Identities and Education: Comparative Perspectives in Times of Crisis 9781350141292, 9781350141322, 9781350141308

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Identities and Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Critical Human Rights, Citizenship, and Democracy Education, edited by Michalinos Zembylas and André Keet Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse, Irving Epstein The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education, edited by Tavis D. Jules, Robin Shields and Matthew A. M. Thomas

Identities and Education Comparative Perspectives in Times of Crisis Edited by Eleftherios Klerides and Stephen Carney

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 2021 Copyright © Eleftherios Klerides, Stephen Carney and Contributors, 2021 The Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design: Charlotte James Cover image © wildpixel / Istock 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carney, Stephen, editor. | Klerides, Eleftherios, editor. | Comparative Education Society in Europe. Conference (28th : 2018 : University of Cyprus) Title: Identities and education : comparative perspectives in times of crisis / edited by Eleftherios Klerides and Stephen Carney. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | “The current volume includes a selection of paper contributions presented at the XXVIII Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) held at the University of Cyprus in 2018”–Preface. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039017 (print) | LCCN 2020039018 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350141292 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350141308 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350141315 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Comparative education–Congresses. Classification: LCC LB43 .I34 2021 (print) | LCC LB43 (ebook) | DDC 370.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039017 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039018 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4129-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4130-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-4131-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt., Ltd, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

All chapters in this book have undergone rigorous peer review.

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Contents Preface  Notes on Contributors  1 Educated Identity, Crisis and Comparative Education  Eleftherios Klerides and Stephen Carney 

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2 Educated Identity: Concepts, Mobilities and Imperium Robert Cowen 

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3 The Positional Identities of East Asian Mobile Academics in UK Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Internationalization and Equality and Diversity  Terri Kim 

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4 The Professoriate in the Dispossessed University: Traditional and Emergent Identities  Nelly P. Stromquist 

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5 Global Citizenship in Motion: Comparing Cross-Border Practices in German Schools Abroad  Simona Szakács-Behling, Annekatrin Bock, Catharina I. Keßler, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Riem Spielhaus  95 6 The Politics of Fear and Hope: Europe at the Crossroads Ruth Wodak 

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7 Right-Wing Populism, Educational Media, and Schools in Times of Crisis  Christoph Kohl 

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8 The Slowing Global Order: Boredom and Affect in Criss-Crossing Comparative Education Research  Noah W. Sobe 

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9 Identity Formation through Consumer Products in Late Modern Hyperculture: A Pedagogic Analysis of Playmobil Figures Phillip D. Th. Knobloch 

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10 A Longer View: Conceptualizing Education, Identity and the Public Good in 1917 and 2016  Elaine Unterhalter 

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11 Victimization and Villainification as Affective Technologies in the Cyprus Conflict: The Case of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ Education Policy  Michalinos Zembylas 

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12 The Return of the Comparativist: Estrangement, Intercession and Profanation  António Nóvoa 

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Index 

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Preface The current volume includes a selection of paper contributions presented at the XXVIII Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) held at the University of Cyprus in 2018. The theme ‘Identities and Education: Comparative Perspectives in an Age of Crisis’ served as inspiration for the title of this book. The conference attracted more than four hundred participants from more than fifty countries from all parts of the world. The combination of ‘educated identities’ and a problematization of our current time as one of ‘crisis’  – two classic motifs in the field of comparative education  – proved to be highly attractive to scholars of comparative education as well as to many others in the related fields of policy studies, sociology of education, history of education, gender studies, international relations, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. From the final selection of 278 presented papers which were delivered in seventy-eight working sessions, the CESE Executive Committee and the editors of this volume selected the six papers and five keynote lectures that we present here. The enormous success of the Nicosia CESE Conference would not have been possible without the committed and continuous support of a whole range of colleagues and institutions, to whom we would like to express our sincere gratitude. First of all, we would like to thank our colleagues on the CESE Executive Committee, Hans-Georg Kotthoff, Paul Morris, Michele Schweisfurth, Eleni Prokou and Carlo Cappa. They were instrumental in the planning and organization of the working groups (WGs) around which the conference was structured and which provide the heart of all CESE conferences. The overwhelming response to our call for papers meant that it was not possible for the CESE Executive Committee to conduct all working sessions of the conference. A special word of thanks must therefore go to those colleagues who helped coordinate the WGs and (co-)chaired not only WG sessions but also numerous thematically focused panels and cross-thematic sessions:  Nelli Piattoeva, Elaine Unterhalter, Miri Yemini, Stavroula Philippou, Irene Psifidou, Yiannis Roussakis, Aristotelis Zmas, Robert Cowen, Marta Moskal, Constandina Charalambous, Maria Eliophotou, Marianna Papastephanou, Miranda Christou and Eleni Theodorou. In addition, we would like to thank the conference hosts,

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the Department of Education of the University of Cyprus. In this context, we would also like to extend our gratitude to the students of the university’s MA and PhD Programme in Curriculum Studies and Comparative Education, in particular Chara Tritaiou and Christiana Kyprianidou, who made this conference their own, contributing significantly to its success. Considerable financial support was granted by the Cyprus Tourist Organization, University of Cyprus, Greek Comparative and International Education Society, Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and Cyprus Pedagogical Association. We express our gratitude for the confidence these bodies displayed as they recognized the potential of the society and the conference to inspire thought and discussion about our common educational future. Finally, we would like to thank all those colleagues who contributed to the conference in Nicosia and whose contributions made this volume possible. Chapter  1 serves as the introduction to the volume, identifying some of the main themes explored in the chapters that follow. At the same time, it also offers a historical genealogy of the motif of educated identity in comparative education as well as a number of lines of thought for understanding how this focus has developed over the last two decades. However, neither this chapter nor the volume as a whole lays claim to providing a ‘complete’ account of the motif of identity. Nor should readers expect to find complete agreement among the contributors. Rather, the collection aims to open up a wide range of significant questions and possible lines of analysis in the hope that these will inspire further dialogues and enquiry in the years to come. Nicosia and Copenhagen, March 2020

Notes on Contributors Annekatrin Bock is a media and communication researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Studies in the ‘Media | Transformation’ Department. Her current research projects and publications focus on the digital transformation and datafication of school, on cloud computing, media practices of children and adolescents and on open educational resources. Her most recent book is the Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies that she co-edited. Stephen Carney is Professor in Comparative Education at Roskilde University in Denmark where he leads its Global Humanities programme. His research focuses on global educational reform and comparative method. He has studied university governance in Denmark, teacher preparation in England and China and school development in Nepal and India. He has been president of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) since 2016. Robert Cowen is Emeritus Professor of Education in the University College London, Institute of Education. He is a member of the editorial board of Comparative Education and honorary member of the Comparative Education Society in Europe. His main current interest is the theoretical assumptions of comparative education, and its future; although, somewhat paradoxically, his most recent writing has been on the history of comparative education. See R. Cowen (2018), ‘Embodied Comparative Education’, Comparative Education, 54(1): 10–25, and two essays are forthcoming, on Joseph Lauwerys and Nicholas Hans, in a book edited by David Phillips on British Comparative Educationists. Catharina I. Kessler is a postdoc at the Institute for Educational Science, GeorgAugust-University, in Göttingen, Germany. In her research, she specializes on schools as well as educational biographies of teenagers and young adults. She has written on how transnationalization transforms school as well as how actors appropriate these dynamics. Recent publications include Doing School (2017) and ‘Being international’ (2018) (with Heinz-Hermann Krüger). Terri Kim is Professor of Comparative Higher Education (honorary full professor at UEL), Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Education and Principal

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Fellow of Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) in the UK. Previously, she was a visiting scholar in International Relations at LSE, visiting scholar at the Collège de France in Paris and distinguished visiting scholar at Monash University in Melbourne. She is a co-convenor of the SRHE Policy Network and a member of the editorial board of Comparative Education, Intercultural Education, British Journal of Educational Studies and Policy Reviews in Higher Education. She has published one book, four edited volumes (special issues) and over fifty articles internationally in the field of comparative education. Eleftherios Klerides is the secretary-treasurer of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). He is Assistant Professor of Comparative Education and History of Education at the University of Cyprus, Adjunct Faculty Professor at the Open University of Cyprus and Honorary Research Fellow of North-West University, South Africa. One of his current concerns is how to revitalize the study of educated identities in comparative education with the help of international political theory. See E. Klerides (2018), ‘History Education, Identity Formation and International Relations’, in J. McLeod, N. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018. Uneven Space-Times of Education:  Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices; and, E. Klerides and M. Zembylas (2017), ‘Identity as Immunology:  History Teaching in Two Ethnonational Borders of Europe’, Compare, 47(3): 416–33. Phillip D.  Th. Knobloch works at the Institute for General Educational and Vocational Education at the Technical University of Dortmund. His current research focuses on Consumer Aesthetic Education and Decolonial Education. His fields of work are General, Comparative, International and Intercultural Education. In his book Pedagogy in Argentina. A Study in the Context of Latin America with Methods of Comparative Education (2013) he shows how important it is to combine these orientations. Christoph Kohl studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Marseilles, France (1997–2003); he then pursued doctoral studies on Guinea-Bissau at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany (2005–9), and was awarded a PhD degree from the Martin Luther University of HalleWittenberg in 2010. Between 2017 and 2019 he worked as a research fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany. Since 2019 he is working as an independent researcher. Felicitas Macgilchrist is Head of the ‘Media | Transformation’ Department at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Studies in Braunschweig



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and Professor of Media Research at the Georg-August-University Göttingen’s Institute of Educational Science. Current research draws on ethnography, discourse analysis and critical data studies to explore the (transnational) policies, practices and discourses of digital educational technology. Recent publications include articles on the subjectivation processes associated with digital media and a social science fiction about possible futures with education and technology. António Nóvoa is professor of the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon. He was president of the University of Lisbon between 2006 and 2013. In 2014, he was awarded with the title of Honorary President of the University of Lisbon. He earned a PhD in Education at the University of Geneva, in 1986, and a PhD in History at the University of Paris IV – Sorbonne, in 2006. He was awarded with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by five universities: Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and Santa Maria, in Brazil; and Algarve and Lusófona, in Portugal. He was the president of International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) between 2000 and 2003. Throughout his academic life, he has frequently written about History of Education and Comparative Education, especially with regard to educational policies and studies on the teaching profession. Noah W. Sobe is Professor of Cultural and Educational Policy Studies at Loyola University Chicago where he also directs the Center for Comparative Education. His work crosses the fields of history of education and comparative international education and he has served as president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). He is currently on leave from his faculty position and working at UNESCO-Paris on the Education Research and Foresight team developing a new global report on the Futures of Education. Riem Spielhaus is Professor of Islamic Studies in education and knowledge cultures at Georg-August-University Göttingen and head of the department of ‘Knowledge in Transition’ at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig. Her research focuses on Islamic education in Germany, representation of minorities in Europe and recent textbook revisions in Arab countries. Nelly P.  Stromquist is Emerita Professor of International Education Policy at the University of Maryland, United States. She examines education from a sociological perspective. Her research covers a wide range of issues: gender and education, globalization and higher education and popular and non-formal education, particularly in Latin America and West Africa. She is author of several books on women’s literacy and non-governmental organizations, globalization’s impact on education and the professoriate. Her most recent book is Women Teachers in Africa: Challenges and Possibilities (2017).

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Simona Szakács-Behling is a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany. Current work focuses on Europeanization, solidarity and global citizenship education in transnational educational contexts. She has published widely on changing notions of citizenship, nation, identity and diversity in educational policies and practices in various European educational systems (Romania, England, France, Germany). Her research published in Europe in the Classroom: World Culture and Nation-Building in Post-Socialist Romania (2018) has won the Georg Eckert Research Award. Elaine Unterhalter is Professor of Education and International Development at University College London, Institute of Education. She has worked on research projects on education equalities in Africa and Asia, and published widely in monographs, journal articles and edited collections on Comparative and International Education. Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Analysis at Lancaster University in the UK and of Applied Linguistics at Vienna University. She completed her PhD in 1974 and her habilitation in 1980, both at Vienna University. She has been the recipient of many awards, including the Wittgenstein Award for Elite Scholars (1996), the Grand Decoration of Honor in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria (2011) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Austrian Ministry of Women (2018). She is a member of Academia Europaea and the British Academy of Social Sciences. Her research interests include critical discourse studies, language and politics (populism studies), identity politics and the politics of the past, gender studies, migration studies and the study of racism and anti-Semitism. Recent book publications include Europe at the Crossroads (2019, with P. Bevelander), The Handbook of Language and Politics (2018, with B.  Forchtner) and Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (2015). Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus and Honorary Professor, Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include Psychologized Language in Education:  Denaturalizing a Regime of Truth (with Z. Bekerman) and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education (co-edited with R. Braidotti, V. Bozalek and T. Shefer.

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Educated Identity, Crisis and Comparative Education Eleftherios Klerides and Stephen Carney

Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. (Mercer 1990: 43)

Introduction Identities are made and unmade, not least in moments of crisis. These moments may revolve around enduring ethnic conflicts and gender inequalities, deepening poverty, existential boredom, social exclusion and lack of solidarity and optimism, or, for example, the failings of our theories to explain the world. They are also shaped by resurgent populist movements that fuel acts of cultural closure and anti-cosmopolitanism. However, crises are not only about anxiety and the dismantling of identities. They are also moments of possibility and potential. Not only do they trigger discussion about the causes of present-day doubts and difficulties, they also facilitate thought and debate about possible futures and identities in the making. Education, when conceived of as a project of individual and collective identity formation, national and international development, is central to such discussions. While education undoubtedly contributes to creating difficult moments, it is uniquely placed to engage with them and offer new directions for living together. The main aim of this volume is to explore and problematize our contemporary moment as a time of crisis through the heuristic of identity, and to do so with a comparative gaze. The issue of educated identity as a way of understanding and acting upon the educational world, we argue in this opening chapter of the

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book, is not a new problematique in the literature of comparative education. Often subject to intense scrutiny during moments of crisis, the issue of identity appears either as an object of study or as an underlying assumption in much research work. This has been so since the modernist beginnings of the field in the nineteenth century. It is a major part of the professional work and intellectual capital of comparativists, to the point that Robert Cowen, in this volume and elsewhere (e.g. Cowen 2009b), depicts ‘educated identity’ as a ‘unit idea’ of the field. The study of educated identity in comparative education has fundamentally changed over time and is now a dynamic, contested terrain as we come to terms with the complex landscape of the twenty-first century. The traditional conception of identity within comparative education prioritizes its study as originary, fixed and unified and has traditionally been shaped by a focus on the nation state as a main unit of analysis. In recent years, such assumptions have been vigorously challenged by work that sought to historicize, decentre and deconstruct the primacy of subject-focused thought in education (e.g. Tikly 1999; Mason 2006; Carney 2009; Beech 2009; Klerides 2009a). Our argument is here that at least two intersecting developments have been prominent in this regard. First, we have seen radical shifts in the conceptions of identity and the subject across the social sciences and humanities and this has obviously been noticed by comparativists. Second, we are ourselves witnesses to significant changes in international political and economic relations that have produced a very different world order from that within which scholars of comparative education first framed such issues. In light of the new possibilities that these two broad sets of developments have opened up for comparative educational scholarship, the question of what it means to be educated becomes important once more. This volume comprises research work that contributes to the challenge of understanding what it means to be educated in our moment of multiple crises. As importantly, it explores this new landscape of epistemological possibility in ways that provide fresh directions for the study of educated identity in comparative education.

The motif of educated identity in the comparative educational canon The question of what it means to be educated has long been a central motif in comparative education. Underpinning the nineteenth-century work of



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educational administrators, such as Horace Mann from the United States, Victor Cousin from France and Matthew Arnold from England, were civic political ideas and ideals of educated identity. As Beech (2006) notes, these early comparativists were appointed by their governments to travel abroad in search for institutions that would help them develop public systems of free and compulsory education. The aim of developing mass schooling was to turn unruly children into disciplined citizens who share perspectives on major issues and participate in politics and economy, respect authority, hierarchy and order and subordinate self-interest to the collective good (Nóvoa 2000). It was civic political conceptions of modern citizenship that were implicitly deployed in the literature of the ‘modern travellers’ as they sought to address the theme of educated identity and such conceptions inspired educational crossborder attraction and mobility, becoming the basis of understanding educational systems comparatively. As Mann stressed in his report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, ‘if Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions’ (cited in Beech 2006: 4). Similarly, after highlighting ‘the most general causes of the prosperity of primary instruction in Prussia’, Cousin pleaded for transfer to take place: ‘May causes so simple and so prolific be speedily naturalized in our beloved country, and bring forth the same fruits!’ (cited in Beech 2006: 3–4). The civic political modalities of thinking and acting comparatively in relation to the educated person were made possible by a particular ‘reading of the global’ (Cowen 2000). The global was construed by the early comparativists as a world of incomplete states. Finding ways to build their power capabilities  – that is, to aid both the legitimacy of their authority and the control, coordination and mobilization of their populations when this was judged necessary  – was of utmost importance for their formation, survival and supremacy in an insecure interstates system. In the context of an emerging antagonistic Westphalian order, schooling became one of the most effective bureaucracies invented, borrowed and implemented in order to enhance the capacity of states to extract human resources in support of their security. However, in their interpretation of schooling, ‘modern travellers’ did not consider the exclusionary nature of the politically defined notions of educated identity that they were attracted to, borrowed (or rejected), adjusted and implemented in diverse settings. As many scholars (e.g. Coulby and Jones 1996) point out, the educated person was defined in the nineteenth and parts of the twentieth century in relation to a ‘norm’ that tended to be masculine,

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white, heterosexual and middle-class. This of course was to the detriment of those identified as women, of black and minority ethnic groups, from migrant communities, the working classes and those with disabilities. With the ascendancy of ethnic forms of nationalism in the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there emerged the idea that the world was organized into a league of unique nations, each with its own distinct character (Hobsbawm 1992). Initially acquiring strong racist meanings, this idea was gradually invested with contextual cultural meaning. Crucial in this regard was the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas and cross-cultural psychologists such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead who used the notion of ‘national character’ to explain differences among nations as the outcome of historical events, social institutions and environmental circumstances. Their rereading of this notion reflected a broader shift in the understanding of the subject in social sciences and humanities: one that rejects the Cartesian view of the subject as a sovereign individual existing independently from its environment and possessing an ‘inner core’ to one that is shaped by the forces of the society in which it emerges. Hall (1992) points out that the so-called ‘sociological subject’ was still understood to possess an ‘inner core’ – a character – but this was believed to shape and be shaped by national cultures ‘outside’ through participation in national communities and socialization with their traditions and values. In comparative education, the notion of ‘national character’ was taken up by ‘the forces and factors school of thought’ and appears in the works of Kandel, Hans, Schneider and Mallinson. This notion was employed to address the motif of educated identity in three interlinked ways. One approach enacted a causal relationship to identity-making. Since national character was said to be ‘for a people what personality is for the individual, the expression of its life and culture’ (Kandel 1933: xxiv), the essentials of national character were seen as the ‘intangible, impalpable, spiritual and cultural forces’ and ‘factors’ that regulate and explain what it meant to be educated in a given nation – that is, the ‘determinants’ of certain forms of educated identities that were defined along national cultural lines. A  second sub-theme of educated identity was addressed in terms of identity differences and their causes. Since national systems of education were ‘the outward expression of national character and as such represent the nation in distinction from other nations’ (Hans 1958: 9), the aim of comparative education was to discover differences in conceptions of the educated person among nations and to attribute these to the distinctive character of each and every nation through a cause-and-effect narrative. Finally, national character was seen as ruling in and out certain possibilities for reform.



