlee Malik’s appointment as the Minister of Education. While he was unsure what to expect at Loyola University Chicago, the political transition in his motherland meant there was now a prospect to contribute new ideas for educational development.

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Having completed his Master’s in CIE and subsequently enrolled in a PhD in Education at the University of Oxford, Aizuddin returned to Malaysia in January 2019 to present the findings of his Master’s research on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education at a conference organized in Universiti Sains Malaysia. Wandering in a secondhand bookstore in town after the conference, he discovered a book titled Sejarah Perkembangan Pendidikan dan Persekolahan (The Historical Development of Education and Schooling), which was first published in 1966 (Daia, 1973). The fisherman was struck by the expansive content of the text written in Malay, which covered ideas about education across various civilizations (Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Jewish, and Islamic), selected modern thinkers such as John Locke, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, as well as the development of education in pre- and post-colonial Malaysia. Was it a CIE text, even if it did not declare itself as such? He did not give much thought to the matter at that time, but purchased the book as a keepsake. As Pravindharan continued to grapple with his graduate studies, he noticed that in the “New Malaysia,” teachers seemed to have more say in public education. With CIE knowledge accumulated under the tutelage of his professors, Dr. tavis d. jules and Dr. Noah Sobe, he decided to write a short article focusing on how comparative research can benefit the Malaysian education system in the face of the nation’s diverse population. In the article, he argued that equipping Malaysian teachers with a comparative perspective would enable them to understand the pluralistic nature of Malaysia which is often taken for granted (Balakrishnan, 2019). In order to share the benefits of CIE to a bigger platform, the fisherman-in-training decided to send a beacon out into a Facebook group that gathered Malaysian education enthusiasts in the wake of the election of Dr. Maszlee Malik as the new Minister of Education. This article caught the attention of Aizuddin and became a crucial kernel for conversations that eventually evolved into the “CIE in Malaysia” project. Thus, from fishermenin-training, we began assuming the role of weavers, exchanging our knowledge and experiences related to CIE in the wake of our respective training in the field. The spirit of exchange and dialogue led Pravindharan to expand his aforementioned article for publication in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education. (Balakrishnan, 2020). In the process of searching for elements of the CIE meta-assemblage through this project, we were also weaving and making knowledge in the field. Armed with new knowledge, we inserted ourselves into the rhizome as we attempted to understand its shape, considering that rhizomes are guided by the logic of becoming and emergence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that both fishermen had traveled abroad to foreign seas to acquire the compass to navigate the CIE terrain back home. Although many developments which we will demonstrate show that elements relevant to the CIE meta-assemblage have been present in Malaysia, the reification of CIE as a field more broadly is in its infancy with respect to the formalization of credentials in universities. Symaco and Chao (2019) observe in the academic setting, specialist institutions which award degrees in the field is lacking but nonetheless, some course electives are offered such as the recent introduction of the Comparative Education elective course (2015) at

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the undergraduate level at University of Malaya in Malaysia, while a course on Comparative Education is also offered at the graduate level at the Open University of Malaysia … (p. 221)

Indeed, the guidelines issued by the Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA) may point to the reason why CIE as a body of knowledge could be obscured by naming conventions. Elements of CIE knowledge may already be taught as part of the curriculum for teachers under the broad umbrella of Foundational Components of Education, as highlighted by the MQA. Additionally, the MQA guidelines also highlight how different codes or subject titles are used by different institutions for courses that contain the same content. Subjects like comparative education, international education, global education or history and philosophy of education may be used interchangeably …. (Malaysian Qualification Agency, 2016, p. 3)

To make sense of this practice of (non)formalization of CIE, we must rely on the strength of other actors as we weave this CIE meta-assemblage. That is where our attention will turn to next. In this section, we have focused on our intellectual biographies and trajectories within CIE as a way of setting the scene for the germination of the “CIE in Malaysia” project. We relay our academic histories-in-themaking against the backdrop of Malaysia’s contemporary education landscape, which presents fertile ground for the reification of CIE as a field of expertise. Here, we have demonstrated how fragments of the CIE meta-assemblage were picked up along the way as we assumed the role of fishermen learning the craft in international waters, all the while our concerns and attention remain homeward. Our paths eventually cross, and our journey of fishing and weaving becomes collective endeavors moving forward. The social dimension of the meta-assemblage—the strength of networks to reify its shape—takes center stage in the next section.

The Assemblage Begins to Take Shape: (Socially) Weaving the “CIE in Malaysia” Project In The mushroom at the end of the world Tsing (2015) writes assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making … Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts? If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities? (pp. 22–3)

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Such a notion of assemblages as unsettled and colored by encounters and ­ “gatherings” aligns with our own experience of slowly carving the contours of the “CIE in Malaysia” project. Following our initial exchange in the online space described in the previous section, our paths intersected in the homeland. Early in 2020, we found ourselves in the same space and time on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The metaphor of the fisher is apt given the geographical focus on fishing as part of livelihood in the area. Aizuddin was conducting his PhD fieldwork in the region, while Pravindharan returned to teach in a secondary school in the area following completion of his Master’s degree. We began by conceiving the project as a living archive, where we would weave together artifacts, discourses, and scholarly outputs related to a number of themes within CIE. The idea of a living archive also points to how this metaassemblage is constantly becoming—modified and reshaped when new elements are added or removed. In order to learn more about contemporary archiving practices, we visited the Malaysia Design Archive (MDA), organized by a group of young researchers who were generous in offering suggestions and leads to other resources to support our aspirations. Learning that the project greatly benefited from the strength of networks and expertise beyond two fishermen, we sought to weave the fabric of the CIE metaassemblage by reaching out to individuals who had been trained in the field. We would use the “CIE in Malaysia” platform as an opportunity to establish such a network and feature these individuals and their works. Related questions of boundaries arose at this point. What counts as topics and themes within CIE? Beyond individuals who obviously trained in CIE abroad, who else qualifies as a researcher or practitioner in this field locally? While we wrestle with these questions at home, we acknowledge the long-standing debates on definitions and boundaries animating the field writ large (Epstein, 2008; Little, 2010; Rust, Johnstone, & Allaf, 2009; Wolhuter, 2008). Hence, as fishermen and weavers, we attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the “CIE in Malaysia” project as a microcosm of the field in Malaysia and also globally. Relying on our instinct as comparativists, we looked to the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) for guidance on topics and themes included within the remit of this field based on the Special Interest Groups (SIG) of this society. In this process, we wondered if we were “performing rituals of allegiance” (Silova & Auld, 2020, p. 11) to an established international body for permission to carve the boundaries of CIE locally. Once again casting our net, we come across an article in a Malaysian journal by Khadijah Zon (1986) titled Pendidikan perbandingan: Satu catatan awal tentang makna ruanglingkup dan tujuannya (Comparative education: Some preliminary notes on its meaning, scope and purpose). Much like other foundational texts in CIE, this article presents the genealogy of the field by highlighting the role of its (Western) founding figures, such as Isaac Kandel and George Bereday. Much less is said by Zon (1986) about the involvement of Malaysian scholars in CIE or the development of this field locally, despite our discovery of the earlier text by Daia (1973) that points to thinking aligned with CIE, mentioned in the previous section. In the absence of local histories to guide our process of territorialization, we agreed on a compromise in order to move forward. The actors and associated works are considered for inclusion in the “CIE in Malaysia” project if their research and programs explicitly adopt a comparative approach in the methodology or they address substantive topics of international

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concern in the field of CIE. However, such inclusion criteria remain unsettled, and we continue to debate and discuss them. In effect, we are still negotiating the boundaries of CIE through this “meta” project, rooted in local concerns while staying abreast with global discourses in the field. Rather than presupposing a set design for what the project should look like, we remain open to the possibility of responding to the ever-shifting national education landscape hinted at in the previous section. This fluid approach to our project is represented by the prefix “Education is a living thing,” which is reflected in the following quote by Michael Sadler that we have foregrounded on the project website: we cannot wander at pleasure among the educational systems of the world, like a child strolling through a garden, and pick off a flower from one bush and some leaves from another, and then expect that if we stick what we have gathered into the soil at home, we shall have a living plant. A national system of education is a living thing, the outcome of forgotten struggles and difficulties, and “of battles long ago.” It has in it some of the secret workings of national life. (as cited in Bereday, 1964, p. 310)

Returning to the possibility of “gatherings” of social actors to form networks that reify the CIE meta-assemblage, we looked into our own personal and professional connections. Beginning with our contemporaries who themselves pursued CIE-related research and education abroad, we featured interviews with these individuals on our project website under the headline “People.” These scholars and practitioners who were featured became agents that helped us weave the meta-assemblage of CIE—some would connect us to colleagues who they knew had also studied CIE. Interestingly, many of our contemporaries we initially featured pursued their studies in CIE abroad following their experience as Teach for Malaysia (TFM) fellows, where they taught in high-need schools for two years. TFM, founded in 2010, is part of the Teach for All movement, which is a contemporary global education phenomenon studied as part of CIE (Thomas, Rauschenberger, & Crawford-Garrett, 2021). It seems here that the meta-assemblage of CIE in Malaysia is imbibed with an international flavor not just in the CIE training gained abroad by many social actors drawn into our configuration but also in the localization of international phenomena such as the Teach for All movement, as well as international university rankings and large-scale assessments such as PISA which were highlighted in the previous section. Delving more into the recent institutional development of CIE in Malaysia through the setup of the Centre for Research and International Education (CRICE) at Universiti Malaya in 2011, a surprising discovery regarding its history pointed to a transnational connection that echoes into the present. We were fascinated to learn that CRICE was set up through the initiative of Dr. Lorraine Pe Symaco in consultation with three academics from the UK: Professors Colin Brock (Symaco’s former Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Oxford), Richard Pring (the University of Oxford), and Michael Crossley (the University of Bristol). Aizuddin, through his current affiliation at the University of Oxford as a PhD student, relied on this shared institutional network to connect the “CIE in Malaysia” project with Dr. Symaco. Although she has since

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left Universiti Malaya to take up a position at Zhejiang University in China, she participated in the interview for our project and also suggested that we connect with a number of Malaysian academics who were instrumental in the founding of CRICE. She also recommended that we maintain connections with the current management of CRICE. On this front, we have reached out to CRICE to introduce the “CIE in Malaysia” project, and we will elaborate more on future plans in relation to this center in the next section. Another connection facilitated by mutual affiliation with the University of Oxford is the project’s connection with Dr. Chang Da Wan, formerly the Director of the National Higher Education Research Institute at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Like Dr. Symaco, Dr. Wan also completed his PhD at the University of Oxford. Our initial conversation with Dr. Wan has been instrumental on a number of fronts to further understanding the genealogy of CIE in Malaysia. When we highlighted how it had been a challenge to locate Malaysian academics who were CIE scholars, he pointed out that although there may be scholars who would elsewhere be considered specializing in CIE, this is less obvious in Malaysia. Referring to his own scholarly identity as an example, he positions his work within higher education policy, although he does adopt comparative perspectives in his research. He also highlighted how his background in economics initially proved challenging in terms of securing funding to undertake research in education, given the very rigid boundaries of academic disciplines in Malaysia. Given that CIE as a field finds its strength in interdisciplinarity do such rigid academic practices add to the challenge of establishing CIE as a field in Malaysia? In response to our observation on the lack of formalization of CIE as a specialization in departments and faculties of education in Malaysian universities, he traces this back to the history of how these departments were set up as teacher training colleges. In contemporary times, advanced degrees in education in Malaysia largely focus on pedagogy and schools, with less emphasis on “macro” level works of policy, systems, or comparative analysis. Referring to CRICE and the work of Dr. Symaco, he highlights how the associated effort to set up the International and Comparative Education Society of Malaysia (ICESM)—which he was involved in the early phase—has since stalled. Our attempt to connect with ICESM has also been met with silence. The thread for weaving is cut short on this front, but another possibility looms. Dr. Wan hinted that, seeing as we have initiated this project, perhaps we would like to revive the effort of establishing a local CIE society … . Dr. Wan also pointed us to Dr. Molly Lee, a retired academic who was active in CIE in Malaysia in the 1990s. Although Malaysia has yet to set up its own professional society in CIE, it has been heartening to learn about the role of Malaysian scholars like Molly Lee in the recent history of CIE in the region. For example, Dr. Lee was involved in the initial setup of the Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA), based on this account by Mochida (2008) the first major event leading to the establishment was the International Symposium on Development and Education in Asia, held in Fukuoka, Japan, in December 1994. The symposium was organised by members of the special committee and others from the JCES. Participants included Lee Byung-jin and Park Jun-hye from

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South Korea, Wang Chia-tung from Taiwan, Isahak Haron and Molly Lee from Malaysia, Mark Bray from Hong Kong, Mohammad Fakry Gaffar from Indonesia, Sumon Amornviat from Thailand, Sureshchandra Shukla from India, and Dao Trong-thi from Vietnam. (p. 309, emphasis added)

Even in the absence of a professional society, Malaysia has once hosted the biennial conference of CESA in 2005 (Bray, 2008). Additionally, we have also learned that in 2014, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Comparative Education Research Network (ACER-N) was formed at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, followed by a series of annual conferences, most recent of which was held in 2019 in Indonesia. In light of this, our upcoming work of weaving connections with retired scholars such as Dr. Molly Lee and Dr. Isahak Haron, as well as contemporary regional networks such as ACER-N is crucial to better understand the meta-assemblage of CIE in Malaysia and the region. We continue to cast the net and weave connections across disparate researchers who do not obviously identify as scholars in CIE, within education faculties and departments where CIE is not formalized, and in the absence of a unified professional society at the national level. Within network relations, Williams (2002) describes “boundary spanners” as “key agents managing within inter-organizational theatres” (p. 104). In the Malaysian context, could the “CIE in Malaysia” project—and our role as its fishermen and weavers—eventually serve as a “boundary spanners” for the meta-assemblage of CIE, (re)territorializing an elusive field in the process? We remain open to this weighty possibility. Here, we have shown how the meta-assemblage of CIE in Malaysia is represented in our project, reified through social connections that beget more social connections. The sustained efforts to maintain these connections hold the assemblage together. Grounded in our background and education trajectories, some threads require us to look back in history, while others necessitate engagement beyond the boundary of the nation-state. In the next section, we take on the role of shadow puppeteers to remark on our dissemination efforts in order to legitimize our position in the very assemblage that we seek to map.

Shadows, Screens, and Silences: From Weaving to Performing Wayang Kulit In recent years, social media has been utilized by researchers to establish new professional connections and maintain relationships with existing scholars (Komljenovic, 2019). For the “CIE in Malaysia” project, establishing an online presence seemed to be a worthwhile endeavor to disseminate our work and seek a new audience. In addition to the website which hosts the living archive, our reflections on the project, as well as interviews with scholars and practitioners of CIE in Malaysia, we have also created a social media platform on Twitter (@CIE_Malaysia). Behind the screen of @ CIE_Malaysia, we are puppeteers in a local performance of Wayang Kulit (ShadowPlay), relaying the contents of this project onto the online domain. Considering that

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this project is still in its infancy, a platform like Twitter—as a space to reshare content and expand on existing trending topics—is essential to gain virtual visibility. So far, we have used our Twitter platform to publicize new materials from the project website. We have also written “threads” about contemporary education topics in Malaysia, such as the results from the Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) 2019, as well as issues of de/centralization of the education system. Our performance as shadowpuppeteers in this regard depends on being observant fishermen that pay close attention to educational tides gaining traction on Twitter and other social media platforms, to which relevant scholarship in CIE can be brought to bear. As resourceful weavers, we then connect and assemble this knowledge into meaningful and comprehensible patterns for dissemination on social media. For example, it was through social media that we became aware of a local postgraduate student researching the colonial history of education in North Borneo, who we subsequently invited to contribute to this project. We have subsequently disseminated the output on our website and the @CIE_Malaysia Twitter (Noorta, 2020). Language also becomes a central issue for disseminating the project. The majority of CIE-related scholarship we trace both locally and abroad is written in English, whilst the mainstream language in Malaysian public education is Malay (the national language). Nevertheless, we have observed that there is also a significant component of education discourse in English among the Malaysian public on Twitter. In a postcolonial society where English can be deemed as a marker of class and cultural capital (Wong, Lee, Lee & Yaacob, 2012), we are aware of how performing this project primarily in English may foreclose engagement with local publics even as it promotes this initiative beyond the boundary of the nation-state. The writing of this chapter is a testament to that latter potential. Nonetheless, being conscious of academic jargon, attention to language, tone, and register in dissemination is crucial to ensure that our performance as shadow-puppeteers does not end up alienating the public. Therefore, in an attempt to balance issues of accessibility and visibility, we have therefore produced and disseminated content in both English and Malay. We are also exploring the possibility of translating materials published on the “CIE in Malaysia” project into Malay as a means of localizing the knowledge and reaching a wider audience at home. The metaphor of the Wayang Kulit as traditionally the entertainment of common-folk, rather than the elite, is a crucial one to remember as we grapple with issues of language in this project (Sweeney, 1970). Even as we seek to promote the visibility of the project, there are instances where our own personal social media presence becomes entangled with the local education discourse in ways that point to the political nature of knowledge production and dissemination in Malaysia. In a separate incident, Pravindharan, a public-school teacher, made critical comments on the country’s online education policy through a series of tweets that gained traction on Twitter. As an employee of MOE, he was reprimanded by his school administration as such comments went against the code of conduct for civil servants in Malaysia. He was subsequently instructed to remove the postings from Twitter. Given his positionality as a public-school teacher, this meant that Pravindharan was silenced from providing critical commentary on the Malaysian public education system using his real identity. In this way, perhaps the “CIE

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in Malaysia” project may also serve as a “screen” behind which such critiques of the education system can be performed like a Wayang Kulit. With reference to scholarship and empirical research in CIE, the project thus serves as a critical intermediary that inflects one’s affiliation with the MOE, circumventing risks of silencing. Nevertheless, engaging in this terrain carefully is crucial given that the MOE is a critical element of the CIE meta-assemblage in Malaysia. Within a highly centralized public education system, engaging with the government via the MOE is inevitable if we are to remain connected with issues of policy and practice affecting the majority of the population. Therefore, finding ways to navigate this political dynamic is a dimension of the project that we negotiate as shadow-puppeteers in tandem with the boundaries of the CIE meta-assemblage. While we seek to disseminate the work of “CIE in Malaysia” project widely to establish the project’s legitimacy within the meta-assemblage, attention to matters of visibility and accessibility in relation to language, as well as tact in negotiating the surveillance of the MOE remain paramount concerns.

Conclusion: The Three Vernacular Figures Forge Ahead In this chapter, we have sought to depict how our “CIE in Malaysia” project represents a meta-assemblage and microcosm of the field locally. Introduced in succession, our three vernacular figures of the fisher, weaver, and shadow-puppeteer navigate the contemporary education landscape in Malaysia, pull together actors and scholarship in CIE through our academic networks, and disseminate the outcomes of the project, leveraging on the strength of social media throughout the process. By first tracing our individual biographies that led to the formation of the “CIE in Malaysia” project, what followed was the process of identifying artifacts, scholarly output, and actors that together can be weaved into an assemblage. As CIE cartographers who seek to map the terrain, we are also making the terrain of CIE in Malaysia, thus becoming part of it. We return to Tsing’s (2015) earlier question regarding polyphonic assemblages: “How do gatherings become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts?” (p. 23). Through this reflective exercise, we argue that the CIE meta-assemblage highlights the collaborative and contingent nature of knowledge-making in the field through complex and dynamic interactions as well as relations. “Happenings,” in this context, manifest through the collective act of the fisher, weaver, and shadow-puppeteer attempting to piece together, while also being worked over by disparate fragments and actors of CIEs. The construction and strength of networks in the meta-assemblage of the “CIE in Malaysia” project, which we have described thus far lend tentative shape to the field of CIE locally, although this is contingent and subject to evolution with new discoveries, new coalitions and new commitments. If this chapter is a case of CIE as meta-assemblage represented in the Malaysian context, then indeed, we echo Tsing’s (2015) sentiment that “[a]ssemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story.” (p. 158). As emerging scholars in CIE from Malaysia, the very act of accounting for our biographies in the course of charting this project reminds us that knowledge-making in the field benefits from reflexive attention to positionality. This in itself is “meta” level

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work—vernacular figures drawn from a specific cultural context honored and brought in dialogue with a field concerned with matters that are international in scope. Recently, we were contacted by a Malaysian teacher who will soon embark on her own journey to study comparative education at the postgraduate level in Japan. We recommended some resources so she is able to get a head-start. Perhaps she will be able to reflect on this learning experience and contribute to the “CIE in Malaysia” project as she is also transformed, as we have been in our own journeys. The emerging field of CIE in Malaysia—together with our account of it—continues to be (re)configured as more actors, artefacts, insights, and aspirations are brought into its fold, consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion that reality is a moment-by-moment production of the encounter between people, objects, or ideas. Education is indeed a living thing. On our own, we present here but a small meta-assemblage nested within the field of CIE in Malaysia. Nevertheless, the very act of writing this chapter, performing the “CIE in Malaysia” project as a text within this volume on CIE as meta-assemblages, echoes Thomson’s (2018) call to view texts as performative, then we do not see them as static, but as having an ongoing life in the world … And performative texts do not act alone, they are socially produced and socially performative … we might ask: What networks or assemblages does this writing join? (p. 79)

Thus, through a textual maneuver—writing the progress of the “CIE in Malaysia” project into being—we offer this chapter as testimony and contribution of an instance of CIE meta-assemblage. Looking ahead, the fisher, weaver, and shadow-puppeteer continue their dialectical dance as the field of CIE continues to be (re)shaped and (re)territorialized in Malaysia.

Note 1 https://ciedumalaysia.wordpress.com/

References Abdul Razak, D. (January 18, 2020). A matter of discipline, not colour. News Straits Times. https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2020/01/557540/matter-discipline-notcolour Anuar, A.M. & Balakrishnan, P. (December 31, 2020). CIE Malaysia 2020 year end reflection. CIE in Malaysia. https://ciedumalaysia.wordpress.com/2020/12/31/ciemalaysia-2020-year-end-reflection/ Balakrishnan, P. (March 28, 2019). How comparative research can help our education system. Free Malaysia Today. https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/ opinion/2019/03/28/how-comparative-research-can-help-our-education-system/

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Balakrishnan, P. (2020). Race, politics, and geography of the Malaysian education system: An imaginary piece on how comparative and international education can benefit Malaysia. In A. W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (Vol. 39, pp. 61–70). Emerald Publishing Limited. Bereday, G. (1964). Sir Michael Sadler’s “study of foreign systems of education.” Comparative Education Review, 7(3), 307–14. Bray, M. (2008). Expanding the coverage and hearing more voices: 2004–2007. In V. Masemann, M. Bray & M. Manzon (Eds.), Common interests, uncommon goals: Histories of the world council of comparative education societies and its members (pp. 83–93). Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) & Springer. Daia, M. (1973). Sejarah perkembangan pendidikan dan persekolahan, second edition. Pustaka Aman Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Epstein, E. (2008). Setting the normative boundaries: Crucial epistemological benchmarks in comparative education. Comparative Education, 44(4), 373–86. jules, t.d., Shields, R. & Thomas, M.A.M. (Eds.) (2021). The Bloomsbury handbook of theory in comparative and international education. Bloomsbury Academic. Komljenovic, J. (2019). Big data and new social relations in higher education: Academia. edu. Google Scholar and ResearchGate. In R. Gorur, S. Sellar & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2019: Comparative methodology in the era of big data and global networks (pp. 148–64). Routledge. Lee, H.-A. (2018). Education in post GE-14 Malaysia: Promises, overtures and reforms. ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. Little, A.W. (2010). International and comparative education: What’s in a name? Compare, 40(6), 845–52. Malaysian Qualification Agency. (2016). Standard program: Pendidikan. Author. Martin, T. (February 1, 2018). Malaysian higher education soaring upwards. QS WOWNews. https://qswownews.com/malaysian-higher-education-soaring-upwards/ Ministry of Education Malaysia. (2013). Malaysia education blueprint 2013–2025 (Preschool to post-secondary education). Author. Mochida, K. (2008). The Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA). In V. Masemann, M. Bray & M. Manzon (Eds.), Common interests, uncommon goals: Histories of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies and its members (pp. 309–15). Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) & Springer. Noorta, N. (November 24, 2020). Sistem pendidikan kolonial di Borneo Utara. CIE in Malaysia. https://ciedumalaysia.wordpress.com/2020/11/24/sistem-pendidikankolonial-di-borneo-utara/ Razali, S.A. & Aziz, I.H. (December 29, 2019). SEKAT: To court if education ministry refuses dialogue on khat implementation. News Straits Times. https://www.nst.com. my/news/nation/2019/12/551741/sekat-court-if-education-ministry-refuses-dialoguekhat-implementation Rust, V.D., Johnstone, B. & Allaf, C. (2009). Reflections on the development of comparative education. In R. Cowen & A.M. Kazamias (Eds.), International Handbook of Comparative Education (pp. 121–38). Springer. Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a meta-assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A.W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (Vol. 39, pp. 133–51). Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Silova, I. & Auld, E. (2020). Acrobats, phantoms, and fools: Animating comparative education cartographies. Comparative Education, 50(1), 20–38. Sweeney, A. (1970). The shadow-play of Kelantan: Report on a period of field research. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 43(2), 53–80. ­Symaco, L.P. & Chao, R.Y. (2019). Comparative and international education in East and South East Asia. In C.C. Wolhuter & A.W. Wiseman (Eds.), Comparative and international education: Survey of an infinite field (Vol. 36, pp. 213–28). Emerald Publishing Limited. Tho, X.Y. (May 8, 2019). Outcry over retraining ethnic quota for pre-university admission in Malaysia. Channel News Asia. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/ malaysia-outcry-ethnic-quota-matriculation-admission-11514578 Thomas, M.A.M., Rauschenberger, E. & Crawford-Garrett, K. (Eds.) (2021). Examining Teach for All: International perspectives on a growing global network. Routledge. Thomson, P. (2018). Troubling writing as “representation.” In B. Jeffrey & L. Russell (Eds.), Ethnographic writing (pp. 69–86). E&E Publishing. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Williams, P. (2002). The competent boundary spanner. Public Administration, 80(1), 103–24. Wolhuter, C.C. (2008). Review of the review: constructing the identity of comparative education. Research in Comparative and International Education, 3(4), 323–44. Wong, F.F., Lee, K.S., Lee, S.K. & Yaacob, A. (2012). English use as an identity marker among Malaysian undergraduates. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 18(1), 145–55. World Bank (n.d.). The World Bank group inclusive growth and sustainable finance hub in Malaysia. Retrieved March 31, 2021, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ malaysia/brief/global-knowledge-and-research-hub Zon, K. (1986). Pendidikan perbandingan: satu catatan awal tentang makna ruanglingkup dan tujuannya. Pendidik dan Pendidikan, 6, 61–6.