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For the comparativists of ‘the forces and factors school of thought’, the distinct character of the nation did not only regulate and interpret the shapes of national education. It also shaped and determined ‘why variant solutions have been attempted (and with what result) to problems that are often common to all’ (Mallinson 1975: 10). There was, however, no consensus among scholars on the meaning of ‘national character’. Some of these comparativists focused on the political and territorial features that constitute national character; others stressed that it was defined by language, religion, descent, customs, habits, mentalities and manners. Still others suggested that this notion was the outcome of a combination of civic-political and ethnic-cultural elements. Hans (1958), for example, defined ‘national character’ in terms of race and language, religious traditions, geographical and economic circumstances and political philosophies. In spite of disagreement, they all shared – and could not escape – a stereotypical, essentialist understanding of ‘national character’. Kandel (1933: 25), for example, described ‘the Englishman’ as a subjectivity who ‘dislikes to think or formulate plans of action’ and ‘believes that an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory’. Being conceptualized in historically and sociologically simplistic (even racist) terms as an ‘objective’ entity, national character was also perceived as unified. As a result, there was little awareness of heterogeneity and/or heteroglossia, for instance, in terms of gender, class, ethnicity or sexuality. The notion of ‘national character’ as a mode of addressing educated identity in comparative education was interchangeably used with, and was gradually replaced by, other semantically similar concepts, such as ‘national culture’, ‘national consciousness’ and ‘cultural identity’ (e.g. Mallinson 1975; Brock and Tulasiewicz 1985). Invoking different conceptions of the educated person with the help of the notion of ‘culture’, Mallinson saw comparative education as ‘a systematic examination of other cultures and other systems of education deriving from those cultures in order to discover the resemblances and differences, the causes behind resemblances and differences, and why variant solutions have been attempted (and with what result) to problems that are often common to all’ (Mallinson 1975: 10). Continuing to be treated as essentialist and homogenized, these concepts remained as nebulous and problematic as that of ‘national character’. Reflecting the dominant sociological view of the time that schooling was merely a mechanism for cultural reproduction (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), ‘culture’ was depicted in comparative education as ‘a whole way of life’ into which children are simply ‘assimilated’, while ‘consciousness’ and ‘identity’ as

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inner and innate essences which are fully realized through school socialization. In the introduction of their book on Cultural Identity and Educational Policy, Brock and Tulasiewicz (1985:  3–4) reproduced these views by defining ‘the cultural identity of the group’ as ‘a common heritage’ and an entity which ‘is kept up by constant reference to the reservoir of its culture’. Similar sociological and historical simplifications of educated identity underpinned both the colonial and early postcolonial literature of comparative education as well as the early literature of what came to be known as ‘international education’. In colonial times, one concept that was particularly deployed to address the motif of educated identity comparatively was that of ‘adaptation’ or ‘adapted education’ (see inter alia Mangan 1993; Steiner-Khamsi 2000; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000; Madeira 2009). Devised in the American South, adapted education was employed by colonial officials, expert commissions and philanthropic organizations to deal with the issue of what kind of education was the most suitable for colonized peoples. Rather than imagining the educated person in academic terms, adaptation envisioned it along technical-vocational and practice-oriented lines:  as a form of subjectivity possessing skills and competences in agriculture and handicrafts, health and hygiene. Declared to be adapted to the allegedly ‘backward’ traditions and ‘limited’ intellectual abilities of colonized peoples, this sort of racist educated identity was judged to ‘fit’ the ‘needs’ of the masses and was contrasted to the subjectivity of elites who were trained according to Western academic traditions in order to help out with the running of the colonies and self-rule. In the early postcolonial times and against the background of decolonization, a new strand of comparative education revisited colonial education (e.g. Clignet and Foster 1964; Carnoy 1974; Altbach and Kelly 1978; Watson et  al. 1982). Concerned with the economic facets of underdevelopment and approached from the perspective of dependency theory, this literature did not lend itself easily to explicit analyses of educated identity. Nevertheless, it was underpinned by this motif, and continued to reproduce simplistic understandings of colonial educated subjectivities. Working within a monolithic understanding of power, the early postcolonial literature took the group categories of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ for granted and imagined their relationship as one of omnipotence. It projected a set of binary oppositions to conceptualize colonial educational experience, such as ‘centre’ versus ‘periphery’, ‘grateful recipients’ versus ‘passive victims’ and ‘desire’ versus ‘resistance’, and gave little attention to a number of other issues that have since been acknowledged as important in identity-making. For example, it did not examine ambivalence and tensions of identity politics within colonial and



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the metropolitan settings, the hybridization of educated identities as a result of cultural struggles and dilemmas and the fragmentation of colonial educational experience along gender, class, racial, ethnic and other lines. The main analytical point of this literature was that although Western educational models were resisted in colonial settings, these were eventually imposed upon most colonies as part of imperial domination and were sustained to perpetuate the control of colonized peoples by educating them to become certain types of subjectivities that suited the imperial order. In the same literature, a similar interpretative framework, also deriving from a rereading of Marxism, was used to understand the educated person in the imperial centres. In particular, it was stressed that even within these centres themselves, schooling fulfilled the same function in relation to educated identities. Carnoy (1974), for example, argued that the aim of education in dominant countries was to develop and maintain an inequitable and unjust organization of capitalist production and economic power between the ruling classes and the ruled socio-economic classes. At about the same time, that is, during colonial and early postcolonial times, international intergovernmental agencies and national non-governmental bodies were offering a different vision for the educated person (see inter alia Fuchs 2007; Klerides 2018). A number of institutions and organizations, such as the International Conferences of American States, the League of Nations, the Norden Associations, National Teacher Unions, UNESCO and the Council of Europe, were promoting, in the words of Alfred Zimmern, the first deputy director of the League’s International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, ‘the international mind’, a sort of educated subjectivity that was inclined towards international understanding and cooperation rather than the nationalistic mentality of the nation state (see Klerides 2018: 227). This type of positionality was advocated by international organizations as a substitute for the militaristic and chauvinistic assemblages of educated identity which were held to prevail in state school textbooks and which were associated with world wars and regional disputes (UNESCO 1953; Council for Cultural Cooperation 1967). An ‘international identity’ was derived from a ‘re-reading of the global’. Seen as a ‘universal human community’ (McGrew 1992), the world was, for comparative pacifists and internationalists, a system of states that had the potential to work together to overcome common problems. Even if anarchy pushes states to pursue their own interests, these comparativists believed that states are capable of forgoing immediate interests in order to further the long-term well-being of the community to which they all belong, and to therefore ensure their own safety and prosperity. They believed, in other words, that rivalry and insecurity

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were not inevitable among states. Emanating from inadequate institutions, lack of information and misunderstandings, these core problems of international relations could be eliminated through bilateral and multilateral forms and patterns of educational action and reform aimed at denationalizing the question of what it means to be educated, investing it instead with cosmopolitan meanings. Comparative educators such as Kazamias (Kazamias 1960; Nash, Kazamias and Perkinson 1965), Lauwerys (1965), Holmes (1981) and McLean (Holmes and McLean 1989) broke away from the dominant political and cultural conceptions of the educated person, offering a philosophical strategy to conceptualize this key ‘unit idea’ of the field. The main analytical point of this literature was that Western philosophers, such as Plato, Locke, Descartes, Rousseau, Dewey and Marx, had helped to shape forms and patterns of education in different countries and, by extension, to address the theme of educated identity for comparative purposes. The most elaborated version of ‘Concepts of the Educated Man’ [sic] (Nash, Kazamias and Perkinson 1965: 1–27) is to be found in Holmes and McLean (1989). Continuing the tradition of searching for differences in conceptions of the educated person, the two comparativists analysed the curriculum in different countries along the lines of ‘essentialism’, ‘encyclopaedism’, ‘polytechnicalism’ and ‘pragmatism’. Although this reading of identity worked rather well at that time as a way of exploring the curriculum of selective, academic forms of secondary education, it continued to say little about the relationship between school knowledge and life chances in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, ability or sexuality. In essence, it failed to examine those issues which are now considered to be important in the conceptualization of (educated) identity and notably the motif of identity-making as a political process and strategic project.

New perspectives and developments in identity research From identity to identification In the 1990s, a number of influential works appeared in the social sciences offering fresh perspectives on identity in late modernity (e.g. Bhabha 1990; Hall 1992, 1996; Bauman 1996, 1997; Castells 1997; Wodak et al. 1999). These built on earlier sociopolitical and epistemological strands of thought such as Saussure’s ‘linguistic turn’, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan as well as the deconstruction of ‘culture’ (Williams 1958) and ‘tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and the emergence of the modernist paradigm in the study of the



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‘nation’ (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). Also significant were the Foucauldian notion of ‘disciplinary power’, as well as the civil rights movements of the 1960s, not least feminist movements that offered powerful social as well as theoretical critique. Together, they signalled a ‘turn’ in the understanding of identity from the types of essentialist perceptions we have outlined above to the contemporary, dominant view of identity as socially constructed. As Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 4) sum up this new position, ‘Rather than being reflected in discourse, identity is actively, ongoingly, dynamically constituted in discourse.’ In moving identity into the realm of discourse and the multimodal generation of meaning, postfoundational thought declared the very idea of ‘identity’ obsolete – the idea of an ‘inner core’ existing either in ‘the very nature of things’ or being formed in interaction with society – and put forward instead a different terminology. Instead of identity, the term ‘identification’ is preferred in discussion of the relationship between the subject and meaning structures. Identification, as Hall (1996: 5–6) points out, refers to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’. Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us.

This theorizing of identity as a ‘meeting point’ can be broken down into several interrelated strands of thinking. Underpinning the analyses offered in many of the chapters in this book, these strands form part of the new landscape of epistemological possibilities for the study of educated identity in comparative education. First, the unity which every collective identity treats as fundamental is not a natural but rather an imaginative structure of solidarity accomplished through the exercise of power. Thus, however different the members of an ‘imagined community’ may be in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality, age, ideology, ability or occupation, and ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each’, identity presents them all as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’, concealing internal divisions and heterogeneity (Anderson 1983: 7). Second, although diversity within a group of people is repressed in constructs of identity, intergroup differences are stressed, even invented. As Hobsbawm (1992:  91) puts it, ‘There is no more effective way of bonding together the disparate sections of restless peoples than to unite them against outsiders.’

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‘It is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the “positive” meaning of any term – and thus its “identity” – can be constructed’ (Hall 1996: 4–5). Third, identities are ‘never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions’ (Hall 1996: 4). The plurality thesis here does not simply mean that identity-making is always a contested process or that it is the product of intersectionality. It also refers to its situated and contingent nature. In Wodak et al.’s (1999: 4) formulation, ‘different identities are discursively constructed according to audience, setting, topic and substantive content’. Fourth, identities change not only in space across geopolitical borders, social institutions and communicative occasions but also over time:  ‘national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short period’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 11). Identity, as Bauman similarly stresses, is ‘an as-yet-unfulfilled, unfinished task’ (Bauman 2004:  20), while for Hall (1996: 2) it is a strategic and political ‘process never completed – always “in process”. It is not determined in the sense that it can always be “won” or “lost”, sustained or abandoned.’ Finally, the large variety of identities that exist in time-space often enter into specific forms of connection and relationship – that is, they may be in relations of appropriateness and translation or in relations of opposition and exclusion. As ‘a mixed body’ (Martin 1995: 17) and ‘a palimpsest identity’ (Bauman 1997: 53), identities are therefore marked by tension, contradictions, discrepancies and disjunctions, ambiguity and, above all, ambivalence. They are ‘fragmented and fractured’, in Hall’s view (1996: 4), made up out of partial and diverse fragments that pull in different directions; they belong to the future as much as to the past, to reality as much as to fantasy. This rethinking of identity does not just render problematic the traditional assumptions of comparative education about the educated person. More importantly, it highlights that the ways we approached the question of educated identity derived from, and served to legitimize, the modern interstates system. Not only have we treated the national as a unified source of identity and suppresses intra-national difference, but we also looked for inter-national differences at the expenses of transcultural similarities. We also treated the national as a natural and fixed source of meanings and failed to examine how, for what and with what resources educated identities were produced and reproduced, transformed and dismantled. Finally, we treated the national as a



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clear-cut formation of identity, and as a result, we failed to acknowledge and explore hybridity, tension, disjunctions and ambivalence in assemblages of identities. What happens when the modern interstates system, one that provided a finite set of theoretical possibilities for the comparative study of the educated person in the past, changes so dramatically?

From government to governance Since the interwar period and notably after the end of the Second World War, a new world order has been slowly, incrementally taking shape, which is different from the modern states system. The so-called ‘post-Westphalian world order’, originating in Kant’s thinking and particularly his notion of ‘perpetual peace’, is driven by the dogma of international cooperation and has emerged in its current forms since the collapse of the Cold War (Karns and Mingst 2010). As the foundation stone of cooperation, the principle of reciprocity accounts for the proliferation of international intergovernmental organizations and other multilateral institutions in the world. From liberal perspectives, these organizations and institutions have become arenas for the cultivation of the habits of reciprocal contributions and concessions through mutually beneficial decision making. The outcome of this ongoing process is a set of ‘international regimes’ (Krasner 1982) that shape how we view the world and engage with it. These are formal and informal, public and private governance-related rules and norms, procedures and structures which shape a state’s behaviour in relation to other states. This tendency to enmesh states in international activity results, always according to liberal perspectives, not only in the moderation of their behaviour in world politics by partially transferring territorial sovereignty to supra-territorial forms of authority. More importantly, integration into the international order heightens and reinforces the sense of interdependency of nations, leading to patterns of integration and collaboration. In a world of global enmeshment, national governments are no longer the sole players in world politics but have increasingly shared the international stage with other actors. Enabled by advancements in technology and communications, the restructuring of capitalism and changes in geopolitics, an inseparable part of international regimes has also been contributions from ‘an embryonic transnational civil society’ (McGrew 1992). This form of society, consisting of a plethora of non-governmental organizations, advocacy networks and think tanks, multinational corporations and transnational communities of citizens, interacts with national governments and multilateral bodies in complex

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ways to promote, regulate or intervene in the affairs of humanity. The agenda of interaction among all these new and old actors is anchored to not only to the traditional geopolitical concerns of peace and conflict but also to diverse economic, social, cultural and ecological issues. Extreme poverty, unfair trade, gender inequality, human rights violations, democratic deficits, racist prejudice, resource depletion and environmental degradation are among an increasing number of transnational issues which acquire international attention and collaboration (Castells 1997). Rather than this ‘evolving global governance complex’ (McGrew 2010) signalling an ‘end of the state’, we can see the arrival of a new, more activist, state. For sure, the Westphalian conception of territorially sovereign statehood – the entitlement of states to rule within their own territorial space without external interference  – is being displaced and transformed but is by no means over. Locked into thickening and overlapping webs of transnational governance, states now assert their sovereignty as a tool of negotiation where power is bartered, shared and divided among a range of global and local actors and institutions. This evolving post-Westphalian system of transnational governance renders problematic the various methodological ‘isms’ that characterized much of our thinking about the educated person in comparative education – nationalism, statism and educationism (Dale and Robertson 2009). More importantly, it also invites a range of new possibilities for the comparative study of educated identity. In this evolving system of newly emergent or emerging international political and economic relations, nation states are joined by new actors that articulate subject positions of identification. These include interstate (e.g. the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the World Bank, OECD), non-state (e.g. Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, EUROCLIO) and corporate actors (e.g. Pearson Education, Cambridge International, Cito, RAND Corporation). There are also new imaginings of the subject (the global citizen, the Homo Europaeus, the lifelong learner, the academic entrepreneur, the competent teacher, the efficient administrator, etc.) as well as new spaces and sites where subject positions and subjectivities are made and unmade, sustained and disseminated. These include expert meetings, communities of practice, joint research projects, knowledge alliances, digital classrooms, recommendation circulars, international student assessment programmes and so forth. We also see new techniques and technologies of enforcing identification and subjectification to available discursive positions. Rankings and league tables, benchmarks, numbered data and comparison, or the politics of ‘name and shame’, of ‘lagging behind’ or ‘being



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left outside’ and of ‘danger’, are examples of the new power circulating in global educational spaces. There are also new rhetorics of legitimizing the diffusion of these positions across borders, for example via the language of ‘efficiency’ and ‘stability’, or of ‘economic development’, ‘poverty eradication’ and ‘women’s empowerment’. What forms and patterns of comparative thinking are needed, and have been emerging, in order to explore the question of what it means to be educated in this evolving global governance complex? How do we as contributors in the current volume position ourselves and our analyses in relation to this new landscape of epistemological possibilities, which, in addition to the global governance complex, is constituted by the reconceptualization of identity in universities? And how do we make use of the heuristic device of educated identity to identify and explore moments of crisis in our contemporary world?