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The European Area of Higher Education as a Complex Educational Assemblage: Prospects for Comparative Approaches Florin D. Salajan

Introduction Over the last three decades, the development, evolution, and integration of European education, and particularly of the European higher education sector, has been a prolific terrain for scholarship, drawing the interest and attention of a growing collection of academics, researchers, and policymakers to this still emerging domain. This space has witnessed an exponential growth in studies on the social, political, economic, and governance apparatuses that give rise to a highly complex and heterogeneous educational space marked as much by a certain degree of convergence, as it is exposed to powerful vectors of divergence. Much of the literature on European higher education has attempted to elucidate the energies that galvanize the motivations, processes, and mechanisms behind the largely voluntary integration of a constellation of nation-states and their systems of education into a sophisticated arrangement held together by their drive to share in the mutual benefits deriving from forging closer and interlinked relationships among the members of the European educational collective. The literature on the subject is vast, varied, and difficult to capture in a summary overview here. For the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to mention a few of the more influential genres of investigation in this area conducted over the years by eminent scholars in the field. These include, for instance, studying the integration of European higher education through the lens of classical European integration theories often centered around the consolidation of the European Union (EU) as an integrative force (Amaral, Neave, Musselin, & Maassen, 2009; De Wit, 2003; Lowe, 1992; Maassen & Olsen, 2007; Sin, Tavares, Cardoso, & Rosa, 2018), tracing the evolution of education in the EU (Moschonas, 1998), taking a historical perspective of the role and development of European universities in the creation of a “Europe of Knowledge” (Corbett, 2005), investigating the Europeanization of higher education (Lawn & Grek, 2012), critiquing efforts made to develop a classification process of the diverse higher

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education systems in Europe (Van Vught, 2009) or examining the various governance approaches in the growing European educational space (Lawn & Normand, 2015). In this larger context, of even greater relevance here is the attention the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has received from its inception in 1999 with the Bologna Declaration and the myriad ways in which it has been studied since then as a model for a closer convergence of enlarged or extended Europe’s higher education systems. These incursions into explicating the EHEA, and the Bologna Process that characterize it, both highlight the catalytic role of the EU in driving the process and underscore its limitations in bringing together higher education systems from outside EU’s and geopolitical Europe’s perimeter, which may share few or none of the socio-cultural histories and attributes of the core European space. The development, evolution, and intricacies of the EHEA, in particular, has been extensively, expertly, and comprehensively captured in a series of edited volumes over the past two decades (see, for example, Curaj et al., 2015; Curaj, Deca, & Pricopie, 2018; Kehm, Huisman & Stensaker, 2009; Tomusk, 2006; Westerheijden & Schwarz, 2004), as well as book chapters (see De Wit, 2007; Nokkala, 2015; Quinlan & Berndtson, 2012), special issues of the European Journal of Education (Kehm, 2012), the European Educational Research Journal (Ursin et  al., 2010), or the European Journal of Higher Education (Klemenčič, 2019) and other scholarly articles far too abundant to enumerate here. The purpose of this chapter is not to tread the same theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches offered through the European integration or Europeanization paradigms provided in this otherwise excellent body of work dedicated to the study of the EHEA. Rather, the intent and scope here are to cast the EHEA in a novel epistemological light and parse this continuous convergence process, or phenomenon, in European higher education through the prism of assemblage thinking by deploying the analytical device termed complex educational assemblage advanced elsewhere in this author’s work (Salajan & jules, 2021). As I will argue in the rest of this chapter, the intermeshing and sophisticated architecture of the interlinked educational systems comprising the EHEA, overlapping both highly integrated and loose groupings of territorial and regional units belonging to heterogeneous cultural, political, and governance realms can be understood as a complex educational assemblage. Viewed through this lens, the EHEA can be envisioned in a more holistic fashion that explains the interconnectedness and shifting nature of this space and allows for the motivating or driving factors animating and fueling its existence to be revealed.

Brief Historical Overview of EHEA Comprehensive and illuminating accounts of the EHEA’s history are plentiful in the European education literature. It is not in the scope of this chapter to review this history at length, but in order to familiarize readers less versed in this corpus of scholarship with some of the key moments in the evolution of EHEA, it is useful to provide a brief historical review and context here. To a certain extent, the earliest modest moves

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toward European integration in education can be linked to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, the precursor of today’s EU). The Treaty of Paris of 1951, which established the ECSC, conceded some very limited educational provisions, primarily related to vocational training and the education of dependents of officials employed in the agencies of the emerging European bureaucracy (Moschonas, 1998). This is not surprising as, from the perspective of the formal legislation, education was delegated to and considered a responsibility of the member states, even if their utility in advancing diplomatic missions was all but recognized at the time. Higher education in particular, given the high degree of autonomy this sector enjoyed in the member states, remained outside the attributions of a fledgling European polity more concerned with economic objectives aimed at bringing to fruition the Single Market and, to some extent, a closer political integration. Given this context, it is understandable that despite political declarations and hardly veiled ambitions in developing a common approach to higher education during the first two-three decades of European political and economic integration, no obvious consensus arose on a convergence process in European higher education. Nonetheless, even in the face of the treaty constraints that reduced the space for political agency in this realm, the member states reached a consensus in establishing the European University Institute in 1972 (Corbett, 2005), a downsized version of an initially grander project for a common European University. A key moment in the integration of European education in general was the enactment of the Treaty on European Union of 1992 (TEU). The TEU (also referred to as the Treaty of Maastricht) contained explicit references to addressing education at the Community level. Such involvement was framed as a contribution to raising the quality of education and training in the Member States, but the TEU left the Member States firmly in control of their individual educational systems. Conversely, the Community’s role was to support and supplement the Member States in this endeavor, not least by encouraging cooperation among them. Subsequent iterations of the TEU reinforced these political commitments at the EU level, by underscoring the Community’s role in supporting and supplementing the Member States’ responsibility for their educational systems (European Union, 2008). The most significant turning point in the integration of European higher education specifically, came with the signing of The Sorbonne Declaration in 1998 by four EU member states, namely France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, again emphasizing the galvanizing role the EU has played in driving broader integration in higher education on the European continent, particularly in the later stages of the process. The Sorbonne Declaration represented a political declaration of common objectives among the signatory countries to build closer educational cooperation and exchange by “harmonizing the structure of higher education” (Neave & Maassen, 2007, p. 135) under their purview. The process gathered further momentum with the signing of the Bologna Declaration in 1999 by ministers of education from twenty-nine European countries, representing a variable and overlapping geographic construction composed of all EU member states, the then EU candidate countries and European Free Trade Agreement members. This triggered a “convergence of higher education systems in Europe” (Perez-Encinas, 2018, p.  108) known as the Bologna Process, which revolved around ensuring greater comparability and compatibility of credentials in

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Figure 8.1  Members of the European Higher Education Area with stages of enlargement. Source: Olds, K., & Robertson, S. (2011). Mapping the expansion of Bologna Process membership (1999–2011). https://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/mappingbologna-process-membership/

a three-cycle degree model facilitated in part by the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). It incorporated in its narrative a concept drawn from EU policy language, namely to develop and promote a “European dimension” in higher education, a frequent rhetorical device meant to infuse a cohesive approach to higher education in Europe (Klemenčič, 2019). Through these initial mechanisms, the EHEA was established, expanding over the following two decades to include forty-eight participating countries spanning a vast Euro-Asian geo-political space of territorial units representing an assortment of political and socio-cultural systems, along with the European Commission. As Figure 8.1 illustrates, this process has occurred in stages, with the bulk of the current members admitted in 1999, followed by smaller waves of expansion up until a decade ago. It is important to stress here that a core expectation in bringing together these disparate and distinct educational systems, each functioning in its own cultural, social, economic, and political environment, into a relatively cohesive configuration is represented by the obligation of each participatory country to adhere to the European Cultural Convention (ECC) of 1954 as a condition for membership in the EHEA. Spearheaded by the Council of Europe, the largest international organization for democracy and rule of law in Europe to which all EHEA members also belong, the ECC’s purpose is to support Europe’s cultural heritage, shared histories and common ideals by pursuing “a policy of common action designed to safeguard and encourage the development of European culture” (Council of Europe, 1954, p. 1). This desideratum is especially important in the context of a complex educational assemblage paradigm, as

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the EHEA participatory countries from the European and extra-European space, many having only partially or some no shared histories, cultures, or social structures with the continental European countries are pulled into an arrangement connecting them declaratively to the values espoused by the ECC. Subsequent stock-tacking exercises in the EHEA repeatedly emphasized the remarkable achievement of constructing this higher-education architecture “based on trust, cooperation and respect for the diversity of cultures, languages, and higher education systems” (EHEA, 2010, para 4), and presented it as a “unique cooperation” among European higher education systems marked by the “diversity of our cultures, languages and environments” (EHEA, 2020, p.  3). This intricate historical evolution suggests that the multiple symbolisms of diversity, of distinct yet multilayered higher-education jurisdictions spanning across a varied geo-political realm, of adherence to a space forged through functional ties and shared values, along with the mechanisms and instruments serving as conduits for holding the arrangement together, translated EHEA into a complex educational assemblage. An explication of the morphing of this space through an assemblage lens is where the focus of this chapter turns next.

Applying an Assemblage Thinking Lens In the context of this volume, to a certain extent here I anchor the notion of EHEA as a complex educational assemblage in the wider conceptualization of comparative and international education (CIE) as a complex assemblage. Given its variegated composition and architecture, amounting to a patchwork of discrete geographically bounded spaces emerging from the ideational construction of an imagined common values-based and norms-oriented higher-education community, the EHEA lends itself to multilayered comparative endeavors. These comparisons may be conducted along the distinct, self-contained educational systems comprising it and the motivating or agentic factors leading them to subscribe to convergence via the Bologna Process. Conversely, as a composite structure, the EHEA may be examined in comparison or in reference to similar emerging educational arrangements in other regions of the world. Although it is not in the remit of this chapter to conduct a comprehensive review of our previous examination of complex assemblages (see Salajan & jules, 2020, 2021, for an extended treatise on this theme), it is worth to nominally recapitulate these principles as they undergird the coagulation of educational assemblages. While embracing an assemblage lens to focus on the EHEA as a complex educational assemblage, it is important to revisit Deleuze and Guattari’s authentic scholarship, rather  than rely on the secondary literature on assemblage, the proliferation of which in social science and educational research has departed considerably from the initial meaning, scope, and purpose of assemblage thinking (Buchanan, 2015, 2021). Therefore, it is relevant and suitable to briefly reflect on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) formulation of their principles informing the rhizomatic nature of assemblages and how these can then be injected into the ideation and scaffolding of EHEA as a representative case of an assemblage, not only as a “mere apparatus” (Buchanan, 2021),

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but also as a manifestation of its “potentializing directionality” (Manning, 2016). In their articulation of assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) proposed several key principles on the rhizomatic nature and properties of assemblages. First, through their connectivity and heterogeneity assemblages are endowed with the capacity to establish innumerable ties among various compatible components with mutually reinforcing attributes. Second, standing in contrast to singularity, multiplicity confers the assemblage its countless dimensions that provide the auspicious conditions for such connections to materialize. Third, asignifying rupture is a critical principle in envisaging the rhizome, as this distinguishes between the lines of segmentarity and the lines of flight along which the forces of (re)territorialization and deterritorialization through coding and stratification (re)configure the assemblage. Finally, cartography represents a culminating principle lending the assemblage the ability to expand its configuration on polymorphic coterminous planes of representation. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) own characterization, On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. (p. 88)

­If, in this conceptualization, the assemblage appears to be endowed with its own agency, this is not without reason. Assemblage is Brian Massumi’s translation of the term Deleuze and Guattari used in their original work in French, namely agencement. This implies, to a certain extent, an element of agency inherent to what has become to be understood as assemblage (Buchanan, 2021) or, as Frohmann (2012) suggests, “design, but no designer, because design is immanent or emergent” (p.  181). At its core, Deleuzoguattarian thinking attributes the flux, flows, and movements intra- and inter-assemblages in the emergence of assemblages to a pure state of desire that “is the source of all creativity and at the same time it threatens all forms with dissolution” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 14).

The Complex (Educational) Assemblage Before envisioning any comparative enterprise involving the EHEA, the immediate and principal aim here is to embed and explain it through an assemblage paradigm. Hence, I revisit, repurpose and expand upon an approach proposed by Salajan and jules (2020) in this regard that elucidated broader educational conglomerate structures, intersecting along policy, systemic, and institutional lines to form self-reinforcing networks of normative and behavioral patterns of action. More specifically, Salajan and jules (2021) “define such constructions as complex educational assemblages, that is, polymorphic and multiscalar arrangements of educational polities, systems, and mechanisms,

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bound together by symbiotic and synergistic relationships, driven by shared purposes, mutual interests, and common responsibilities” (p. 150). As Deleuze and Guattari allow for the concurrent existence of multiple interconnected assemblages, and “themselves treat the assemblage as a provisional concept for which ‘much working out remained to be done’” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 6), complex educational assemblages are envisioned here as comprising emerging assemblages and elements or units that gravitate toward one another based on their affinities and motivations to engage in joint functional endeavors, relationships and alliances for their mutual benefit in steering collective educational processes. Used in this particular constructionist-educational mode, this is a related variant of the notion of an “assemblage of assemblages” derived from Deleuzoguattarian logic employed, for example, in studies of political assemblages or places (Kortelainen & Koeppen, 2018), urban or human geography (Kanai & Kutz, 2013), or international relations (Acuto & Curtis, 2014). Following Deleuze’s pondering that “theory is exactly like a box of tools … It must be useful. It must function” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, as cited in Buchanan, 2021, p.  7) and that “it should be used to see something outside and beyond its point of origin in a specific work” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  7), it is fitting to place the EHEA directly at the center of this ideational representation of complex educational assemblages, given its multilayered, heterogeneous, network-like appearance sustained by intricate co-dependent and co-functional relationships. In this sense, the characteristics of assemblage scrutinized by Salajan and jules (2020; also Chapter 1 in this volume) uphold and apply to the EHEA, particularly as non-human actors—in the form of mutually agreed to conventions, policies, mechanisms, and instruments of convergence in higher education—and human actors—the individuals both steering the process and those enjoying the results of educational mobility in this space—in this sprawling assemblage create and consolidate new informal and formal pathways of bureaucratic and socio-human interconnectivity among the intermeshed highereducation apparatuses. This aligns with, expands on, and gives explicit manifestation to the notion that “assemblages are not defined by their components; they are defined, rather, by what they produce, and what they produce, ultimately, are the complex forms and objects that populate contemporary society” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 47). It does so, particularly as the EHEA, as a compound structure of disparate higher-educational systems, represents an ideation and embodiment of a long-standing aspiration that is weightier and more expansive than the mere sum of its parts. Stepping away for a moment from the immediate realm of EHEA and the educational domain, it is instrumental here to use as an explanatory device a European complex assemblage, as an adaptation of the concept defined earlier, operating primarily on intergovernmental lines. The Euler diagram in Figure  8.2 represents an evocative example of the intricate patterns of relationships forming through negotiated and mediated interests among components of the politico-territorial assemblage. In fact, this diagrammatic illustration encapsulates the very idea of a complex assemblage of multiple territorial formations arranged in a multitude of assemblages defined by their value-driven affinities (e.g., an adherence to the principles of democracy and the rule of law), their shared cultures and histories, their regional identities or their economic or functional co-dependencies. Although none of these traits are mutually exclusive, they

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Figure 8.2  An illustration of a European complex assemblage. Source: Wikipedia. (2010). Euler diagram of supranational European bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Supranational_European_Bodies-en.svg#file.

are nonetheless mutually inclusive and translate into interlocking, yet shifting alliances by virtue of the arrangements serving the temporal, yet ephemeral benefits and desires of the human actors shepherding their politico-territorial units into the complex assemblage. These shifting alliances territorialize the assemblage on precarious and contingent lines of segmentarity, as these polities negotiate their belonging to the arrangement sometimes in several coterminous assemblages depending on their overlapping aims and traits enumerated above. Conversely, they deterritorialize at equally fleeting lines of flight when their desires no longer correspond with those of the assemblages they had territorialized, leading to a rupture in the alliance caused by the departing entity. However, save for a complete or absolute withdrawal from the multiplicity of the interdependent arrangements, and the overarching arrangement, the complex assemblage likely survives, albeit in a slightly altered configuration. These transformations conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) observation that “a territory is always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization” (p. 326). More concretely, to elucidate the above dynamics, it is notable that the largest arrangement in this complex assemblage is the Council of Europe, the intergovernmental compact embodying the promotion and protection of human rights and the guardian of democratic rule principles in the Eurasian geopolitical space, or “the foundation block for reconstructing and integrating Europe” (Bond, 2012, p. iv).

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On a related note, it is perhaps not coincidental that this is also the governing body that commissioned the European Cultural Convention to which all EHEA members have to subscribe before they are admitted into that eponymous assemblage. This intergovernmental space has been gradually territorialized, figuratively and factually, through the legitimacy it conferred its members by adhering to its conventions, governing and regulating instruments attesting to their protection of shared notions of democracy, transparency, and, to a certain extent, European socio-cultural values. In time, membership into the Council of Europe translated into a sine qua non condition for membership into another assemblage, namely the EU, for those members that met a whole set of additional criteria, requirements, and expectations. For good reason, the EU assemblage is juxtaposed, overlayed, and, at the same time, co-extensive with the Council of European assemblage of the European complex assemblage. Both of these marked examples of pan-European cooperation have existed, in some shape or form, in the plane of immanence as the continent’s constituent entities had found themselves perennially in tension and, very often, in open conflict over disputed territorial, political, or economic claims (Pagden & Hamilton, 2002; Tavares da Silva, 2009). Only the near-total annihilation of European society in the aftermath of the two global conflagrations of the twentieth-century persuaded the European polities to enter into binding agreements for preserving peace, promoting democracy, and ensuring prosperity on the continent (Dinan, 2014). At this stage, through the formal creation of commonly agreed-upon governing instruments, the arrangements moved from abstract ideals to the concrete plane of organization that bestowed the growing arrangements a semblance of palpability and stability. The ideas or ideals of European unity as a form of expression found propitious terrain for evolving as a form of content. This stemmed from a desire to keep the peace, then to continually fine-tune the balance and co-dependency between those ideals and the concrete manifestation of the European concert. As Buchanan (2021) put it, “the abstract machine does not exist independently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions independently of the machine” (p. 44). While they have been territorialized through both the non-human actors represented by the formal conventions and legal instruments of accession, and the human actors yielding those instruments to achieve common goals, these forms of European cooperation and cohabitation have also been exposed to deterritorialization pressures over time. The EU, in particular, experienced a “soft” deterritorialization when Greenland, as an autonomous territory of Denmark, opted to withdraw from the EU (the then European Economic Community) in 1982 via a popular referendum. The will of the human actors, the people, was enacted through the non-human actor, the plebiscite, leading to both the figurative and actual deterritorialization of the EU (although Greenland eventually was given the designation of an overseas territory of the EU, therefore counting its inhabitants as EU citizens and, thus, continuing to exist partly within that assemblage). A “hard” deterritorialization began in 2016, when the UK decided, also through a (non-binding) popular referendum, to withdraw from the EU, triggering a prolonged, divisive and contentious process of legal maneuvering on the arguments, procedures, and instruments to be invoked in this regard (Raitio & Raulus, 2017). The process, also known as Brexit, was completed in 2020 and, this time, a full

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member of the EU took the unprecedented step to leave the union, causing a rupture in the immediate assemblage to which it had belonged and a tear in the contiguous assemblage. Before Brexit, the scenario of complete withdrawal from the EU of a full member state had only been theorized upon based on the aforementioned case of Greenland and existing case law or European Court of Justice opinions, but never clearly settled in the EU Treaties and secondary legislation (Berglund, 2006). Again, the human actors, for mixed reasons, voiced a desire and will to depart from the union, via the non-human actors represented initially by the referendum and eventually the withdrawal instrument that acted in concert as deterritorialization forces. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the complex assemblage, its structure shifted only minimally, as the UK remained in its composition. Concurrently, it also preserved intact its affiliation in a smaller assemblage, the Common Travel Area it shares with Ireland, an arrangement which by the act of UK’s departure is now straddling what could be considered at once a tenuous line of segmentarity and flight. Ostensibly, the UK could cross again this imaginary line, should it consider to rejoin the EU at some point in the future (De Mars & Murray, 2020), therefore reterritorializing that assemblage. The fluctuating nature of UK’s alliances that it alters when the choices of its human actors are enacted through the non-human instruments of withdrawal (or accession, when convenient and expedient) evoke Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) reminder of the importance “to note this formation of new assemblages within the territorial assemblage, and this movement from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages by means of components of passage and relay” (p. 325). The intricate architecture of the European complex assemblage is further illustrated by other such interwoven alliances, that can transcend multiple lines of segmentarity or flight among the assemblages. For instance, the Nordic Council, an inter-parliamentary cooperation mechanism among Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, an essential component of what has been hailed as “one of the oldest forms of multilateral political partnership anywhere in the world … rooted in the geographical, historical and cultural affinity between the five Nordic countries” (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2011), is composed of members of multiple assemblages in various configurations. While all are members of the Council of Europe, only Finland is fully integrated in most core European assemblages (i.e., EU, Eurozone, EU Customs, European Economic Area, Schengen Area, etc.), while Denmark and Sweden share with Finland in the same assemblage with the exception of the Eurozone. The other two Nordic Council members are even more loosely integrated in coextensive assemblages, with Iceland and Norway only sharing in the EEA and Schengen Area with the other three Nordic counterparts. In turn, these two entities belong to another assemblage that includes Switzerland and Liechtenstein, the European Free Trade Agreement, which excludes Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Here, the potential for territorialization is again evidenced by two previous attempts of the Norwegian government to lead the country into the EU in 1973 and 1995. Although the non-human actors embodied in the instruments of accession had all but assured Norway’s place in the EU assemblage, the human actors voiced their dissent against territorializing the EU with their rejection of membership into the assemblage (Thorhallsson, 2015). Conversely, the aptly named Baltic Assembly, another regional organization for intergovernmental

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cooperation between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania is compactly and fully enmeshed into the same assemblages as those enumerated earlier for Finland, while maintaining close ties with other assemblages such as the Nordic Council and the Visegrád Group (Cutler & Von Lingen, 2019). The case of the Baltic assemblage conjures complete and relatively stable territorialization, as all its members share in unison the same lines of segmentarity or flight, but the intent of crossing them separately from one another appears to be remote, even though conceivable. These instances of actual, but also potential, shifts in the politico-territorial, as well as the imaginary, arrangement seem to mimic to a great extent the properties inherent in movements among assemblages Deleuze and Guattari (1987) postulated as the territorial assemblage continually passes into other assemblages. Likewise, the infra-assemblage is inseparable from the intra-assemblage, as is the intraassemblage from interassemblages; yet these passages are not necessary but rather take place “on a case-by-case basis.” (p. 325)

Although this European complex assemblage offers numerous other examples of these fluctuations in the juxtaposition and variability of its assemblages, or interassemblages, to adapt a Deleuzoguattarian term, the ones examined above suffice here to underscore the fleeting nature of these alliances, notwithstanding the apparently dense contractual or formal ties that bind the various units into one or multiple assemblages, but can be dissolved if its actors will it.

EHEA Illustrated as a Complex Educational Assemblage Returning to the EHEA, and following in the same logic presented above related to the complex European assemblage, Figure  8.3 provides this time a geographic representation of the multiple assemblages forming the EHEA complex educational assemblage. Three contiguous and interrelated primary arrangements stand out in this cartographic representation of educational assemblages: (1) the EHEA as the collective association of national education systems; (2) the ERASMUS+ Programme, the EU’s flagship integrated program, the core function of which is to foster faculty, student, and staff mobility across the participating national educational systems designated as either program countries (all EU member states, all of which are also EHEA members) or partner countries (EU associated states, most of which are also EHEA members); and (3) the Horizon 2020 Programme, the EU’s framework program for research and innovation, which involves to a large extent and requires the participation of the higher-education sector in carrying out entrepreneurial partnerships with industry. Here, of note are again the various overlapping associations among national education systems, forming interlocked arrangements with varying degrees of integration and relational strengths. The value of these arrangements stems from and translates into the combination of a range of individual units and the assemblages to which they belong to form viable relationships. These fluid permutations operate not only by virtue of the functional-institutional motivations aligning them to the Bologna Process at the core

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­Figure 8.3  A geographical representation of the EHEA complex educational assemblage. Source: European University Association (2019). https://era.gv.at/public/documents/4105/ wk14377_en19.pdf

of the EHEA, but are also premised on the socio-cultural dimension imposed by the European Cultural Convention which the joining members are obligated to sign and to adhere to its spirit. On a closer examination of this variable geometry of memberships and associations, the EHEA becomes a complex educational assemblage, or an assemblage of assemblages, as the units concurrently form relationships or belong to contiguous, juxtaposed, or intersecting arrangements. For instance, if initially the core drivers of the EHEA were four EU members, soon thereafter a multitude of national systems signed onto the Bologna Process, eventually becoming members of the EHEA in the course of several years (see Figure 8.1). During that same process, a number of the EHEA members, predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe also joined the EU (to which one may add their admission into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] which, in itself, is an arrangement or assemblage spanning a larger geographical space, with a constellation of elements coalescing around a distinct set of rationales, motivations, and interests, that is, to form a mutual defense pact). Hence, the EHEA complex educational assemblage brings together members belonging to other assemblages, the objectives of which may or may not directly coincide with that of the EHEA. Currently, the EHEA comprises all EU member states, which automatically make them full members of ERASMUS+ and Horizon 2020, and it has yet to be subjected to deterritorialization (although, following Deleuze and Guattari, the potential for this disassembling force always exists). Nonetheless, the contingent and fluid nature of this complex assemblage is illustrated again through the example of the UK’s exit from the EU. Although the EU assemblage has been deterritorialized to a certain extent through this act of departure, the EHEA has not been affected, as the UK remained in its

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composition. Notably, however, the UK partially deterritorialized another assemblage in the process, perhaps only temporarily, as its departure from the EU also meant an abdication of its participation as a program country in the ERASMUS+ mobility scheme (Zotti, 2021) governed by the EU on behalf of the EHEA. By the same token, the UK may retain its status as an ERASMUS Programme country if the association negotiated with the EU through the withdrawal agreement establishes that status. This would be similar to the participation of other current non-EU members in ERASMUS+ (Hubble, Bellis, & Bolton, 2021), such as Iceland and Norway (which rejected EU membership and are part of the Nordic Council assemblage discussed above), North Macedonia and Turkey (both associated countries with and aspirants to EU membership, and the latter belonging to the EU Customs Union) and Liechtenstein (with no foreseeable aspiration or desire for EU membership, but belonging to the European Free Trade Agreement and the Schengen Area along with Iceland and Norway), all of which are full members of the EHEA. In addition, there exist a number of EU associated countries fully part of the EHEA, forming themselves a fluid assemblage of candidate countries to the EU but, unlike Turkey or North Macedonia, for example, have weaker links with ERASMUS+ and therefore considered partner countries in that program, such as Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Moldova, Ukraine, and countries in the Caucasus region. Even more loosely associated are several countries in the North African region, which share only in the ERASMUS+ as partner countries, but are not part of the EHEA. This way, the EHEA complex educational assemblage translates into a variable geography of assemblages, each with bonds of various strengths both intra- and, particularly, inter-assemblages, depending on the degree of codification and stratification giving rise to each assemblage. Thus, national education systems that are also part of the EU assemblage, for instance, share much closer bonds intra-assemblage than with systems outside it, yet the inter-assemblages links formed via the EHEA create bonds on other lines of segmentarity, codified on a set of values and objectives that are common to all EHEA members. While these arrangements would appear as separated by allegiances to different sets of norms or expectations, in actual fact, these assemblages should be seen as one another’s extensions, as the overarching goal of the EHEA is to establish connecting channels, pathways, and conduits for convergence of the educational systems premised on shared values and common interests that strengthen the ties among the multiple assemblages, while upholding the heterogeneity inherent in their diverse socio-cultural characters. Nor are they locked into concentric or parallel arrangements, but rather into interrelated alliances that function because the units entering into the assemblages of this complex assemblage derive the benefits to which they aspire or desire, to put it in Deleuzoguattarian terms, by maintaining and developing their relationships. The advantages each member derives from belonging to the ERASMUS+ Programme, for example, through mobility and collaborative projects, feed into consolidated ties within the EHEA. These render interactions and interconnections concrete in these interwoven arrangements through codifying and stratification instruments, such as the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), that acts as a repository of data on degrees, credentials and courses of studies and their transparent exchange across the complex assemblage. But this codification and stratification leading to

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the territorialization of the complex educational assemblage is driven just as much by the imaginary aims of creating a symbiotic European educational collective, a European integrated ideal of collaboration and cooperation in education, as the concrete normative instruments and conventions giving its tangible contours and persistent presence concomitantly in the plane of immanence and in the plane of organization. The ideational inception of the EHEA as a desideratum for greater compatibility between European national educational systems gave rise not only to an intricate pattern of connections among individual polities, but also to unpredictable arrangements and clusters creating an assemblage of assemblages. The actions of the actors in these assemblages and of the assemblages themselves are operationalized or concretized through their unabated flow along the pathways and, the sometimes selective, affinities for sharing in the functional rewards of belonging to this complex educational assemblage.

­Complex Educational Assemblage in CIE Overlayed on the principles of assemblage discussed earlier, the EHEA as a complex educational assemblage presents an illustrative application of assemblage for research in CIE. The intrinsic properties of assemblage enumerated and explicated above, namely connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture and cartography, as well as the processes of codification and stratification by which it is (re)territorialized and deterritorialized provide a holistic frame of reference and analytical tool for comparative studies. The extensibility, elasticity, and malleability of assemblages allows for a more encompassing comparativist perspective than the discrete units of analysis at nation-state, regional, or system levels that continue to predominate in the CIE research literature. An assemblage paradigm eschews the rigidity of enclosed spaces defined by distinct territorial boundaries, as it focuses on the relational character of the units and, as shown above, assemblages coalescing on the synergies and compatibilities found in various stages of bonding. Viewed as an assemblage of assemblages, for example, a complex educational assemblage such as the EHEA, lends itself to less constrained comparisons, both intra- and inter-assemblages, without compromising the rigor of its validity as a “unit of comparison.” On the contrary, the extensibility, versatility, and fluidity of the assemblage allows for nuancing connections and relationships among the units of comparison rather than artificially attempting to identify mere similarities and differences among them. It also takes into account that these subjects of comparison are emergent, everchanging and contingent arrangements that evade the rigid strictures of measurability along finite, discrete features, or variables that could be construed as expressive of their functioning. The act of comparing educational systems or arrangements through an assemblage prism thus alleviates, to a certain extent, the researcher’s narrow focus on defining units of comparison and the correspondence between them solely on their spatial or territorial classifications recurrently problematized by comparativist scholars (see, Bray, Adamson, & Manson, 2016; Philips & Schweisfurth, 2014).

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Such an approach addresses some of the intractable issues with comparative education analyses Bray, Adamson, and Mason (2016) noted in their most recent treatise on comparative methods an overarching point of the Bray and Thomas article was their call for multilevel analyses in comparative studies to achieve multifaceted and holistic analyses of educational phenomena. The authors observed that much research remained at a single level, thereby neglecting recognition of the ways in which patterns at the lower levels in education systems are shaped by patterns at higher levels and vice versa. While researchers can often undertake only single-level studies because of constraints dictated by purpose and availability of resources, Bray and Thomas suggested that researchers should at least recognise the limits of their foci and the mutual influences of other levels on the educational phenomena of interest. (p. 10)

­An assemblage paradigm and, by extension, a complex educational assemblage view, obviates the need to think narrowly about units of comparison in terms of the need to “explode the cube” (Sobe & Kowalczyk, 2013) of circumscribed levels of comparison. It rather compels comparativists to ponder primarily on the relational, interwoven and interconnected nature of the world of education, in its myriad manifestations and “to examine the varied actors, sites, and levels of interaction precisely because power is distributed unequally within a system” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014, p. 39). It also imbues them with the realization and acknowledgment that heterogeneity is a valueadded, rather than a value-subtracted, attribute, and cautions against its extraction for the profit of institutional actors claiming hierarchical primacy in controlling or steering education. By embracing the analytical tools of an assemblage paradigm, comparativists enunciate, articulate, and implement a refined epistemological position that stretches the field’s normative boundaries (Epstein, 2008). Its nimbleness, pliability and comprehensiveness open a window into new possibilities for (re)defining the very act of comparison.

References Acuto, M. & Curtis, S. (2014). Assemblage thinking and international relations. In M. Acuto & S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 1–16). Palgrave Macmillan. Amaral, A., Neave, G., Musselin, C. & Maassen, P. (2009). European integration and the governance of higher education and research. Springer. Berglund, S. (2006). Prison or voluntary cooperation? The possibility of withdrawal from the European Union. Scandinavian Political Studies, 29(2), 147–67. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2006.00147.x Bond, M. (2012). The Council of Europe: Structure, history and issues in European politics. Routledge. Bray, M., Adamson, B. & Mason, M. (2016). Comparative education research, second edition. Springer.

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Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d., (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a meta-assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education. 2019 (pp. 133–51). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920200000039014 Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d., (2021). Regulated and unregulated big data analytics as (re)makers of complex educational assemblages in the EU and the CARICOM. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education. 2020 (pp. 149–70). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920210000040010 Sin, C., Tavares, O., Cardoso, S. & Rosa, M.J. (2018). European higher education and the internal market: Tensions between European policy and national sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan. Sobe, N.W. & Kowalczyk, J.A. (2013). Exploding the cube: Revisioning “context” in the field of comparative education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 16(1), 6–12. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/cice/pdf/30407_16_1_Noah_Sobe_Jamie_Kowalczyk.pdf ­Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2014). Comparison and context: The interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study of education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 16(2), 34–42. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/cice/pdf/33066_16_2_Gita_Steiner-Khamsi.pdf Tavares da Silva, J. (2009). Europe, giving shape to an idea. Council of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2860/39834 Thorhallsson, B. (2015). The outsiders: Norway and Iceland. In C. Grøn, P. Nedergaard & A. Wivel (Eds.), The Nordic Countries and the European Union: Still the other European community? (pp. 32–50). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315726335 Tomusk, V. (2006). Creating the European area of higher education: Voices from the periphery. Springer. Ursin, J., Zamorski, B., Edvardsson Stiwne, E., Teelken, C. & Wihlborg, M. (2010). The Bologna Process: Help or hindrance to the development of European higher education? European Educational Research Journal, 9(1), 29–31 https://doi. org/10.2304/eerj.2010.9.1.29 Van Vught, F. (2009). Mapping the higher education landscape: Toward a European classification of higher education. Springer. Westerheijden, D.F. & Schwarz, S. (2004). Accreditation and evaluation in the European Higher Education Area. Springer. Zotti, S. (2021). Academic mobility after Brexit: Erasmus and the UK post-2020. European Journal of English Studies, 25(1), 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.20 21.1918834

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The Vibrating Plateau of Caribbean Historiographies: Re/dis/assembling Regional Educational Assemblages tavis d. jules

Introduction This chapter takes up what I will call “regional educational assemblage” as an invitation to think about regionalism, a political process that entails spatial or material components.1 Assemblages can be seen as heterogeneous networks or meshworks based on relationships between human actors, networked communities, and institutional subsystems and organizations (Yu, 2013). Assemblage theory or assemblage thinking has rapidly emerged as an analytical tool, explanatory device, or conceptual framework in the social sciences and educational research (Salajan & jules, 2020; Savage, 2019). This chapter advances the notion that the Caribbean region (comprising fifteen member-states2 of the Caribbean Community [CARICOM]) and, by extension, the regional level, more abstractly conceptualized, should be understood as a complex assemblage (see Salajan in this volume; Salajan & jules, 2021). More precisely, in combining previously unconnected human and socio-material elements in contingent ways that are opened to transformation by incorporating and discarding while at the same time reorganizing the relations between them, the assemblage is endowed with a social reality dimension that arises from the synchronicity of the multiple societies within its realm. As such, this chapter aims to trace the formation of regional educational assemblages. In doing so, we first define assemblage as “a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms … the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations that are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 69). In this way, we need to think of assemblages as having a “material dimension (form of content, machinic assemblage, etc.) and an expressive dimension (form of expression, collective assemblages of enunciation, etc.), a principle of unity (abstract machine), and it rests upon a condition of possibility (BwO, plane of immanence, plane of consistency, etc.) which is crisscrossed by lines of flight (lines of  deterritorialization and

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reterritorialization)” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 121). It is the latter aspect that this chapter is concerned with, that is, the general conceptualization of a regional assemblage. In Deleuzoguattarian terminology, assemblage is a “rhizome” to be thought of as a network rather than a structure highlighting the connection between subjectivity and objects (CARICOM can be seen as such). As a network, parts of the assemblage are coevolving, and the assemblage retains some independent subsistence outside of its relations. Since territorializing “is an intrinsic capacity of the assemblage” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 104), this chapter interrogates the shifting relationship between the national, regional, and global and uses the descriptive term “regional educational assemblage” to explain how regional elements interact with situated beliefs, practices, policies, and politics and how these manifest out of the vitality of regional forces and interactions. In this way, following Buchanan (2021), who offers a cogent visualization and conceptualization of assemblage (he prefers to call them arrangements), a regional assemblage can be viewed as “a dynamic arrangement between two (or more) semi-autonomous formations that encompasses the organization of bodies and the organization of discourses” (p. 114). In this vein, I define and deploy the term regional educational assemblage, represented by a heterogeneous network of actors cross-cutting institutional and territorial boundaries, to analytically underscore contemporary educational governance arrangements that do not follow institutional and spatial boundaries structure traditional analysis in comparative and international education (CIE). In this way, actors, institutions, materialities, and instruments use regionalization (the economic process) and regionalism (the political project) and are motivated by the desire (recognized as the foundation of all behavior [animal, human, and more-than-human]) to create a network with codependent relational arrangements in the educational realm that ultimately coalesce into a contingent regional structure named regional educational assemblage. As Toohey (2019) notes, “desire is not rational or coherent but rather an ‘ontological drive to become’” (p. 6). Therefore, an “assemblage of desire” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) can be seen as a force occurring among and in-between assemblages. As Deleuze explains, assemblage, which is composed of heterogeneous components and populated by material objects (documents, machines, or architectural artifacts), seeks to “interrogate ‘the circumstances in which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on?’” (as cited in Buchanan, 2021, p. 13). Following Robertson and Dale (2021), we can think of education as an “ensemble,” which exists in the regional assemblage, in that it is an enterprise composed of an array of material objects, actors (both human and non-human), and institutions immersed in wide-ranging activities at multiple scales. According to Robertson and Dale (2021), the education ensemble is a complex construction of the social worlds that cannot be reduced to institutionalized activities such as schools, universities, learners, and teachers. The education ensemble, which is composed of “the unity of multiple, contingent, and contradictory determinations of social processes and relations involving power, forms of exchange, and meaning making” can generate “tensions and contradictions within the ensemble” stemming from its “ideas, forms

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of engagement, interests, and authority” (Robertson & Dale, 2021, p. 287). In other words, the individual elements of the educational ensemble can only be understood through its collections. Given that the focus of this study is at the discursive level, policy is viewed as a different assemblage (but it exists in the regional network) because of its arrangements and orderings, making it possible. This means that policy decisions are also components and part of the expression of the policy network. In this case, the policy assemblage is part of the regional educational assemblage and educational ensemble since policymaking takes place “in the middle of things” (Lea, 2014). In this way, assemblage is used as a technique that “generates enduring puzzles about ‘process’ and ‘relationship’” given that it is “a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life” (Marcus & Sakka, 2006, p.  101). Given that an assemblage has multiple dimensions (material and expressive) and components, the analytical focus accounts for all dimensions as they are crisscrossed by lines of flight and lines of segmentarity (de-territorialization and reterritorialization). Thus, this chapter focuses on explaining how educational assemblages have been influenced by regionalization (the concurrent political, cultural, social, and economic processes) and the project of regionalism. Here, the focus is on how “heterogeneous components that are always transient and open, and in process, never solidifying into a closed totality or system” (Acuto & Curtis, 2014, pp. 4–3) come to be at the regional level and how these components are structured by regionalization. In this way, the governance logics of educational assemblages are brought to the forefront as we chart how regional educational assemblages become more complex by incorporating components from national assemblages. Across this chapter, I use CARICOM as an example of a regional educational assemblage. In doing so, I first outline the core attributes of assemblage thinking. Then, I shows how a new materialist perspective on regionalism can help us better understand the principles of assemblage thinking in education. Next, I discuss the opening up of the regionalization process to micro-political investigation to reveal the material interactions between the region and the nation state. Here the aim is to show an assemblage (the regional level) of human and non-human bodies, together to produce the world. I conclude by discussing what I call “de-regionalization” and “re-regionalization” and how they occur, and their consequences for the regional educational assemblage.

Cracking Assemblage Thinking Open Assemblage thinking is used as “an analytic tactic to deal with the abstract and the unseen” (Acuto & Curtis, 2014, p.  11). In this chapter, the abstract and unseen is the concept of “regionalism,” which is pulled apart into the components of its assemblement to allow us to see how its spatial forms, processes, and orders hold together as it undergoes composition and decomposition. As an analytical tactic,

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regionalism is broken down into contingent realities of policies, networks, institutions, and routines to investigate how socio-technical networks of regionalization come together, persist, and fail. Assemblage can be seen as a disaggregated structure comprised of ideational and material dimensions; however, “for convenience we speak of assemblages as already composed things, but what it really names is a state of interactivity between two distinct and autonomous formalizations” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  33). In opening assemblages like the “region,” the aim is to unveil other smaller totalities assembling and dissembling. Due to the pausing of globalization, the region as a category needs to be destabilized and abstracted in an era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the rise of the “educational intelligent economy” (Salajan & jules 2019). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) conceive of the assemblage as an abstract ideation (always in the plane of immanence or body without organs). It always has first to be envisioned, and it always exists in the abstract along with its form of expression in the concrete. Therefore, in locating the regional level as an assemblage or what Saskia Sassen calls an “established category” (as cited in Acuto & Curtis, 2014), the aim is to understand how education is used to transform and make visible the dissembling of preexisting domains. In relying on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “vibrating plateau,” which is constituted by lines of flight and lines of departure, the regional assemblage’s focus becomes a way of helping us understand how critical interacting elements are assembling, reassembling, and disassembling. The focus is on the complex power relations, changing formations and  schemes, and normative implications. Since assemblages are a “vibrating network of interactions and relationships” (Acuto & Curtis, 2014, p. 20) that do not happen but instead are an affect (not to be understood as synonymous with human emotions) of human decisions, the focus becomes on showing how education is used in the form of “power play” to territorialize the region. Drawing on assemblage thinking, scholars have used new materialism as a qualitative methodological framework (Fox & Alldred, 2017, 2021) to analyze narratives (Feely, 2020), ethnographies (Schadler, 2019), and diffractive analysis, which is an encounter with the research data in order to see “how something different comes to matter” (Davies, 2014, p. 734). In what follows, I rely on antidualist materialist theories, particularly Deleuzian materialist ontology, to inform a new-materialist method, which is attentive to both discursive and material force, in analyzing educational policy discourse. An antidualist approach assumes that nothing (object or human) causes specific processes since “positions, entities and processes are already inside the ‘phenomenon’ … or the ‘assemblage’” (Schadler, 2019, p. 216). Here, I am proposing an approach based on new materialism, that allows for a reconfiguration of analytical research methods by relying on a cycle of discursive data collection (documents, websites, and artifacts) and analyzing it (through a process of what Schadler [2019] calls “referencing”—producing sub-phenomena and drawing boundaries) and presenting it (through a process Schadler [2019] calls “rebuilding worlds”—an encounter of a researcher, research outcomes, and publication sources). In other words, a new materialist perspective has the ability to provide new insights into the development of regional educational assemblages’ material-discursive processes. Such an analysis navigates the pitfalls that Fox (2016) highlights when he notes that “in post-structuralism, texts and textuality became the object of inquiry, while the biological body appeared to recede beyond the analytical purview of the post-structuralist social scientist” (p. 67). As

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such, new materialisms define a world that the researcher, the research apparatuses, and the research objects are a part of or, as Barad (2007) states according to agential realism, knowing, thinking, measuring, theorizing, and observing are material practices of intra-acting within and as part of the world. What do we learn by engaging in such practices? We do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about phenomena—about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming. The point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we too are part of the world’s differential becoming. (pp. 90–1)

In other words, I begin from the point that “both material entities and discursive statements are real, in that they both have effects in the material world and they both affect each other” (Feely, 2020, p. 177) in that material and semiotic entities “have the same ontological status” (Grosz, 1994, p.  167). In picking up the Deleuzian flat ontological plane, this chapter argues that all entities, both materially and discursively, are assumed to be in flux rather than fixed. In this way, the focus is on the contextdependent capacities of entities to affect and be affected by change. In Youdell’s (2011) words, the aim is to analyze an assemblage by exploring the ways that “apparently inchoate elements come together to form a particular whole” (p. 46). New materialist analysis aims to rebuild “sedimented history” (Barad, 2007) by relying on “the researcher as a formative part of this history” since “differentiation processes leave a trace during their material becoming, and through that trace, these processes can be rebuilt” (Schadler, 2019, p. 224). Thus, I define a set of initial processes that allow me to draw boundaries and explain the research object where the “outcomes are descriptions of a world, its inhabitants and processes” (Schadler, 2019, p. 224). Hence, the aim becomes understanding how desire drives (the regional educational) assemblage into being or becoming by explaining how material things give rise to an essentially discursive or expressive entity like regionalism. While we cannot determine a particular set of actions, I aim to plot the “contingent coming together of a set of elements” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 119) since an assemblage has multiple dimensions that need to be accounted for, but more importantly “desire is primary; it is desire that selects materials and gives them the properties that they have in the assemblage” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  56). As discussed below, an assemblage cannot coexist without desire, and productive desire produces materialism in this way since “if desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality” (as cited in Buchanan, 2021, p. 56). While we cannot discern the intention of regional policy actors, we should see education policy as an assemblage (kinds of arrangements and orderings) where policy decisions are components of the policy assemblage and not some pivotal moment in the life of a policy. The focus becomes the desire of the assemblage’s metaproduction of regionalism as CARICOM countries move from open regionalism to mature regionalism (discussed below).

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A Materialist Perspective on Regionalism Today the term “assemblage” has been co-opted and domesticated across many fields, and there has been a call for a return to its original meaning (Buchanan, 2021). Nevertheless, “assemblage is not merely a new word for an old concept, it is a point of departure—it answers to a new problematic” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 13) and seeks to answer several types of questions, “how?,” “why?,” “when?,” and not just a “what?” question. The Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblage is deployed to account for various ensembles across various fields. In turn, using assemblage thinking, Gorur (2011) conceived of policy work in education as assemblages, particularly in the context of the powerful instruments of commensuration and comparison wielded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in informing policy development. While assemblage thinking is based on modeling structures that predict heterogeneous social entities’ structuring capacities, assemblages are often born out of other assemblages’ preexisting configurations. In the case of the regional-level assemblages in the Caribbean along the lines of regionalism, CARICOM has become more complex through the reterritorialization of the regional level (The West Indian Federation [discussed below]) and national assemblages based on survival impulses. However, the Caribbean network of regionalism (i.e., the regional assemblage) has been driven by a desire to protect the small (and micro) states of CARICOM from existential threats. Connolly (2013) describes “new materialism” as the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticize anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and comment on the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics. (p. 399)

In using a materialist perspective informed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1984; 1987) and other scholars such as Braidotti (2006), DeLanda (2006), Fox and Alldred (2014), Grosz (1994), and Thrift (2004), this chapter focuses on three schemes: (1) an emphasis on the material effects of entities and not what they are, but what they do (Braidotti, 2000; Buchanan, 1997); (2) view all matters as not being molded by human agency, consciousness, and imagination but instead seen as having “agential” capacity to affect (Coole & Frost, 2010); and (3) focuses on the materiality of effects (rather than things), to consider the “hard” matter of bodies and things (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010). In this way, first, bodies and other materials should be regarded as relational, given that these relations develop unpredictably “in a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways” (Potts, 2004, p. 19). Second, a materialist perspective challenges the dualism or anachronistic categories of classical ontologies and allows us to rethink subjectivity by focusing on the role of non-human forces.

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This implies that materialism is not a state but a process of becoming that does not rely on external agents—human or divine—but contains its “own energies and forces of transformation” (Coole, 2013, p.  453). In this way, “new materialisms focus on the actual entwining of phenomena that have historically been classified as distinct” (Coole, 2013, p. 454). Third, social production is not linear but rhizomatic in that it is determined by affect given that in an assemblage, there is no “subject” and no “object” and no single element possesses agency; instead, the changes in state or capabilities are driven by the affect of becoming which then produces additional affective capacities within assemblages (Anderson, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Fox & Alldred, 2014). In other words, affect, which may have a singular or aggregative impact on the assemblage, controls the “lines of flight” by allowing the assemblage to either flow (territorializing) and/or destabilize (de-territorializing). Finally, materialist sociologies suggest that all “materially affect and [can] be affected by other elements of an assemblage” (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p.  7). So, while desire drives assemblage formation, it is the affects (which are “spatialized image[s] of desire in its pure state” [Buchanan, 2021, p.  38]) that unite and disunite with bodies. As Buchanan (2021) further reminds us, “desire creates by creating assemblages. These assemblages may become so ‘naturalized’ that we forget they are assemblages and mistake them for the primary functioning of desire” (p. 38). In other words, a new materialist approach, which is posthumanist and postanthropocentric (Braidotti, 2013), as well as embedded and embodied, and relational and contingent, “consider[s] that the world and history are produced by material forces that extend from the physical and the biological to the psychological, social and cultural” (Fox & Alldred, 2021, p.  2). In this way, a relational ontology focuses on analyzing the consequences of the displacement of humans as the central focus as encapsulated in the post-anthropocentrism perspective while drawing attention to how the rejection of a distinction between the physical world and the social construct of human thoughts affects each other. Applying such a perspective to regionalism in the Caribbean first rejects the binary boundaries that have been developed and does not see the material world (the regional level) as a fixed, stable entity, but as relational and emerging from the “capacity to affect and be affected” (Deleuze, 1987, pp. 127–8), which allows for the emergence of “a series of interactive and productive events/ assemblages” (Fox & Alldred, 2021, p. 3). In other words, the focus is on relationality (where entities are seen as having “no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas” [Fox & Alldred, 2021, p. 4] rather than on essentialism to draw attention to the affects and how these arrangements of bodies and things, which are described as machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984), become “agencements”— commonly translated as assemblages. In this way, the regional assemblage comes together through the capacities to affect or be affected. Thus, affect is always becoming within the assemblage and affects produce further affects within assemblages: because one affect can produce more than one capacity, affects flow “rhizomically” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 7), branching, reversing flows, coalescing and rupturing, supplying a diachronic

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and dynamic understanding of production as an open-ended becoming (Goodley, 2007, p. 147), without beginning or end (Cluley, 2020, p. 288). The flow of affect within assemblages is the means by which lives, societies and history unfold, by “adding capacities through interaction, in a world which is constantly becoming” (Thrift, 2004, p. 61). (as cited in Fox & Alldred, 2021, p. 4)

If we think of an assemblage as a body, an object, or “territory,” then affect can change the assemblage’s capacities and thus allow it to territorialize and de-territorialize in an antagonistic movement. In this sense, territorialization should be seen as a process of “specification” (Fox & Alldred, 2017) in that it specifies the capacities of the relation while deterritorialization causes the inverse movement of an affect, in that it can be viewed as opening up new possibilities for the territory when it assembles with other relations.

Governing without Governance: Decentering the Parts In the Caribbean, in addition to transnational regulatory networks, the regional assemblage is composed of and functions through a range of interacting sociotechnical entities and other assemblages: (1) legal instruments (the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and Declarations); (2) fifteen member states and five associate members states3 and eight observers;4 (3) the Secretariat (the coordinating body); (4) organs (Heads of Governments and Standing Committees) and secondary organs (the Council for Finance and Planning[COFAP], the Council for Foreign and Community Relations [COFCOR], the Council for Human and Social Development [COHSOD], and the Council for Trade and Economic Development [COTED]); (5) bodies (the Legal Affairs Committee, the Budget Committee, the Committee of the Central Bank Governors); (6) the Community Council; (7) twenty-five institutions5 and seven associate institutions,6 and material discourses (policies, communiqués, declarations, and statements). These diverse components of the network are driven by desire and work in tandem over time and affect each other in a complex, multidirectional (or what Deleuze and Guattari term rhizomatic) style to produce regionalism or at least a discourse (the functional attributes) that lead to different forms of regionalism (open regionalism and mature regionalism). Yet, in time, the regional assemblage created may fall apart (de-regionalize), and it reconfigures itself (re-regionalize), as occurred in CARICOM with the movement from a discourse based on open regionalism toward one based on mature regionalism (discussed in detail below). It may also undergo different alterations (incorporating global reforms, such as Education for All [EFA], the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs], and the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs]), and the desire to compete in an era of globalization may cause the assemblage to reinterpret itself (for example, focusing more on the vision of the Ideal Caribbean Person) to make itself relevant. DeLanda (2006) notes that an assemblage is composed of smaller assemblages and is also a component of larger assemblages, and its space of possibilities defines it

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while its topological borders bound its identities. Therefore, the assemblage is defined by its agential forces (tendencies and capacities) as complex adaptive systems. In the case of CARICOM, which was established in 1973 through the Original Treaty of Chaguaramas, the regional educational assemblage entails a multiplicity of pushpull factors between coevolving entities—legal instruments, members states, the secretariat, in education, COHSOD, the budget committee, and institutions (such as the Caribbean Single Market and Economy [CSME], the Caribbean Examination Council [CXC], the Caribbean Court of Justice [CCJ]), and associated institutions (such as the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, the University of Guyana, and the University of the West Indies) as well international discourses on education (EFA, MDGs, and SDGs) and historical legacies such as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) Programs. However, “as scale increases, each assemblage will possess emergent properties that simultaneously enable and constrain its components” yet, “it is also important to note that no assemblage is a seamless whole—it is always possible to take a component out of one assemblage and plug it into another assemblage” (Freely, 2019, p. 179). The regional educational assemblage comprises an assortment of historiographic rationalities written in its own canonical veridicality and then contrasted, enmeshed, amalgamated, obliterated, and finally evolving, emerging, gathering, or ignoring other interactions. Over the last three decades, the regional educational assemblage has focused on three essential components: (1) human resource development in the form of the CARICOM 2030 HRD Strategy; (2) the characteristics of the ideal Caribbean person; and (3) the widening (open regionalism) and subsequent deepening (mature regionalism) of regionalism. In this way, the regional educational assemblage allows us to map a space of inquiry as we focus on the circulation of modern forms of globalization. As such, attention is paid to the structure of the assemblage instead of its vibratory energy, which is derived from the materials it constitutes (see Bennett, 2001, for a discussion about the interactions of assemblages). Thus, regional as an established category focuses on exposing the shrinking authority of the nation-state. Thinking in this way allows us to make visible all kinds of things and relationships that are not visible to the naked eyes and elude the state’s formal power. This implies a focus on the governing technologies (in this case, regionalization) and how it allows for governing without government, and the role that education plays in unfolding trajectories of social change. The aim here is to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage to engage in a kind of reconstruction to explain the stability, consistency, and scale of regionalism and how it uses education to achieve these elements. In doing this, it is first argued that the current7 regional educational assemblage has been structured by the efficacy of SAPs and emerged in the context of the economic wars of the early 1980s in the Caribbean or what has been called ideological pluralism. Ideological pluralism, a phrase coined by CARICOM leaders in the 1980s, signified the varying ideologies of member states of the Community and it “became pronounced in the 1980’s after states such as Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada opted for socialism in contradistinction to the rest of the region which maintained … Western liberal democratic principles” (Hall, 2003, p. xii). During this time, a relationship was disestablished between several disparate elements—socialist, capitalist, communist, Marxists—as a form of de-territorialization occurred. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) stipulate that there are three forms of de-territorialization or what they also call lines

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of flight (a line of flight is the path of a particular de-territorialization): (1) negative implies changes that are overlaid by reterritorialization; (2) relative “overcomes the inertia of reterritorialization” (Buchanan, 2020, p. 89); and (3) absolute in the sense that it creates a new beginning that does not lead back to old territories. The Grand Anse Declaration of 1989, with its nine protocols8—legal instruments setting out new rules to revise the Original Treaty of Chaguaramas—would lay the foundation for the reterritorialization, scaling, and governing (in the form of open regionalism) to open and thus pave the way for the regional commencement of an educational assemblage. Reterritorialization occurred through the Grand Anse Declaration because of three reasons. First, it was premised upon the deepening of economic integration (in the form of open regionalism through production integration), which implied a call for a movement away from the Caribbean Common Market, as embedded in the Original Treaty of Chaguaramas, and the movement toward the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). Second, it paved the way for the widening of the economic mass of CARICOM by allowing other countries to join CARICOM, with Suriname and Haiti joining in 1995 and 2002, respectively). Third, it allows for incorporating the regional level into the global trading and economic system. Such a movement that destabilized the old political hierarchies can be seen as modulation in the Deleuzian sense in that it was a movement from a form-imposing mode (as embedded in the Original Treaty of Chaguaramas) to a self-regulating mode (as eschewed in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas) (Deleuze, 1992). For Deleuze (1992), the shift from a disciplinary society in the Foucauldian sense to a control society signifies a change in the manner in which power functions. Deleuze (1992) argues that there is a space for the individual in controlled societies that can change from one moment to another. In CARICOM, we can see such a shift commencing with the Grand Anse Declaration and the drive toward production integration in the form of open regionalism. This new form of control was thought to speed up regional integration, and individuals (using educative attainment) rather than states were placed at the center of regionalism. In other words, assemblages and their components are driven by variable processes that can “either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 12). As discussed below, it is not that a regional educational assemblage did not exist before the Grand Anse Declaration; it is just that Grand Anse allowed for the regional assemblage to become more complex and as it did, national educational assemblages became part of the regional educational assemblage thus re-creating a different type of regional educational assemblage that was more suited to the need of the regional assemblage.