New approaches to educated identity in a comparative educational perspective The new millennium has heralded a number of new approaches to the question of educated identity, all of which have some debt to the traditions of the field. These approaches have resulted in a (partial) re-conceptualization of the motif of educated identity, one that discards the old assumptions of identity as fixed and unified and that views the nation state as the sole source of identification. Since the identity of nation states has been re-conceptualized in terms of acts of silence and the repression of intra-national difference and inter-national similarity, many scholars working within and outside comparative education have begun to focus on issues of pluralism and interrelationality (e.g. Coulby and Jones 1996; Grant 1997; Cortina and Stromquist 2000; Gundara 2000; AndersonLevitt 2003; Moutsios 2004; Sprogøe and Winther-Jensen 2006; Unterhalter 2007; Bruno-Jofre and Schriewer 2012). This literature, extending thematically the agenda of attention of the field to ‘other identity markers’ (Grant 1997), such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, caste, ability, age, migration and occupation, has criticized assimilationist, exclusionary and discriminatory policies and politics of education arguing for multicultural, inclusive and integrationist educational forms and patterns. In addition to the ‘social construction’ of nation, race and class, such notions as ethnic exclusion, gender inequality and sexual discrimination have begun to be used not only as units of single-country analysis but also as frames for cross-country and regional comparison.

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Coexisting and intersecting with entrenched tendencies to promote intranational sameness and inter-national difference, these new scholarly emphases on intra-national pluralism and inter-national similarity have added new layers of complexity in the study of educated identity in comparative education. Educated identities are not simply derived from national cultures, religious traditions and political philosophies, as our traditional literature stressed. The question of what it means to be an educated person is also associated today with a range of other topics, such as respect for human rights, intercultural competence, gender equality, environmental sensitivity, poverty eradication, economic productivity, efficient leadership and sexual tolerance. Moutsios (2004) points out that these complexities are a result of pressures for the recognition of identities from ‘within’ states by various social groups (e.g. women, black and other ethnic minorities, LGBTQI groups), as well as from ‘above’ states by the large range of interstate and non-state actors that are prominent within the evolving global governance complex. The challenge of addressing this bewildering, fleeting multiplicity and relationality of iterations of educated identity deepens as these subject positions multiply. This is a crisis for comparative education itself. How do we deal with this proliferation of identifications and subjectivities? Is the motif of identity still relevant for interpreting and acting upon the educational world? The contributions to this volume suggest so. In the second chapter, Robert Cowen points out that educated identity is still relevant today urging comparativists to recapture this motif in their work. He explains that by ‘rescuing’ the unit idea of ‘educated identity’ we ‘rescue our moral vision’: Some versions of ‘educated identity’, such as those embraced by ISIS or Taliban Afghanistan or apartheid South Africa (or refusals of any ‘educated identity’ to girls or young people who are studying – and who are attacked because they are studying) shock us back into moral judgement. Within the unit ideas, ‘educated identity’ is our moral fulcrum, a fulcrum we have not always been anxious to identify. (Cowen in this volume: pp. 32–3)

Cowen’s discussion of educated identity should be read as an extension of this first chapter. Locating the motif of educated identity within the ‘unit ideas’ of ‘academic comparative education’, he identifies some of the additional deficiencies of the traditional ways in which we thought about this ‘unit idea’ in the past. He subsequently suggests that some of our best ways to think about the question of what it means to be educated comparatively ought to be constructed upon and around the complex intersections of domestic and international politics. In this



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way, he concludes, we will be able to reveal ‘imperium’ which is encoded and decoded in definitions of educated identity. In revealing shifting patterns of power in higher education, Terri Kim points out that a moment of crisis emerges when ethnic minority voices are still oppressed in spite of domestic and international rhetorics of diversity, equality and inclusion. Through her analysis, Kim gives voice to the unheard East Asian mobile academic community of the UK as they endeavour to position themselves in relation to the new identities generated by neoliberalism. Specifically, she identifies two such antithetical subject positions:  a ‘marketframed internationalization policy for “excellence” and an over-generalized equality/diversity policy for “inclusion” ’. Her work analyses how this social group have been subjected and have subjected themselves to these two neoliberal transnational positions of identification. Her argument is that ‘excellence’ and ‘inclusion’ intersect with the Confucian cultural values of this academic minority to shape and hybridize the identities they articulate for themselves and eventually embody and perform. Nelly P.  Stromquist identifies another type of subjectivity that has also emerged in higher education as a consequence of neoliberal imperium:  that of the growing body of ‘contingent faculty’. For Stromquist this subjectivity is promoted by policies that defund public education and make universities dependent on their own revenues. Although her analysis focuses on the United States, this subjectivity, as emerging comparative scholarship shows (e.g. Munene 2018), is rapidly becoming a transnational phenomenon. Stromquist points out that this subject position is resisted by contingent faculty who draw upon elements from the traditional identity of faculty staff to articulate a new, hybrid identity with which to assert themselves as both intellectuals and workers deserving fair salaries and recognition. The articulation and dissemination of the subjectivity of ‘contingent faculty’ and, more broadly, the dispossession of professional identities by neoliberalism are not the only source of crisis in universities. She points out that crisis also emerges with the lack of solidarity by the permanent faculty in support of their contingent counterparts despite the university being ostensibly a site for democratic practices and values such as inclusion and equality. The contribution by Simona Szakács-Behling et  al. engages with ‘global citizenship’, another transnational form of educated subjectivity which builds on our earlier conceptions of an ‘international identity’ and which prioritizes cosmopolitanism over nationalism. Literature on the visions of the educated person advanced by pieces of the global governance apparatus is enormous. It

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stresses that the position of global citizenship is fragmented, consisting of diverse definitions of educated identity which are shaped by the different political mandates of multilateral organizations (e.g. Klerides 2018). It also stresses that global citizenship is marked by theoretical tensions and contradictions (e.g. Mannion et al. 2011; Oxley and Morris 2013), as well as a bias that reflects and spreads Western values and norms (e.g. Hobson and Silova 2014; Takayama, Sriprakash and Connell 2017). There are nonetheless disputes among scholars about how best to interpret such complex subject positions. The analysis of Szakács-Behling and colleagues is part of this debate. Through their analysis, they challenge abstract academic typologies of global citizenship arguing instead for a situated understanding that is place-based and time-bound. In particular, they illustrate how pupils and teachers in German schools abroad participate dynamically in the making of this position, appropriating elements from pieces of global governance first and then re-configurating them in novel ways to enact new assemblages of global citizenship. This analysis of how global citizenship is recontextualized in schools offers more than just a moment of crisis to the literature. It illustrates that crises of interpretation about the meaning of global citizenship also arise when fluid and malleable identifications move across borders, spaces, institutions and practices. How do we understand the mobility of positionings of educated identity, their indigenization processes and their context-specific shapes and functions? In this view, the analysis of Szakács-Behling et al. belongs to an emergent body of comparative scholarship that examines how forms of educated identity ‘morph, as they move’, to invoke Cowen’s (2009a) phrase (e.g. Anderson-Levitt 2003; Beech 2009; Carney, Rappleye and Silova 2012; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012; Alexiadou and van de Bunt-Kokhuis 2013; Klerides 2014), or why they are resisted and rejected in contexts of their reception (e.g. Beech and Barranechea 2011; Klerides and Zembylas 2017). This scholarship also extends backwards in time to cover historical cases of the ‘transfer, translation and transformation’ of forms of educated identity, including a rethinking of colonial subjectivities embedded in ‘adapted education’ (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi 2000; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000; Klerides 2009b; Bruno-Jofre and Schriewer 2012; Bagchi, Fuchs and Rousmaniere 2014). Like Szakács-Behling et al., this emergent literature makes clear that it is impossible to continue studying the educated person within the confines of nation states and local institutions without reference to transnational discourses of educated identity and vice versa. It is no longer possible to separate flowing visions of the educated person from their manifestations and articulations in local practices and state institutions.



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The idea of global citizenship is disputed not only within academia. Focusing on another transnational position of cosmopolitan identification  – the ‘European identity’ – Ruth Wodak notes that these two overlapping subject positions are also contested by far-right populist parties in Europe and beyond. Wodak identifies ‘the refugee crisis of 2015’ as a key moment of a partial shift of power towards the political far-right in EU member states and the resurgence of anti-European positionalities and subjectivities. In spite of this shift, she points out that different standpoints still exist among the EU leaders and political parties. In order to illustrate the diverse and partial fragments of European identity that pull into irreconcilable directions, she focuses on the genre of speculative speeches of politicians as a site of identity-work and juxtaposes two contrary visions for the Homo Europaeus, metonymically identified with the French president Emanuel Macron and the Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, respectively. For Wodak, as well as other social scientists (e.g. Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2017), these two visions do not just testify that the European identification is emotionally polarized by interpreting the same historical facts differently. More importantly, they highlight that the EU and Europe are confronted at the present moment with anxiety and uncertainty about the future: which path will they follow – that of ‘a Europe of hope’ or ‘a far-right politics of fear’? However, crisis does not just emerge because ‘fear’ is instrumentalized by right-wing parties for the purposes of making anti-cosmopolitan subjectivities. Christoph Kohl shows that a moment of crisis also arises when right-wing populist movements attempt to colonize the field of education and gain ideological legitimacy and hegemony through the medium of schooling. In his contribution, he examines how, and to what extent, right-wing populism has infiltrated the educational media, notably school curricula and textbooks as sites of identity-work, in Austria, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Norway and the United States. Kohl’s analysis identifies a number of targets that populist leaders and parties pursue, as well as the strategies they deploy in order to challenge existing educational practices of allegedly pluralist identity-making. The aim of such populism is nothing less than to replace progressive visions of educated identity with sexist, racist, nationalist, homophobic and Islamophobic narratives. His contribution, like that of Wodak, reminds us of the continued relevance of understanding the ‘social embeddedness of education’ and what this means for identity formation. The rise of populist right-wing movements but, equally, left-wing countermovements, reminds us of how much is at stake for comparative education.

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Apart from the revival of anti-cosmopolitan populist identities, the story of global deceleration must also be told. Here, existential boredom narrates the embodied experiences of those who are left behind and marginalized from the forces of global acceleration. An engagement with this subject position through affect theory and a criss-crossing comparative approach is the central theme of the contribution by Noah W. Sobe. Being located at the intersection of ‘speed’ and ‘slowness’, the subjectivity of boredom is specifically generated by discrepancies and disjunctions among the multiple identifications that define processes of (de)globalization. As his analysis shows, education, notably higher education, is deeply implicated in the production of existential boredom by virtue of its role in evoking ideals of educated identity that are beyond the reach of many. The mismatch between educational attainment and employment opportunities is but one pressing example. For Sobe, therefore, crisis emerges when subject positions multiply in the evolving global governance complex but in ways that are inconsistent or exclusionary. Phillip D. Th. Knobloch returns the focus to stories of global acceleration, identifying other aspects of the social embeddedness of education that comparative education must take seriously, namely the influence of consumer culture and cultural capitalism. In his analysis of Playmobil figures adapted to various country markets (e.g. Germany, Greece, Holland, Mexico), he argues that while consumer products produce and reproduce, sustain and modify national cultural identifications, they simultaneously offer subject positions which cut across national contexts. These transcultural positions are constituted by and upon a range of meanings, such as feelings and emotions, tastes and lifestyles or visions, ambitions and desires, which are not unique to a certain state, but rather characterize all human beings. Such hybrid identities oscillating between what he calls ‘cultural essentialism’ and ‘hyperculture’ are produced as capitalism crosses borders and exploits national personages for purposes of profit accumulation. Knobloch notes that this moment of opportunity is inextricably intertwined with a moment of uncertainty: how do we educate children and youth to respond to the large variety of consumerist positions they are invited to identify with? Should we expand the scope of comparative education to cover the study of consumer identities and their educational implications? Since there is an emerging body of comparative scholarship that has begun to engage with non-formal and informal sites and techniques of socialization (e.g. Dussel 2016), the question shifts to one of intersectionality: How are consumer identities entangled with those produced in formal practices and by formal strategies?



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If we are now studying a wide range of identities that are made and unmade in national and international, formal, non-formal and informal spaces and places, Elaine Unterhalter points out that we also need to think of them in the longue durée. In particular, she discusses ideas about the educated person and their entanglements with the notion of the public good in two different historical moments – in 1917 and 2016. Writings by Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje and John Dewy on education, identity and the public good illustrate the temporality of earlier visions of educated identity and are used here to consider contemporary versions linked to the privatization of schools, school-related gender-based violence and the decolonization of universities. Through ‘a longer comparative view on the present moment’, Unterhalter is able to identify a specific form of crisis in our contemporary moment: that we have moved from sentiments of optimism to pessimism in relation to positions that have the potential to support care, hope, solidarity, sustainability or empathy. At the same time, her comparative-historical analysis, like those offered by Wodak and Kohl, reminds us of the importance of ‘time’ – and another moment of crisis – in explorations of the motif of educated identity. While we now have a promising literature spatially dealing with ‘mobile identities’ (cited above), our scholarship on temporal constructions of educated identity remains limited. Notions of palimpsest, restored, transformed or resilient identities have certainly been introduced (e.g. McLeod, Sobe and Seddon 2018; Silova, Piattoeva and Millei 2018) but invite further examination. Michalinos Zembylas focuses on the resilience of identity, suggesting a key role for affect theory. Like Sobe and other comparativists, such as Epstein (2019), he suggests that comparative education would do well to study the emotional and affective aspects of positionalities and subjectivities. Through a discussion of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy in Greek-Cypriot schooling, he analyses ‘villainification’ and ‘victimization’ as two specific forms of affective technologies that are employed in schools to constitute the Greek-Cypriot identity. The policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ was initiated following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the occupation of the northern part of the island since that time and its de facto division into two ethnically homogenous parts. For Zembylas, failure to grasp the functioning of such technologies in the production and reproduction of identities in conflict and post-conflict settings is a moment of crisis that blocks peacemaking processes of memory, history and identity reconstruction, and in the case of Cyprus, the possibility of reunification. In contrast, understanding what ‘villainification’ and ‘victimization’ as technologies of affect do is a starting point for the construction of more tolerant and intercultural positions of educated identities in Cyprus and elsewhere.

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In the closing chapter, António Nóvoa builds on his earlier work (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Nóvoa 2018) to identify the centrality of comparison in today’s illusion of ‘total knowledge’. This is another – existential – moment of crisis in and for the field of comparative education, and manifests itself in the explosion of intersecting and overlapping subject positions associated with the proliferation of national and international regimes of data production, interpretation and utilization. As a way out of this vertigo of scientifically generated positionalities and subjectivities, he proposes resistance via ‘a return of the comparativist’, which he defines as ‘a unique stance that is specific to each and every comparativist’. Rather than contribute to the ‘vertigo of data’, he suggests a new role for comparative education as producer of ‘intelligent view(s) of the multiple educational realities’: We need him/her to bring us a reflection based on his/her personal experience, knowledge of reality, conversations, and dialogues, a reflection that illuminates aspects that otherwise wouldn’t be revealed, a reflection that surprises with its lucidity, insight, and the ability to make sense. (Nóvoa in this volume: p. 251)

Nóvoa presents three gestures that he believes our scholarly educated identity as comparativists ought to include: estrangement, intercession and profanation. In a sense, then, his contribution belongs to an emerging body of comparative scholarship that seeks to revive an old motif in comparative education:  the delineation of facets of the identity of the comparativist as a specific type of academic habitus and how these facets interact with and shape our comparative scholarship (e.g. Epstein 2019; Kim 2020). In light of the dislocation of identity and nation state presented here, this early motif of comparative education ought to be placed at the heart of our scholarship and guide us in exploring contemporary moments of crisis. Many of the contributors of this book stress that we as comparativists are unsure of how to position ourselves in relation to the multiplicity of subject positions that frame our work and lives. Under such conditions of uncertainty, moments of opportunity emerged and we produced new articulations of identity where ‘ “identity” is a name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty’ (Bauman 1996: 19). The tendency to claim identity positions in order to avoid indeterminacy is one of many questions that comparativists must face if we are to take seriously the challenge of exploring our own academic identities. How do we construct and reconstruct, perform and project and summon others to identify with our positionalities? What theories and concepts and methods do we deploy to forge these, under what circumstances and for what purposes?



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In articulating a unique comparative stance on the world, how do we navigate between reality, fantasy and desire, between understanding and intervention or between certainty and uncertainty? Are we conscious of the fact that we unify human experience by silencing diversity and construct difference by ignoring sameness? For sure, a recognition of the complex, temporal-spatial situatedness of our own identity construct – the very fact that our ‘practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write’ (Hall 1990: 222) – helps us to acknowledge the biases and limitations of our own positionality. Such recognition can also be instrumental in mitigating both our commitment to the ‘truth’ and the discursive modalities we often employ to invite others to share our positionality and subjectivity. It helps us to realize that it is impossible to exhaust the study of heteroglossia and thus fully grasp the world. And finally, it ensures an ongoing awareness that we are simultaneously subjects and objects of power and that this conundrum limits our claims to mastery in and of the world. Knowing that the attributes we ascribe to the identity of the comparativist are always political and relational, contingent and biased, we must nevertheless commit ourselves to engaging with the multiple subject positions existing in the world. As Cowen puts it (in this volume, p.  33), ‘we should discuss and contrast and empathize with a wide range of “educated identities” with all of the sensitivities and relativities and flexibilities that commitment implies. In that sophisticated mode of work, our purpose is Verstehen:  a rather special form of “understanding” educated identities.’ Adopting Verstehen, our task must be to approach the proliferation of identities around us with the awareness that our own identities are multiple, situated, provisional and partial. This perspective invites a huge array of questions for the study of educated identity in comparative education. Some important directions include the following: what identities are on offer, how they are constructed and reconstructed and where do these processes take place, by who, for whom and for what ends, with what resources and strategies, why and how do they change in time and space, how they are diffused across borders and imposed onto people? Taken together, the contributors of this book show that the concept of ‘identity’  – in its ongoing forms  – remains a powerful analytical tool with which to make sense of the educational world. Knowing where we locate ourselves and others in the mosaic of identities is a first step in a complex intellectual endeavour to intervene in their making but always through a sensitive and flexible language, which aims at producing openness rather than closure. Perhaps this is the identity of the comparativist in our contemporary moment:  moral but conscious of its own morality, politically aware but

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attuned to its own complicity in consolidating systems of power, aesthetic but acknowledging the limits of good writing and academic performance in the field.