From Open Regionalism to Mature Regionalism—The Shifting and Morphing of an Educational Assemblage Regionalism is often conceptualized as a relatively closed system of countries based upon equilibrium, cyclicality, and predictability. However, looking at regionalism through an assemblage lens allows us to analyze the system’s historical development,

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and it provides a vista of nonlinearity, openness, adaptation, feedback, and pathdependency (Acuto & Curtis, 2014). Here, there is a movement away from the “process of assembling” (Buchanan, 2021) that has emerged in the social sciences and toward the critical analytic question of understanding what kind of assemblage would be required in specific situations. Thus, the focus becomes on the interaction of various social actors, such as nation-states and their heterogeneous parts, as assemblages occur across multiple scales. Such interactions allow assemblages to become the component parts of other assemblages. While assemblage theory offers a bottom-up perspective, at the regional level, the process of assemblage elicits an “emergent topdown causality” (Acuto & Curtis, 2014), which occurs “once a larger scale assemblage is in place, it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and resources for its components” (DeLanda, 2010, p. 12). Large-scale assemblages, products of historical and material relations, occur through what Connelly (2013) describes as the “sharp, disjointed edges and loose joints between the heterogeneous human and nonhuman processes composing them” (p.  412). In other words, “as larger assemblages emerge from the interactions of their component parts, the identity of the parts may acquire new layers as the emergent whole reacts back and affects them” (DeLanda, 2006, p.  33). Thus, the regional level allows for the structuring capacities of heterogeneous social entities since a new materialist perspective draws “distinctions among forms of agency and types of agents rather than along conventional binaries such as matter and information, human and non-human, organic and inorganic, or even hierarchical and rhizomatic” (Schandorf & Karatzogianni, 2018, p. 91). In tracing the evolution of the regional educational assemblage, we must trace the evolution of regionalism as an assemblage within the Caribbean. Since assemblages live in the abstract, one can say that in the Caribbean, it is the affect, the desire that moves the assemblage from the plane of immanence (unformed elements) to the plane of organization (the political and economic union). Looking at the Caribbean, one will see that desire has allowed Caribbean regionalism to de-territorialize and reterritorialize several times to arrive at its current incarnation. The regional assemblage that began with the West Indian Federation9 in 1958 was driven by the desire of colonial elites to create a body that would foster political union between the small (and micro) states of the Caribbean. The desire for a stronger political union led to the evolution in education of the beginning of the regional educational assemblage, which became more complex because of cooperation and expansion of tertiary education and thus leading to the establishment of the University College of the West Indies (UCWI [today the University of the West Indies, UWI]), in 1948 with one campus at Mona, Jamaica and second campus at St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1960.10 As the regional educational assemblage re/de-territorialized, new forms of agency were developed as actants mixed and matched their loyalties and tested their subjectivity (home country, nationalism, ethnicity etc.,) against others (other CARICOM countr[ies]) as the agential forces were political/intentional and affective/motivated. We must remember that “assemblages thus actively configure and reconfigure under historically contingent processes: as entities move between assemblages, their agencies and meanings likewise transform” (Knuston, 2021, p. 797). As actants become part of the assemblage through social encounters, “they project an image or persona; in networks they play informal

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roles; and in organizations they acquire formal roles; and they may become identified with these roles and personas making them part of their identity” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 33). Therefore, “new materialism recognises agency [and agential capacity] as being distributed across a far greater range of entities and processes than had formerly been imagined,” in this way “new materialists are able to decouple agency from humans while raising questions about the nature of life and of the place or status of the human within it” (Coole, 2013, p. 457). The creation of UWI was the territorializing of the regional educational assemblage, and while the federation ended in 1962, UWI would continue to thrive and become more complex and central to the regional educational aims of CARICOM. After the West Indian Federation, the regional assemblage was de-territorialized due to Jamaica’s withdrawal—the largest member—after conducting a national referendum in 1961 on its continued participation in the arrangement. This action would spark a call in Jamaica for independence that reverberated across the region and eventually led to the demise of the regional assemblage. This is an instance of desire being a destructive force leading to de-territorialization. But while the larger regional assemblage was in flux, the regional educational assemblage remained consistent in the abstract (neither constructive nor destructive) as it was driven by functional cooperation—the noneconomic pillar of Caribbean integration. Here it is important to note that the abstract is always alongside the material; it takes desire to bring into being and “destroy” the assemblage. In other words, depending on the valence of desire (constructive or destructive), the assemblage takes form in the abstract before it takes shape in its material form. However, in the post-independence period, the regional assemblage would reterritorialize around the issues of trade in the form of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA)11 and later become more complex by focusing on economic integration (the strengthening, coordination, and regulation of the economic and trade relations among the Member States) as the twelve-member Caribbean Community and Common Market came into being under the 1973 Treaty of Chaguaramas. This regional assemblage would evolve and function under old regionalism or closed regionalism, where its parameters were around creating a common market through production integration. Closed regionalism was inward-focused or closed against trade with non-CARICOM member states and promoted the manufacturing sector, zeroed trade tariffs, and removed trade barriers. Under closed regionalism, the regional educational assemblage came to be defined by the Treaty of Chaguaramas as an institution of CARICOM, in the form of the Standing Committee of Ministers Responsible for Education (SCME) that was responsible for the regional coordination of education at the national level. The most fundamental reform undertaken by the SCME was establishing an Advisory Taskforce on the state of regional education. This mandate would recognize the pre-existing educational assemblage, the UWI, based on tertiary education established at the founding of CARICOM and extend it to address education reform at all levels. In this way, the regional educational assemblage was driven by functional cooperation and noneconomic sectors’ ability to integrate. It became focused on the desire to attain a 15 percent enrollment rate in post-secondary education and universal quality secondary education by 2005. Thus, the regional educational assemblage was responding to the recognition that the central factor

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of competitiveness was essential to survival in the global economy, and education and training needed: (1) to be relevant; (2) to lead to the development of a creative and adaptive individual; and (3) geared toward producing skilled labor for the vital economic sectors of industry, agriculture, services, and tourism. This meant that education was not seen as a nationalistic endeavor that cemented notions of citizenship, encouraged the sovereignty of the nation-state, and defined education as a vehicle for instilling loyalty to the state; instead, education was seen as having regional aims as CARICOM countries needed to unite if they were to survive in an epoch demarcated by global competitiveness. During the latter part of closed regionalism, the assemblage was constantly in flux and subjected to evolution and devolution. But the educational assemblage, at this time, was also inward-looking in that it was a network of regional policy initiatives and suffered little or no external effect. As the assemblage shifted due to the desire of regional leaders, globalization, and the failures of closed regionalism, the regional integration scheme became more complicated, and it transformed from the protectionist measure that limited members’ access to the markets under closed regionalism to export-led growth under “open regionalism” or “new regionalism,” which can be seen as a process to accommodate multilateralism and globalism since it liberalizes inter-regional trade in goods, services, and labor (Bergsten, 1997; Bulmer-Thomas, 2001). Thus, open regionalism came to be described as a process where countries simultaneously dismantled trade barriers while opening up their economies to foreign direct investment. In large part, in the Caribbean, the drive toward open regionalism was a response to correct the pestilences (debt crisis, political fragmentation/ideological fragmentation, and structural adjustment facilities) that plagued CARICOM’s regional project in the 1980s. Its main aim was to facilitate the entry of regional integrative projects into hemispheric and global relations. With the intensification of a regional assemblage based on open regionalism (as the affects and instruments of open regionalism entered its relational composition), it soon became apparent that deeper economic integration linked to the global assemblage of trade liberalization was insufficient to deliver the promises of Caribbean regionalism. Open regionalism was driven by re-regionalization in education and sought to territorialize around four phases (jules, 2014). In the first phase, the emphasis was placed on cooperation and collaboration in the form of the regional educational strategy, The future of education in the region (CARICOM, 1993), which also envisioned a central role for UWI and was linked to the 1990 Education for All goals (which aimed at meeting the learning needs of all children, youth, and adults by 2015) and education as engendering regional development. The second phase saw the institutionalizing affect, as the reconfiguring of established attributes of the assemblage was undertaken. In the case of education, SCME was disbanded and replaced in 1997 with the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD). The third phase saw the institutionalizing of a normative framework around the “ideal Caribbean person” (CARICOM, 1997a) or the “neo-Caribbean citizen” (jules, 2014), who is expected to demonstrate that: they are psychologically secure; value differences based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and other forms of diversity as sources of strength and richness; are environmentally astute; are responsible and accountable to family and community; have a strong work ethic; are ingenious and entrepreneurial; have a

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conversant respect for the cultural heritage; exhibit multiple literacies, independent, and critical thinking to the application of science and technology to problem solving; and embrace the differences and similarities between females and males (CARICOM, 1997a). This move, in effect, served to flatten the colonial distinctions that were created across the region. The fourth and final phase was integrating the region into the national level to create the CSME. The Caribbean Single Market (CSM) came into effect in 2006. During this period, the educational assemblage focused on the portability of skills within the Single Market as enshrined in the CARICOM Free Movement of Skilled Persons Act (CARICOM, 1997b) which allows any qualified national (university graduates, media workers, sportspersons, artists, musicians, teachers, nurses, and domestic workers) with a Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) to move across the region. These four phases reconstituted educational regionalism in CARICOM and created an educational regime dedicated to “widening the Caribbean region” to facilitate economic integration better. Educational regionalism is thus defined by the movement toward structured institutional mechanisms within education that have been erected or reformed to accommodate the shift from open regionalism to mature regionalism. An educational assemblage came into being driven by the desire for deep economic integration because the economic aspects of regionalism had failed, and the focus shifted to the functional aspect of regionalism. Functional aspects of regionalism (functional cooperation) are those areas outlined in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (CARICOM, 2001a) and are based on developing and sharing policies and programs, disseminating information, human resource development, and monitoring and evaluation (Task Force on Functional Cooperation, 2008). Once Caribbean leaders had recognized and accepted that open regionalism was not working in the ways it should and delivering the intended promises, their desire for deeper economic integration led to the reconfiguring of the assemblage (deregionalization) and the movement toward a mature form of regionalism. Mature regionalism in the Rose Hall Declaration on “Regional Governance and Integrated Development” (CARICOM, 2003) emerges as a coordination mechanism of earlier policy assemblages (in this case, regional agreements) across the region, namely the Nassau Understanding (CARICOM, 1984), the Grand Anse Declaration (CARICOM, 1989), the Bridgetown Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action (CARICOM, 1997c), the Montego Bay Declaration (CARICOM, 1997d), the Nassau Declaration on Health (CARICOM, 2001b), and the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (CARICOM, 2001a). With de-regionalization, the assemblage became more complex by morphing the “desires” of the human and structural-material actors in its fold (this can be defined by “external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation” [Nail, 2017, p.  23], which combined with and built upon the valuable parts of old assemblage), which is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole. Since elements of an assemblage are external, items can be added, subtracted, or recombined, as needed, with one another ad infinitum. In the case of CARICOM, the core function of the assemblage remained (the desire for economic regionalization through the CSME), but aspects of it were subtracted (what came to be viewed as open regionalism) and new features added (mature regionalism). Since each new piece entering the assemblage produces a new

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kind of assemblage, the constitution of the regional assemblage was changed by the Rose Hall Declaration (CARICOM, 2003), which articulated … the need to intensify efforts to promote human and social development through, inter-alia, appropriate education and training in order to improve the overall well being of the people of the Community and to establish the conditions for the creation of a knowledge-based society capable of competing effectively in the new global environment. (p. 4)

This articulation led to adding new elements and the desire to shift away from an open form of regionalism to a focus on the unrestricted movement of goods, services, labor, capital, and the right to establishment—i.e., the ability to set up a business in any territory. As the regional assemblage became more multifaceted as interests and motivations shifted, the move toward a “mature” form of regionalism or “mature regionalism” is a change toward a top-down process and a regulatory mechanism of regional governance that is dispensed across varying forms (ideationally, materially, and institutionally) and seeks to coordinate all sectors (economic, foreign, security, and functional) of Caribbean regional governance. However, as the regional assemblage became more complex, its regulatory coordination mechanism (functional cooperation) was retained, the regional project (mature regionalism) was transformed as “decision-makers” moved the process; they were driven by the state or energy (say volition) of the assemblage. Here we need to distinguish between regionalism (a political project) and regionalization (an economic process). Thus, the regional educational assemblage would come to function in the “Caribbean Educational Policy Space” (jules, 2014). While open regionalism and mature regionalism have similar goals, integrating the small (and micro) Caribbean economies into the global system, they differ in achieving these goals. On the one hand, open regionalism in education focuses on liberalizing national educational systems through regional coordination in the form of a regional education policy—The Future of Education in the Region which “created the post-bureaucratic state premised upon the privatization of state enterprises, which, in turn, led to mass reforms in the regional public sector that eventually trickled down to education” (jules, 2014, p.  16). On the other hand, mature regionalism in the form of educational regionalism emerges as an instrument of educational governance to deepen the integrative process.

De-regionalism and Re-regionalism In relying on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work, the aim here has been to look for a systematic explanation of regionalism by construing it as a problematic field. I defined the regional educational assemblage as an energetic arrangement between two (or more) semi-autonomous configurations encompassing the organization of bodies (institutions) and the organization of material discourses (policy) bound together by

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desire and interaction (hence, “enunciation”) with other assemblages. Therefore, the focus is on the organization of relations specific to education regionalization. At its most basic, the assemblage is an ongoing process, not a static whole, and “combines material ‘nondiscursive multiplicities’ and expressive ‘discursive multiplicities’” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  33). This chapter has anchored complex assemblages, such as CARICOM, as multifunctional adaptive systems rooted in complexes of desire related to discursive, subjectivizing, and ideological formations. It has shown that assemblages are embedded in historical and material relations. While assemblage is a function with two dimensions, “form of content” and “form of expression” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 33), its real work is blurring these dimensions together. Like Charles Darwin, Deleuze and Guattari (1997) view change as contingent and brutal and not as gradual and progressive, therefore, the present can be seen as not a result of the “direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result” (Gould, 2000, p. 283). Assemblage thinking is not about “trying to understand very fluid, indeterminate and heterogeneous social realities in terms of given frameworks” but instead reflects “a much more careful, modest admission that we can only grasp a pretty limited part of unfolding contemporary life” (as cited in Acuto & Curtis, 2014, p. 24). In other words, the assemblages of today are not more perfect forms of yesterday’s assemblages. Regionalism must be refashioned in the image of its age. Above I have sought to unmask the mechanisms of Caribbean regionalism (from closed regionalism to open regionalism to mature regionalism), which have led to several instances of deregionalism and re-regionalism. I have suggested that regionalism is in flux while changes have occurred in Caribbean society’s technical, material, and organizational basis. The technologies of regionalism have moved beyond a mode of disciplining Caribbean economies (under open regionalism) and toward a zone of control (through mature regionalism), and education is the regulatory tool that is used. In this way, we can think of regionalism as a disciplined technology that is exhorted through the use of functional areas such as education, given that the core technology (regionalism) has not produced the desired results (more comprehensive economic integration under open regionalism) and now the modulation of the behavior has given rise to a new form of control (mature regionalism) and legitimacy (through the Caribbean Court of Justice) to function. In short, the Caribbean assemblage and the ensuing regional assemblage continues to evolve. Such an evolution has consequences for the field of CIE in that it allows us the view how materialism transpires.

­Notes 1 In this context, material components are part of the territorializing process or the so-called T-factor. 2 Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. 3 Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Turks and Caicos.

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4 Aruba, Colombia, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Sint Maarten, and Venezuela. 5 Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), Caribbean Meteorological Institute (CMI), Caribbean Meteorological Organisation (CMO), Caribbean Food Corporation (CFO), Caribbean Environment Health Institute (CEHI), Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute (CARDI), Caribbean Regional Centre for the Education and training of Animal Health and Veterinary Public Health Assistants (REPAHA), Assembly of Caribbean Community Parliamentarians (ACCP), Caribbean Centre for Development Administration (CARICAD), Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute (CFNI), Caribbean Agricultural Health and Food Safety Agency (CAHFSA), CARICOM Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS), Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Caribbean Community Administrative Tribunal (CCAT), CARICOM Competition Commission (CCC), Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM), Caribbean Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality(CROSQ), Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCC), Caribbean Organisation of Tax Administrators (COTA), Council of Legal Education (CLE), Caribbean Aviation Safety and Securing Oversight System (CASSOS), and Caribbean Regional Information and Translation Institute (CRITI). 6 Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), University of Guyana (UG), University of the West Indies (UWI), Caribbean Law ­Institute/Caribbean Law Institute Centre (CLI / CLIC), Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECD), West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), and CARICOM Private Sector Organization (CPSO). 7 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, Deleuzoguattarian principles do not clearly identify how far one must go back to identify the very first assemblage. In other words, “assemblages are thus finite, but they have no specific or distinctive life-span; they do not have a specific temporality” (Marcus & Saka, 2006, p. 103). However, in the case of CARICOM, one can identify its precursor assemblage as the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), which was a regional free-trade arena in place between 1965 and 1972. Moreover, CARIFTA was an outgrowth of the West Indies Federation, which existed from 1958 to 1962. 8 The Protocols were institutions and structures which included: (i) the right of establishment; (ii) provision of services and movement of capital; (iii) industrial policy; (iv) trade policy; (v) agricultural policy; (vi) transport policy; (vii) disadvantaged countries, regions, and sectors; (viii) competition policy and consumer protection; and (xi) disputes settlement. 9 The West Indies Federation was comprised of ten territories—Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, the then St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago—and it was established by the British Caribbean Federation Act of 1956 with the aim of establishing a political union among its members. 10 Today, the University of the West Indies has four campuses—Cave Hill, Barbados; Mona, Jamaica; St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Open Campus. 11 CARIFTA was founded by Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago on December 15, 1965, with the signing of the Dickenson Bay Agreement. Later Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Montserrat, Jamaica, and Belize (then British Honduras) joined the Association.

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References Acuto, M. & Curtis, S. (2014). Assemblage thinking and international relations. In M. Acuto and S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 1–16). Palgrave Macmillan. ­Anderson, B. (2010). Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 733–752. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3), 801–31. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachments, crossings, and ethics. Princeton University Press. Bergsten, C.F. (1997). Open regionalism. The World Economy 20(5), 545–65. doi:10.1111/1467-9701.00088 Braidotti R. (2000). Teratologies. In I. Buchanan & C. Colebrook (Eds.), Deleuze and feminist Theory (pp. 156–72). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti R. (2006). Transpositions. Cambridge: Polity Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Buchanan, I. (1997). The problem of the body in Deleuze and Guattari, or, what can a body do? Body & Society 3, 73–91. Buchanan, I. (2020). Assemblage theory and method : An introduction and guide. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Buchanan, I. (2021). Assemblage theory and method. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bulmer-Thomas, V. (2001). Introduction. In V. Bulmer-Thomas (Ed.), Regional integration in Latin America and the Caribbean: The political economy of open regionalism (pp. 1–13). London: ILAS. CARICOM. (1984). The Nassau understanding: Structural adjustment and closer integration for accelerated development in the Caribbean Community. Georgetown, Guyana: CARICOM. http://www.caricom.org/jsp/communications/meetings_ statements/nassausunderstanding.jsp?menupcommunications CARICOM. (1989). Grand Anse Declaration. Georgetown, Guyana: CARICOM http:// www.caricom.org/jsp/communications/meetings_statements/grand_anse_declaration. jsp?menupcommunications CARICOM. (1993). The Future of Education in the Caribbean. Georgetown: CARICOM. CARICOM. (1997a). Creative and productive citizens for the twenty-first century. Paper presented at the Eighteenth Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community, Montego Bay, Jamaica. http://www. caricom.org/jsp/communications/meetings_statements/citizens_21_century. jsp?menu=communications. CARICOM. (1997b). The Caribbean Community (free movement of skilled persons) act. Georgetown: CARICOM. https://moj.gov.jm/sites/default/files/laws/The%20 Caribbean%20Community%20(Free%20Movement%20of%20Skilled%20Persons)%20 Act.pdf CARICOM. (1997c). Bridgetown declaration of principles and plan of action. The Caribbean/United States summit partnership for prosperity and security in the Caribbean. Bridgetown. http://caricom.org/communications/view/caribbean-unitedstates-summit-partnership-for-prosperity-and-security-in CARICOM. (1997d). The Montego Bay declaration. Georgetown: CARICOM. https:// caricom.org/montego-bay-declaration/

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CARICOM. (2001a). Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. Georgetown: CARICOM. www. caricom.org/jsp/community/revised_treaty.jsp?menu=community. ­CARICOM. (2001b). The health of the region is the wealth of the region. http://archive. caricom.org/jsp/communications/meetings_statements/nassau_declaration_on_ health.jsp?menu=communications CARICOM. (2003). The rose hall declaration on regional governance and integrated development. Georgetown: CARICOM. http://www.caricom.org/jsp/communications/ meetings_statements/rose_hall_declaration.jsp?menu=communications Connolly. (2013). The “new materialism” and the fragility of things. Millennium, 41(3), 399–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829813486849 Coole D.H. (2013). Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: Thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences. Millennium, 41(3), 451–69. https://doi. org/10.1177/0305829813481006 Coole, D.H. & Frost, S. (2010). Introducing the new materialisms. In D.H. Coole and S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43). Durham, NC: Duke University. Davies, B. (2014). Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 734–41. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2010). Deleuze: History and science. Atropos. Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. http://www. jstor.org/stable/778828 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II. Continuum. Fox, N.J. (2015). Emotions, affects and the production of social life. The British Journal of Sociology, 66(2), 301–18. Fox, N.J. & Alldred, P. (2021). Doing new materialist data analysis: A Spinozo-Deleuzian ethological toolkit. International Journal of Social Research Methodology. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/13645579.2021.1933070 Fox, N.J. & Alldred, P. (2014). The research-assemblage: a new materialist approach to social inquiry. Paper presented at the BSA Annual Conference, Leeds. https://www. researchgate.net/profile/Nick-Fox/publication/270685981Theresearch-assemblageane wmaterialistapproachtosocialinquiry/links/54b2bbc30cf220c63cd2739d/The-researchassemblage-a-new-materialist-approach-to-social-inquiry.pdf Fox, N.J. & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism. Sage. Feely, M. (2020). Assemblage analysis: an experimental new-materialist method for analysing narrative data. Qualitative Research: QR, 20(2), 174–93. https://doi. org/10.1177/1468794119830641 Gorur, R. (2011). Policy as assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611–22. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.611 Gould, S. (2000). Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history. Vintage Books. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies. Indiana University Press. Hall, K. (Ed.) (2003). Re-inventing CARICOM: The road to a new integration. Ian Randle Publisher. jules, t.d., (2014). The political economy of “open regionalism” and education in small (and micro) states: The construction of the Caribbean Educational Policy Space in

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CARICOM. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12(4), 474–97. https://doi.org/10.10 80/14767724.2013.861708 jules, t.d., (2017). “Mature regionalism” and the genesis of “functional projects”: “educational regionalism” in small (and micro-states). Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(4), 482–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2016.1264289 Knutson, S. (2021). Itinerant assemblages and material networks: The application of assemblage theory to networks in archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 28(3), 793–822. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09494-3 Lea, T. (2014). From little things, big things grow: The unfurling of wild policy, E-Flux #58. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61174/from-little-things-big-things-grow-theunfurling-of-wild-policy/ Marcus, G.E. & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 101–6. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406062573 Nail, T. (2017). What is an assemblage? SubStance, 46(1), 21–37. https://www.muse.jhu. edu/article/650026. Potts, A. (2004). Deleuze on Viagra. (Or, what can a Viagra-body do?). Body & Society, 10(1), 17–36. Robertson, S. & Dale, R. (2021). Cultural political economy (CPE) in comparative and international education: Putting CPE to work in studying globalization. In t. d. jules, R. Shields & M. Thomas (Eds.), The Bloomsbury handbook of theory in comparative and international education (pp. 283–300). Bloomsbury. Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2019). Educational intelligence in the era of Big Data: The rise of the educational intelligent economy. In t. d. jules & F.D. Salajan (Eds.), The educational intelligent economy: Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things in education (pp. 1–11). Emerald Publishers. http://doi. org/10.1108/S1479367920190000038001 Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a meta-assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (pp. 133–51). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479367920200000039014 Savage, G.C. (2019). What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance. http://doi. org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1559760 Schadler, C. (2019). Enactments of a new materialist ethnography: Methodological framework and research processes. Qualitative Research: QR, 19(2), 215–30. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1468794117748877 Schandorf, M. & Karatzogianni, A. (2018). Agency in posthuman international relations: Solving the problem of computer-mediated agency. In E. Cudworth, S. Hobden & E. Kavalski (Eds.), Posthuman dialogues in international relations (pp. 89–108). Ashgate. Task Force on Functional Cooperation. (2008). Final report of the task force on functional cooperation. CARICOM. Toohey. (2019). The onto-epistemologies of new materialism: Implications for applied linguistics pedagogies and research. Applied Linguistics, 40(6), 937–56. https://doi. org/10.1093/applin/amy046 van der, T.I. & Dolphijn, R. (2010). The transversality of new materialism. Women: A Cultural Review, 21(2), 153–71. Youdell, D. (2011). School trouble. Routledge. Yu, J.E. (2013). The use of Deleuze’s theory of assemblage for process-oriented methodology. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 38(2 (144)), 197–217. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24145482

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Educational Leaders Becoming: A Virtual Community of Practice as Assemblage(s) Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker

Introduction The teaching and learning of comparative and international education (CIE) typically occur in higher-education classrooms, in which people, institutions, and issues from “out there” are brought “in” to the bounded learning space through literature, media, and perhaps personal experiences. The notion of e-learning breaks down the outside/ inside barriers by casting participants into a middle space that is neither here nor there. We become de-territorialized, assembled around a common learning goal.1 Such an assemblage mimics the kind of multifaceted learning community we will describe as emerging through a newly created, virtual learning space called the Comparative Educational Leadership Lab (CELL).2 In this chapter we will first present grounding concepts of assemblage, rhizomatic arrangements, and mangling, then describe the CELL and reflect on its becoming—in other words, how a particular community of practice (CoP) assembled along with the CELL. We will then propose that the CELL, as an assemblage in continuous action, frames learning communities and generates infinite relations in CIE (and beyond) that we will call educational leaders becoming. To conclude, we will argue for the CELL as an example of futuristic global education in the field of CIE.

Assemblages, Rhizomatic Arrangements, and the Mangle of Practice Deleuze and Guattari (1987) propose a mode of thinking that decenters and unfixes what we often consider to be stable organisms of entities. They base their approach on dynamical systems theory that investigates the (self-)organization of complexity and chaos within a system. Some theorists contend that dynamic systems are selforganizing, that they “naturally evolve” out of the system’s inherent energy (Bak & Chen, 1991). This reference to chaos theory means that even when initial conditions in a system are known, there is always an element of uncertainty. We can therefore

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understand that individual differences/perspectives, contexts, meta-cognitive factors, and technological features converge in dynamic, varied ways for any given person at any given moment in space/time. Following this, any development or outcomes result from interactions and processes across multiple levels (Newman & Newman, 2020), synchronously and asynchronously. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that assemblages and their components can be analyzed according to this premise. Postulating that such components, and particularly the relations among them within a given body or constellation, are fluid, exchangeable, and multifaceted, they approach assemblages through relations of exteriority. For them, exteriority signifies the selfsubsistence and autonomy of parts within a whole, or components within/among an assemblage, thus allowing for analysis of contingent relations between those parts. Through the processes of coding, stratification, and territorialization, elements are ordered, resulting in hierarchies, which are materialized in bodies or assemblages. Additional processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization indicate the ever changing and complex constitution of assemblages, their bodies’ interconnectedness, and their dependence on the environment in which they are embedded. DeLanda (2006, 2016), drawing on and expanding Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) framework of assemblage theory, defines assemblages as “the main theoretical alternative to organic totalities” (p. 10). An important difference between totalities and assemblages is the nature of the latter’s relations formed between its components, which are ever-changing and fluid. DeLanda (2006) claims that while linkages between components are “logically necessary … in an assemblage, these relations may be only contingently obligatory” (p. 11, emphasis in original). In essentialist totalities, relations are typically non-self-subsistent and without contingency, and hardly analyzable. Assemblages, however, with their heterogeneous and nonlinear nature, depict actually existing entities impacting and impacted by their surroundings. In DeLanda’s (2006) “neo-assemblage theory” or “assemblage theory 2.0” (p.  4), assemblages consist of “parts which are self-subsistent and articulated by relations of exteriority, so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage” (p, 18). This exteriority is the “relations established between the two groups … that connect them but do not constitute them” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 2). As we will show below, the CELL’s property of exteriority, demonstrated through access to and analysis of its contingent parts, enables it to function as an assemblage(s) of learning communities. In addition to the relations of exteriority, DeLanda (2006) similarly defines assemblages using two dimensions: material/expressive and territorialization/ deterritorialization. The former describes “the variable roles which component parts may play” while the latter refers to “processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 18). Highlighting the ontological perspective of assemblage theory, DeLanda (2006) adds another third dimension devoted to processes in which specialized expressive media intervene, processes which consolidate and rigidify the identity of the assemblage or, on the contrary, allow the assemblage a certain latitude for more flexible operation while benefiting from genetic or linguistic resources (processes of coding and decoding). (p. 18)

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­DeLanda’s (2016) emphasis on processes of individuation, defined as “historical processes which produced … any given assemblage” (p. 140), that is, focusing on becoming rather than being, is particularly apt. Indeed, the CELL’s open-source architecture lends itself to unpredictability and guarantees that the CELL hovers in certain uncertainty. A central concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) approach to assemblage theory is that of rhizomatic arrangement: the messy, ostensibly confused connections among parts of a whole. These connections, likened to a root system ecology rather than a tree with its central trunk and shooting branches, defy hierarchy. They defy definition. They defy linearity. They are in continuous states of becoming and morphing. They are nevertheless identifiable soupçons (or inklings, ideas)—large or small, broad or narrow, deep or shallow in scope—that do not themselves define but rather participate in the definition of the whole. The whole would not exist without them, but they are transient and mutable. Given the geographical dispersion and continuous expansion of project partners, the promotion of e-learning solutions, and the project’s underlying objective of generating and sharing knowledge, know-how, best practices, and field experience on an international scale, we apply assemblage theory to the CELL. By so doing, we frame the work of our community of practice—of our learning community—as an assemblage cultivating opportunities for innovative, authentic, and emergent virtual learning experiences in educational leadership. In applying assemblage theory to the CELL, we also draw on Pickering’s (1995) concept of “the mangle of practice.” Pickering (1995) defines the mangle as “a convenient and suggestive shorthand for the dialectic because … it conjures up the image of the unpredictable transformations … [and] draws attention to the emergently intertwined delineation and reconfiguration of machinic captures and human intentions, practices, and so on” (p. 23). This concept is employed to explore basic constituents and processes of science and its agents, postulating that “science [is] an evolving field of human and material agencies reciprocally engaged in a play of resistance and accommodation in which the former seeks to capture the latter” (Pickering, 1995, p. 23). Put differently, adopting a post-humanistic perspective, Pickering (1995) suggests that scientific bodies, experiments, discoveries, and finally facts are based on mutual human and non-human or semiotic agencies, which, importantly, are unknown in practice before they co-emerge. Scientific practice is therefore always transitional, undergoing a constant positioning “between being real entities and social constructs, and back again” (Pickering, 1995, p. 12).

The CELL as Assemblage(s) The CELL is a virtual learning hub. It is an open-source website and contains multimedia artifacts that support the elaboration of “teaching case studies.” The case studies were imagined and realized by actors in several countries based on needs, questions, and innovations in those localities. The commonality across them is the notion/practice of school leadership, conceived broadly and flexibly. The CELL can therefore be described as a constellation of contingent relations. A part of the CELL (e.g., a case study, an artifact within a case study) can be detached; still, the CELL remains “whole” or legitimate. The CELL as a whole, therefore, is not

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only the sum of its parts. The CELL arrangement or layout (Nail, 2017) or diagram (DeLanda, 2016) having not a (sole) essence, per se, consists of a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences hovering in virtual space. Appropriately, the central principle of the “teaching” case study is its open-endedness. There are no solutions to the case and no easy answers to questions posed (see Figure  10.1, a screenshot depicting “Critical thinking questions” from one case study). The learning goals are not to resolve the case in a particular way but rather to curate non-prescriptive space for critical consideration of multiple perspectives, multiple possibilities, and allow for the exploration of contradictions, complications, and controversies around the topics presented. The CELL itself contains information, however, it is not truly educative or transformative unless it is acted upon by users (learners). At that point, the CELL becomes catalytic, enlivening the connections and ideas that convert information into knowledge. As each individual is unique and comes with their own perspective(s), the resulting knowledge is neither fixed nor predictable. Each user may have a completely unique learning experience. In this sense, as it contains malleable content, the CELL exists in a constant condition of ambivalence, in stark contrast to traditional educational material that offers “facts,” “figures,” and supposed “truths,” and—above all—contains established learning objectives and/or “correct answers.” Indeed, the image on the CELL’s landing page (see Figure 10.2, a screenshot of the landing page) is a creation by Niki de Saint Phalle, who lived for a time in Fribourg, where the CELL was founded. Innovation and finding new ways of inhabiting the world were central to Saint Phalle’s vision. She used assemblage to depict visionary architecture, fantastical human creatures, and experimental societies, and she used art to shift reality (Katrib & Graf, 2021). The CELL has the potential to exemplify analogous pedagogical reality shifts. What is more, human and non-human (semiotic and technological) elements mutually

Figure  10.1  Critical thinking questions as a guide to one case study. Source: Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker. “Case study: Diversity—Engaged leadership,” CELL. http:// globalleadershipineducation.com/migration/

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Figure  10.2 The CELL landing page. Source: Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker. “Educational leadership: Capturing global knowledge,” CELL. http:// globalleadershipineducation.com

define each other and simultaneously depend on and provide agency. Throughout the different phases of the project, all of its constituents are transformed without ever reaching a final state of completion. By allocating more human, financial, material, and time resources, the scientific body—or assemblage—expands, able to produce and transmit more (socially constructed and materially captured) knowledge. Inspired by Salajan and jules’s (2020) portrayal of CIE as a meta-assemblage, we look into the catalytic potential of the CELL and ask the following guiding questions: 1. How is the CELL an exemplar of assemblage(s) and sub-assemblage(s) in CIE? 2. To what extent is the CELL’s rhizomatic nature a mode of knowledge construction and a model for futuristic global teaching communities? To answer these questions, we reviewed reflection questionnaires completed by participants midway through the two-year CELL project,3 engaged in informal dialogical interviews with partners about the project,4 and considered/reconsidered our own critical reflection as project facilitators. Through content analysis of the questionnaires and ongoing critical thinking, we outlined two central avenues through which the CELL can be seen as assemblage(s): one is the process of the CELL becoming, and this includes the coalescing of the CELL partners’ learning community. The other captures the becoming of an infinite number of educational leaders who access and utilize the CELL—and network with each other in various communities of practice. Ontologically, we question the premise of a fixed truth and instead favor an untethered sense of reality which is always mediated, in process, and relative to

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individuals’ experiences and perceptions thereof. Therefore, our epistemological approach is eclectic, emergent, and constructionist. It cannot be considered “finished” since individuals’ interaction with the realities in our social world continuously generates new knowledge.

The CELL Becoming Most educational leaders around the world have not been formerly prepared for their role, and even those who have, have rarely had the opportunity to reflect on and learn from the application of leadership practices in diverse country contexts.5 The CELL helps fill this gap by simultaneously creating a virtual learning and discussion space and a socio-academic professional network for actors interested in educational leadership around the world. The CELL project’s primary objective was the development of locally based teaching case studies about educational leadership in different country contexts, subsequently uploaded to an open-source web platform. Relations within and among CELL entities are in constant becoming, as a fluid assemblage. Emphasizing valuable relations as the CELL’s core essence, rather than the (more) concrete case studies, various emergent relations and groupings incorporate dynamic components which “strive toward symbiotic relationships, continuously repositioning themselves as sub-assemblages” similar to how Salajan and jules (2020) describe “the meta-assemblage of CIE” (p. 141). The two sub-processes of coding and decoding described within the third dimension of DeLanda’s (2006) definition of an assemblage are helpful to characterize the becoming of the CELL. Although processes of consolidation (coding) and flexibility (decoding) seem contradictory from the outside, they capture well the complex, fluid, and nonlinear nature of our CoP. These additional processes serve to analyze, express, and capture the becoming of the CELL. As an international, heterogeneous constellation of researchers and practitioners, we formed a learning community to create something new, something unique, something elastic, yet knowledge-providing and knowledge-producing. Over time, as project partners interacted, their own learning community emerged. In fact, mere collaboration to achieve the project’s objective evolved into a rich intercultural and interpersonal exchange, fostering individual and collective growth alongside successful project work (namely production of the CELL website and its contents). For instance, exchanges and feedback among partners were considered, as one partner noted, to “have an important role in collaborative work” (Participant  2). They were further perceived as “inspiring” (Participant 1). One partner stated, “For me it was an inspirational moment when I [learned] from colleagues about their experiences [and] ideas” (Participant 3). This exchange on a professional and personal level during in-person and virtual meetings was a safe space—free of formal constraints or hierarchies—inviting all project partners to participate. Partners appreciated the purposeful approach of encouraging “equality of voice” (Participant 4) and “giving power to everyone” (Participant 5). Although one partner noted that the nonhierarchical approach was “not goal-oriented” (Participant  1), ultimately the interactions included space(s) of “respect, trust and mutuality”

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(Participant 4). As one partner explained, “I like to listen [to] what the others say, and if I want to share something, the others give me the space” (Participant 1). Another said, “everyone can openly share their opinion, no authority” (Participant 5). This indicates a respectful and helpful give-and-take among the partners, which could be projected onto other organizational structures. By sharing ideas, experiences, and practices about their teaching case studies, partners implicitly taught their colleagues about their country context, and thus contributed to a better understanding of each local (and complex and unfolding) culture and its influence on the education system. The feedback received by colleagues in turn advanced the teaching of case studies, as one explained, “It was exciting, useful … to share [one’s] own experience and get feedback from team members” (Participant 3). With each individual bringing forth their strengths and expertise in specific domains, the interdisciplinary learning experience was very valuable to all partners and to the overall project success.

The CELL Assemblage(s) as a Virtual Community(ies) of Practice As it evolved naturally out of partners’ common interests, values, and objectives as active practitioners in the field of higher education and their commitment to sharing best practices and ameliorating educational experiences of the local communities, the CELL can be characterized as a “community of practice” (CoP) (Wenger, 1998).6 According to Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002), CoPs are “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (p. 4). Members are active practitioners and concerned with transforming (research) results into concrete benefits to the social life of community(ies) in which the CoP is embedded. The underlying operating principle heavily depends on the exchange of promising practices, ideas, feedback, and experiences among the CoP’s members, increasing the knowledge and expertise of each. These interactions require a commitment of the members to fully engage with one another, adopt different perspectives, and foster understanding of social processes. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) describe the common learning experience, however they accumulate knowledge, they become informally bound by the value that they find in learning together. This value is not merely instrumental for their work. It also accrues in the personal satisfaction of knowing colleagues who understand each other’s perspectives and of belonging to an interesting group of people. (p. 5)

As the quotes taken from the project partners’ feedback regarding the CELL and the group dynamic show, this description fits perfectly well. Further, as an academic CoP focused on collecting, managing, and sharing knowledge on an international scale, the CELL is inextricably intertwined with and contributes to the global knowledge economy. The knowledge economy, defined by Powell and Snellman (2004) as “production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence” (p. 201), increases reliance on human capital and

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intellectual property and thus the need for such CoPs. CoPs, as Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) argue, contribute to strategically producing, managing, and sharing knowledge while they simultaneously acquire social capital as they teach and learn from others. The interplay of human and non-human (technical) elements also helps shape the CoP, as members learn about technology along with case study content and are provided with the opportunity to spread knowledge on a global scale. Given our increasingly connected and digitalized (academic) world and given that our project partners are based on three different continents, the CoP might be even better described as a “virtual community of practice” (VCoP) (Dubé, Bourhis, & Jacob 2005). Dubé, Bourhis, and Jacob (2005) explain that a VCoP differs from a “regular” CoP in that “its members use ICT as their primary mode of interaction” (p. 147). While these do not have to be exclusively virtual and can also include in-person meetings, “geographical dispersion and busy schedules make communicating through ICT much more efficient” (Dubé, Bourhis & Jacob, 2005, p. 147). In fact, without ICT, the CELL project would have hardly been able to ensure successful cooperation among partners in Australia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Switzerland. Nevertheless, the authors argue that in-person meetings remain key “for building relationships and trust among members” (Dubé, Bourhis, & Jacob, 2005, p. 147), as was also the case for the CELL. For instance, one CELL partner said “in-person meetings— they are all the most favorites” and another reported that “especially our in-person meetings are great, intercultural aspects, language, food, literature” (Participant 5). As these quotes indicate, meeting together in the same physical space is enjoyable since team members can engage in cultural activities, learning experiences, and relations-deepening together. We, therefore, view the original learning community as a hybrid—part VCoP and part CoP. Into the future, the CELL will offer a VCoP presence, with the possibility of local, in-person CoPs and various self-organizing virtual learning communities.

­The CELL within the Field of Comparative and International Education Salajan and jules (2020) suggest that CIE as a field can be seen as “subordinate and interwoven assemblages exerting influence on one another by establishing relational patterns” (p.  135) and we found this to be echoed in the CELL, which legitimated both “individual purpose and functional co-existence” (Salajan & jules, 2020, p. 135). As a published website, the CELL offered legitimation of individual purpose by validating the work of individuals in their own contexts, where such work may not be appreciated or understood. It also legitimated various indigenous approaches and concepts that are weakly or not at all represented in the literatures across the comparative and international education and educational leadership fields. The CELL’s legitimation of functional coexistence occurred as the CELL case studies demonstrated common challenges across assemblages and sub-assemblages, showed the advantages of establishing relationships across contexts through the constitution of one or more assemblages, and celebrated mutual problem-solving.

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Salajan and jules (2020) further argue that “the field seeks to stabilize itself ” (p.  140) and we see CIE continually attempting to self-justify through publications documenting its history, its luminaries, and its relevance (Epstein, 2020; Phillips, 2020). The interdisciplinarity and the many intersections and crisscrossing of its members through writing, projects, intellectual melding (or battle), field research, and friendship, lends backing to its heterogeneity and its existence through a (perhaps infinite) myriad of assemblages. Critiques also help us to re-envision the field. Particularly relevant to this chapter is Sobe and Kowalczyk’s (2014) suggestion to “explode the cube” by acknowledging the complexities of context.7 In the case of the CELL, context is not limited to particular “national,” “social,” “political,” etc., dimensions, but rather evidenced through iterative power dynamics among members and continual attention to decolonialization efforts in working process through mutual interrogation and deliberation. One partner even suggested that the CELL does not seek to highlight the experiences in lesser-known contexts but instead to present them, prima facie, as legitimate: I think we started working together based on [de-centering the West and amplifying the voices of non-Western experiences and partners], but at the end we created a learning community or practice architecture which by its nature made any de-centering or centering meaningless. The community we created cannot be de-centered from the West or de-centered from the East. It was built on sharing and self-reflection on own experiences … which excludes dominating. Equality of sharing excludes domination of either the West or the East. (Participant 2)

Simultaneously, as a field, CIE seeks to coalesce around a common identity—a kind of common air—that is both territorialized and de-territorialized, that is both defined and undefinable, that reifies the “non-spatial processes which increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 13). The lack of definite boundaries, limitations, common properties, or common definitions even, demonstrate the deterritorialized nature of the CELL as an actor in the field itself, if territorialization is “a parameter measuring the degree to which the components of the assemblage have been subjected to a process of homogenization and the extent to which its defining boundaries have been delineated and made impermeable” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 3). The CELL has no fixed boundaries. Rather, it acts as “a contingent ensemble of practices and things that can be differentiated … and that can be aligned along the axes of territoriality and deterritorialization” (Sassen, 2008, p. 76). Within and among CELL content, contexts can be considered “an assemblage of multiple, at times paradoxical, things and practices that come together in particular places at particular times” (Sobe & Kowalczyk, 2014, p. 10). The whole of the CIE field exists alongside its parts (or sub-assemblages) in an ontological sense (DeLanda, 2016), with its many parts operating in a multi-scalar manner. The CELL is an example of this in miniature; it consists of technological glue (the common air) that is the virtual Lab itself, as well as its many parts and subassemblages that are of equal or greater complexity than the whole. These sub-parts

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or sub-assemblages embody exteriority as, again, they are connected to but do not constitute the assemblage, or vice versa; they could be considered self-sustaining but “nested sets” (DeLanda, 2016). Forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity both exist within the field of CIE and are elaborated through the CELL. For example, while the CELL creators and its infinite users (or participants) are heterogeneous by virtue of geolocation, gender, language, ethnicity, etc., the relational ties of its members, as they access the case studies and interact with the materials, binds them—explicitly/publicly or implicitly/hidden, thus exemplifying DeLanda’s claim that “non-spatial processes … increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 13). Similar to the way in which special interest groups within the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) link disparate members, conjuring homogeneity within sub-assemblage(s) (and sub-sub-assemblages, and so on), the CELL does the same though participants’ common interest in one or more elements of the CELL (i.e., could be interest in a topic or a country or region, or a particular person, etc.). Rather than presenting the CELL as a model, “best practice” or “promising practice,” we offer it as a vision of assemblage that might inspire future, diverse visionary assemblages. CIE scholars and practitioners are predisposed to making farreaching and often unconventional connections among colleagues; the CELL offers a mechanism in which such connections can be displayed for others to learn from and through which technology is seen as not only instrumental but inherent to learning processes. As a demonstration of work in CIE, the CELL captures the essence of what we do in the field in terms of research, knowledge production, and networking. Often, CIE project work is bound by location(s)/countries, people (consultants, etc.), and time/funding cycles. The CELL as an open space, ever-growing, evolving virtual landscape releases such constraining aspects. Partners “come alive” as well, in multilingual video interviews alongside their case studies. This highlights non-Northern/Western scholars in a visual, audible, and narrative presence, adding increased dimensionality to the typically two-dimensional research article, report, or text that is effectively dispossessed of humanity. The active elements, brought to life by multimedia, force the user/viewer to confront their own humanity and possible participation in the phenomena discussed. It facilitates a “knowing” of the “other,” so critical in the CIE field yet difficult to establish without financial or institutional support for travel, and even more challenging in the era of Covid-19 and reduction of physical movement. Another implication for CIE as a field regards a lifting of publishing power. Given that most literature—and most widely cited literature—in CIE is published in English and by publishing houses based in the North and West, the opportunity for expanding the power to publish is tremendous. The CELL, as a virtual space that itself is published and public, offers its contributors/authors a platform to express in English as well as their local language their views, theories, epistemologies, and reflections. As well, additional outgrowths from this space in the form of local, regional, and international publications are unrestricted and encouraged. To this end, partners are presenting in and writing up their case studies for local conferences, journals, and newsletters, opening new windows for deliberation and knowledge expansion. Partners are

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welcome to enhance their CELL case studies on the CELL at any time, which allows for unlimited collaborative creation. This heralds the advancement of thinking and scholarship through the dismantling of both overt and covert scholarship power.

The CELL as Rhizomatic Arrangement of Educational Leaders Becoming An assemblage’s diagram captures the virtual properties of the assemblage, or “the structure of the possibility space” (DeLanda, 2016, p.  5). The CELL continues to expand its learning community(ies) and appears as an assemblage to help educational leaders every/anywhere to engage in becoming.8 The CELL’s technological mechanisms and infrastructure could be considered as the assemblage’s “abstract machine,” that is, the network holding various, changing parts, and entities together. It is—importantly—not constructed arborescently, or based on “arborescent thinking” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Rather than having a hierarchical structure (e.g., trunk) with central concepts, features, or premises out of which grow case studies (branches), the CELL exists rhizomatically, according to no particular order or scheme. Communication flows, idea brainstorming, feedback, and advisement among participants are multidirectional. Further, because there is no singular objective (other than fulfilling the starting grant mandate), its growth and transformation can come from anywhere, is unpredictable, and can have multiple and varied results/manifestations. The connections—the relations—between and among elements of the CELL (persons, artifacts, dialogues, etc.,) hold value as much as, or perhaps more than, the case studies themselves. How a particular visitor to the CELL interacts with, understands, or interprets a case study is more meaningful than the mere existence of the case study. As a melding of human and non-human elements, the CELL is a mangle (Pickering, 1995) that continually shifts reality for those en traversant, or we might say, crisscrossing (Sobe, 2018). It is very challenging to depict a multidimensional, moving set(s) of elements on a flat page, but perhaps Figure 10.3 captures the almost phosphorescent (or tendency to continually bear varying light) nature of the CELL. Any given element, although necessarily somewhat “fixed” if we were to place it on/into the image, is movable and malleable. This is a markedly different view of the CELL from Figure 10.2, for example, and closer to what we think of as its reality/essence. Concrete “coterminous elements” of the assemblage include teaching case studies from different country contexts that can be employed in a classroom setting or as selfdirected learning opportunities across the globe by educators, leaders, and policymakers. The latter is the so-called “agents” of the assemblage (Nail, 2017) that are “linked together … by virtue of their mutually sustaining compatibilities, interests, purposes or needs” (Salajan & jules, 2020, p. 138). As it has only contingent features, any CELL agent will experience it uniquely. When elements and agents interact, the relations and learning opportunities consequently and necessarily shift and “coadapt” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). That is, the assemblage depends on the dynamism of the CoP and

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Figure 10.3  The CELL’s conceptualization as an assemblage in continuous action. Source: Microsoft PowerPoint Design Ideas. Powered by Office Intelligent Services. 2021.

other varying influencing elements, such as underlying hierarchies, interdependent relationships among (sub-)group members, and external (non-)physical objects and surroundings. Due to the fluctuating nature of the assemblage, its changing structure and composition constantly create new and textured layers of connectivity among its participants/agents/actors. Additional sub-assemblages thus emerge, contributing to new angles and dimensions of research and practices and the co-/pluri-construction of knowledge and values. In other words, the CELL as a rhizomatic arrangement insists that no perspective or part is more inherently powerful or important than another (the arrangement is nonhierarchical), the various parts are necessarily interpreted and utilized differently depending on who is interacting with them, and these parts may shrink or expand over time. For example, if we think of a “part” of the CELL as a country context, we might one day see one case study presented, and another day, there might be another. A year later, one of these might have been deleted. As an example of the rhizome in action, two partners in the project, one from Switzerland and one from Azerbaijan, were talking over breakfast one morning in Baku. They started discussing children’s literature and book publishing. Several months later, through communication unrelated to work on the CELL, this cooperative relationship resulted in a book contract between a Swiss publisher and an Azerbaijani children’s book author. Another example is the invitation of several partners to present their case studies at an education conference in Azerbaijan. Such an event was not planned and served to extend the CELL work in a new direction, one that resulted in a university in Azerbaijan devoting resources to CELL case study development. A third example

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would be this very chapter, through which the CELL is represented and disseminated indirectly. The chapter and the CELL itself are connected through the authors and the multiple relations each author experiences with the writing of the chapter and the development and testing of the CELL. In one last example, the existence of the CELL has allowed for further support for its expansion, in the short term through funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and (hopefully) through new sources in the future. The immediate expansion is both wide (through the addition of case studies in South Africa, Argentina, and others) and deep (through testing of the CELL with current school leaders and refinement for better effectiveness). The widening was possible because of professional ties among the project organizer and the new partners as a result of CIES networks. As well, new relations are forming; for example, a scholar in yet another country context has requested (and was immediately granted) permission to use the CELL in a new seminar developed at her university. Relatedly, the CELL is inspiring colleagues in one of the new partner countries to build an inaugural university program on educational leadership based on CELL materials.9 One can see from these examples the give-and-take, the flowing of relational property (both human and non-human) across time and space. The CELL can be acted upon by learners/participants, but it can also act and inspire and disrupt existing systems, practices, and communities of practice. The CELL, in itself an interactive and growing abstract machine then, impacts multiple (sub-)assemblages with its technological features and evolving opportunities for participation. It is a constantly shifting, enmeshed ensemble of elements. It can mean different things to different actors. It can inspire, require and/or disperse learning communities, communities of practice, and virtual communities of practice, with endless possibilities to rhizomatically expand and morph.

Conclusion: The CELL as a Beacon of CIE’s Future With the expansion of e-learning, e-books, and e-materials ad infinitum, we explored in this chapter one virtual learning space as assemblage(s) to demonstrate the nonuniformity and ambiguity of international and comparative digital pedagogy, demonstrating ways in which this assemblage is in a constant state of (anticipated and non-anticipated) becoming. The resulting learning communities that appear, sharpen, cohere, or disappear demonstrate its mutability and its nature as a mangled set of contingent relations. While its use could be challenging because of insufficient technological infrastructure in some regions and the linguistic or cultural barriers inherent in global audiences, and its decolonial aspirations could be limited by underlying power dynamics due to (Western) project funding, we believe the CELL exemplifies the positive possibility for twenty-first—and indeed twenty-second— century teaching and learning in the field of CIE. This is particularly true if “teaching and learning” or “pedagogy” are reframed as not a transfer of knowledge nor even a facilitated dialogue (Freire, 1970), but rather a communal becoming in and through which inventiveness, questioning, and unanticipated outcomes are prioritized.

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As the CIES annual meetings of 2020 and 2021 were thrust into virtual space owing to Covid-19 restrictions, we found and experienced new ways of knowing, new ways of connecting, and formed new arrangement(s) of individuals and groups so that CIES now seems to be more rhizomatic than arborescent. The CELL, as a virtual entity becoming in a CIE space that is also becoming, we find that the future of learning, of learning communities and of communities of practice can stand as a node of the future. We can benefit from exploring its potential and its iterations for subsequent application to other fields, topics, and spaces. To investigate this further, scholars and practitioners might want to consider: 1. How to better use virtual learning to open spaces for divergent thought … 2. How to encourage networks and connections through teaching and work to inspire unforeseeable outcomes … 3. How to reduce reliance on traditional structures of education to take a more rhizomatic than arborescent approach to teaching comparative and international education … 4. How to think more about developing learning communities across time and space rather than (or at least in addition to) individual programs and accomplishments … 5. How to support non-hierarchical research and project work in international and comparative education … 6. How to integrate enhanced virtual realities into learning processes and communities … 7. Or … or … or … and … and … and … . Like the CELL assemblage(s), the potential for future exploration and even enhanced virtual learning is boundless.