References Alexiadou, N., and S. van de Bunt-Kokhuis (2013), ‘Policy Space and the Governance of Education: Transnational Influence on Institutions and Identities in the Netherlands and the UK’, Comparative Education, 49(3): 344–60. Altbach, P., and G. Kelly, eds (1978), Education and Colonialism, New York: Longman. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Anderson-Levitt, K., eds (2003), Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory, New York: Palgrave. Bagchi B., E. Fuchs and K. Rousmaniere, eds (2014), Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education, Oxford: Berghahn. Bauman, Z. (1996), ‘From Pilgrim to Tourism – or a Short History of Identity’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 18–36, London: Sage. Bauman, Z. (1997), ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, 46–57, London: Zed. Bauman, Z. (2004), Identity, Cambridge: Polity. Beech, J. (2006). ‘The Theme of Educational Transfer in Comparative Education: A View over Time’, Research in Comparative and International Education, 1(1): 2–13. Beech, J. (2009), ‘Policy Spaces, Mobile Discourses, and the Definition of Educated Identities’, Comparative Education, 45(3): 347–64. Beech, J., and I. Barrenechea (2011), ‘Pro-Market Educational Governance: Is Argentina a Black Swan?’, Critical Studies in Education, 52(3): 279–93. Benwell, B., and E. Stokoe (2006), Discourse and Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bhabha, H., ed. (1990), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge. Boukala, S., and D. Dimitrakopoulou (2017), ‘The Politics of Fear vs. the Politics of Hope: Analysing the 2015 Greek Election and Referendum Campaigns’, Critical Discourse Studies, 14(1): 39–55. Bourdieu, P., and J. C. Passeron (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage. Brock, C., and W. Tulasiewicz, eds (1985), Cultural Identity and Educational Policy, London: Croom Helm. Bruno-Jofre, R., and J. Schriewer, eds (2012), The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions through Time and Space, London: Routledge.



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Carney, S. (2009), ‘Negotiating Policy in an Age of Globalization: Exploring Educational “Policyscapes” in Denmark, Nepal and China’, Comparative Education Review, 53(1): 63–88. Carney, S., J. Rappleye and I. Silova (2012), ‘Between Faith and Science: World Culture Theory and Comparative Education’, Comparative Education Review, 56(3): 366–93. Carnoy, M. (1974), Education as Cultural Imperialism, New York: Longman. Castells, M. (1997), The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Clignet, R., and P. Foster (1964), ‘French and British Colonial Education in Africa’, Comparative Education Review, 8(2): 191–8. Cortina, R., and N. Stromquist, eds (2000), Distant Alliances: Promoting Education for Girls and Women in Latin America, New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Coulby, D., and C. Jones (1996), ‘Post-Modernity, Education and European Identities’, Comparative Education, 32(2): 171–84. Council for Cultural Cooperation (1967), History Teaching and History Textbook Revision, Strasbourg. Cowen, R. (2000), ‘Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts?’, Comparative Education, 36(3): 333–42. Cowen, R. (2009a), ‘The Transfer, Translation and Transformation of Educational Processes: And Their Shape-Shifting?’, Comparative Education, 45(3): 315–27. Cowen, R. (2009b), ‘Then and Now: Unit Ideas and Comparative Education’, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1277–94, Dordrecht: Springer. Dale R., and S. Robertson (2009), ‘Beyond Methodological “ISMS” in Comparative Education in an Era of Globalization’, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1113–27, Dordrecht: Springer. Dussel, I. (2016), ‘Global Knowledge Flows and Patterns of Appropriation in Youth Media Production Digital in Argentina and Mexico’, Paper presented at 25th CESE Conference in Glasgow. Epstein, E., eds (2020), North American Scholars of Comparative Education, Oxon: Routledge. Epstein, I. (2019), Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse, London: Bloomsbury. Fuchs, E. (2007), ‘The Creation of New International Networks in Education: The League of Nations and Educational Organizations in the 1920s’, Paedagogica Historica, 43(2): 199–209. Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Grant, N. (1997), ‘Some Problems of Identity and Education: A Comparative Examination of Multicultural Education’, Comparative Education, 33(1): 9–28. Gundara, J. (2000), ‘Issues of Discrimination in European Education Systems’, Comparative Education, 36(2): 223–34. Hall, S. (1990), ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 222–37, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

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Hall, S. (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Future, 273–325, Cambridge: Polity. Hall, S. (1996), ‘Who Needs “identity”?’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–17, London: Sage. Hans, N. (1958), Comparative Education: The Study of Educational Factors and Traditions, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobsbawm, E. (1992), Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, D., and I. Silova, eds (2014), Globalizing Minds: Rhetoric and Realities in International Schools, Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Holmes, B. (1981), Comparative Education, London: Allen and Unwin. Holmes, B., and M. McLean (1989), The Curriculum: A Comparative Perspective, London: College of Preceptors. Kandel, I. (1933), Comparative Education, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Karns, M., and K. Mingst (2010), International Organizations, London: Lynne Rienner. Kazamias, A. (1960), ‘What Knowledge Is of Most Worth? An Historical Conception and a Modern Sequel’, Harvard Educational Review, 30(4): 307–30. Kim, T., ed. (2020), ‘Biographies of Comparative Education: Knowledge and Identity on the Move’ [Special Issue], Comparative Education, 56(1): 1–141. Klerides, E. (2009a), ‘National Cultural Identity, Discourse Analysis and Comparative Education’, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1225–47, Dordrecht: Springer. Klerides, E. (2009b), ‘National Identities on the Move: Examples from the Historical Worlds of Greater Britain and Hellenism’, Comparative Education, 45(3): 435–52. Klerides, E. (2014), ‘Εducational Transfer as a Strategy for Remaking Subjectivities: National and Transnational Articulations of “New History” in Europe’, European Education, 46(1): 12–33. Klerides, E. (2018), ‘History Education, Identity Formation and International Relations’, in J. McLeod, N. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018. Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, 220–39, London: Routledge. Klerides, E., and M. Zembylas (2017), ‘Identity as Immunology: History Teaching in Two Ethnonational Borders of Europe’, Compare, 47(3): 416–33. Krasner, S. (1982), ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables’, International Organization, 36(2): 185–205. Lauwerys, J. (1965), ‘General Education in a Changing World: Opening Address’, International Review of Education, 11(4): 385–403. Madeira, A. I. (2009), ‘Comparing Colonial Education Discourses in the French and Portuguese African Empires: An Essay on Hybridization’, in R. Cowen and



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A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 181–94, Dordrecht: Springer. Mallinson, V. (1975), An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Education, London: Heinemann. Mangan, J., ed. (1993), The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience, London: Routledge. Mannion, G., G. Biesta, M. Priestley and H. Ross (2011), ‘The Global Dimension in Education and Education for Global Citizenship: Genealogy and Critique’, Globalization, Societies and Education, 9(3–4): 443–56. Martin, D. C. (1995), ‘The Choices of Identity’, Social Identities, 1(1): 5–20. Mason, M. (2006), ‘Comparing Cultures’, in M. Bray, B. Adamson and M. Mason (eds), Comparative Education Research, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. McGrew, A. (2010), ‘Globalization and Global Politics’, in J. Baylis, S. Smith and P. Owens (eds), The Globalization of World Politics, 14–31, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrew, T. (1992), ‘A Global Society?’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures, 61–116, Cambridge: Polity. McLeod, J., N. Sobe and T. Seddon, eds (2018), World Yearbook of Education 2018. Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, London: Routledge. Mercer, K. (1990), ‘Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 43–71, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Moutsios, S. (2004), ‘The Identity of the European Union and the European Pedagogic Identities’, in E. Buk-Berge, S. Holm-Larsen and S. Wiborg (eds), Education across Borders, 129–46, Oslo: Didakta Norsk Forlag. Munene, I., ed. (2018), Contextualizing and Organizing Contingent Faculty, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Nash, P., A. Kazamias and H. Perkinson (1965), The Educated Man: Studies in the History of Educational Thought, New York: John Wiley. Nóvoa, A. (2000), ‘Europe and Education’, in J. Bouzakis (ed.), Historical – Comparative Approaches: Festschrift in Honour of Andreas Kazamias, 47–69, Athens, GA: Gutenberg. Nóvoa, A. (2018), ‘Comparing Southern Europe: The Difference, the Public, and the Common’, Comparative Education, 54(4): 548–61. Nóvoa, A., and T. Yariv-Mashal (2003), ‘Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?’, Comparative Education, 39(4), 423–38. Oxley, L., and P. Morris (2013), ‘Global Citizenship: A Typology for Distinguishing Its Multiple Conceptions’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3): 301–25. Silova, I., N. Piattoeva and S. Millei, eds (2018), Childhood and Schooling in (Post) Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Sprogøe, J., and T. Winther-Jensen, eds (2006), Identity, Education and Citizenship – Multiple Interrelations, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Steiner-Khamsi G. (2000), ‘Transferring Education, Displacing Reforms’, in J. Schriewer (ed.), Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, 155–87, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Steiner-Khamsi, G., and H. Quist (2000), ‘The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the case of Achimota in British Ghana’, Comparative Education Review, 44(3): 272–99. Steiner-Khamsi, G., and F. Waldow, eds (2012), World Yearbook of Education 2012: Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education, London: Routledge. Takayama, K., A. Sriprakash and R. Connell (2017), ‘Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education’, Comparative Education Review, 61(S1): S1–S24. Tikly, L. (1999), ‘Postcolonialism and Comparative Education’, International Review of Education, 45(5/6): 603–21. UNESCO (1953), Bilateral Consultations for the Improvement of History Textbooks, Paris. Unterhalter, E. (2007), Gender, Schooling and Global Social Justice, London: Routledge. Watson, K., ed. (1982), Education in the Third World, London: Croom Helm. Williams, R. (1958), Culture and Society, New York: Columbia University Press. Wodak, R., R. de Cillia, M. Reisigl and K. Liebhart (1999), The Discursive Construction of National Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2

Educated Identity: Concepts, Mobilities and Imperium Robert Cowen

Introduction Comparative education is a fascinating academic area, partly because every now and then it goes through moments of intellectual hysteria when it decides that what it has been doing is all wrong. Examples include the compulsive rejection of ‘history’ as the only way to write comparative education; the intense squabbles over ‘method’ which characterized the Anglophone debate for a decade from the mid-1960s; the anguish in England about whether comparative education was a discipline within the asociological and simplistic definition of ‘discipline’ asserted by R. S. Peters (1966); the lurch in the 1970s, from confidently seeing the world as in need of modernization to remembering that there is something called colonialism; and our current discovery that we have been analysing the wrong world:  the world is post-industrial, post-modern, postcolonial, post-socialist and very loosely globalized – all at once. Of course it is. Comparative education is complex because the world which it reads is complex; and the field of study is not improved by sticking lazy labels on it and calling it ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘international comparative education’. In this chapter, I  take ‘comparative education’ to be undisciplined (in the sense used by Peter) and wisely so. The world is more complicated than academic disciplines. Our attempts to be just one thing (e.g. ‘history’ or ‘a predictive science’) have been strident, oppressive and erratic. In comparative education, several conversations overlap with each other, often discordantly. Our conversation – like the conversation in all interesting families – is multilayered and occasionally fissiparous, but it has common motifs, as well as the family pleasures of gossip about ancestors, unexpected cohabitations and the oddities

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of faraway cousins. For us, as a family, there is a bonus: we have a family library; there are written records about family members; there are materials for unwritten biographies stored in safe places; and there is quasi-official documentation about family assemblies. The result? The result is that, as in most families, we can see retrospectively some coherence in the conversation. There are motifs to which the conversation keeps returning, amid noisy divorces and family discord about the academic word which best defines our contemporary world and our contemporary work. I will call those motifs  – the strategic themes of academic comparative education which have been pursued over the last hundred years or thereabouts – the ‘unit ideas’ of comparative education (Cowen 2002a, 2009a). The phrase ‘unit ideas’ comes from Robert Nisbet’s (1967) analysis of sociology, but I judge that, within comparative education, we have pursued our own, different, ‘unit ideas’ – albeit erratically, and without recognizing them as ‘unit ideas’. Currently, the concept of unit ideas needs confirmation partly to deflate a field of study which has developed a ‘bloat of topics’ (Cowen 2018a). Thus, this is an excellent time to rethink what we are doing and why we are doing it, and the theme of ‘educated identity’ within comparative education highlights some of the ethical choices that we need to make.

Unit ideas The unit ideas are transfer; the educational system; the State; ‘educated identity’; space; time; social context; and praxis.1 There is one particular unit idea which has been of continuous interest. Others have been given different emphases by individual scholars. Right now, two of the unit ideas – ‘social context’ and ‘praxis’ – need be noted only briefly. One ‘idea’ (social context) is currently seriously muddled and the second is seriously conventional. ‘Social context’ is indeed one of our most difficult puzzles, historically; but at the moment the word ‘context’ means almost as many things as there are listeners in the room. Fortunately, there is a new and sharp debate (Crossley 2009; Sobe and Kowalczyk 2018). The result is that ‘context’ is ‘between-meanings’. The patient is still alive, as it were, but not very well. Older notions dating back at least to Michael Sadler in 1900 (Higginson 1979) are now too vague to be of much use. New meanings of ‘context’ have not yet stabilized and so the theoretical problems remain, as do the policy problems which follow from not having a useful social technology to cut through ‘context’



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(especially for the policy relationships between education and ‘development’). In contrast, our notion of ‘praxis’ has tended to remain optimistic and simplistic. For decades (Paul Monroe, Michael Sadler, Isaac Kandel) and with finetuning and reinforcement in the mid-1960s via the writings of Edmund King and Brian Holmes, Harold Noah and Max Eckstein, academic comparative educationists have tended to take for granted that we should be influential reformers of educational systems (Cowen 2006, 2018b). One of the few virtues of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is that it has had the unintended side effect of suggesting caution over our ancient aspirations to have an alliance between comparative education specialists and politicians (Cowen 2014a; Auld and Morris 2016; Morris 2016). ‘Transfer’, intellectually our core unit idea, needs a longer reprise, although ‘transfer’ is an awkward word. Alternatives have been proposed (such as educational cooperation or cultural borrowing) but they, like most of the alternatives, are analytically imprecise and so the traditional word – transfer – is retained here. At least that word hints at the core intellectual problem: ‘as it moves, it morphs’ (Cowen 2009b). When Jullien de Paris in 1817 was thinking about improving French education and looking at education in the cantons of Switzerland, he thought ‘transfer’ was non-problematic. By 1900, the problem of educational practices moving-and-morphing (or moving without morphing) was raised in Sir Michael Sadler’s answer to his own apparently common-sense question: ‘How far may we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education?’ (Higginson 1979). The theme was a continuing policy problem within the French and British Empires, but was also visible in the 1930s with Paul Monroe and his institutional impact on Chinese education, and after the Second World War in the reconstruction of education in Japan and Germany. ‘Transfer’ (as a ‘unit idea’) has retained its visibility (Phillips and Ochs 2004; Beech 2006; Cowen 2009b; Cowen and Klerides 2009; Phillips 2009; Manzon 2011; Rappleye 2012; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012), and it is currently underpinning new discussions about post-socialism and postcolonialism. ‘Educational systems’ have, per se, been central to comparative education ever since Jullien and the work of nineteenth-century educational administrators such as Mathew Arnold and Horace Mann and their inclusion in most ‘histories’ of comparative education. Comparative educationists (and comparative historians of education) have spent a great deal of time narrating how ‘the educational system’ has been changed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, these days, how it is being kept relevant to changing definitions of what

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counts as an advanced economy. Similarly, in the last two hundred years, we have seen major changes in forms of ‘the State’. The work of Isaac Kandel and Nicholas Hans on the State and the nation was refined by subsequent historical and comparative analyses (Vaughan and Archer 1971; Archer 1979; Müller, Ringer and Simon 1987; Green 1990; Palomba 2009). Currently, new forms of State have been identified and given serious attention:  notably the neoliberal State. We have also explored concepts of the post-socialist State (Silova 2009, 2010), the ‘developmental State’ (Law 2009), ‘the Occupied State’ (Shibata 2005; Phillips 2018) and we have begun to take up the theoretical problems posed by fragile states, failing states, and so on. Thus, amid the unit ideas as a group, our attention to transfer, the educational system, the State, our commitment to praxis (taken to mean, here, a commitment to practical policy reform in education) has been more or less continuous for something approaching two hundred years. This has not been the case for ‘space’ and ‘time’. The unit idea of time has, in our history, frequently been obscured within other vocabularies. For example, the discussions about ‘history’ and ‘science’ in the 1960s paradoxically  – by making everything oversimple  – made the theoretical complexities of time, including time-past and time-future, almost invisible (Cowen 2002b). In terms of ‘space’, there have been two remarkable muddles: one over what to call the field of study and the professional Societies within it (Carnoy 2006; Crossley and Watson 2011; Epstein 2016) and, the other about what ‘north, south, east, and west’ and North, South and East and West mean (Cowen 2014b). It has taken years for time and space to be identified in their own right as major intellectual puzzles within academic comparative education (Cowen 1998, 2002b, 2014b, 2018c; Symaco and Brock 2013; Larsen and Beech 2014) and to begin to be rethought – for example within the World Yearbook of Education, edited by Julia McLeod, Noah Sobe and Terri Seddon (2018). However – despite their somewhat erratic intellectual history, their occasional relative invisibilities, despite their different and specific sociologies, and the absence of regular and coherent restatement of their interrelations  – the unit ideas help us to stay alert to our own assumptions, to be self-conscious about the unit ideas that we wish to use as our analytical starting points, and they encourage us to deal with the generic puzzle: which interrelations among the unit ideas do we, as individual scholars, wish to stress? The unit ideas are also an uncomfortable reminder to us that we, as a field of study, have created an oversimplified modernist comparative education (Cowen 2009a) rooted in the nineteenth century. By linking comparative education and ‘educated identity’ to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century concept of a system of education and



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to the reform of such ‘systems’ by educational administrators, we overlooked most of human history. However, we did at least stop puzzling over the theme of national character and finally came up with new ways to think about ‘educated identity’.