Notes 1 Although the experiences relayed in this chapter occurred pre-pandemic, the 2020 global pivot toward virtual learning makes this assemblage story especially relevant. 2 Readers can connect with the CELL online at: www.compedleadershiplab.com; initial funding for CELL development was awarded by Movetia. 3 The questionnaire was adapted from Magno’s (2010) learning community inquiry and framed loosely around Kemmis’ (2009) practice architectures framework. It included twenty-seven questions, mostly open-ended, about the CELL project’s culture, objectives, collective action, governance, decision-making, trust, norms of engagement, network, and learning gains. 4 These were conversations in which partners asked about and discussed the purpose of the project, their feelings as a partner in the project, and their aspirations for learning both during and after the project. 5 Most literature and theory on educational leadership is published in the West and in English.

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6 The term was first used by Lave and Wenger (1991) in their concept of “situated learning” to describe the learning of newcomers through practice and participation in order to become full members of a group or community. 7 The “cube” references the popular CIE methodological/analytical approach proposed by Bray and Thomas (1995) in which context is treated as static and inherently able to be categorized and defined. We acknowledge, however, that the CELL website is organized through country-specific pages, which could be (mis)construed as contextdefining. 8 Here we use “educational leaders” to denote the original target group for the CELL, but the content can—and hopefully will—be engaged and “mangled” by anyone in the education sphere. 9 Importantly, the materials will likely be “mangled” in various ways to suit the situation.

References Bak, P. and Chen, A. (1991). Self-organized criticality. Scientific American, 264, 46–53. Bray, M. & Thomas, R.M. (1995). Levels of comparison in educational studies: Different insights from different literatures and the value of multilevel analyses. Harvard Education Review, 65(3), 472–90. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Dubé, L., Bourhis, A. & Jacob, R. (2005). The impact of structuring characteristics on the launching of virtual communities of practice. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 18(2), 145–66. Epstein, E. (2020). North American scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 20th century comparativists. Routledge. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum Press. ­Katrib, R. (Curator) & Graf, J. (Assistant Curator). (2021). Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for life. [MoMA Exhibition]. Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/5111 Kemmis, S. (2009). Understanding professional practice: A synoptic framework. In B. Green (Ed.), Understanding and researching professional practice (pp. 1–21). Sense Publishers. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. Magno, C. (2010). Learning communities and social capital and the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund: A descriptive case study. https://www.wcgmf.org/advocacy/ learning-conversations. Magno, C. & Becker, A. (2020). Case study: Diversity-engaged Leadership. CELL. http:// globalleadershipineducation.com/migration/. Microsoft Powerpoint Design Ideas. Powered by Office Intelligent Services. Nail, T. (2017). What is an assemblage? Substance, 46(1), 21–37. Newman, B. & Newman, P. (2020). Theories of adolescent development. Academic Press.

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Phillips, D. (2020). British scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 19th and 20th century comparativists. Routledge. Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. University of Chicago Press. Powell, W.W. & Snellman, K. (2004). The knowledge economy. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 199–220. Salajan, F.D. & jules, t.d. (2020). Exploring comparative and international education as a meta-assemblage: The (re)configuration of an interdisciplinary field in the age of big data. In A. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual review of comparative and international education 2019 (pp. 133–51). Emerald Publishers. Sassen, S. (2008). Neither global nor national: Novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights. Ethics & Global Politics, 1(1–2), 61–79. 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. Sobe, N.W. & Kowalczyk, J.A. (2014). Exploding the cube: Revisioning “context” in the field of comparative education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 16(1), 6–12. Wenger, E. (1998). Community of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E., McDermott, R. & Snyder, W.M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice. Harvard Business School Press.

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Assembled Teaching: A Sensitized Conceptualization of Didactics Elin Sundström Sjödin and Ninni Wahlström

Introduction Over the last decade, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been an active player in formulating a transnational policy ideas of education (Addey & Gorur, 2020; Grek, 2020). In the framework of Education 2030, the OECD (2018) proposed a “mobilisation of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values through a process of reflection, anticipation and action.” Several studies have shown how national education policy and curricula borrow international policy ideas and concepts, albeit in very different ways (Wahlström & Sundberg, 2018; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). At the center of this contested policy arena are the actual teaching practices in terms of didactics. The scientific discipline of didactics deals with the theories and practices of education as well as the relations between education, teaching, and learning. Accordingly, didactics explores the theoretical bases and the didactic models from which we can understand and analyze education as well as the practical work of teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms (Wahlström, 2015). Didactics draws on the German Bildung tradition (Hopmann, 2011; Klafki, 2011; Künzli, 2000), which exceeds issues of acquisition of knowledge and skills to embrace the more existential questions of what it means to develop as a human being; contribute to individual students’ growing abilities for self-determination, democratic participation, and solidarity; and develop society as a whole. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in comparative research in didactics concerning not only comparative perspectives on educational contexts, school subjects, and curricula but also comparisons of classroom practices observed in different countries and in different subjects taught at school. This type of research, which we here denote as didactical situations, is relatively new in the field of comparative didactics. International comparisons in education have, to date, focused mainly on the policies in national school systems, implications for curricula, and, of course, students’ knowledge results from various international tests (Ligozat & Almqvist, 2018). In this new international comparative strand with a focus on didactics, we argue that understanding teaching and learning as situated didactic assemblages gives

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researchers the potential opportunity to critically and carefully renew the exploration of actors and actions involved in teaching. The concept of didactic assemblage comprises an analytical understanding of the “reality in practice” (Mol, 2002) in teaching situations. Didactic assemblages identify the human and non-human actors who, in their roles as actual actors, influence the teaching content, the classroom discourse, and the learning environment in a specific teaching situation. Thus, a didactic assemblage constitutes an empirical reality where neither the actors nor their consequences are known beforehand—and neither are the (power) relations between the different actors and their effects. By paying attention to the assemblage of actors that emerge in individual didactic events, a researcher can analyze which phenomena (actors and their performances) are potentially influencing the teaching and compare how didactic assemblages take shape differently in distinct historical, social, and geographical contexts. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a widened and, at the same time, sensitized concept of didactics, illustrated by three scenarios that we mirror against traditional didactic triangle models. We describe the assemblages of actors, both human and non-human (Latour, 2007), involved in these three specific teaching situations, how they performed, and what effects they had. These cases are not presented as being representative of something larger, or as something that fits easily into comparisons with corresponding or equivalent entities in other countries or other practices, but rather as phenomena in their own rights, which nonetheless can provide more sensitized comparative research “as incitement to ask questions about difference and similarity, about what alters in moving from one place to another” (Law & Mol, 2002, p. 16). Whereas comparative research usually uses context for its explanatory features, our analytical focus is on the making of the context, the details of the assembled didactic situations, and the actors and effects of their relationships. We see didactics as a relational and situated endeavor because the existence of actors and relations within one didactic situation does not necessarily mean the same in other situations. This approach can offer comparative insights alongside large generalizable sets of data or quantifiable measures because the details of classroom practices and the relationality that the approach builds upon making visible the parts of practices that differ, where they differ, and what effects they have. Thereby we argue that the approach sensitizes comparisons between practices about what assemblages become possible, the different critical effects that different assemblages have, and what contexts can be created from there. This kind of analysis brings to the fore not only the complexities of didactical situations but also the critical effects that different relations in the assemblage have. We explore where, when, and how critical aspects of didactics take shape— in what constellations and in what relations—and we address “the critical” as the way in which different forms of marginalization, oppression, and exclusion are embedded in or become enacted by discursive, material, and embodied educational practices (Postma, 2012; Sundström Sjödin, 2017). By making visible the untamed, unpredictable, and uncontrollable practices of reading and education, we can develop an understanding of the many things that fall outside the rationality and intentionality of education (Leander & Boldt, 2013; Sundström Sjödin & Wahlström, 2021).

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­Didactics as Assemblage: A Relational and Performative Approach To develop a more situated and sensitized understanding of the elements involved in the making of teaching and learning—that is, in didactics—we turn to the sensibilities of material-semiotics (Latour, 1987, 2007; Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). Material-semiotics is part of the post-humanist and sociomaterial approaches and methodologies. Central features that connect different post-humanist methodologies are the understanding of research as the making of realities (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011; Mol, 2002); the notion of performativity (Barad, 2007; Mol, 2002); a symmetric view of discourse, materiality, and affect (Braidotti, 2013); and a substantial influence from feminist approaches (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Haraway, 1991; Suchman, 2007). The material-semiotic approach carries all these features but is specific in its focus on the relationality of actors within assemblages. An actor becomes what it is, and is able to act, only if it is connected to other actors: “Actors are entities, human or not, that happens to act. They are not given, but they emerge in relations” (Law, 2004, p. 102). Therefore, we do not ascribe specific abilities or competencies to actors beforehand. Just as in the linguistic use of the concept of semiotics, a letter within a word or a word in a sentence becomes meaningful only in relation to other letters or words (Bodén et al., 2019). Material-semiotics provides a way to analyze the performativity and dynamics of didactic issues as assemblages of humans and non-humans connected in specific and situated relations as well as how these connections enact educational, political, and social effects (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Gorur et al., 2019). This implies that we draw on a relational and performative conception of didactics—that is, the constitution of educational issues takes form and shape through its performance in assemblages, in webs of relations. Everything that is part of a didactic situation has the ability to act—to make a difference in the situation. In accordance, this sensibility has strong implications on research methodology too. A  researcher is part of the network he or she is exploring and can never claim to reveal something hidden with references to certain methods or theories (Gunnarsson & Bodén, 2021). When exploring didactic assemblages, we cannot forget that we as researchers are also co-creators of the network by tracing certain actors and making certain connections. The knowledge-producing practice of comparing is also the crafting of differences and sameness (Alarcón López et al., 2021; Gorur & Dey, 2021).

The Didactic Elements of Teaching The concept of didactics and the models used in didactic research offer a way of making comparisons of classroom practices between various contexts. Didactic studies investigate the relations between the elements that constitute teaching and learning, problematized by certain didactic questions: the what, the how, and the why of teaching, learning, and educational content. These questions make

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visible the complexity of the relations between different didactical aspects: “What content should be handled in education/teaching? What are the aims and goals of education/teaching? How can this specific content be motivated? Who is the student who is supposed to meet this specific content? How should teaching be planned, drawing upon the didactic questions posed above?” (Wahlström, 2015, p. 97, authors translation). One of the most common ways of framing didactics is with the help of the didactic triangle model, which describes the various educational elements (Hopmann, 2011). The classic didactic triangle consists of three corners representing content, teacher, and student. What is most applicable about the didactic triangle is that it makes visible the foundational relationships of content, teaching, and learning. However, when analyses of education are based on these three aspects, other aspects of education risk being superseded. In all didactic situations, the actors involved have to create connections and new relations for teaching and learning to happen. The didactic relations within the practice are more complex than the model in Figure 11.1 suggests. Teachers have to ally with various ideas and materials to enact school (as the scenario with the wing chair in this chapter will show us) and also separate themselves from other ideas and materials. Teachers’ didactic competence implies making selective choices about the actors involved in the creation of didactic assemblages and preparing for the effects and consequences of said assemblages. Hence, we argue that we need to make use of more sensitive tools when studying and comparing educational practices and place our outlook inside the models—in the midst of the practices of education. From that

Figure 11.1  The classic didactic triangle (modified figure after Hudson & Meyer, 2011, p. 18).

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Figure  11.2 The extended didactic triangle (modified figure after Hudson & Meyer, 2011, p. 19).

position within, we can see an extended network of many different elements: people, materials, texts, technologies, and discourses. To account for structural influences on education, the didactic triangle has been illustrated within structural frames, as shown in Figure 11.2 (see also Hudson & Meyer, 2011). In these extensions, consideration is given to certain structural aspects of the didactic context: specific pedagogical aspects, the institutional context, and conditions of schools, educational politics, and societal context. This model suggests, however, that context (of different levels from micro to macro) can be illustrated as frozen frames or backgrounds on which practice is played out. The relational and performative approach of material-semiotics has implications for how critical issues and power issues are addressed. In view of didactics as an assemblage, context is treated as contingent, enacted, and changing even as practice happens. Instead of approaching power structures as a precondition, in this chapter, we analyze power issues by asking questions such as: “How has [this structure or system] been compiled? Where is it? What is holding it together?” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, p. 19). For power to function, the links between actors must be created and maintained; power is viewed as an effect of these links. The relations between a teacher, a student, and content include alliance, influence, and negotiation with a number of other elements and aspects, and power can be enacted in many of these elements, not least in mundane and often overlooked things, which can be evidently similar across contexts, as well as evidently different. However, this openness toward how power is enacted is not the same as demeaning or denying the ubiquitous nature of traditional critical issues, such as class issues, racism, or gender oppression, nor

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are we suggesting that it can be overlooked in education research. As Nespor (1994) noted, “It would be a mistake to emphasize the fluidity of the world without noting that it flows at times in very deeply worn channels” (p. 15). Rather, it is a matter of exploring how critical issues “may appear in different forms in particular contexts” (Postma, 2012, p. 138) and especially where and how they become marginalizing and oppressive. The critical analytical question that can be raised in didactics does not necessarily have to be what the critical aspects of didactics are but instead where they can be found. This includes allowing material actors a more symmetrical position in analyses since they are seen as having substantial critical and political effect, a “politics of what” (Mol, 2002, p. 172). The purpose of such an approach is to move beyond regarding materials and things as naturalized artifacts and to recognize their normative, political—and critical— dimensions. No matter whether the different elements in teaching situations are human, material, or discursive, they need to be handled in didactical practices as well as research, since they all bring with them and enact values, politics, and criticalities that affect students, teachers, and the subject matter (Sundström Sjödin, 2019). By drawing didactic assemblages, we are provided with the didactical where question, with which we can pose analytical questions about the relationality and performativity of the actors involved, which is of interest also when making international comparisons of educational practices. Wahlström (2009) focuses on the communicative aspects of knowledge making, teaching, and learning when she posed didactical questions, specifically on the spaces in between actors involved in communication—between teachers and students: “What parts of the world becomes possible for students to meet in the space in between (what)? What questions are posed (how)? Who is given a voice (who)? What knowledge about the world does the world need, and the people inhabiting it (why)?” (Wahlström, 2009, p. 237, authors translation). We argue that cases of didactic assemblages and the didactical where question can visualize where answers to the other didactical questions can be found. This also concerns finding the nodes and relations where critical issues are enacted: What didactical relations become possible in different situations? Where—in what relations—can we find actors in education practices that become dominant, neutral, or marginalized? In the following scenarios of didactic assemblages, we have not used traditional critical issues as starting points for the analysis, but instead we have treated them as performative effects. And since the outcomes of interactions between different actors in the assemblage are not given beforehand, they might take unexpected directions.

­Three Scenarios of Didactic Assemblages In the following, we present three didactical situations and take a closer look at the actors that are assembled there. These assemblages are mirrored against traditional didactic models and pose the didactical where question as an analytical way of visualizing critical and urgent issues.

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Scenario 1: “Everything Became More Correct”— Rachel and the Lab Technician In an interview about distance teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rachel, a 25-year-old medical student, described a very appreciated lab she had in a course about viruses and bacteria. “That course was really good as a remote course; they were well organized, … and they also organized for us to have an obligatory lab online, so we wouldn’t have that pending for next term.” The lab was organized online, with a lab technician in the lab doing the laboratory work while the students were connected via Zoom. Normally there were around 15 students in a lab group; however, this time there were around 30 students doing the lab remotely, instructing the lab technician on what to do. “Instead of him mixing and blending things himself, we had to instruct him, like ‘Now you dip the cotton swab in there, and then you smear it out on the plate’ and ‘Place that petri bowl in a water bath.’ And I really thought that I learned more in this lab than I have learned in all the other labs I have done.” Rachel told us that when they normally did labs, it could be really noisy and messy, as 15 students would be doing lab work and shouting for help. Rachel said, “Sometimes it can be better to watch someone who knows what they’re doing, because sometimes when you are in a lab, you just stand there, and you have an instruction, and you work with a lab partner, and you might not understand an instruction or agree with your partner, and then you need to get help from the supervisor, and, well, it just doesn’t flow as good as it did now. He showed us everything in the correct way. When you try for yourself—for example, if you’re going to smear bacteria on an agar plate—well then it is easy to make mistakes, because you’ve never done it before. But now he was very instructive and showed us exactly how to do it … I guess it felt as if everything became more correct.”

If we look at the actors involved in the example with Rachel and the lab technician, we  find  that the classical didactic triangle does not apply easily in this didactic situation. The roles of teacher, student, and content were moved, twisted, or switched. In the assemblage, there were students, of course—about twice the number the students were accustomed to. The students were not present in the lab; they were dispersed in their homes, and they had individually studied and prepared in advance—well enough to instruct the lab technician to perform the laboratory work for them. The lab technician was not in his home. He was placed in the laboratory, and the students were there with him—on a screen via Zoom. The lab technician took on the role of a learner—a doer—and the students took on the role of the instructor. At the same time, the technician (who was normally not a teacher for these students) was able to instruct the students about how different techniques and aspects of the laboratory work was done best: “He showed us everything in the correct way” (interview notes, Rachel). The lab technician (a didactic network in himself) held the experience and the skill that the students probably would not have been able to see up close if they had performed this work themselves. As

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Rachel pointed out, “Normally it is noisy and messy when there are 15 people in a lab room, and everyone shouts for help” (interview notes, Rachel). The technician was the learner, the instructor, and the learning content all at once. At the same time, he was subordinated to the students, who were instructors, learners, and content as well. Many material actors were part of the assemblage too: agar plates, cotton swabs, fluids, viruses, and a whole range of technological equipment. Technology was the actor that allowed the students to watch up close, moving them from their usual position in pairs at desks spread out in the lab to computer screens in their homes. Space, as well as distance, was performed as an effect of heterogeneous sociomaterial relations (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). This technological part of the assemblage was an assemblage in itself: computers, cameras, screens, software, internet, and (hopefully stable) Wi-Fi connections. However, this assemblage can be regarded as black-boxed (Latour, 1987), which means that it functions as an intermediary in the didactic assemblage, as an unquestioned transporter of matters of fact (Latour, 2007; Sundström Sjödin & Wahlström, 2017), rather than as an active agent. The teacher who normally instructed the students was seemingly missing in the didactic assemblage (see Figure 11.3). Apart from having provided the student group with instructions, they were not present in the lab (except perhaps as an observer in the Zoom room).

Figure 11.3  The missing didactic roles.

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The example in Scenario 1 shows that the didactic roles of the actors cannot easily be pinned down in the didactical triangle or the traditional roles of teacher, student, and content. There are several other actors involved that could be ascribed these roles, but the roles continuously change; they are fluid and multiple.

Scenario 2: Information and Commercials— Society as One of the Actors In the following example, the theme of the teaching content is about information and commercials. The content of the work theme is dissemination of information, advertising, and opinion formation in various media. The content also involves how sexuality and gender roles are portrayed in the media and popular culture. The work theme is included in the civics syllabus, with the aim of giving the students opportunities to learn how to distinguish messages, senders, and purpose, both in digital and other media, with a source-critical approach. The dialogue in the example includes the actors of the teacher and some of the students. However, the content consists of the students’ own experiences from parts of society other than school. Teacher: You follow a person … There are some very famous bloggers … Klara Henry, Miss Lissibell, yes? Tim: Blogs are so damn bad. Bill: They are sick in their head. Tim: People check them out, they get more famous, they get money, and if they get really big, Facebook will give them money so that they can continue blogging. Teacher: Yeah … do you think there are mostly boys or most girls? … Those of you who think that there are mostly girls who read blogs, raise your hands. [Almost everyone raises their hand.] Tim: It is, it is! Bill: I know why—because if boys do that, then they will be called gay. Tim: No Bill, that is not true. Bill, you cannot say that gay is a bad word; they are super. Teacher: Is it wrong for boys to read blogs, then? Bill: No, but … some people think that.

In the dialogue above, the place was an ordinary classroom with the teacher and the students in the same room. However, the focus of the teaching was directed outward, toward the role of media in society. The conversation was about blogs, girls, and sexual orientation. A first striking observation from the dialogue is that both the teacher and the students assumed that blogs were for girls; however, no girl participated in the conversation, although they were represented in the classroom. The girl, as a typified character—both as a reader of blogs and as a blog creator (Klara Henry, Miss Lissibell)—was an important part of the assemblage. Two more typifications included

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in the assemblage were the character of the “ordinary boy” who did not read blogs and the character of the “gay boy” who probably read blogs. The blog itself, as an important part of social media, constituted a significant element in this social situation shaped by the teacher’s talk and the students’ talk. The teacher’s presumption was that all the students were experienced in using social media and specifically blogs. The example illustrates the limitations of the didactic triangle in time and space. The teaching content was not present in the classroom but rather in the minds of the participants. Notions, stereotypes, and experiences formed by the society in which the teacher and students found themselves influenced the discussion about what blogs were and how reliable they were. Blogs themselves are a phenomenon in society; however, the presence of blogs as part of students’ lives varied. Thus, for the analysis of this example and its implications, the didactic triangle needs to be extended to also include the society in which teaching takes shape in line with Figure 11.2. When we include place and time in the analysis of a didactic situation—in this case, the teacher’s and students’ diverse experiences of social media outside of school—it also becomes obvious that this teaching content would have been an impossible lesson for twelveyear-olds twenty years ago, when the concept of a blog was unknown. Assemblages in didactic analyses need to be included in a broader framework of society to create meaning in the analysis. At the same time, society cannot be understood as a uniform or stable entity surrounding education or as mediated only through teaching. In this analysis, values and norms present in society were the unmediated focus of the discussion among the students. The interconnection between teaching situations and societal norms is illustrated in the broken extended didactic triangle in Figure 11.4. The main actor in this assemblage became the blogs on the internet, which were closely connected to the students. Thus, the blogs became the place from where the critical could be enacted.

Figure 11.4  Place and time outside school influencing the didactic situations.

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Scenario 3: The Wing Chair It is not always the human action, intention, or agency that brings about the strongest or most durable effects in didactic assemblages. With the help of the following narrative, we make visible the power relations and norms at work, and we show that a reading chair has the capacity to bring about critical effects in a specific, yet quite mundane, classroom situation. On a closed ward in a detention home for male adolescents in Sweden, the teachers struggled for several years to have a separate classroom where the boys could have their lessons instead of using the common areas of the ward. After endless planning and discussions with staff about security and surveillance, the classroom became a reality. The teachers furnished the small room with a computer desk, a table with two opposing chairs, and a bookshelf containing pedagogic material, schoolbooks, and literature. Next to the bookshelf, they placed a big dark-blue wing chair with a matching footrest, in which the boys could sit and read. The boys’ reactions to the wing chair were interesting and quite surprising to the teachers. As they were introduced to the classroom for the first time, the boys often flinched a bit when they saw the wing chair and asked: “Who’s going to sit there?” “If you want to read, you can sit there,” was a teacher’s answer. And the boys always passed the chair and sat down by the table.1

This example actually consists of several didactic assemblages that enact different versions of teachers and students and different versions of reading. The teachers knew that to create a school environment for the students, they had to separate themselves from the people and things that were part of the common areas of the ward. By doing so, they could create new relations with students as well as things in a new didactic assemblage—one that would perform school. Tables, paintings, computers, and books needed to be enrolled in the activity of teaching for the roles to become settled. Teacher, student, and content. The didactic assemblage consisting of the table with the two opposing chairs performed one specific kind of teacher, student, and school activity. In this assemblage, the student was stooped over the assignment on the table, and the teacher sat in front of him, nodding, helping, watching, and supervising. The table acted as a workspace as well as a divide. With the help of the table, the relations became clear; they performed work. School was enacted here. The roles of the teacher and student, and the table between them, were familiar and safe. However, by furnishing it with the dark-blue wing chair, the teachers seem to have changed the room in unexpected ways. The teachers wanted the students to have a comfortable place to sit while reading, but the chair performed quite differently from what they had expected. The chair also performed something different from what the students had been expecting as they walked into the room. The wing chair was not school. It moved the school activity (reading) outside the didactic assemblage by the table and turned the student into a reader—and reading into something that could take place in this specific relaxed position. The critical aspects of this story were enacted

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in part by the posture of the student sitting in the chair. The student (or reader) was transformed as he conquered a place that was not made for him; he claimed a place and a position as a new kind of reader, and it had less to do with what he was actually reading than where he was doing the reading. The chair enabled the student to act as someone who was comfortable when reading and being a reader. The scenario was also about the students passing the chair. The refusal of sitting in the wing chair can be seen as a critical distancing from reading as leisure, or from a hegemonic view of literature by which some of these students possibly felt excluded. A chair of this kind holds another kind of person who reads thick, heavy books—a respected intellectual. This chair was not made to hold a boy with a shaved head and tattoos all over his neck and arms, who had failed in school and who read really bad literature or none at all. The refusal did not have to include reading, however—only reading in the chair. The school-reading assemblage, which included the table and the familiar and safe roles of teacher and student, was still an option. The various actors in the scenario with the wing chair, their relations, and the influence and impact they had on each other would not have been possible to illustrate with any of the didactical models. Figure 11.5 rather illustrates the impossibility for some actors to become dominating in a static way. There are simply too many actors outside of the “usual” didactical relations that have a critical impact on what takes place. The assemblage in the story also makes visible the contingency and multiplicity—the situated experiences for different people in the situation. The chair, which was seen as an instrument of growth and development by the teacher, enacted a marginalizing power on some of the students. The actors, which are part of the traditional didactic models, are part of these assemblages as well, but they are part of many others, and their

Figure 11.5  Didactical assemblage.

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performativity cannot be decided beforehand. The described scenarios should be read not as representing anything larger but rather as cases with a focus on the didactical details that evoke questions about differences and similarities of the assemblages where critical enactments take place.

Concluding Discussion In this chapter, we have explored the analytical question of where the critical elements in didactic situations can be found. We have made the critical into a relational question, and we have shown that the didactic triangle as an archetype of a didactic situation is clear but incomplete. It is built on the assumption of a teacher presenting content to a student. In the Bildung tradition, the content is expected to be the main actor in the assemblage from a student’s perspective. This assemblage also includes the teacher as an actor as well as the student. As became clear already in the first example, we can never know beforehand what actors will become important to constitute the critical in teaching and learning moments. In example one, the critical, or the urgent, could be located in the changing roles of the expert (the lab technician) and the learners. The students had to take responsibility of the laboratory process, including the materials used. If they had not focused on the teaching content, the laboratory process could have failed. What became critical in this situation were the relations between the lab equipment, the lab technician, and the learners. Through the action of detailed instructions, the learners interacted with the lab equipment, while the lab technician acted as subordinate in this assemblage. The power was located in the interactive relations between the learners and the material equipment. In the second example, the didactic triangle became too narrow. Blogs on the internet were the important actors forming the critical issues of gender. The blogs as actors performed significant relationships with the boys in the class. The didactic situation became located outside the classroom, online, and in society. The blogs on the internet formed a place for the critical in the relations between the internet and two of the boys, supported by the teacher, who made the assumption that most blog followers were girls. The critical in the situation became specifically clear through the assemblage of actors, where the girls became actors in terms of being the silent objects discussed in this didactical assemblage. In the third and final example, the didactic triangle became too limited, as the actors in the example enacted multiple didactical situations, and the relations that created the critical aspects of these situations were made up by things other than teachers, students, or content. All three corners of the triangle were dissolved. The wing chair created a center of power, which all students related to either by distancing themselves from the chair or by sitting in it and reading or by using it in a way that was not intended. The wing chair became an actor that could not be ignored and marked a space for the students to express themselves and to take a critical stance toward

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the situation—both the actual reading situation and the situation in broader terms, including a societal aspect. The example shows the multiple actors involved also in a relatively limited didactic moment and that the impact of individual actors can never be foreseen. Figure 11.5 shows an exploded triangle, where the various elements can be formed into relationships that place actors in the foreground or in the background only after the didactic situation has taken place. Thus, the didactic question of where the critical manifests itself in a didactic situation—that is, where a student needs to engage himself or herself by taking a conscious attitude in relation to other actors—cannot be planned beforehand. However, as shown by the example, it can only be analyzed after the situation has taken place to gain new knowledge about critical spaces in different situations of learning across schools. The aim of showing an exploded didactic triangle is to elucidate that for some analyses, the traditional didactic triangle (Figure  11.1) is too plain and reductionist to be helpful for interpreting didactic activities. In the traditional version of the didactic triangle, it is presupposed that the main actors and the dominating relationships are known beforehand: the content, the teacher, and the student and the relationships between them. We do not deny that these actors and relationships are involved in didactic activities; however, we argue that their emergence as performative actors, critical for the learning situation in the specific assemblage, is an empirical question. To sum up, in response to the didactic question of where, the comparative implication in the comparison of didactic situations lies in analyzing the actors involved, their power relations, and their critical potentials. What assemblages form the didactic context? Where does the critical become possible? Where (in what relations) are power relations established? This kind of analytic focus will provide a thick comparison of matters of concern across different didactical sites. Instead of starting with descriptions of national school systems and the curricular structure and content (e.g., Alexander, 2001), the comparison takes its starting point in the didactic situations themselves, comparing the assemblages and relationships between actors in situated didactic moments across countries. The international comparative aspect concerns what assemblages of actors and their relationships become possible, common, or unthinkable in a certain country. What are the didactic patterns, and where does the critical become prominent? When comparing these explorations between countries, the assemblages of the didactic situations will show similarities, unpredictable factors, and differences. We suggest that exploring the didactic question of where in situational learning contexts is suitable for translocal comparative research projects (see Comber, 2017).