Educated identity: Traditional perspectives It was Joseph Lauwerys who broke with the tradition of thinking about ‘national character’ – a concept used in anthropology and cross-cultural psychology by scholars such as Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gore and Margaret Mead and taken into the comparative education literature in the 1950s (Mallinson 1957; Hans 1958). Whatever the wartime virtues of Ruth Benedict’s work on Japan, within comparative education the literature on educated identity and national character was, at best, vague; in the writing of Hans, as he edged towards race, embarrassing; and in the writing of Vernon Mallinson, historically and sociologically jejune (for a discussion of ‘national character’, see Klerides 2009). Joseph Lauwerys (1967) found a simpler way to address the theme of educated identity in his Presidential Address to the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). His CESE paper was impressively short. The analytical point was that ‘philosophers’ such as John Locke, Descartes, Dewey and Marx distilled the goals of ‘general education’ in England, France, the United States and the Soviet Union – and by extension captured ‘educated identity’ for the purposes of comparative education. This interpretation, this sketch, by Lauwerys worked rather well as a way of understanding the curriculum of academic high schools, for example the grammar school in England or the lycée in France, and also permitted an understanding of the curriculum principles of the ‘common secondary school’ of the United States and the USSR. Later the analysis by Lauwerys was relabelled by Brian Holmes (Holmes 1981; Holmes and McLean 1989). He termed the epistemic traditions ‘essentialism, encyclopaedism, pragmatism and polytechnicalism’. This was a tactical improvement. Holmes’ analysis made a sharper distinction between German and French forms of encyclopaedism and, more importantly, permitted students to create the mnemonic E1, E2, P1 and P2 for examination purposes. Unfortunately, the whole mini-tradition was strategically flawed. ‘Philosophical models of man’ offered an excellent culturalist Gestalt for understanding the curriculum of some selective, academic, forms of secondary education as contrasted with curricula in countries shaped by different political

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conceptions of citizenship, but nothing complex was said about knowledge in terms of class, race, gender and links with the distribution of life chances. The relabelling by Holmes (of the Lauwerys’ categories) carried the implication that the classification system of Lauwerys has not been abstract or neutral or ‘scientific’ enough; but the new labels (E1, E2, P1 and P2) said nothing fresh about the sociology of knowledge. The basic error of working from axioms which stressed ‘philosophies’ of knowledge was continued in a book by Holmes and McLean (1989). There was  – as in so much of the comparative education of what Bill Halls (1973) called ‘the culturalist School’ from the 1960s onwards – a sociological silence. The traditional mainstream comparative education literature on the theme of ‘educated identity’ was mono-optical  – historically and sociologically deficient (Welch 1991; Cowen 1994). Given such theoretical distortions and sociological oversimplifications in the traditional comparative education literature, what then is the point of insisting that ‘educated identity’ is still a unit idea  – and also an ‘idea’ without which academic comparative education becomes even more incoherent as ‘a bloat of topics’ than it is at the moment? Peculiarly, the urgency of the point – made almost invisible by the Cold War – has been reinforced by the so-called Islamic State. In the Cold War period and in the 1960s, within George Bereday’s (1964) definition of ‘the northern crescent’ countries as the main concern of academic comparative education, the USSR was a tricky problem. How could ‘comparative education’ as a field of study, with values that stressed its own relativism, its empathic openness to foreign cultures and, later, its pride in being a neutral social science, deal with such an aberrant political culture as that created by the Stalinist Soviet State? Neutral science does not condemn poisonous snakes. Relativist comparative educationists try hard not to judge. ‘Models of man’ permitted this non-judgement. Within that epistemic modelling, the USSR and the United States, France and England could be given equal treatment – with nothing said about struggles for international power, the Gulag, or Empires and imperialist stratifications, past, present or future. Hence, in contrast to the nominal neutrality of ‘philosophical models’, rescuing the unit idea of ‘educated identity’ helps to rescue our moral vision. Some versions of ‘educated identity’, such as those embraced by ISIS or Taliban Afghanistan or apartheid South Africa (or refusals of any ‘educated identity’ to girls or young people who are studying – and who are attacked because they are studying), shock us back into moral judgement. Within the unit ideas, ‘educated identity’ is our moral fulcrum, a fulcrum we have not always been anxious to



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identify (Cowen 1973). Yes, we should discuss and contrast and empathize with a wide range of ‘educated identities’ with all of the sensitivities and relativities and flexibilities that commitment implies. In that sophisticated mode of work, our purpose is Verstehen:  a rather special form of ‘understanding’ educated identities. But the moral compass swings nervously when we are confronted with an ‘educated identity’ that contains definitions of moral principles and social futures which are unacceptable to us as educators (and not merely to us as individuals with a particular nationality or gender or as citizens of ‘a democracy’ or as members of a specific political party). As educators, we are sharply confronted with a challenge which has to do with changing patterns and flows of power: of what historic use are we if, as educators, we are not able to bear witness? As educators, we fail if we are not able to put to our students existential and educational questions that are more challenging than whether their research techniques are hard-edged, technically exact, à la mode, or whether is it axiomatically good to work for the international agencies. As educators we fail, if we do not draw to the attention of our students the theme of hubris – including our own intermittent commitment to being neutral social scientists influential in advising governments. It is politics, international and domestic and their intersection, which sharpen the comparative gaze and bring comparative education and unit ideas to life. Therefore, let us now put international and domestic politics and transfer and educated identity back together.

Bringing unit ideas to life, labelling the international and finding a way to think Politics make all unit ideas sociologically real  – and the ‘unit ideas’ of comparative education have a peculiar characteristic. With one exception, when they are made real, they move inter-nationally – and the unit idea which does not move inter-nationally (‘social context’) constrains and shapes, at the intersection of domestic and international politics, the mobility and some of the impact of the ‘unit ideas’ which (in their sociological forms) do move. For ­example  – although we have been remarkably silent about major territorial Empires (Cowen 2014c) – there is sufficient literature to alert us to the genesis of educated identities, and the morphologies of educational systems, within Empires where ‘domestic’ and international politics meet, sometimes stridently. There is considerable literature on the maintenance of imperial educated

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identities, their variations, their collapse and their post-imperial redefinitions (Clignet and Foster 1964; Mangan 1986; Cowen 1994, 2018d; Allender 2009; Madeira 2009; Klerides 2018; Silova and Palandjian 2018; Tavares 2018). Indeed, in a charming irony, Empires sometimes change the educated identity of academics themselves (Burton and Kennedy 2016). Mutatis mutandis, ‘the educational system’ can also be construed as mobile not just within Empires but also within particular theories – for example, world culture theory – which offer (contested) interpretations of how and why ‘the educational system’ spreads (Carney, Rappleye and Silova 2012; Schriewer 2012). There were also the wellknown historical examples of the intersection of domestic and international politics in the mobilities of educational systems: efforts, for example, to ‘copy’ the Prussian educational system, to ‘borrow’ the instructional system of Lancaster and Bell, to ‘transfer’ the US model of 6-3-3 schooling to Japan, to ‘import’ (and ‘export’) patterns of Soviet education into China in the 1950s. Notions of the State can themselves also be exported (e.g. the construction of the ‘communist bloc’ within East Europe). More recently there were efforts to export a version of ‘the democratic State’ (and educational reforms) to Afghanistan and Iraq. Notions of significant-time do move – indeed they are often expected to travel, as in the contrasts between secular and religious time embedded in the educational efforts of Christian missionaries in India in the nineteenth century or in notions of time embedded in 1960s American modernization theory. And space too moves. It expands and is made coherent with new ideologies (pax Romana, pax Britannica). It shrinks and ‘fractures’. Much of the space of the Spanish Empire mutated into what is now loosely called South America. The European Union is an example of the deliberate creation of new political space. The AustroHungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, East Germany and the USSR ‘collapse’. All these are examples of mobile ‘space’. Thus, to confirm: all of our unit ideas (with one exception) are mobile and all of the unit ideas (including ‘social context’) link with the intersection of domestic and international politics. That, surely, has to be good news. As comparative educationists, we specialize in ‘the international’, do we not? Yes, as comparative educationists, we do specialize in worrying about ‘the international’ and the ‘inter-national’. We give to those themes in our work a centrality and intellectual commitment that philosophers, sociologists, economists and even historians of education have not traditionally matched. And yes, we have for a couple of decades been confidently showing we have cracked the problem of ‘the international’. The theoretical point of departure for this work was good – the academic discourse of many first-rate scholars such as, illustratively, Appadurai, Applebaum and Robinson, Castells,



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Featherstone, Held, R.  Roberston, W.  I. Robinson, Sklair and Wallerstein. We took up ‘globalization’ as the way, for our times, ‘to read the global’ (Cowen 2000). Our own literature on ‘globalization’ became massive and metaphorically voracious  – like some sort of academic Black Hole attracting and swallowing flurries of concepts such as globalized knowledge, transnational villages, postindustrialized societies, information ages, globalized cultures, ends of epochs, ‘localization’, ‘glocalization’, ages of anxiety and even hints of ‘deglobalization’. It is not as if those committed to comparative education failed in vision. Good books (of slightly different kinds in terms of theoretical ambition), at least one good journal and handbooks – usually a hint that a major topic can be consolidated – were created (Burbules and Torres 2000; Zajda 2005; Spring 2009; Zajda and Rust 2009; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). However, there were two problems which emerged within comparative education in the subsequent decade. The smaller version of the problem was: what qualified as a ‘black swan’ in terms of ‘globalization’? Certainly, Iran resisted various forms of ‘modernization’ and reform efforts by the Shah – and has continued to insist on a singular identity under a new regime during the times loosely labelled ‘globalized’. Both Japan and Saudi Arabia have some of the important characteristics of ‘global’ players within conventional definitions of economic globalization, but it would be rash to claim that their political and core cultural systems have been strategically reconfigured by economic forces. Certainly, there was the Arab Spring and the implosion of Libya. But with what precision can or could these countries and events be interpreted symbolically as ‘black swans’ in terms of globalization and its educational relations? Narrations of ‘economic globalization’ have been offered and the general concept and its implications has become sharp enough to be a refutable hypothesis. Globalization and its educational relations have been massively discussed and illustrated, but the labels are so large and the confirmatory illustrations so multiple that it is difficult to assess if ‘exceptions’ are temporary phenomena  – or refutational (i.e. ‘black swans’). And the larger version of the problem has magnified the muddle. ‘Globalization’, as the concept began to be used by politicians and the media, became so nebulous that it explained almost everything and thus almost nothing. It is not easily possible to find a ‘black swan’ when, for the purposes of our work, the ‘white swan’ (globalization and its normal educational relations) has become miasmic.2 Currently, we are uneasy about whether the academictheoretical starting word  – the label for the world  – should be ‘globalization’ or ‘neoliberalism’. Would we be better off with populism, or postcoloniality, or ‘the South’? We are on the edge of having too many labels for the educational

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and social patterns of our times  – and there are already new candidates easily available (such as, ‘banal imperialism’, or ‘banal internationalization’, or ‘surveillance capitalism’). Thus, strategically, we are in danger of being confident about educational solutions but losing our grip on what we are seeing as ‘the problem’. We have the solution to what is a good education system: PISA has shown, on its own measures of quality, that the South Korean system is ‘better’ than the German (etc. etc.). But analytically  – that is, refusing to take as axiomatically true the definitions of the public good which PISA asserts (including the rewards that will follow from PISA-D) – what is the global problem which PISA solves in its strange definition of ‘education’? Certainly, we have a new stress on the need for nations and individuals to acquire what has been called ‘skills’; but do skills solve the problem of knowledge societies – or knowledge economies? Certainly, we now speak happily enough in theory-talk about time-space compression, but is that the theoretical aperçu which defines a core characteristic of globalization, or a side effect of the communicative possibilities of the internet, or something more complex than either? Certainly ‘neoliberal states’ or ‘market states’ are excellent at redefining the measurable efficiency of university systems but is this ‘solution’ aimed at coming to grips with globalization (or its contemporary younger cousin ‘internationalization’), or at meeting local managerial targets about what will translate as ‘impact’, or at constructing and servicing the publicity and student recruitment that tends to follow high rankings in inter-national university ranking systems? Oddly enough despite the clear warnings in some very famous phrasings of T. H. Marshall (1963), we have probably fallen into the trap of aiming at high theory and – on our ‘way to the stars’ – failing to keep the precision that permits us to relate ‘history, social structures and individual biographies’.3 Increasingly, and certainly in England, we may have hurried our doctoral students into what T.  H. Marshall called ‘the way to the sands’  – an overemphasis on empirical research and its techniques. However, we already have a reminder about why we wanted to ‘read the global’ in the first place and why we invented the conversations that we did invent. We already have access to the possibilities of creating middle-range theory which subsumes a remarkable amount of data in a ‘reading of the global’. What we have seen contemporaneously, while we were talking about economic globalization and education, is a partial, unevenly spread and complex redefinition of one of the unit ideas of comparative education. We have seen a redefinition of the State, although we have not tended to use that vocabulary. What we have done is to see – that is, to research, specify and illustrate in scholarly work – changing



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forms of the governance of educational systems. This has been done by scholars such as Alexiadou (2007); Lawn and Grek (2012); Nóvoa and Lawn (2002); and Ozga, Seddon and Popkewitz (2006). As indicated earlier, we have also seen the theme illustrated in relation to PISA by scholars such as Auld and Morris (2016); Cowen (2014a); Meyer and Benavot (2013); and Pereyra, Kotthoff and Cowen (2011). In other and very different words, what we have seen is ‘the evaluative State’ – the phrase and the original aperçu belong to Guy Neave (2009, 2012) – mutate and expand from the initial locus and nexus which Neave sketched: the Bologna Process and the nation state. The evaluative State is now generic and widespread; it is being framed by the intersection of politics at the domestic and international levels; and, startlingly, the evaluative State – this new version of a unit idea – creates a fascinating contemporary variant on another unit idea – transfer. Indeed this new version of the State, this layered in-between State with domestic and inter-national facets, makes active (i.e. gives sociological form to) another unit idea:  this in-between State carries out processes of ‘transfer and translation’ – for example in the reaction of Germany to PISA results (Ertl 2006) or in the enthusiastic embracement in England of the PISA ideology by Michael Gove4 (Morris 2016).5 Nor, at this level of middle-range theory, are the illustrations limited to a discussion of PISA. The illustrations can be looped back, not merely to illustrate the changing unit ideas of the State and ‘transfer’ but also to the conflicts over a third unit idea  – educated identity. A  rather large range of international institutions are offering or (there is an important political history to this motif, cf. the League of Nations) were offering notions of a good ‘international identity’; albeit the contemporary phrasing tends towards ‘global citizenship’ (with the ominous phrase ‘global competence’ creeping in). The literature is massive, but fortunately excellent analytical papers are available. Two remarkable papers taken together (Mannion et  al. 2011; Oxley and Morris 2013) map brilliantly the theoretical tensions and show the contradictions between the politics and the visions of the educated identity called ‘global’. There are of course disputes among academics – quite properly so – about how to interpret such a complex concept as global citizenship, but here the point which can be stressed is that the different charters, political responsibilities and policy agendas of international institutions (e.g. UNESCO, the World Bank, OECD) bias them towards construing different versions of educated identity. The confusions and crises begin – and the comparative education agenda snaps into scholarly focus and comparative education defines itself epistemically, ethically and

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politically  – when the specific forms of this unit idea move, that is, intersect with domestic politics to define new forms of education. On what terms do we ‘understand’ those?

Concluding motifs Thus, perhaps rather remarkably, we are seeing contemporary changes in three ‘unit ideas’: ●

●

●

We have new versions of ‘the State’: a State which is ‘in-between’ because it is shaped not by national motifs and ‘internal’ national political struggles, but by the intersection of international and domestic politics.6 We have a new and complex arena in which the unit idea of ‘transfer’ is visibly incorporating the theme of ‘who translates’ and – already perhaps with global measurements of university systems – we can see hints of local usages: strong domestications, that is, ‘transformations’. We have a very visible and long trajectory, especially post 1945 in the immediate search for principles and practices of peace; and, within the Cold War, the emergence and advocacy of new definitions of educated identity at the intersection of international and domestic politics; and in practice and currently, multiple and competing versions of good global ‘educated identity’ offered by the major international agencies.

The strategic concluding point is simple: at least three ‘unit ideas’ can be seen to be changing currently, and international political and economic relations were an important part in framing new versions – including ‘educated identity’ – of those unit ideas. A second concluding motif is the suggestion that the crucial entrée to this perception was a particular way of ‘reading the global’:  a strong and precise literature which traced new flows of power (in the governance of educational systems), rather than the high theory of ‘globalization’. A third concluding motif is that we can move onwards in revealing new forms of imperium.7 It has been suggested that a remapping of the sociological and political framing of new forms of educated identity is possible; that this is rooted in a heavy, albeit precise, stress on regional and inter-national political relations and their relation to education; and that this perspective offers a new way to think about two other unit ideas whose sociological form is rapidly changing: the State and ‘transfer’.



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Overall, however, this suddenly puts us in a very different place from the comfortable definitions of ourselves in our histories. Clearly, unit ideas are embedded in our history, but  – like an artist’s palette  – they are beautiful, promising, but inert. Unit ideas are what we paint with, but we are the artists – we choose the colours and create the picture. In less romantic terms: our ‘history’, which in part is our self-legitimation, traditionally emphasizes that we want to influence educational policy – we wish to be part of imperium. Whose? In which political circumstances? Our most traditional version of our ‘history’ emphasizes that we were getting close to creating a science of comparative education; one example of which was to be a science of predictable results that would follow from our grasp of method. Thus, ‘educational transfers’ would be successful. To whom would that science belong? And our traditional history emphasizes that we are good at thinking about educational policy – and not ‘education’. It may be time to tap the kaleidoscope and see if we can come up with some revisionist history which explores our relations with imperium – and, partially in counterpoint, we may be able to re-visualize an academic future for ourselves. The point is urgent: there is a difference between ‘bearing witness’ and having ‘impact’. And at the intersection of some forms of international and domestic politics and educational relations, in some societies, the roles are contradictory.

Notes 1 A mea culpa is in order. In my first sketch of the ‘unit ideas’ of comparative education (in Cowen 2002a) I used the word ‘culture’ instead of the phrase ‘social context’. The problem became that, while I could choose several meanings for culture (mores, ‘high culture’, ‘national culture’, belief systems, etc.), I could not stabilize a meaning which I could use crisply and analytically with the concept ‘transfer’. I began to think that the intellectual problem was better captured by the idea of ‘social embeddedness’. That phrase offered a hint about the possible difficulties of ‘extracting’ policies or institutions from one place and ‘inserting’ them elsewhere. However, I could not at that time pin the concept of relocation or ‘import’. A rather worrying vision kept getting in the way: were one to be constructing ‘a communist bloc’ or a ‘Roman Catholic bloc’ or a ‘knowledge economy bloc’, it would be very useful to have available a routinized social technology – an exact ‘geometry of insertion’ – for the one true policy of transformation that should be put in place and which would give predictable consequences. Finally, I decided (Cowen 2009a) that the phrase ‘social context’ was appropriate because it is wondrously vague and so resolves nothing. Thus it acts as an alarm bell, labelling a classic puzzle

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2

3

4 5

6

7

Identities and Education within traditional comparative education that will not go away and for which we have inadequate words (such as ‘variables’ or ‘culture’ or the even looser mantra of ‘context’, unqualified by adjectives). A second mea culpa is also proper. In my first sketch of the ‘unit ideas’ of comparative education (in Cowen, 2002a) I used the word ‘pedagogic identity’ instead of the phrase ‘educated identity’. I was wanting the idea of a ‘pedagogized’ identity to carry the meanings: formally taught within a process of careful socialization in specialized institutions, and accepted by many individuals within a systematic educative experience. Examples would include the Janissaries, Boy Scouts who went on to live as a Boy Scout should, successful candidates for the Komsomol, most members of the Foreign Legion and many graduates of Eton College. In 2009, I shifted to the less esoteric vocabulary of ‘educated identity’, which also avoids implications of an identity overdetermined by one very specific process (‘teaching’) within a range of formal educative experiences. It is a bit like watching the ballet ‘Swan Lake’. The narrative offered by the dancers is remarkably simple; but the story as it is usually captured by the stage backcloth is so darkly dramatic, so swirling with doom and disaster, that it is impossible to find coherence. Clearly, something bad is going to happen – but where is the beginning, the middle and the end? This vocabulary (‘history, social structures and individual biographies’) is taken from C. Wright Mills (1959), The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. Mr Gove’s title at that time, in other countries, would have been ‘Minister of Education’. We will have to wait for the long-term consequences (‘the transformations’, i.e. the domestications) of those transfers and translations. Those ‘transformations’ would complete the third layer in my version of the unit idea of ‘transfer’ – what I termed ‘The 3T Problem’ (Cowen 2009b). Of course this interpretation can rapidly be made more complex by invoking Davos, McKinsey, Russian oligarchs and so on. That is not however the strategic point which is being made here. The strategic point is simple but hitherto has not been simply framed: at least three ‘unit ideas’ can be seen to be changing, currently. And international political and economic relations were an important part in framing new versions – including ‘educated identity’ – of those ‘unit ideas’. Following Weber (see H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds (1946), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press), the word imperium would traditionally emphasize the theme of who commanded and punished. Here the sudden use of the term is intended to emphasize the theme of flows of power and making those (and, here, their educational consequences) as visible as possible – a specific version of bearing witness by scholarly work. This is a fairly common stance within academe (e.g. C. Wright Mills (1956), The Power Elite, New York: Oxford



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University Press, and many contemporary scholars in the social sciences); but as a stance, it can be suggested, not strenuously pursued within mainstream comparative education.

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Mangan, J. A. (1986), The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, London: Viking. Mannion, G., G. Biesta, M. Priestley and H. Ross (2011), ‘The Global Dimension in Education and Education for Global Citizenship: Genealogy and Critique’, Globalization, Societies and Education, 9(3–4): 443–56. Manzon, M. (2011), Comparative Education: The Construction of a Field, Hong Kong: Springer and Comparative Education Research Center, University of Hong Kong. Marshall, T. H. (1963), Sociology at the Crossroads, London: Heinemann. McLeod, J., N. Sobe and T. Seddon, eds (2018), World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, London: Routledge. Meyer, H.-D., and A. Benavot (2013), ‘Book Review: PISA, Power, and Policy: The Emergence of Global Educational Governance’, Comparative Education Review, 58(1): 185–8. Morris, P. (2016), ‘Education Policy, Cross-National Tests of Pupil Achievement and the Pursuit of World-Class Schooling: A Critical Analysis’, in An Inaugural Professorial Lecture, London: UCL Institute of Education Press. Müller, D. K., F. K. Ringer and B. Simon (1987), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neave G. (2009), ‘The Evaluative State as Policy in Transition: A Historical and Anatomical Study’, in R. Cowen and A. M. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 551–68, Dordrecht: Springer. Neave, G. (2012), The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-Engineering Higher Education in Western Europe: The Prince and His Pleasure, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Nisbet, R. A. (1967), The Sociological Tradition, London: Heinemann. Noah, H. J., and M. A. Eckstein (1969), Toward a Science of Comparative Education, New York: Macmillan. Nóvoa, A., and M. Lawn, eds (2002), Fabricating Europe: The Formation of an Education Space, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Oxley, L., and P. Morris (2013), ‘Global Citizenship: A Typology for Distinguishing Its Multiple Conceptions’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3): 301–25. Ozga, J., T. Seddon and T. Popkewitz, eds (2006), World Yearbook of Education 2006: Education Research and Policy: Steering the Knowledge-Based Economy, London: Routledge. Palomba, D. (2009), ‘Education and State Formation in Italy’, in R. Cowen and A. M. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 195–216, Dordrecht: Springer. Pereyra, M., H.-G. Kotthoff and R. Cowen, eds (2011), Pisa under Examination: Changing Knowledge, Changing Tests, and Changing Schools, Rotterdam: Sense in association with CESE.



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Peters, R. S. (1966), ‘The Philosophy of Education’, in J. W. Tibble (ed.), The Study of Education, 58–89, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Phillips, D. (2009), ‘Aspects of Educational Transfer’, in R. Cowen and A. M. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1061–78, Dordrecht: Springer. Phillips, D. (2018), Educating the Germans: People and Policy in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1949, London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, D., and K. Ochs, eds (2004), Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives, Oxford: Symposium. Rappleye, J. (2012), Educational Policy Transfer in an Era of Globalization, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard (2010), Globalizing Education Policy, London: Routledge. Schriewer, J., ed. (2012), ‘Reconceptualising the Global/Local Nexus: Meaning Constellations in the World Society’ [Special Issue], Comparative Education, 48(4): 411–22. Shibata, M. (2005), Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation: A Comparative Analysis of Post-War Education Reform, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Silova, I. (2009), ‘Varieties of Educational Transformation: The Post-Socialist States of Central/Southeastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union’, in R. Cowen and A. M. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 295–320, Dordrecht: Springer. Silova, I., ed. (2010), Post-Socialism Is Not Dead: (Re-)reading the Global in Comparative Education, Bingley: Emerald. Silova, I., and G. Palandjian (2018), ‘Soviet Empire, Childhood and Education’, Revista Española de Educación Comparada, 31 (enero-junio): 147–71. Sobe, N., and J. Kowalczyk (2018), ‘Context, Entanglement and Assemblage as Matters of Concern in Comparative Education Research’, in J. McLeod, N. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven SpaceTimes in Education: Historical Sociologies of Methods and Practices, 197–204, London: Routledge. Spring, J. (2009), Globalization of Education, New York: Routledge. Steiner-Khamsi, G., and F. Waldow, eds (2012), World Yearbook of Education 2012: Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education, London: Routledge. Symaco, L. P., and C. Brock, eds (2013), ‘The Significance of Space, Place and Scale in the Study of Education’ [Special Issue], Comparative Education, 49(3). Tavares, H. M. (2018), ‘Modernity, Identity and Citizenship: Re-thinking Colonial Situations and Their Temporal Legacies’, in J. McLeod, S. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, 179–93, London: Routledge. Vaughan, M., and M. Archer (1971), Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France 1789–1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Positional Identities of East Asian Mobile Academics in UK Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Internationalization and Equality and Diversity Terri Kim

Introduction Background to and rationale for the research The number of East Asian students studying in Western universities has continued to increase, far exceeding other nationalities. East Asian students make up the largest group of international students in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) marked by the literal visibility of ‘East Asian’ faces on many campuses. Universities UK (2017a) reports that East Asian students are responsible for a large proportion of more than £25 billion a year that international students contribute to the UK economy. Overall internationalization has become a policy for the export and import of all sorts of market-driven university activities. Contemporaneously internationalization is like the earlier buzzword, ‘globalization’: a word linked to a certain way of thinking. Among other things, internationalization invites some reflection about who is ‘a minority’:  when and where and why (Kim 2019). For instance, despite the strong semiotic and financial impact of the presence of international East Asian (IEA) students in UK HE, the number of East Asian academics working in UK universities has not been significant. Furthermore, their positional identities and contributions are not really known despite the rise of identity politics and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policy amid growing concerns about inequality and the lack of diversity in UK HE.

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In policy terms, I  argue that there is ‘disparity’ between the two sets of neoliberal policy discourses in UK HE:  that is, the neoliberal marketframed internationalization policy for ‘excellence’ on the one hand and the overgeneralized equality/diversity policy for ‘inclusion’ on the other. The equality and diversity issues in UK HE have been addressed quite separately from the internationalization policies and practices so far. However, neither of these policy agendas have given enough attention to the non-UK academic staff working in UK universities, whose number (including the European academics) is estimated at 61,580 while the number of UK academic staff is 143,335 (HESA 2018). The proportion of non-UK academic staff is currently over 30 per cent and is likely to increase further (Universities UK 2017b). Furthermore, the UK’s Brexit debate and final decision makes the nexus between internationalization and EDI policy urgent for UK HE. Overall, despite the substantial number of non-UK academics working in UK universities, there is still a paucity of knowledge on the interface between ‘international’ and ‘minority ethnic’ academic identities, and their respective or entwined experiences. Furthermore, besides the racial profile and representation in numeric terms, it is also important to understand the sociology of racial/ ethnic relations inside the HE sector. It’s been often critiqued that the EDI policy and support networks in UK HE focusing on individual academics’ career progression in general start with the ‘deficit’ model, stereotyping black and minority ethnic (BME) academics for lack of success in attaining positions of leadership, and try ‘fixing the individual’ while overlooking the broader environment which also plays a crucial role in the potential progression of BME staff (Morrow and Ross 2015; Fook et al. 2019; Johns, Fook and Nath 2019). Against that background, the chapter examines (1) how East Asian mobile academics make sense of their cross-border mobility and current work conditions, and (2)  how they have been subjected, and have subjected themselves, to the neoliberal discourses and practices of ‘excellence’ and ‘inclusion’ in UK HE and (3) its implications for contemporary identity politics in HE – that create a new ‘Imaginary East Asia’ in comparative perspective. The following section will look at the representation and identity of East Asian academics in the diversifying contexts of UK HE.

Diversity, ethnicity and discrimination in British academia According to the McGregor-Smith Review:  ‘Race in the Workplace Report’ (2017), one in eight people of working age in the UK is from BME backgrounds.



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It also found that BME workers tend to be more qualified than white ethnic groups. However, they are less likely to be promoted – as the fact that only one in sixteen management positions in the UK is held by an ethnic minority person demonstrates. Barriers exist. Similarly, the state of the BME academic staff in UK universities as a whole can be summarized in two points (1)  a significant under-representation at senior levels and (2) an ethnicity pay gap which is also entwined with gender and nationality (Croxford 2018; Sian 2019). Time and again, it has been reported that BME academics often have more detours in their career progression and that they needed to work harder and to meet higher thresholds for promotion (Bhopal and Jackson 2013; Bhopal and Brown 2016; Fook et al. 2019). However, according to the McKinsey & Co. Report (Hunt et  al. 2018), companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 per cent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians (companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 per cent more likely). Diversity at board level was also found to be financially beneficial: companies with the most ethnically diverse boards were 43 per cent more likely to outperform on profit. This would add £24 billion a year to the UK economy each year – or 1.3 per cent of GDP. Overall it can be surmised that getting people of different ages, genders and backgrounds together can encourage them to come up with different solutions and out-of-the-box thinking (Lorenzo et al. 2018). In UK universities, however, BME staff are half as likely as whites to hold one of those top roles (ECU 2015). Currently there is only one East Asian ViceChancellor in the UK HE sector – Max Lu, V-C of the University of Surrey, who is also international (Chinese Australian). The proportion of BME academics among the full professors is 8.5 per cent, in which BME male professors 6.5 per cent, BME female professors 1.9 per cent, and only 0.6 per cent of UK professors were black (Advance HE 2018). When we study the gender balance among BME academics, racial disparity is even more apparent: 23.9 per cent of professors were female. Of these female professors, BME women make up just 1.6 per cent and black female just 0.5 per cent (HESA 2018). There are, of course, factors other than race/ethnic or gender identity such as class, nationality and religion. The editor of The Good Immigrant (2016), Nikesh Shukla says, ‘But diversity is the wrong word – diversity is the celebration of otherness, often filtered through a white male perspective’ (cited in Parmar 2016). For Wei Ming Kam, ‘being a model minority is code for being on perpetual probation’ as well as denying an individual’s complexity. According to Reni Eddo-Lodge: ‘It is up to you to make

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your own version of blackness in any way you can – trying on all the different versions, altering them until they fit’ (cited in Parmar 2016). Hence, my curiosity-driven research inquiry of the IEA academics and their positional identities began against the conventional approaches to the ‘BME’ EDI policy discourse.

Methodological approaches: A note on comparative reflexivity This research is a by-product of the Advance HE/Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE) commissioned project, tracking the impact of Diversifying Leadership Programme on BME participants and their institutions (Fook et  al. 2019). Most of BME participants in the programme reported experiences of frustration, awareness of racism, discrimination and hidden pathways to formal progression in academia. However, a few participants reported not perceiving these negative experiences, which they attributed to their cultural background. Interestingly, they happen to be IEA participants (ibid.). For this research I interviewed seventeen East Asian international academics (four males and thirteen females) who are working in UK universities, and two of them were the Advance HE project participants and the fifteen academics were interviewed through snowball sampling in the period of 2017–19, whose nationalities are Chinese (three), Chinese Australian (one), Chinese Malay British (one), Chinese Filipino (one), Japanese (three), Korean (three), Korean American (two), Taiwanese (one), Taiwanese Canadian (one) and Vietnamese (one). My research adopts a narrative-constructivist heuristic methodology and employs a ‘comparative gaze’ (Kim 2014) to unpack international power relations entailed in HE and also embodied as an internalized ‘imagined West’ in the East Asian academics in UK universities. Identity politics has become a basis of a normative research industry nowadays and there is a danger of doing self-sustaining advocacy research. Rey Chow (1993) had warned about the danger of ‘sanctification of victimization’ among ‘Third-World minority intellectuals’ based in the Western academy. She suggests that as long as the Third-World intellectuals or minority diasporas remain within that boundary of exotica of victims, the First-World scholars would continue to enjoy the unconscious ethnocentrism that remains intact in this rhetoric of exaggeration and sanctification of victimization.



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In a similar vein, Victor Ray (2016) critiqued a general perception of ‘mesearch’ as a particular issue for scholars of ‘colour’ in the social sciences and humanities: that is, the underlying bias of people of colour as incapable of ‘objectivity’, while certifying the objectivity of the speaker. As Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi (2001: 126) suggested, mainstream sociology is ‘fundamentally connected to Whites’ common sense on racial matters’ and social scientists tend to follow understandings of racism in their analysis of inequality as relegated to a secondary status (Mulinari and Neergaard 2017). Overall, it is surmised that the dominant position of white people in both social and epistemic worlds has allowed the voices of BME people to be appropriated by researchers (Ray 2016). Relations of dominance are built into what we think of as legitimate topics of study – as eloquently and powerfully expressed by bell hooks: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (bell hooks 1990: 241–3)

In terms of positioning, however, Jean Paul Sartre saw the ‘gaze’ as the battleground for the self to define and redefine itself. The binary nature of the gaze – that is, mutual gaze interaction – implies that the positioning becomes a ‘relationship’ in which someone enters: ‘Insofar as I am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved’ (Sartre 1956: 110). I argue that this notion is the obverse and reverse of the same coin, in terms of simultaneous mastery and submission. Hence there is a need for cultivating a ‘comparative gaze’ (Kim 2014). All researchers, regardless of their backgrounds, should be aware of and open about how their social positions (both positioning and being positioned) or how personal biographies influence their assumptions and the process of subjectification, through which one becomes a subject, entailing a necessary vulnerability to the Other (Butler 1997; Davies 2006). For instance, to be a woman is to stand in a complex set of social (and hierarchical) relations to men (mutatis mutandis for men) (Haslanger 2017). Hall (1996) also suggested that ‘identities are often “positions” imposed upon subjects who knowingly accept that identities are merely “representations” that are always constructed across a “lack”, across a division, from the place of the Other, and thus can never be

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adequate – identical – to the subject processes which are invested in them’ (Hall 1996: 6). There was significant recognition that research arising from a shared background and the personal experience of the researcher could be especially valuable, which gave rise to a whole approach called ‘heuristic research’ (Moustakas 1981). Heuristic inquiry developed by Moustakas (1981) is a search for the discovery of meaning and essence in significant human experience. It requires a ‘subjective process of reflecting, exploring, sifting, and elucidating the nature of the phenomenon under investigation’ (Douglass and Moustakas 1985: 40). The heuristic approach is an adaptation of phenomenological inquiry, but explicitly acknowledges the involvement of the researcher, to the extent that the lived experience of the researcher becomes the main focus of the research. Indeed, what is explicitly the focus of the approach is the transformative effect of the inquiry on the researcher’s own experience. (Hiles 2001: n.p.)

Taking this notion of mutually influential ‘comparative gaze’ and ‘heuristic inquiry’, my research analysis is presented and discussed in the following section.