Note 1 The story and extended analysis of the wing chair was published in an article by Sundström Sjödin and Wahlström (2021), Reading in the wing chair: The shaping of teaching and reading bodies in the transactional performativity of materialities, in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(9), 920–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 31857.2020.1814739.

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Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge. Law, J. & Mol, A. (2002). Complexities: An introduction. In J. Law & A. Mol (Eds.), Complexities: Social studies of knowledge practices (pp. 1–22). Duke University Press. Leander, K. M. & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracities.” Bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Ligozat, F. & Almqvist, J. (2018). Conceptual frameworks in didactics—learning and teaching: Trends, evolutions and comparative challenges. European Educational Research Journal, 17(1), 3–16. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press. Nespor, J. (1994). Knowledge in motion: Space, time and curriculum in undergraduate physics and management. RoutledgeFalmer. ­OECD (2018). The Future of education and skills, Education 2013. http://www.oecd.org/ education/2030/E2030%20Position%20Paper%20(05.04.2018).pdf Postma, D. (2012). Education as sociomaterial critique. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 137–56. Suchman, L. (2007). Feminist STS and the sciences of the artificial. In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C.A. Miller & L. Smith-Doerr (Eds.), New handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 139–63). MIT Press. Sundström Sjödin, E. (2019). Where is the critical in literacy? Tracing performances of reading, readers and non-readers in educational practice [Doctoral dissertation, Örebro University]. Örebro Studies in Education, 59. Sundström Sjödin, E. (2020). Empowerment(s) in practice: Reading literature in a critical space. Pedagogy, Culture and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.1830842. Sundström Sjödin, E. & Wahlström, N. (2017). Enacted realities in teachers’ experiences: Bringing materialism into pragmatism. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 49(1), 96–110. Sundström Sjödin, E. & Wahlström, N. (2021). Reading in the wing chair: The shaping of teaching and reading bodies in the transactional performativity of materialities. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(9), 920–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2 020.1814739 Waldow, F. & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.) (2019). Understanding PISA’s attractiveness. Critical analyses in comparative policy studies. Bloomsbury Academic. Wahlström, N. (2009). Mellan leverans och utbildning: Om lärande i en mål- och resultatstyrd skola [Between delivery and education: About learning in a goal- and resultdriven school]. Daidalos. Wahlström, N. (2015). Läroplansteori och didaktik [Curriculum theory and didactics]. Gleerups. Wahlström, N. & Sundberg, D. (2018). Discursive institutionalism: Towards a framework for analysing the relation between policy and curriculum. Journal of Education Policy, 33(1), 163–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1344879

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Quo Vadis Comparative and International Education? The Cultural Turn and the (Re)Assembled Contours of a Metamorphosing Field tavis d. jules and Florin D. Salajan

The Cultural Turn and the Mosaic of Assemblage in CIE As noted in our introductory chapter, we do not claim a pioneering role in examining the evolving nature and redefining comparative and international education (CIE). Its evolution, epistemological foundations, academic scope, and the applicability of its scholarship have been critiqued, debated, and pondered from early on by prominent scholars who found their intellectual home within its realm (see, for instance, Altbach, 1991; Brickman, 1960; Cowen & Kazamias, 2009; Epstein, 2016; Trethewey, 1976). As Silova (2019) reminds us, “historically, Comparative Education has been ‘an integral part of the modernity project in the West’, with the ideas of Enlightenment, rationality, and progress laying the intellectual foundations of the field” (p. 444). As the field becomes more globally minded and increasingly responsive to networks, interactions, relations, junctures, and movements, the shape, expanse, and influence of the field remain a contested terrain, signifying that as much as it is an established and professionalized field of scholarship, it is nonetheless emergent and everchanging (see jules, Shields, & Thomas, 2021; Manzon, 2011; Wiseman & Wolhuter, 2019). This indicates that the field must be open to new mutations and variant perspectives of thinking. The appearance of a “post-foundational intellectual turn” (Cowen, 2006, p. 569) in the field’s scholarly domain suggests that the prevailing canons of scholarship in CIE may be insufficient or ill-equipped to interrogate and explore the fluid, variable, contingent, and relational character of many educational phenomena in a post-modern, post-structural, postcolonial, post-humanist, post-Anthropocene, and interconnected world marked by acute social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals (see Ninnes & Mehta, 2004). In fact, as such a young field, it can be argued that CIE is finally going through its own “cultural turn,” which implies a shift in the practice of history and looking for contested meanings and omissions. We should be mindful that “Comparative Education itself

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must undergo a radical shift by redefining its fundamental categories and taken-forgranted assumptions in order to bring into copresence all of the modernity’s absent Others” (Silova, 2021, p.  609). This implies a movement away from the scientific methods and techniques, secularization and de-spiritualization, colonial histories and Eurocentrism, and the scientific rationality of “linear evolution” and “controlled inquiry” (exemplified by the research done in international knowledge banks) that have come to dominate the field (Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977; Silova, 2019; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2017). The cultural turn emphasizes that culture is used in “making meaningful—it is through culture that everyday life is given meaning and significance” (Chaney, 1994). In other words, as Nash (2001) reminds us, the cultural turn in social theory has taken two forms: “the ‘epistemological’ case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the ‘historical’ case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society” (p. 77). We argue that CIE is now coming into its own cultural turn by putting culture in its place, which suggests that culture is not reduced to discourse or language. This, therefore, implies that the field needs to be self-reflective and rethink the politics of education, given the relationship between structure and agency. As the field begins to reject deterministic and dualist models of society connected with structuralist-functionalism and the hegemony of Western ontological and epistemological dimensions of knowledge that are not part of Western modernity’s framework, culture becomes being viewed as consequently constitutive and mediating social life. The cultural turn in CIE implies using a wideranging assortment of theoretical insights from several new fields, such as postfoundationalism. Such a cultural turn is warranted given the mass mobilization of human, more-than-human, and non- or other-than-human material actors and actants across the globe in addressing societal maladies, human-induced catastrophes, or natural disasters increasingly amounting to an existential crisis for humanity that is difficult to capture through technocratic policy analyses, rational choice explanations, discrete comparisons, or quantitative determinations of their motivations. Such an emphasis moves away from “reifying human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism,” which has served to “reinforc[ed] the hierarchies of being, hindering our opportunities to acknowledge and meaningfully engage with multiple worlds and worldviews” (Silova, 2019, p. 445) and moving toward new non-Western ontological and epistemological possibilities or what might be called pluriversal thinking which incorporates indigenous cosmos and ontologies, Southern epistemologies, and African cosmologies (Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Escobar, 2018; Mignolo, 2011; Santos, 2014). Here pluriversal thinking signifies that reality is represented “by many kinds of worlds, many ontologies, many ways of being in the world, many ways of knowing reality” (Querejazu, 2016, p. 3). As education plays an integral role in galvanizing these movements, a holistic approach to studying these amorphous and fluid trends requires a “problematization of policy” (Webb, 2014, emphasis in the original) and recalibration of the epistemological assumptions upon which our understanding of how education weaves through the fabric of society rest. In reinforcing its vibrancy and resilience as a field that “perpetuates itself epistemologically” (Cook, Hite, & Epstein, 2004), CIE scholars in the cultural turn are increasingly embracing post-foundational reasoning

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such as assemblage thinking precisely to address and analyze such momentous changes in education from a comparative perspective. In a post-pandemic era of heightened race relations, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, climate ecology, and the intensification, acceleration, and globalization of neo-liberal capitalism, assemblage theory offers CIE a way to rethink how the white supremacist norms, privileges, and assumptions that have structured the field since its inception can be redrawn. Moreover, we should be encouraged to consider the influence of human agents and the relations between humans and non-human agents. In order to learn what CIE can understand from assemblage thinking, it is essential to unpack the raison d’etre of assemblage thinking. Assemblage thinking, as structured by Deleuze and Guattari, was a response to Lacanian psychoanalysis and structural linguistics and viewed as a way to “understand linguistics and wider social phenomena by unpicking their immanent, rather than essential, characteristics” (Beighton, 2013, p. 1296). Deleuze and Guattari saw an assemblage as an analytical tool composed of the heterogeneity of human and non-human elements in response to these critical programs. Deleuzoguattarian principles maintain that a work of art was irreducible to “a single, static idea which simply reproduced itself at each encounter” (Beighton, 2013, p. 1295) and, instead, argues that structure and relations between components (not requiring any human agency) did not have a fixed center of origin. Deleuze and Guattari’s focal point was the bonds between relational features, and they proposed that elements: (1) can be both content and forms of expression; (2) composed of emergent components that are drawn toward nonstatic elements; and (3) are made up of materiality. Assemblage thinking suggests a “shift at the level of theorization and methodology, opening analysis to the recognition of the complexity of cultural and social as well as ‘natural’ phenomena” (Venn, 2006, p. 107). Throughout this volume, the chapter contributors have attempted to show that assemblage can be conceived of as much as a theory or analytical framework for interrogating, as well as a metaphor for re-envisioning the social and, by extension, the educational. Venn (2006) notes that the concept of assemblage has emerged as one of a series of new concepts, alongside those of complexity, chaos, indeterminacy, fractals, string, turbulence, flow, multiplicity, emergence and so on, that now form the theoretical vocabulary for addressing the problem of determination, of process, and of stability and instability regarding social phenomena. (p. 107)

This collective mosaic of works by the contributors in this book is a testament to the variability, adaptability, malleability, and extensibility of the assemblage paradigm for examining and exploring educational phenomena in CIE. To reiterate, we intended to frame CIE in an assemblage paradigm and transpose assemblage thinking into the multiple interpretations our contributors revealed through their conceptual and methodological examinations of assemblage. In this sense, the works presented here sought to maintain close fidelity and epistemological commitments to principles or features of assemblage thinking without compromising rigor and methodology.

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They also carefully considered that the multifaceted nature of assemblage invites intellectual creativity and exploration in the application of assemblage thinking to gain new insights into educational phenomena from a comparative perspective. For the most part, in their narratives and analyses, our contributors strived to counter the “apparent reluctance in the field to return to the original source material” (Buchanan, 2021, p.  3) when it comes to imagining, theorizing, and applying assemblage thinking to CIE, as a field, and to the scholarship it engenders. In Venn’s (2006) words, authors across this volume have been able to carefully translate the themes of assemblage thinking “into a vocabulary that re-codes emergence and becoming, namely, (de/re)-territorialization (in relation to topology), the machinic (in relation to autopoiesis), multiplicity, ‘agencement machinique’ (in relation to differentiation, compossibility)” (p. 107). Certainly, the advent of any relatively novel paradigm can be laden with epistemological pitfalls. As such, criticism may be directed at the indiscriminate, diffuse, or generic use of assemblage in CIE, and it could be argued that such blanket application of assemblage may lack methodological rigor. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) themselves caution against this approach they term “technonarcissim,” in that, conceptualizing the multiplicity of the rhizome or assemblage, “one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it” (p. 22). For his part, Buchanan (2021) reinforces the Deleuzoguattarian admonition in evading a systematic inspection of assemblage for the convenience it may provide as an all-encompassing notion to explain any arbitrary accumulation of elements, alerting us to the fact that … if any and every kind of collection of things is an assemblage, then what advantage is there in using this term and not some other term, or indeed no term at all? What makes an assemblage an assemblage and not some other kind of collection of things? If any apparently random ‘heap of fragments’, to use Jameson’s suggestive phrase for the ‘randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory’, is an assemblage then the concept serves only to say either that everything is more organized than it appears, or, on the contrary, that everything is ultimately less organized than it appears. (p. 3)

In this sense, we formulate a cautionary note that, if assemblage thinking is to demonstrate its utility for comparative studies of education, any consideration of an assemblage paradigm in CIE should balance its extraordinary pliability as a theoretical and philosophical concept for deconstructing the interrelations in the social, with concrete applications of its powerful metaphors and principles for understanding the reasons and motivations for educational phenomena embedded and inextricably linked to the social environment. In this sense, assemblage thinking invites the CIE researcher to a serious and profound investigation of and reflection on educational ensembles, puzzles, problems, or possibilities emanating from the interconnectedness of imagined human actions, organizational structures, power relations, policy imperatives, material implements, and their vivid expression in the social realm. As

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Deleuze suggests, assemblage forces one to go beyond merely considering how things work and engage with “the circumstances in which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on?” (Deleuze, 1995, as cited in Buchanan, 2021, p. 13), and that “assemblage is intended to answer several types of question, ‘how?’, ‘why?’, ‘when?’ and not just a ‘what?’ question” (Deleuze, 2004a, as cited in Buchanan, 2021, p. 13). In the context of CIE, that is to say, in parsing comparison through an assemblage prism, it is not sufficient to merely define the terms of the problem and the units of comparison to establish the methodological rigor for which the field has been both praised (Altbach, 1983; Cossa, 2016) and also often deemed as needing melioration (Bray, 2016; Torres, 2016; Wiseman & Anderson, 2013). As much as those elements are prerequisites for the act of comparison, interrogating “the how” and “the why,” to borrow from the Deleuzian reasoning mentioned earlier, is paramount in elucidating the complexity of intersecting, coextensive, and coproduced educational imaginaries reflected through the tangible manifestations of human experience in the mosaic of often competing yet, at the same time, co-functional and interdependent educational spaces. The desires and driving forces behind the material and technocratic politics, policies, governing structures, and power relations that aim to steer global education through discrete and readily quantifiable decisions can be better understood and compared through an assemblage paradigm if they are placed in the nexus of codependencies generated by the interaction between human and non-human actors in the complex educational assemblage (Salajan & jules, 2020, 2021). An assemblage perspective of and in CIE resonates with and amplifies in a multitude of ways Crossley and Watson’s (2003) poignant appeal for an “increased sensitivity to context, culture and difference” (p. 65). In order to benefit and serve the interests of the human constituencies subjected to the comparative study of education, an application of assemblage thinking in CIE research necessitates the careful consideration of the assemblage principles enunciated by its originators to inform methodological approaches that would yield empirical results translating into actionable, transformational and meaningful solutions for the vexing realities and conundrums of education.

Linkages of the Disparate: Re/dis/assembling CIE Being in a state of continuous becoming, marked by porous boundaries of knowledge production, or lines of segmentarity and flight, and seeking to engender synergistic connections on multiple “plateaus,” CIE is epistemologically, ontologically, axiologically and praxiologically enriched by the nuancing and relational character of assemblage when translated into an explanatory and analytical device in comparative studies. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) defined “a ‘plateau’ [as] any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (p. 2). In this vein, the multiple connections formed organically among the innumerable disciplinary, post-disciplinary (multifaceted wicked problems), trans-disciplinary (creating something new), and inter-disciplinary

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(insights from other disciplines) dimensions extend the CIE assemblage inordinately. More specifically, ontologically, the complex assemblage paradigm places CIE on constantly evolving planes of scholarly inquiry, as questions about its becoming and reshaping persistently challenge dogmatic assumptions related to its existence as a field. Epistemologically, the arrangements and rearrangements of assemblages along blurred doctrinal boundaries or lines of segmentarity create the conditions for intensified connectivity among individual or group actors to co-share and coconstruct multidimensional scholarly collectives. Through the same process of (re)arrangement, axiologically, the complex assemblage allows for juxtapositions of value orientations in CIE research, as scholars participate and engage in intersecting assemblages of knowledge production. In turn, praxiologically, through its malleability, flexibility, and state of constant flux, the CIE complex assemblage opens spaces for practitioners in its various assemblages to interface with, permeate and bridge micro- and macro-verses of scholarship for the emergence of symbiotic relationships between research and praxis in CIE. Let us distinguish between CIE as an evolving assemblage (see Salajan & jules, 2020, for an extensive discussion) and the application of assemblage thinking to CIE to shape it. While we briefly explore the former here, it is the latter that is of significant concern to us in the present discussion. When assemblage thinking is applied to CIE, we can think of CIE as an assemblage as a portable disperser of interrelated phenomena where the need for change is central to its ability to analyze the dynamism of its structures. In this way, CIE would be forced to challenge the field’s binaries (such as local/global or inside/outside) by bringing together the serial properties of complexity that push and pull it through multiple dimensions. As Beighton (2013) reminds us, assemblages function both horizontally (via material content and multiplicities) and vertically (movements of instability or de-territorialization) and, therefore, “rather than explaining change away in terms of succession or negation, assemblages present the co-adaptation of interdependent phenomena” (p. 1297). We then have a field in constant flux and whose ontological status is non-hierarchical as it is always-becoming-something-else. As the field evolves, it will become imperative that it remains susceptible to transformation or de-territorialization. Thus, CIE is able to (re)assemble around new governance constellations that are constituted by new theories, and that create various new linkages and spaces. As an assemblage, CIE exercises agency not because of its internal composition of numerous elements (policies, persons, structures, institutions, and so forth) but because of how its composition interacts with its environment. CIE is a highly territorialized formalized assemblage with a high degree of coding that gives it the coherence that allows it to function through its rituals and other mixed or non-verbal forms of communication shared among its members. In this way, CIE’s ability to territorialize and de-territorialize as new ways of thinking challenges its structures is based upon “the assumption that there is no necessary or ‘natural’ form of an institution; rather, the boundaries of entities are constituted and then extended or ‘stretched’ through historical and social processes” (Bacevic, 2018, p. 4). Therefore, the aspects of the emergent totalities, which are culturally and socially constituted, need to

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be understood in specific political and historical contexts of the development of CIE as a field. In other words, we might ask how the field will change once new elements (racism, sexism, etc.,) are considered. In this way, we may want to consider Bureš’s (2015) interpretation of an assemblage as a ­ umber of disparate and heterogeneous elements convoked together into a single n discernible formation that displays some form of consistency and regularity while it remains open to transformative change through the addition or subtraction of elements or reorganization of the relations between them. (p. 14)

As such, assemblage theory in CIE offers numerous instances of “path-dependent recontextualisation of global trends as different assemblage-‘landscapes’” (Hartong, 2018, p.  139) may shed light on multi/inter/trans-disciplinary transformations. Similarly, assemblage theory and concepts of governmentality share close links and can provide insight into the emergence of new temporalities and spatialities. In this way, we can think of de-territorialization, a movement that produces change, indicating its creative potential to connect differently and grow disorganized. As the field responds to new ways of thinking and confronts its white supremacist structures, it will need to free up its fixed connections through de-territorialization while exposing itself to new spatial relations (reterritorialization). We should not view the de-territorialization of the field as unfavorable, and in fact, we should advocate for this to happen, as such a process will only strengthen the field. Here, we want to think of the field as an assemblage that is becoming rather than “being.” We should think of CIE as a complex educational assemblage composed of a heterogeneous collection of material and non-material elements that have come into composition in different ways at different times to produce it (Salajan & jules, 2020). Viewing CIE as an assemblage means considering its various network of component pieces and how they work collectively to shape and form a contingent and emergent process. In rhizomatics, where assemblage is used to describe the gathering of elements encompassing it and the procedures stemming from the different ways those processes come together and relate, so the various components of CIE are working to shape its practices. Thus, CIE as part of an assemblage is no longer an autonomous being interested in studying foreign educational systems. Instead, CIE is considered one element working within a collection of several elements that act together to construct its practices jointly. As the assemblage grows more extensive and more complex through the interactions of its component parts, it will ultimately acquire new layers. Within these new layers, we must seek to reformulate CIE to become more responsive to dealing with its historical past while looking at its future trajectory. In an era of rising governance complexity, assemblage thinking enhances our understanding of CIE by providing a framework through which we can reconceptualize the field. As social transformations occur, new assemblages will evolve from the relationships that constitute new and old social situations. In

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this way, as CIE evolves through social interaction, change will occur through territorialization and de-territorialization. In other words, as Van Wezemael (2008) reminds us, assemblage-based ontology is open to any connections or expansions as long as any additions are defined in a non-essentialist way and as long as any novel entity introduced maintains relations of exteriority … with those entities already included. (p. 168)

Therefore, this implies different materialist understandings of the world that do not lend themselves to an analytical approach as every relation has a localized motive. This indicates that a “part detached from such a whole ceases to be what it is, since being this particular part is one of its constitutive properties” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 9). As Lester (2012) notes, “it is only through spatial specificities that the precise relations constituting the assemblage at any one moment are manifested” (p.  1471). Since an assemblage is any number of heterogeneous components—“things” or parts of “things”—collected into a single context, its external meanings can change without the structure changing; we, therefore, must look into the inner meanings of the components involved. In this way, an assemblage’s beauty lies in its ability to bring together several disparate elements while its relations of exteriority join the component parts. In other words, autonomy from the whole of which it is composed is retained since individual elements exhibit a variety of capabilities. Therefore, it is these capacities to affect and be affected by other components that drive possible interactions in the assemblage.

(Not a) Conclusion: Assemblage as an Analytical Tool for CIE As stated above, we are suggesting that CIE is entering its cultural turn, and as such, it will have to address today’s global challenges (racism, climate change, war, etc.,). Authors in this volume have outlined a theoretical vocabulary and framework around the concept of assemblage to broaden its ontological underpinnings. Above, we have described CIE as an assemblage, and we also argued that within the cultural turn, assemblage theory can provide insights into helping CIE address various educational phenomena. We have done this by drawing upon the theory sketched out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and elaborated by Manuel DeLanda. DeLanda (2011) defines assemblages as agents or actants who embody materiality. DeLanda (2011) further suggests that assemblages are defined by their “space of possibilities,” which encompasses the tendencies and capacities of an assemblage. As such, first, we approach the space of possibilities of the field of CIE from a post-foundational perspective, which allows us to interrogate the metaphoric absence of ground in Heideggerian terms, which are enmeshed in the four concepts (absence, withdrawal, retreat, and staying-away) of grounding/degrounding. As Carney (2016) notes, “a post foundational orientation acknowledges a positioning between ‘an impossible

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certainty and an interminable deconstruction,’ and therefore approaches intellectual work with both ‘reverence and mistrust’” (p.  515). As such, our beginnings are to find fault with the foundational principles which frame society as being “grounded on principles that are (1) undeniable and immune to revision and (2) located outside society and politics” (Herzog, 1985, p.  20). For example, post-foundational approaches do not assume the absence of metaphoric ground but instead accept that some ground is necessary. In other words, Marchart (2007) asks us to remember that a post-foundational approach does not turn into anti-foundationalist nihilism, existentialism or pluralism, all of which would assume the absence of any ground and would result in complete meaninglessness, absolute freedom or total autonomy. Nor does it turn into a sort of post-modern pluralism for which all meta-narratives have equally melted into air. (p. 14)

This implies that analysis shifts from the actually existing foundations to their ontological status. We can therefore think that the most important aspect for an investigation of post-foundationalism lies in the fact that the retreat of ground does not imply the latter’s final disappearance, since we are not engaged in a purely “logical” argumental step of simple negation of ground. (Marchart, 2007, p. 20)

Therefore, the metaphoric ground Marchart (2007) speaks of does not disappear but is put under erasure. At its very heart is the encounter with an abyss/a-byss (the absence of ground) intertwined with the ground. In short, at the bottom of ground, there is ground without ground. Thus, post-foundationalists do not seek to eradicate the dimension of the ground in CIE entirely, but problematize its status as fundamentum inconcussum. As a post-foundational paradigm, then, assemblage thinking interrogates and challenges longstanding epistemological assumptions of and about the field to dispel the presumed unassailability of its apparently unshakable foundations. As a post-foundational approach, assemblage principles are rightly placed to investigate humanity’s complex challenges. Assemblage theory should be seen as “an ontological weakening of the status of foundation without doing away with foundations entirely” (Marchart, 2007, p. 14), which can galvanize action within the field through desire and affect. Some of the new research areas in CIE are now crossdisciplinary, so we need to abandon disciplinary boundaries to tackle complex issues. We do so by dislocating and disrupting monuments in which foundations crumble. As a post-foundational theory, when used in CIE, assemblage theory can move away from the duality (pitting foundationalism or “metaphysics” against anti-foundationalism) that defines the foundationalist debates in the field. For instance, if we take Spivak’s (1993) work on deconstruction, we see that it is neither non-foundationalist nor antifoundationalist, but instead, it is “a repeated staging of attention on the construction

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of foundations presupposed as self-evident,” which offers “a perpetually rehearsed critique of the European ethico-political universal” (p.  153). In other words, the current paradigm shift within foundationalism toward “postfoundationalism is a new ‘paradigm’ which can be described as ‘disruption’ of foundationalism from within through the realization of contingency” (Marchart, 2007, p. 16). In this way, assemblage theory challenges the field to go beyond its foundation of Western ideas of progress and modernity and tackle historical and contemporary subjects that have historically been outside the scope of the field’s study of foreign systems. We can think of “assemblage [as] a sort of antistructural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life” (Marcus & Saka, 2006, p. 101). Moreover, as the field expands its horizons, assemblage theory offers it an avenue to develop the shortcoming of Western cannons and thinking. Furthermore, it allows us to challenge our assumptions about “truth.”