East Asian academics and a ‘perpetual foreigner’ syndrome When we look at identity politics in UK HE, there is lack of East Asian representation. The ways in which race/ethnicity is analysed politically are also crucial to identity. As reported in the Advance HE/LFHE report (Fook et  al. 2019), however, being forced into a binary choice about identity (BME or white) is a short-sighted and completely oversimplified way of categorizing people and their experiences. In my research, I  have tried to highlight some of the complexities and therefore the need to develop appropriate categories to capture the diversity of experiences and identities found in my sampled East Asian academics. I argue that in the existing BME racial equality and diversity policy framework, East Asian academics are perpetual ‘others’ from within  – often voluntarily. In fact, East Asian academics seem to be edging selves out of discussions on racism in contrast to their experiences of micro-aggression  – such as misrecognition, infantalization, undermining leadership calibre or academic achievements. Most of the IEA academics, whom I know or have interviewed, admit that they have never participated in the BME support network activities in their universities. But why?



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I myself am an East Asian (Korean) female academic, who came to London from Seoul, Korea, initially as an international student for postgraduate studies. After my PhD in comparative education under the supervision of Professor Robert Cowen and the late Professor Jagdish Gundara at the Institute of Education, University of London, I  worked for OECD CERI as a research consultant in London/Paris briefly and did my postdoc in international relations at LSE in London, and then worked as Brain Korea 21 Contract Professor at Seoul National University (SNU) before returning to London in 2002. So far I  have been working in UK universities for the last eighteen years as well as having lived in London for twenty-seven years. However, I  myself had been quite indifferent to racial/ethnic identity issues in UK HE, before I moved to my current institution. My former employing university UEL is a flagship institution for widening participation and social justice  – the best university reducing inequalities in the UK and the second best in the world (Times Higher Education, 4 August 2020), where the majority of students are BME (67 per cent) with many of them being first-generation university students. This is higher than the sector average which is approximately 24 per cent (Wilson and Matysova 2019). Interestingly, however, there is hardly any East Asian student or staff at UEL – a big contrast to the UCL Institute of Education, for instance, my alma mater, in which I am serving as an honorary senior research associate. At UCL East Asians are the majority among the BME students and staff (UCL 2014). At UEL I have worked as reader and then professor of comparative higher education for the last seven years and served on the Racial Equality Committee. I have contributed to the process of UEL application for the Racial Equality Charter. I co-led the Advance HE/LFHE research project on Diversifying Leadership in HE (2016–18) as well. An overarching framework of my research was the concept of intersectionality to be mindful of how different aspects of a person’s social personae (with international and minority ethnic backgrounds) might interact to bring about different experiences and perceptions of equality and diversity. This was borne out to some extent by points made in the literature regarding the evidence of intersectionality of nationality, race/ethnicity and gender imbalance. BME international academics are less than half as likely as white international academics to hold professorial leadership positions (Arday 2017). On the other hand, Chinese academics (without discernment of nationality) are overrepresented in the senior roles compared with other ethnic groups (Royal Society 2014) given the proportion of the Chinese population in the UK population as less than 1 per cent. However, as mentioned earlier, we do not know the case

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of East Asian academics who may not be of Chinese ethnicity – for example, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and so on. In my research I  have addressed the problem of the one-size-fits-all BME policy framework for Equality and Diversity and how this framework may have had an unintended consequence of alienating East Asian academics that the Equality and Diversity policy seeks to include and protect, in principle (Kim and Ng 2019). The following interview excerpts from my research depict how IEA academics are positioning themselves: I know I  am being categorised in the BME group, but I  don’t think I  am the short end of the stick. I  am not part of [that history of] repression and discrimination … Class distinction is more significant than race/ethnicity but the wide spectrum of diversity within the BME category has been elided into the black and poor widening participation beneficiaries. (IEA 1, male, Southeast Asian) When people casually ask if the bullying I  experienced in my previous university was due to racism, I  strongly deny. I  think such an attribute is a psychological projection and oversimplifies the complex situation … I don’t really define myself in racial, ethnic terms. I don’t have a ‘chip on my shoulder’, which is the term I actually heard from a fellow ‘BME’ colleague recently. On the contrary, I  enjoy being a foreigner here. I  find my insideoutsider position useful for my academic work and life in general. (IEA 2, female, Northeast Asian) Why do I  need to be bothered about my ethnicity that is not related to my academic work? I  don’t want to spend time on racial politics. I  really don’t think the BME policy package based on racial ethnic categories will help my academic career progression. I like the freedom to define myself. I don’t need to follow the game. For the moment, I enjoy not being categorised … I believe in meritocracy. There are just individual attributes, individual choices and individual disadvantages. (IEA 3, female, Northeast Asian)

Another IEA academic (IEA 4)  affirms that he had never been professionally discriminated against in the UK. He believes that the BME categorization, in which he had been included without consent or consultation, has prompted him to imagine himself as a BME member in playing a role in public events inside and outside his university, where he has been invited to speak ‘as his university’s only BME professor’. However, he thinks the BME identity is contrived and artificial. He firmly believes that his ethnicity played no role in his award of a university chair where he was required to fulfil the same requirements as other applicants regardless of ethnicity (Kim and Ng 2019: 105).



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In the UK, there is no affirmative action in recruitment and promotion – in contrast to the United States. This is very likely associated with different patterns of colonialism and different patterns of voluntary migration. For comparison, the following section will provide the US example of ‘affirmative action’ applied to minority ethnic academics and the case of East Asian Americans.

Affirmative action and the model minority myth for East Asian Americans: Being a victim of its own success In the United States, East Asians have been typically perceived as a ‘model minority’  – as compared with the ideational legacy of the ‘yellow peril’ (Kim and Ng 2019). The United States and the ‘Golden Mountain’ in the mid-1880s were very attractive to the Chinese and other East Asians; but far from finding prosperity in the United States, Chinese and East Asian immigrants settled in an environment of discrimination and resentment. The anti-East Asian propaganda then led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan of 1907 (Tchen and Yeats 2014). In the twentieth century, the harsh treatment of the Japanese Americans during the war  – the lawful internment of innocent Japanese Americans during the early 1940s  – was somewhat balanced by the post-1945 political relations of the United States with Japan, which permitted the construction of ‘a model minority’ of East Asian Americans within the domestic context of the United States since the 1960s onwards (Kim 2019; Kim and Ng 2019). All in all, the American public perceptions of East Asians have been distinct from other racial/ethnic minorities in the United States, typically stereotyping East Asian characteristics initially perceived as political pariahs in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. American public perceptions of East Asian immigrants have drastically changed during the second half of the twentieth century to stereotype them as paragons of scholarly success  – hard-working, good at math and science, submissive and keeping their heads down and so forth. Such a model minority myth, however, has served to isolate and pit East Asian Americans against other minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics, and ironically may lead to a new form of the ‘yellow peril’ anxiety contemporaneously (Kim and Ng 2019). In line with the model minority myth, Affirmative Action in the United States (which gives special rights of hiring or advancement to certain ethnic minorities to make up for past discrimination against that minority) has been controversial and challenged in several high-profile court cases since it was

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enacted in 1961 (Kramer 2019) and it was under fire again recently by a group of East Asian American students who sued Harvard University for allegedly discriminating against them and rejecting them for their race. Students for Fair Admissions argued that students of East Asian descent have the strongest academic records and yet receive the lowest scores on personal ratings, which score applicants on traits such as ‘courage’, ‘likability’ and ‘positive personality’.1 Similarly, the US Justice Department investigation of Yale University admission procedures has concluded that Yale has been discriminating against applicants to its undergraduate program based on their race and national origin. East Asian American and white students have ‘only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials’ (Balsamo, 13 August 2020). Supporting this line of arguments, Glenn Loury (the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown in the United States, who was the first black tenured professor of economics in the history of Harvard University at the age of 33 in 1982) talks to the Chronicle of Higher Education about his views on race, ethics and Affirmative Action: Don’t judge us by a different standard. Don’t lower the bar! Why are you lowering the bar? What’s going on there? Is that about guilt or pity? … We’re sliding into a dispensation where we concede that blacks can’t compete academically, so we configure things to achieve titular representation … Equality is the only legitimate long-term goal – racial equality, not head-counting. I’m talking about equality of dignity, respect, standing, accomplishment, achievement, honor … We’re content with representation as distinct from achievement … The story of Asian-American achievement in this country is extremely powerful, and a reflection of the openness of American institutions. If you’re African-American and you’re in the top 20 per cent of the applicant pool, you have a more than 50 per cent chance of getting admitted to Harvard. If you’re Asian-American and in the top 20 per cent, you have a 5 per cent chance of getting admitted. (Glenn Loury, interviewed by Evan Goldstein (2019), Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 June 2019)

However, in the UK HE sector, neither a model minority myth about East Asians nor Affirmative Action exist. The dominant policy discourse in the UK HE has been structured around the internationalization notably with the rapidly increasing number of international Chinese students and the domestic EDI policy with the BME category such as BME students’ attainment gap, BME staff pay gap and the BME under-representation in senior roles on the whole.



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International power relations entailed in HE and embodied as an internalized ‘imagined West’ among IEA academics All of the IEA academics interviewed in my research find the BME framework for EDI inappropriate to them because of its over-simplistic binary category. They did not really think of themselves in those terms. The following interviewee (IEA 5), who initially came to the UK after she gained her first degree in her country of origin, narrates her recent experience of restructuring and redundancy: Looking back, it was both positive and negative. It made my move to a more established institution and enabling environment but the whole experience during restructuring was demotivating. Frustrating to see how prevalent neoliberal ideology and marketisation of the higher education institutions have become in recent years. Too much teaching that blocked focused time for research was the main problem that I faced for more than a decade. It was a structural problem rather than a personal or programme specific … My nationality is British now; so I am only an ethnically foreign academic. I had numerous scholarships and great support in postgraduate studies and had a solid foundation and training in teaching. But in terms of balancing teaching with research, I had to work my way through barriers and obstacles myself. (IEA 5, female, Northeast Asian)

Throughout the interview, she (IEA 5) did not use any of the typical words used in the EDI policy narratives such as ‘victim’ or ‘discriminated’. By contrast, the Advance HE/LFHE longitudinal study (Fook et al. 2019) reported that most of the sampled BME people identified strongly with the BME EDI policy framework and the implied BME experiences of racism and discrimination, even though none of them actually liked the BME labelling per se. To my interview question, ‘what insights and recommendations would you want to pass on to fellow minority academics who are seeking academic careers in UK HE today?’, her (IEA 5) answer was straightforward and neutral: Make sure that your research outputs are clearly outstanding. Things that are quantifiable such as REF outputs will be your main assets. (IEA 5, female, Northeast Asian)

Another IEA academic (IEA 6, male, Southeast Asian) confirms that ‘productivity’ is a part of his sense-making not only because of his cultural upbringing but also because he is consciously aware of the public perception of him pigeonholed as a ‘hard-working’ East Asian. He thinks the two dynamics shaped his positional

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identity. He (IEA 6) asserts that any cultural minority person would understand that they need to exert extra efforts to learn the local rules of the host society. He says he enjoys learning the British academic culture, the British way of socializing – for example, having ‘British small talk’, learning to become a good colleague in British academia. A Chinese academic (IEA 7, male) who is originally from Beijing and now works as a senior lecturer and leading a research group in a UK (post92) university says that there are many Chinese academics in his university – including at least six Chinese full professors: However, no Chinese ethnicity-based network group meeting has been set up in my university. Chinese academics are all working well individually. I  don’t think about EDI issues in relation to my academic career development in the UK. I  don’t feel that I  am treated differently because of my Chinese ethnicity or nationality. I believe in meritocracy. If I improve my academic performance, I will get promotion. (IEA 7, male)

About his ethnicity and nationality, he thinks there is some competitive advantage: I think there is a space created by and for Chinese academics in UK universities. Chinese people are more welcome than other minority ethnic people here. Chinese academics are perceived as cleverer. There is no particular negative bias towards Chinese academics in UK universities. Overall, I think there are more positive stereotypes of Chinese (and East Asian academics, in general), which helps. (IEA 7, male)

In terms of international academic migration, a senior international Chinese Australian academic (IEA 8, female) explains her experience and opinion: My partner and I felt that we had achieved all we could in Australia and were looking for new challenges. We moved to the UK about 10 years ago, and 5 years after that spent 2 years working in Canada. We moved to Canada because we wanted to experience North America, but found that we missed the UK terribly, so moved back 3 years ago. However, when I compare my experience here to what colleagues from the USA say, it appears that their system uses much more positive discrimination to ensure that people of non-white backgrounds attain places of seniority and leadership. (IEA 8, female)

This professor has moved back to the United States eventually to take up a senior leadership position in a major university. In terms of new knowledge creation, she (IEA 8) relates her positional identity to epistemic advantage:



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I think my marginal background has been helpful in assisting me to see other perspectives more readily, and therefore to more readily question established or taken-for-granted viewpoints (including my own) as well. In that sense I think having a marginal background has made me more critical, and able to appreciate the influence of dominant thinking. (IEA 8, female)

She eloquently explains her position in the intersection of internationalization and racial equality and diversity: I feel foreign again now, in a way, as I try to champion issues of diversity at my university, but I have little official role or authority, despite my own background and academic expertise in this matter. I feel like I am still trying to do things unofficially, and from the margins, which in some ways is how people from marginal backgrounds have to operate to get what they want done … From my experience in the UK, I would say that there is not near enough systematic harnessing of this experience, and I suspect that much of this happens informally, on the initiative of the foreign academics themselves. (IEA 8, female)

Another IEA female academic (originally from Northeast Asia, IEA 9) answers my question if foreign academics can make distinctive contributions to the internationalization of universities and new knowledge creation, by saying, ‘yes, but as far as these do not challenge existing values of universities which are often embedded in Eurocentric knowledge production’ (IEA 9). Unlike many other IEA academics whom I know or have interviewed, she is an active member of the Race Equality Steering Group in her university (a Russell Group university). She acknowledges that she is constantly witnessing intercultural tensions, the hierarchy of cultures, and so forth. She thinks her position as an IEA academic working in UK HE is very marginalized but to some extent this was partly her choice of subjects for research – as a specialist in gender and politics. Overall, she emphasizes that she occupies a ‘unique position, which does not fit perfectly into the existing categories’ (IEA 9, female, Northeast Asian). Among the seventeen East Asian academics interviewed in my research, those from the New World (Chinese Australian, Taiwanese Canadian and Korean American) and from a social sciences background (especially sociology) were more critically aware of the EDI issues in UK HE, referring to the literature on institutional racism. In other words, it was perhaps easier for them to integrate structural analyses of the UK HE EDI policy and lived experiences into their positional identities than those who had been brought up in East Asia and/ or who are natural scientists. It can be surmised that East Asian academics

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who were raised in an East Asian society and culture, where they were seen as mainstream/majority, are not accustomed to being otherized; nor would their positional identities necessarily benefit from being labelled as such. Overall, the positional identities of East Asian academics working in UK universities tend to be not associated with the common stereotyping of BME positions as ‘victims’, but instead they assume (and even take advantage of) the image of the foreign. They are highly motivated and proactively complying with the neoliberal corporate norms and practices in universities, which promote ‘performativity’ and ‘excellence’. However, this does not necessarily mean that their experiences in pursuing academic careers in UK HE have been all smooth and positive. Nevertheless, they would not acknowledge their sense of marginalization. Many of them did not want to talk about their political stance in public either, saying they do not want to be seen as a ‘trouble maker’.

Analysis: Making a new prototype So far, I have presented selected snapshots of positional identities of East Asian academics against the backdrop of the internationalization of HE and the BME EDI policy in the UK. The selected East Asian self-positioning narratives indicate that the existing policy framework may undermine the career ambitions of some East Asian academics who do not feel related to the mainstream BME narratives and prefer to act independently. Some commonalities among the IEA academics found in my research are: ●

●

●

●

●

Pride (no stigma) in their ethnic, national, cultural, civilizational entities. Strong belief in meritocracy. Strong ‘resilience’ and ‘flexibility’ in pursuing academic careers in the UK as well as internationally. Strong individuality in their institutions – most of them, except one, have not joined the BME racial equality and diversity network group, while actively engaging in the mainstream networks and developing significant international networks – not necessarily certain race/ethnicity-based. Keeping the ‘low-profile’ nature of ambidexterity: that is, socially passive-loyal and yet individually pro-active to survive and thrive (Kim and Ng 2019).

I argue that such common attributes identified among the IEA academics in UK universities resonate with the classic Confucian attributes (Kim 2009), as listed below:

●

●

●

●

●

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Revering the existing social order. Believing in meritocracy – that is, believing that anyone who survived the rigour of study and exams could be upwardly mobile. A high level of aspiration and attainment. Emphasis on self-cultivation to determine one’s proper position in the network of social relationships and to behave properly according to one’s position. Emphasis on individual accountability, diligence, thrift, cooperation and loyalty to one’s group/organization.

Here I would not wish to overgeneralize my research finding but it is probable that East Asian academics’ self-accountability and strong belief in meritocracy are still very Confucian value-laden. However, when both the internationalization and EDI policies in HE promote a neoliberal normative way of mobilizing social agents (Davies 2005; Ball 2012; Joseph 2013), where individuals must plan, produce and accomplish their professional career development in the ethos and structure of the enterprise form, IEA academics’ self-defined positions seem to fit in well with this agenda – the obvious point to emphasize the possibility of ‘Confucian-neoliberal’ attributes.

Confucian-neoliberal attributes to the positional identities of IEA academics Given the expectation of individual choice, competition and accountability in the neoliberal system of higher education in the UK and many other countries around the world nowadays, academics need to negotiate their ways. For foreign (East Asian) academics, this is often the case in the absence of tangible cultural guidance and social norms. They are subjected, and have subjected themselves often proactively, to the new structures of power relations in their adopted society, which are configured in racial/ethnic/gendered relations – as narrated by the official EDI policy discourses in UK HE. According to Joseph (2013), ‘resilience’ fits with a neoliberal mode of governmentality because it supports the idea of the neoliberal subject as autonomous and responsible (Joseph 2013:  40). Given the contemporary neoliberal regime in UK HE, most East Asian academics, whom I  have encountered and/or interviewed for this research, preferred to be recognized as an individual outlier rather than as a BME victim or a model minority. They do not participate in ‘identity politics’ based on their racial/ethnic backgrounds.