Toward an Ontoepistemology While there are several directions into which assemblage thinking can take CIE (speculative realism, transcendental materialism, object-oriented ontology, actornetwork theory, new materialism, anthropocentrism, post-humanism, etc.), below, we will spell out how a new materialist ontology might be employed in CIE as it seeks “to problematize the anthropocentric and constructivist orientations” (Gamble, Hanan & Nail, 2019, p.  111). The materialist turn (not to be confused with the cultural turn described above), which highlights the agentive dynamics of matter, begins with the acknowledgment of “a perceived neglect or diminishment of matter in the dominant Euro-Western tradition as a passive substance intrinsically devoid of meaning” (Gamble, Hanan & Nail, 2019, p.  111, emphasis in original). As such, we need to deal with the challenges brought about by the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, which blends the physical with the cyber-physical, and which is coming to be defined by the subtlety of neo-liberal economic and political programs and the spurt of environmental catastrophe; the focus on the economic outcomes of education; the rise and growing range of new actors in education such as celebrities, corporations, corporate philanthropies, and billionaire philanthropists; datafication, informationalization, and data servitization; and the challenges of learning loss and unfinished learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Everywhere we look in education, the social world is intermixing with the material world in complex and varied ways. Moreover, the rise of the so-called “educational intelligent economy” (Salajan & jules, 2019), which is premised upon the application of knowledge, implies that the field of CIE will need to pay attention to ethical concerns, knowledge production, and causal explanations. In other words, the field will have to ask critical questions about rational actants and the position of affect in policy and decision-making. The new materialist turn begins with an inquiry into the ontological underpinnings of agential capacities that seek to understand globally distributed and locally varied calls for educational reforms and alternatives to globalized neoliberal capitalism. Critical issues with

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“epistemological-cum-methodological implications” (Coole, 2013) in this regard are: (1) human exceptionalism in the age of the Anthropocene and the irreversible environmental catastrophe that humans have caused, leading to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and Earth; (2) the evolution of “third spaces” to deal with issues of social responsibility and the changing relationships between context, actors, visions, and action; (3) the informationalization of industrial production toward information communication technologies; (4) the agentive ontologies found in indigenous literature; and (5) other post-humanist and Capitalocene1 ideological and discursive forces. These developments or “events” (Connolly, 2013) considerably challenge CIE, while modernist demands for power, participation, and education remain well affixed in a globalized world’s post-human and digital-networked realities. In order to understand the diverse and widespread impact of these and other phenomena, post-disciplinary interactions among a range of disciplines must be entwined together in a coherent theoretical fabric, and the urge to withdraw to secure theoretical silos is resisted. As such, an assemblage perspective can represent CIE concerns given the demands education and self-organizing markets make on both human life and non-human force fields and the boomerang consequences that evolve as these pressures and morphings intensify simultaneously. The field will have to deal with epistemic and real uncertainty, which are labyrinthine, multidimensional, and multi-scalar, and part of past conditions which seek to engender new results. Such a focus will require an approach that rejects longstanding classifications, such as those associated with hierarchical antecedents. It will therefore require the recognition of a “flat ontology” (Latour, 1993) of human and non-human actors and actants, which does not “privilege some kinds of entity or agency over others and one in which new assemblages and unstable hybrids are recognised to be constantly emerging and dissipating across a normatively and ontologically horizontal plane” (Coole, 2013, p. 454). It must be remembered that different levels and entities operate at different speeds and are manifested at variable intensity. Therefore, we must be willing to unmask existing ontological perspectives and frameworks to account for the diversity of non-human actants (be that things or other species). This means that in CIE, we must first begin to view the world as more than human and that the social world is rooted in and traversed by the non-human. Such vantage points allow us to reject totalities and replace them with assemblages. In this way, recognition is given to the fact that “ideas organize and drive social structure” given that society can be seen as a “collection of assemblages, manifesting itself in spatially particular interactions and through specific forms of coding that holds these assemblages together with a ‘stable identity’” (Kvachev, 2020, p. 17). In CIE, such thinking would allow us to move away from a focus on the “essence of objects” or “things-in-themselves” and “hierarchical taxonomy of objects and subjects based on their relation” and move toward “structure with some kind of interrelated network or assemblage” (Kvachev, 2020, p. 17). In other words, we are asked to view social reality as transparent and ideas and ideology as irrelevant as we move beyond methodological nationalism. This also implies that CIE would need to decenter the orthodoxy and nomenclature of the human subjects as it moves from anthropocentrism to anti-anthropocentrism. By doing so, CIE would place attention on “object-oriented democracy” (Latour, 2004) by recognizing the

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role non-human actors and objects play in producing reality. As the field of CIE advances, we can circumvent broad theories and totalities to understand reality, as these prevent us from seeing how humans and non-humans equally produce reality through their agentic capabilities. This means that we should focus less on establishing vertical relations and pay attention to the flat connections that transpire. Let us put it clearly: we cannot lack a sense of self-reflexivity since an anti-hierarchical approach in the field rejects vertical relationships and structures. Assemblage thinking, therefore, offers a means to “open up” CIE by grouping its diverse components, topologies, and paradigms and analyzing the relations between them to accommodate complex forms of causal productivity (DeLanda, 2006). Assemblage thinking is adept at being applied to CIE as a field as it has arisen “out of the turn towards relational thinking and the limitations of networks as a means of interrogating socio-spatial entities” (Donovan, 2017, p. 49). Therefore, the use of assemblage theory in CIE allows scholars to examine the roles of elements (ranging from material to expressive) and the processes involved, which either strengthen the character of the assemblage (territorialization) or destabilize it (deterritorialization). Such thinking begins by assuming that CIE is an assemblage that has relationality to other assemblages (schools, institutions, markets, cities, cultures, states, etc.,) through relations of exteriority. Assemblage theory opens up forensic spaces for educators to reconceptualize education reforms as components that act together with each another and with other assemblages. It also provides a space where the complex landscape of education reform can be examined by taking a relational approach. It allows us to move away from the lens of modernists concerns and rejects the humanist orientation of Western thoughts (which eschews a singular understanding of transformations embedded in “arborescent linearity,” “binary oppositions,” and “Cartesian dualism” [Gale, 2007]), and moves toward a heuristic for exploring several of the challenges that education reforms are facing. Such a focus, for example, can “subvert” the “colonized spaces of education” (Carney, 2016, p.  507) as we reimagine the field. Assemblage insights are reworked to highlight contested spaces, emerging social relations, and temporal dimensions of educational multiverses or pluriverses. Such work, therefore, captures the “temporality of processes, and dynamic character of the interrelationships between heterogeneous phenomena” (as cited in Ball, 2012, p. 143). The empirical work outlined across this volume’s chapters “seeks difference and complexity” by building upon a “recursive methodology” (Webb, 2014, p.  364 emphasis in original) through the “de-familiariz[ation of] present practices and categories, to make them seem less self-evident and necessary, and to open up spaces for the invention of new forms of experience” (Ball, 1995, p. 266). In (dis/re)locating various assumptions about educational research, this implies a critique of rationalistic methodologies that seek to solve problems. We are therefore able to account for change, resistance, and agency as assemblage tenets emphasize adaptivity rather than fixity or essence, the formal properties of the system rather than the specific instance or individuation, the spatio-temporal dimension rather than quantities, co-articulation and compossibility rather

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than linear and discrete determination, multilinear time and the temporality of processes such that emergence and irreversibility are brought to the fore, for instance in embryonic development. (Venn, 2006, p. 107)

­This implies a movement away from the “‘morass of methodologies’; whereas researchers are only limited to conducting research to problems that can be developed” (Webb, 2014, p. 366). It means that researchers need to de-familiarize themselves as they move away from “discursive illusions” (Deleuze, 2004b) and begin to account for various identity politics and political stances (researchers’ “biases”) through which researchers situate themselves. As we attempt to rethink certain aesthetic and ethical aspects of our research due to complicated and inconsistent relations, assemblage thinking, therefore, offers us the opportunity to “frame narratives that work against the terrain of controllable knowledge” (Lather, 2000, p. 221). As new forms of spatial politics begin to emerge, assemblage, therefore, signals the emergence of a transmodern episteme. We have outlined above both CIE as an assemblage and CIE as using assemblage thinking to respond to the world’s wicked problems. What matters is how researchers from different disciplinary and methodological traditions take up our call above to reinvent the field. Assemblage thinking is a conceptual apparatus that can be used to address and analyze heterogeneous modernist problems within the ephemeral. In CIE, assemblage thinking can highlight ongoing processes through which different human and non-human actants act; reconsider social arrangements as multifaceted ensembles composed of a diversity of components that are not seamless organic wholes; and concentrate on the expressive influences of entities. In this way, we can engage assemblage thinking in the field as a concept, ethos, or world that centers on how spatial forms and processes are assembled, kept together, and operate to open up or close down possibilities. In this chapter, we have called for an emphasis on the material aspects of assemblages. With the advent of global educational policies and the rise of “Global Education Inc.” (Ball, 2012), as well as new actors or policy brokers in education, an assemblage vantage point helps us to pay attention to international financing agendas, global directives, and geopolitical dimensions of educational reforms. In invoking a cultural turn in CIE, we call for a movement away from representation (the Western ontology and the dualisms of Enlightenment account that separate humans from the world) and a move toward a materialist ontoepistemology (the interrelatedness of ontology and epistemology) vested in assemblage thinking. The flat ontology that we proposed for CIE above does not privilege one aspect of the world above the other. We have sought to shift the discussion of CIE into new directions by drawing on the language of assemblage theory to develop a new indigenous ontoepistemology of CIE. Please do not get us wrong; we are not suggesting that assemblage thinking is necessarily the only way forward. We are saying that an assemblage lens offers CIE different ways of thinking about and studying foreign educational systems. In other words, we are advancing that the conceptual scaffolding and theoretical insights offered by assemblage thinking may

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augment our understanding of foreign educational systems. The movement away from boundaries and hierarchies toward relational ontologies that view things as they are (constantly changing) due to their interrelations and entanglements with other assemblages (also perpetually shifting). We offer assemblage as a way of rethinking the field of CIE by focusing on the “intertwining relationships that are always in the processes of change and transformation” rather than on “bounded entities” (Tsoraki et al., 2020, p. 495). As we approach some of the “big questions” in the field, our call then is for the field to focus on what things are doing and can do at any given time. As Knuston (2020) suggests, “Assemblage Theory is particularly adept at articulating emergence and handling multiscalar phenomena in ways that do not compromise the specificity of local relations when attending to macro-scale phenomena” (p.  796). Assemblage with its multiplicity and favoring of events while rejecting unity and essence or form (defining features) present theoretical benefits for questioning and translating how we might open spaces for numerous ways of making meaning of the world multiple ways of being. Following Silova (2019), we aim to “disrupt the before/after chronological and spatial frameworks of modernity and neoliberal globalisation associated with it, thus opening a space for (re)imagining education … beyond the Western horizon” (p. 447). We are reminded that “although the field has become more fractured, developing multiple and diverse strands, each replete with critiques and divisions, attempts to clearly define boundaries remain restrictive” (Silova & Auld, 2020, p. 23) and, therefore, we are suggesting a new cartography of comparative education aimed at re/dis/assembling the field. Such a new cartography presents a different reading of knowledge formation by bringing into focus multiple cosmologies and pluriversal thinking. Therefore, our starting point is to use epistemological and ontological differences to conceptualize the objects of knowledge and move beyond Euro-American modernist frameworks of interpretation. We do not conceive of assemblage theory as a panacea to the cultural crisis of modernity and (hu)man exceptionalism, but offer it as one of several alternatives (others being post-humanist, decoloniality, etc.) to confront the shifting tectonic plates of the comparative enterprise. Assemblage theory presents CIE with a new vocabulary to explicate its fraught history and look to a reflexive future. As we disrupt hierarchies of being, we do this by changing our analytical approaches in education and considering the role of relational ontologies or “sympoiesis” (Haraway, 2016; Silova, 2021) in our research. As such, the works assembled (the choice of term is only partially coincidental here) in this volume provide guiding conceptualizations, methodological directions, and applicative leads for how assemblage thinking may infuse CIE scholarship. We see these chapters beginning a more extended dialogue about the politics of our field, and we encourage readers to engage with the various approaches, tools, and histories presented here. They evoke the eclectic, contingent, fragile and elastic nature of assemblage while reaffirming its resilience and adaptability in making sense of the apparent incoherence, incongruities, inequities, inequalities, and instability of global educational dynamics. They open new vistas in reimagining the comparative approach and, by extension, (re)assembling the shifting cartographies of CIE scholarship along its interconnected and constantly evolving plateaus.

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Note 1 Capitalism’s planetary crises is defined by a “system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life” (Moore, 2017, p. 594).

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Contributors Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar is a DPhil in Education candidate, Clarendon scholar, and Doctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include education and inter/national development, post-colonialism, rural education, informal education, and the politics of knowledge production. He previously co-authored a chapter on post-colonialism in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education (2021). Pravindharan Balakrishnan is a public school teacher in Malaysia. His research interests focus on education for sustainable development, international large-scale assessments, and public-private partnerships in education. He recently published a book chapter on education for sustainable development in Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action (2021). Anna Becker is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant in the Department of Education Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is responsible for supervising student internships and teaches seminars on multilingual education and engaged practicum issues. Her lines of research focus on multilingualism in schools, migration, and language and power, with a dissertation titled English in Multilingual Switzerland–Mediator or Troublemaker? An analysis of lived experiences of language, perspectives on multilingualism, and language education policy in Swiss upper secondary schools (2022). I­ rving Epstein is Rhodes Professor of Peace and Social Justice Emeritus at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. His publications include Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse (2019), The Whole World Is Texting (2015), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide (2007), Recapturing the Personal (2007), and Chinese Education: Problems, Policies, and Prospects (1991). An active member of the Comparative and International Education Society for over forty years, he is especially proud of his service as a board member of the Scholars at Risk Network, an international organization of over five hundred institutions, dedicated to protecting scholars while promoting academic freedom advocacy. Conor Galvin is Director of Doctoral Programmes at UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, School of Education, Dublin, Ireland, where he also lectures and researches. His academic interests include sustainable development, policy and policy networks, professional knowledge, and the impact of technology on learning and society. He has published on EU policy and policy networks and in the social history of the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement on the island of Ireland. Dr. Galvin is a consultant to the

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Contributors

European Commission and is an adviser on the new Jean Monnet Action on Teacher Education & Training. Radhika Gorur is Associate Professor of Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her research interests include education policy and governance, the social lives of data, global education reforms, and science and technology studies. She was lead editor of the World Yearbook of Education 2019. Crystal Green is Postdoctoral Scholar in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education Division of the Department of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her research takes an international comparative perspective on professional agency and identity in teacher education. Her appointment is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. tavis d. jules is Professor of Cultural and Educational Policy Studies and Higher Education at Loyola University Chicago, USA, specifically focusing on Comparative and International Education and International Higher Education. His vast professional and academic experiences have led to research and publications across the Caribbean and North Africa. He is President of the Caribbean Studies Association, Book Review Editor for the Caribbean Journal of International Relations, and an International Institute of Islamic Thought Fellow. His most recent books include The Educational Intelligent Economy: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things in Education (with Florin D. Salajan, 2019); Educational Transitions in PostRevolutionary Spaces: Islam, Security and Social Movements in Tunisia (with Teresa Barton, 2018); Re-Reading Education Policy and Practice in Small States: Issues of Size and Scale in the Emerging Intelligent Society and Economy (with Patrick Ressler, 2017); and The New Global Educational Policy Environment in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Gated, Regulated and Governed (2016). Paolo Landri is Senior Researcher in the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at the National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS). His main research interests concern educational organizations, professional learning, and educational policies. He has recently published Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory (2021). ­ athryn Magno is Professor in the Department of Education Sciences at the C University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where she teaches comparative and international education policy and theory. Her research, projects, and publications emphasize equity in education across education sectors and geographical regions, with attention to gender, migration, and leadership. Her recent works include (Re)Mapping Migration in Education (2022), the open-source Comparative Educational Leadership Lab (www. compedleadershiplab.com, 2020), and articles such as Learning through leadership: Capturing practice architectures (2022). David Martyn is an Irish Research Council Employment Based Ph.D. Scholar at the School of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland, and an Education Researcher

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with Plan International Ireland. His research interests focus on global education policy, international development, critical policy analysis, Monitoring & Evaluation, and Critical Realism and Assemblage Theory. His Ph.D. research undertakes a Critical Realist Assemblage analysis of the application of global education policy concepts in international NGO development programming. The research conducted in this publication was funded by the Irish Research Council under grant number EBPPG/2018/73. Florin D. Salajan is Professor in the School of Education at North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, comparative education, and instructional methods. His areas of research interests include comparative and international education, European higher education policies, European educational policy analysis, teacher education in comparative perspective, comparative e-learning, and information and communication technology in teaching and learning. His research articles have appeared in journals such as the Comparative Education Review, Compare, European Journal of Education, European Educational Research Journal, European Journal of Higher Education, and Educational Policy. He recently co-edited and contributed chapters for the volume titled The Educational Intelligent Economy: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things in Education, as part of the International Perspectives on Education and Society volume series (with tavis d. jules, 2019). Elin Sundström Sjödin is Associate Senior Lecturer in Swedish at the School of Education, Culture and Communication at Mälardalen University, Sweden. She is specialized in literary didactics, critical literacy, and science and technology studies. At present she conducts research on valuations of reading, reading robots, and reading as radical aesthetics. Andrew Swindell is a doctoral candidate in Social Sciences and Comparative Education at the School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA, USA. His research interests include how to promote universal access to quality and inclusive education for people in emergency settings and Global Citizenship Education (GCE). He has published on education in emergencies and the intersection of human rights, globalization, and education. His most recent article is a Freirean analysis of online education and digital literacy (2021). Ninni Wahlström is Professor of Education at the Department of Education and Teachers’ Practice at Linnæus University, Sweden. Her current research focuses on transnational and national policy discourses and their implications for national curriculum and classroom teaching from a perspective of curriculum theory and educational philosophy. The most recent publication is Wahlström (Ed.) Equity, Teaching Practice and the Curriculum (2022). Charl Wolhuter obtained a doctorate in Comparative Education at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He was Junior Lecturer at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and Senior Lecturer at the University of Zululand, South Africa. Currently he

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Contributors

is Comparative and International Education Professor at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University, South Africa. He has held Visiting Professorships at i.a. Brock University, Canada; the University of Queensland, Australia; and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilio, Italy. He is the author of various books and articles on History of Education and Comparative Education. Linli Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Science and Comparative Education at UCLA, USA. Linli conducts institutional effectiveness research in higher education aiming to support students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Subject Index Abdi, Ali A. 102 ACT exam 32 actor network theory (ANT) 6, 15, 27–8. See also Latour, B. assemblage 69–71 cause effect and interpretative approach 68–9 container context 66–8 gains and limitations 60 local interaction 67 nested scale 66 notion of “inscription” 67 ontological and epistemological commitments 62–4 principle of symmetry 63 role of non-humans 64–6 social imaginary 62–3 sociological accounts 64–6, 68 affect theory assemblage 34–7 Caribbean assemblage 17 Covid-19 pandemic 14–15, 23, 29 importance 28–9 policy making 7 resistance and rejection of schools 42 Agamben, G. 4 agencement 5–6, 132, 151, 204 Alldred, P. 148, 150–2 Andreotti, Vanessa De Olivera 95, 102 asignifying rupture principle 8, 132, 140 assemblage theory. See also Deleuze, G.; Guattari, F. academic interests 6 actor network theory 27–9 areas of alteration and extension 77–8 change and capture 84–5 CIE principles 3, 5–17 coherence and production 82–3, 89 concept 203 Covid-19 29, 34–7

critical realism 73–4 definition 5 desire and singular logic 78–9, 82–3 Euro-Asiatic space 16 material and expression 80, 83–4 regional arrangements, comparisons 13 rhizomatic nature 8 social movement functions 23 typology 79–80 assembled teaching case scenarios 189–95 didactical situations 183–4 didactics elements 185–8 distance teaching during the COVID-19 189–91 information and commercials 191–3 power relations and norms at work 193–5 relational and performative approach 185 wingchair experience 193–5 BAICE Presidential Address 50 Baker, T. 45, 51, 73, 82–3 Barnard, Henry 58 Baudrillard, J. 4, 31 Bereday, George 12, 96, 118–19 Bhambra, Gurminder K. 95, 102 Bhaskar, Roy 89 A Realist Theory of Science 75 Biesta, G. 50–1 Educational Research: An unorthodox introduction 46 Black Lives Matter 34, 36, 203 Blaise 65 Bologna Process 137 Bourdieu, P. 26 Braidotti, R. 24, 150–1, 185 Brexit 135 Butler, J. 4, 24

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capabilities theory 51 Caribbean assemblage abstract and unseen 147–9 Caribbean Community and Common Market 154, 156 Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) 153 Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) 153 Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA) 156 Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) 158 CARICOM 147, 149–50, 153, 156–8 COHSOD 152–3, 157 cooperation and expansion 155–6 Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) 152 creation of UWI 155–6 deterritorialization 145, 152 Future of Education in the Region 157 global reforms, incorporation of 152 Grand Anse Declaration 154, 158 historical development 154–5 integration scheme 157–8 materialist perspectives 150–2 OECD policy development 150 regionalism 145–60 reterritorialization 146–7, 150, 154 Rose Hall Declaration 158–9 shifting and morphing 154–9 socio-technical entities 152 Standing Committee of Ministers responsible for Education (SCME) 156 Structural Adjustment Programs 153 Treaty of Chaguaramas 152–4, 156, 158 case study assembled teaching 189–95 PISA-D initiative 85–8 Chen, K., Asia as Method 53 Common Travel Area 136 comparative and international education (CIE) barriers 57 black box methodologies 35, 190 CELL as future 179–80 complex educational assemblage 140–1 cultural turn 201–3

definition 41–5 field vs. method 52–3 new frontiers 3–5 ontoepistemology 210–14 post-foundational approach 209–10 post-pandemic era 203 re/dis/assembling 205–8 scholarly field 3, 41–2, 45, 51–2, 88 social environment 204 socio-political and cultural aspects 58 statistical forms 57–60 western modernity project 201 Comparative and International Education Society Presidential Address 41, 44–5, 50–1 Comparative Educational Leadership Lab (CELL) assemblages, description 169–72 catalytic potential 171–2 characteristics 173–4 functions 167 future trends 179–80 indigenous approaches and concepts 174–6 multiple perspectives 170 open-source architecture 169 post-foundational approach 209–10 primary objective 172–3 rhizomatic arrangement 177–9 traditional materials vs. 170 Covid-19 14–15, 23, 29, 34–7, 65, 189–91 assemblage and affect 29, 34–5 death 32–4 displacement 30–2 exile 29–30 Cowen, R. 12, 42, 61, 201 critical approach 93–4, 96, 101, 103–5, 191 critical realism. See also Bhaskar, Roy assemblage theory 73–4 epistemological approach 80–2 formation and causation 75–7 ontological alterations and extensions 74, 77–8 three main elements 75 critical thinking 51, 158, 170–1 DeLanda, M. 6, 9, 23–4, 76–82, 113, 150, 152, 154–6, 168–70, 172, 175–7, 208, 212

Subject Index Deleuze, G. arborescent thinking 177 assemblage theory 4–10, 14, 23–4, 28, 41, 83–4, 87, 90, 168 on coadapt 177 coherence and production 82–3 complex educational assemblage 131–3, 137 deterritorialization 138 forms of strata 85 ontological alterations and extensions 82 power functions 153–4 process of change 84 regionalism 145–6, 148, 150–1, 159–60 rhizome metaphor 8–9, 116, 151, 167–9 de Paris, Marc-Antoine Jullien 57 Derrida, J. 4 didactics framing questions 185–6 material-semiotics 185 performative conception 185 structural influences 187–8 teaching elements 185–8 traditional models 184 triangle model 186–7 digitalization 65 Durkheim, E. 52, 66 education comparative method 8, 14, 52–3 concept 47 dual meaning 52–3 formal mode 47, 53 German terms 46 indeterminacy 51–2 lexical definition 45–6 modes 47–8 scientific investigation 25 spiritual aims 51 UNESCO’s definition 50 education systems comparative perspective 44 geographic levels 49–50 international 45 national 43 patent or latent manifestation 48–9 social contexts 60–1

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societal contexts 50–1 transcendental anchor 50–1 Elder-Vass, D. 73–85, 88–90 empirical research 53, 61, 96, 123 ERASMUS+ Programme 137–9 European complex assemblage 133–7 European Court of Justice 136 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) 139 European education systems 58, 61–2 European Higher Education Area (EHEA) assemblage theory 131–2 coding and stratification 132 as complex educational assemblage 137–40 connectivity and heterogeneity 132 Council of Europe 134–5 European Cultural Convention 135 history 128–31 human actors 135–6 non-human actors 133 normative and behavioral patterns 132–3 pan-European cooperation 135 regional identities 133–4 fluidity 17, 23–4, 73, 76, 90, 104–5, 140, 188 Foucault, M. 4, 49 Fox, N. J. 148, 150–2 Freire, P. 25 Gebrial, D. 102 Global North 26, 35, 42, 99, 101, 104 Global South 30, 35, 42, 99, 104–5 Griscom, J., A Year in Europe 57–8 Grosz, E. 149–50 Guattari, F. 4 arborescent thinking 177 assemblage theory 4–10, 14, 23–4, 28, 41, 83–4, 87, 90, 168 on coadapt 177 coherence and production 82–3 complex educational assemblage 131–3, 137 deterritorialization 138 forms of strata 85 ontological alterations and extensions 82

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power functions 153–4 process of change 84 regionalism 145–6, 148, 150–1, 159–60 rhizome metaphor 8–9, 116, 151, 167–9 Hans, N. 57–8 Hecht, C. H. 25 heterogeneous modes 8–10, 13–14, 16, 41, 64, 74, 76, 82, 104–5, 127–8, 133, 145–7, 150, 155, 160, 168, 172, 176, 190, 204, 207–8, 212–13 Hickling-Hudson, A. 102 Horizon 2020 Programme 137–8 idiographic approach 93, 96, 98–9, 104–5 indigenous knowledge 24, 101, 103 interdisciplinary field 7, 89, 93–4, 96, 102, 104–5, 173, 205 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) 58 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 58 international perspectives educational systems 45–50 intergovernmental agencies 7 social science assumptions 25–6 International Standards Classification of Education (ISCED) 58–9 investigation 13, 25–6, 32, 51, 60, 64, 68, 70, 81, 83, 87–8, 103, 127, 147, 204, 209 Jullien, A. M. 25, 44, 57, 96, 101 Kandel 44, 50, 61, 94–5, 98, 101, 104, 118 Studies in Comparative Education 58 knowledge seeking 94, 99–105 Latour, B. 6, 10, 23–4, 27–8, 32, 62–4, 67–70, 184–5, 190, 211 Reassembling the Social 62 Malaysia actors 113–14, 117–19, 123–4 Barisan Nasional 114 black shoe issues 115 Centre for Research and International Education (CRICE) 113 CIE in Malaysia 113–24 fisherman-in-training 115

Malaysia Design Archive (MDA) 118 Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA) 117 Malik, Dr. Maszlee 114–15 meta-assemblage of CIE 114, 116–17, 119, 123–4 Ministry of Education (MOE) 115 new education policy 115 pluralistic nature 116 political transition of “New Malaysia” 114–16 scholarship 113–15, 122–3 Special Interest Groups (SIG) 118 STEM education 116 Mann, H., 1843 Seventh Report 58 Manzon, M. 4, 6, 42, 93, 102, 201 Mbembe, A. 4 Nişancıoğlu, K. 95, 102 nomothetic approach 93, 96–8, 103–5 Nordtveit, B. H. 41 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 138 Pashby, K. 102 pluriversalism 93, 104 policy making/development 7, 13–15, 26, 32, 36, 46, 48, 52 modernist approaches 7 positivism 4, 25–6, 75, 95–8, 104 postmodernity 51, 105 problem-solving skills 51, 174 Program for International Student Assessments (PISA) 44, 52, 59, 61–2, 66, 68, 73, 76, 85–8, 98, 100, 115, 119 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 65 questionnaires 53, 96, 171 re-assembly 41–2, 45, 48, 51, 53 remote learning 30–1, 102 Russia, video surveillance technology 64–5 Rutzou, T. 73, 75–85, 88–90 Sadler, M. 25 Guildford lecture 42, 44, 50

Subject Index Sadler, Michael 58 SAT exam 32 scholarly representation contemporary challenges 23, 25–6, 29, 35–6 new frontiers and directions 3–5, 7–8, 10–17 re-assembled theory 41–53 social capital 27, 174 social justice 29, 51, 97–8 social sciences 6 assemblage theory 24 CIE’s relationship 25–7 public policy 26 sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) 63 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 59–60 Takayama, Keita 25, 95, 100–2, 202 Thatcher, Margaret 62 theoretical approaches critical 93–4, 96, 101, 103–5, 191 idiographic 93, 96, 98–9, 104–5 nomothetic 93, 96–8, 103–5

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Thrift, N. 60, 150, 152 Tilly, C. 53 Tobias, Nathaniel Adam 102 Torres, C. A., Three Global Commons 51 Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) 52, 59, 122 Tsing, Anna, The Mushroom at the End of the World 117 tuition programs 45 UNESCO 45–7, 50, 58–9, 86, 102–3 definition of education 50 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) 59 Institute of Statistics (UIS) 59 United Nations 45 Creed of Human Rights 51 United States Covid-19 29, 32–4 progressive era 25 World Bank 58 Learning for all 51

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