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Furthermore, many of them – except one – have not been actively engaged in issues of gendered discrimination either, even though they originally came from gender discriminatory countries such as Japan and Korea.2 When they faced micro-aggression, many of them said, they would perceive it at face value rather than interpret it as a form of ‘racism’. Some attributed it to certain individual shortcomings, jealousy, or cultural misunderstandings  – instead of using the broadly defined term called ‘racism’. When they were denied promotion, many of them focused on their own shortfalls rather than psychologizing the outcomes by referring to ‘racial/ethnic discrimination’. There were, of course, individual variations in experiencing and dealing with micro-aggression in the course of their transnational academic mobility and career progression. However, what is common among the East Asian academics whom I  know and/or have interviewed is a strong belief in meritocracy and social possibilities of success beyond conventional boundaries; hence they want appropriate support for their talents rather than collective bargaining based on racial/ethnic identity politics. They keep the low profile, positioning themselves as socially passive-loyal and individually pro-active in career development (Kim and Ng 2019). Overall, I think it is worth giving attention to such commonalities among the East Asian international academics. An idea which needs further exploration – not least given the latest wave of ‘identity politics’ in higher education – is the possibility of ‘Confucian-neoliberal’ attributes embodied in the IEA academics.

Conclusion The case of IEA academics discussed here is indicative of how different people experience diversity, and the implications of being invisible within the dominant minority narratives advocated in the racial equality and diversity policy. Different people, from different BME backgrounds, respond differently to the BME label – for example, most notably academics of Chinese/East Asian backgrounds did not identify as being ‘black’ (Fook et al. 2019). These cultural differences, often exemplified in ways of communicating, or in how to socialize, can be quite significant in how and what culturally appropriate styles of leadership (for a minority person) are developed. The question of identity is also important given the context of how and when peoples’ identities are formed. In terms of minority identities, it would be equally important to recognize what ‘advantages’ minority people have experienced, as



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these might also form a crucial aspect of their identities and to explore the terms of which international mobile/migrant academics feel considerable pride in their ethnic, national, cultural, civilizational entities. What are their attributes to confidence, to success? This is as important a question as asking about the historical and corrosive and long-term effects of colonialism and racial segregation, for example, in the United States, but also racial prejudice in the UK – very marked after 1945; and the contemporary irritations about migration  – a point of sharp importance given the remarkable cultural and political muddle of Brexit in the UK and the Trump anti-immigration policy and the ongoing trade war between the United States and China (Kim 2019). Geopolitics is now getting in the way, as the Trump government intensifies its restrictions on Chinese businesses and citizens as part of its broader trade war. ‘China Initiative’ – a program launched in late 2018 by the US Department of Justice  – aims to combat economic espionage. It is reported that Chinese espionage is not just taking place against traditional targets like the defence and intelligence agencies but also against targets like research labs and universities. Developments affecting higher education include visa limits for Chinese graduate students in high-tech fields to one year (from five years), investigations and calls to close Confucius Institutes, bans against research funding from Chinese telecom companies, revising the US federal funding guidelines, especially the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policies, and FBI surveillance on Chinese researchers (Yu and Coco 2019). The increasingly hostile atmosphere, after the NIH’s recent crackdown on Chinese-funded scholars, and high-profile blunders when bringing spying charges against ethnically Chinese scientists, has sparked accusations of racism. There are mounting criticisms that Chinese scholars and students are being exclusively and unfairly treated based on their ethnicity (Lee 2019). In a March letter to Science magazine, a group of ethnically Chinese scientists accused the United States of engaging in ‘racial profiling’ (Yu and Coco 2019). From a comparative perspective, it raises an urgent question about fears and anxiety as a recurring pattern in history and its implications for contemporary transnational academic mobility and identity politics in HE and international relations. It is important to understand an ‘imaginary East Asia’ and more specifically the so-called ‘China threat’ embedded in Western societies then and now, and also constantly being re-created and transmitted through East Asian international mobile academics in the comparative gaze – given their specific intersectional experiences in crossing many borders and boundaries. As Binna

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Kandola (2018) notes, prejudice in general and racism in particular are not static, but they evolve; racism, like a virus, mutates, which makes it harder to articulate by being deeply embedded not only in our traditions and institutions but also in our unconscious communication and embodied knowledge. I argue that despite this legacy, East Asian ethnonational and cultural norms have now gained a new recognition and rationality in the rise of East Asian economic power (Cox 2012; Nougayrède 2017; Khanna 2019; Kim and Ng 2019). Although these norms are strong and have deviated from the Western hegemonic narratives, the ways in which this meta-narrative of change (in the notion of ‘Confucian Capitalism’ and the ‘Developmental State’ model of the twentieth century) is translated into the micro level of individual lived experiences and positional identities and values formation (such as ‘Confucian-neoliberal’ dispositions) have been little explored, and therefore require attention. This was my approach in the research for this chapter. I suggest that East Asian academics’ embodied knowledge of Confucianism and their desire to escape and critique some aspects of Confucianism (such as gendered hierarchy and discrimination) are intricately enmeshed with their subjection to neoliberalism and so with making a new Confucian-neoliberal subject. In other words, IEA academics are moulded into their Confucianneoliberal dogma as passive-loyal subjection and become the embodiment of Confucian-neoliberalism as a strategic position and habitus that they proactively develop and inhabit.

Notes 1 According to the Students for Fair Admissions, Harvard engaged in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s. Jews at Harvard tripled to 21 per cent of the freshman class in 1922 from about 7 per cent in 1900. Ivy League Jews won a disproportionate share of academic prizes but were widely regarded as competitive, eager to excel academically and less interested in extracurricular activities such as organized sports. Non-Jews accused them of being clannish, socially unskilled and either unwilling or unable to ‘fit in’ (Source: ‘Anti-Semitism in the U.S.: Harvard’s Jewish Problem’, https://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem). 2 There is a new wave of ‘feminisation of international migration’ through the forms of study and work abroad in the twenty-first century. More East Asian women than ever before are crossing borders for study and career progression. More than a decade ago, this trend was already notable among East Asians who



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chose to study abroad: 80 per cent of Japanese studying abroad are women, an estimated 60 per cent of Koreans studying abroad are women and more than half of the Chinese entering higher education overseas are women (Y. Kim 2012). In a recent survey by the Korea Women’s Development Institute, 79 per cent of young Korean women (between the ages of 19 and 34) want to leave Korea, which indicates the (already) feminized migration trend among Koreans is likely to continue (Hyun-jung 2019).

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Hunt, V., L. Yee, S. Prince and S. Dixon-Fyle (2018), ‘Delivering through Diversity’, McKinsey & Co., January. Available online: https://www.mckinsey.com/businessfunctions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity (accessed 13 August 2019). Hyun-jung, P. (2019), ‘75% of Younger S. Koreans Want to Leave Country’, Hankyoreh, 30 December. Available online: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_ national/922522.html?fbclid=IwAR2Y eOaUHHMGPfnAI-dqbbCPoL54yMFrbahB yxvc2x9h9r80LDThaizKQbs (accessed 19 January 2020). Jewish Virtual Library (2012), ‘Anti-Semitism in the US: Harvard’s Jewish Problem’, Jewish Virtual Library: A Project of Aice. Available online: https://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem (accessed 19 January 2020). Johns, A., J. Fook and V. Nath (2019), ‘Systemic Changes to Crack the Concrete Ceiling: Initiatives from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education’, in P. Miller and C. Callender (eds), Race, Education and Educational Leadership in England, 183–208, London: Bloomsbury. Joseph, J. (2013), ‘Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach’, Resilience, 1(1): 38–52. Kandola, B. (2018), Racism at Work: The Danger of Indifference, Oxford: Pearn Kandola. Khanna, P. (2019), The Future Is Asian, New York: Simon & Schuster. Kim, T. (2009), ‘Confucianism, Modernities and Knowledge: China, South Korea and Japan’, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), The International Handbook of Comparative Education, 857–72, Dordrecht: Springer. Kim, T. (2014), ‘The Intellect, Mobility and Epistemic Positioning in Doing Comparisons and Comparative Education’, Comparative Education, 50(1): 58–72. Kim, T. (2017), ‘Academic Mobility, Transnational Identity Capital, and Stratification under Conditions of Academic Capitalism’, Higher Education, 73(6): 981–97. Kim, T. (2019), ‘East Asian Academics in UK Embrace Idea of Being Foreign’, University World News, 20 April. Available online: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story=20190414202658463 (accessed 19 January 2020). Kim, T., and W. Ng (2019), ‘Ticking the “Other” Box: Positional Identities of East Asian Academics in UK Universities, Internationalization and Diversification’, Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 3(1): 94–119. Kim, Y. (2012), ‘Female Individualization? Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women’, in Y. Kim (ed.), Women and the Media in Asia, 31–52, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kramer, M. (2019), ‘A Timeline of Key Supreme Court Cases on Affirmative Action’, New York Times, 30 March. Available online: www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/ affirmative-action-supreme-court.html (accessed 19 January 2020). Lee, J. (2019), ‘Universities, Neo-Nationalism and the “China Threat” ’, University World News, 9 November. Available online: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story=20191105074754722 (accessed 19 January 2020).

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Lorenzo, R., N. Voigt, M. Tsusaka, M. Krentz and K. Abouzahr (2018), ‘How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation’, BCG, 23 January. Available online: https:// www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boostinnovation.aspx (accessed 19 January 2020). McGregor-Smith Review (2017), ‘Race in the Workplace: The McGregor-Smith Review’, UK Government Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, 28 February. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/race-in-theworkplace-the-mcgregor-smith-review (accessed 13 August 2019). Morrow, M. E., and F. Ross (2015), ‘Leadership Foundation for Higher Education Insights: Why Does Ethnicity Matter in Higher Education Leadership?’, Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, June 2015. Available online: https://www. academia.edu/17114188/Why_does_ethnicity_matter_in_higher_education_ leadership (accessed 19 January 2020). Moustakas, C. (1981), ‘Heuristic Research’, in P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds), Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research, 207–17, Chichester: John Wiley. Mulinari, D., and A. Neergaard (2017), ‘Theorising Racism: Exploring the Swedish Racial Regime’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(2): 88–96. Nougayrède, N. (2017), ‘Global Power Is Shifting to Asia – and Europe Must Adapt to That’, The Guardian, 9 September. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2017/sep/09/global-power-shifting-asia-europe-must-adapt (accessed 19 January 2020). Parmar, S. (2016), ‘The Good Immigrant Review – An Unflinching Dialogue about Race and Racism in the UK’, The Guardian, 22 September. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/22/good-immigrant-review-nikesh-shuklabritain-racist (accessed 13 August 2019). Ray, V. (2016), ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Mesearch’, Inside Higher Ed, 21 October. Available online: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/10/21/me-studiesare-not-just-conducted-people-color-essay?utm_content=buffer2436b&utm_ medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer (accessed 10 August 2019). Royal Society (2014), ‘A Picture of the UK Scientific Workforce Diversity Data Analysis for the Royal Society Summary Report’, February 2014. Available online: https:// royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/leading-waydiversity/picture-uk-scientific-workforce/070314-diversity-report.pdf (accessed 15 September 2020). Sartre, J. P. (1956), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New York: Philosophical Library. Sian, K. (2019), ‘Racism in UK Universities Is Blocking BAME Academics from the Top’, The Guardian, 10 July. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2019/jul/10/racism-in-uk-universities-is-blocking-bame-academicsfrom-the-top?CMP=share_btn_link (accessed 31 August 2019).



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Tchen, J. K. W., and D. Yeats, eds (2014), Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, London: Verso. Times Higher Education (2020), ‘Best Universities for Reducing Inequalities’, Times Higher Education, 9 August. Available online: https://www.timeshighereducation. com/student/best-universities/best-universities-reducing-inequalities?fbclid=IwAR2 bIVaCV0UpEPhKljprnFZhpq-F7Lt9CjzuuqsHRzYm70qi704TfNdtewE (accessed 15 September 2020). UCL (2014), ‘Race Equality Charter Mark Application Form’, University College London. Available online: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/equality-diversity-inclusion/sites/ equality-diversity-inclusion/files/recm_application_finaljan16.pdf (accessed 19 January 2020). Universities UK (2017a), ‘International Students Now Worth £25 Billion to UK Economy – New Research’, Universities UK, 6 March. Available online: https://www. universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/Pages/International-students-now-worth-25-billion-toUK-economy–new-research.aspx (accessed 17 August 2019). Universities UK (2017b), ‘International Higher Education in Facts and Figures 2017’, Universities UK, 25 May. Available online: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policyand-analysis/reports/Pages/international-facts-figures-2017.aspx (accessed 17 August 2019). Wilson, M., and C. Matysova (2019), ‘A Reflection on the Race Equality Charter SelfAssessment Process’, Advance HE, 10 September. Available online: https://www. advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/reflection-race-equality-charter-self-assessmentprocess (accessed 19 January 2020). Yu, Y., and L. Coco (2019), ‘Chinese Students and US Universities Become Pawns in the Trade War’, Nikkei Asian Review, 7 August. Available online: https://asia.nikkei.com/ Spotlight/Cover-Story/Chinese-students-and-US-universities-become-pawns-inthe-trade-war (accessed 19 January 2020).

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The Professoriate in the Dispossessed University: Traditional and Emergent Identities Nelly P. Stromquist

Introduction The nature of the university has been fundamentally altered by the global adoption of the twin forces of the ‘knowledge society’ and neoliberalism. The first propelled a tremendous growth in higher education enrolments; the second advanced the notion that the role of the state in promoting social welfare should be reduced significantly, compelling institutions of higher education to exert greater effort in securing their own revenues while simultaneously reducing their labour costs. Together, they are creating considerable change in the structure and mission of universities. Neoliberalism sees the university as a major source of research and development; at the same time, it considers advanced education as a personal investment and consumer good, much less as a public responsibility and social good. This shift of financial burden from the state to the individual solidifies the link between the university and economic objectives (Allport, McAlpine and Roberts 2010; Cantwell 2011; Fanghanel 2012). The view of the university as a major economic player is shared by political and higher education leaders around the world. The influential League of European Research Universities (LERU), with its vision of the ‘Europe of Knowledge’, argues that ‘greater investment in research and development must remain a vital priority for Europe’ (2002: 9), and pays only a passing reference to basic research, the social sciences, arts and humanities,1 areas in which the economic benefit is less proximate. Further expressing this trend, referring to a position paper entitled ‘Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy’ prepared by

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the UK Department for Business and Information in 2009, Fanghanel (2012) notes that while the terms ‘excellence’ and ‘excellent’ appeared sixty-eight times, society appeared twenty-six times and social justice only four times. Stewart (cited in Deneulin 2006: 85) observes that ‘the introduction of liberalization and market-oriented policies in the 1990s has had deep influence upon the mode of functioning of groups and how groups have behaved in a more self-interested and market-oriented way than when Keynesian and social welfare-oriented policies prevailed’. A common feature of the labour force under neoliberalism is the principle of ‘flexibilization’:  the reliance on temporary and part-time employment as a response to a constantly shifting economy. Twenty years ago, Bourdieu (1988) observed that in France three-fourths of newly hired workers were on temporary basis and only one-fourth of those three-fourths would become permanent employees. He warned at that time: ‘Casualization of employment is a form of domination of a new kind, based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission, into the acceptance of exploitation’ (Bourdieu 1988: 87). It is estimated that today, for every full-time position in the industrialized economies, two or three flexible, part-time jobs are created (Van Arsdale 2016). High proportions of part-time employment can also be observed in other parts of the world, both advanced and less industrialized. In the United States, the industry for part-time personnel was projected to generate $145 billion in sales in 2018 (Hudzik, Streitwieser and Marmolejo 2018). What is happening in the labour force is well captured by Standing (2011), who alerts us to the emergence of high levels of poverty among those who work as the new normal in his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Higher education has been identified as the leading economic sector in employing an increasingly contingent workforce (Henderson, Urban and Wolman 2004).2 Moser (2014) maintains that in the United States, between 1995 and 2009, 92.4 per cent of the increase in faculty appointments was due to the growth in casual faculty hires; further, at for-profit institutions in the United States, contingent faculty in 2015 represented 99.7 per cent of the faculty (US GOA 2017). A well-known Canadian teacher union leader (Robinson 2006: 1) asserts, ‘The casualization of the academic workforce has been one of the most significant trends over the past decade. Left unchecked, the increasing use of fixed-term and part-time appointments will steadily undermine the tenure system and fundamentally weaken academic freedom.’ As one of the leading capitalist countries, providing one of the most extensive higher education offerings, the United States presents a useful referent on which



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to focus this chapter, taking it as a case of particular interest to trace recent changes affecting the professoriate. My core argument is that a significant transformation is taking place within the professoriate, as new forms of employment in what used to be a prestigious occupation have become prevalent. The behaviour of established faculty in not contesting these forms of employment but rather acquiescing to them has motivated the new faculty members to seek a professional identity that departs from the established teaching-research link and that recognizes the importance of teaching on its own terms as well as their right not only to social reputation but also to a decent living. The data for the chapter is drawn from secondary sources in various disciplines, including higher education, economics, sociology and political science. I begin by describing the situation of contingent faculty in the United States. Then I  offer a conceptual anchoring to the chapter’s topic. Next, I  explore the responses of traditional academic institutions and regular professors to the plight of contingent faculty,3 and move on to discuss the emergence of a new academic identity, as reflected in the actions taken by contingent faculty. I then lay out the consequences of this shifting terrain on the professoriate identity and the democratic life of universities. Finally, I try to make sense of ongoing developments and highlight some recommendations.

The plight of contingent faculty Contingent faculty today are a subset of the new working poor as well as a subset among those holding PhDs (Miller 2015).4 Table 4.1 shows the rapid growth in the various types of university teaching employment between 1995 and 2011 in the United States. Clearly, the rate of growth of contingent faculty dwarfs that of permanent faculty. Another significant trend is the fast growth experienced by graduate student workers who, as contingent faculty, find themselves facing situations of economic austerity. Women represent almost half of the faculty in post-secondary institutions. Among the contingent faculty in 2005, women were under-represented in the full-time positions (30 per cent of such positions) and slightly overrepresented in the part-time positions (52 per cent, cited in West and Curtis 2006). A recent statistic, based on a 2019 survey conducted by the AFT, reported 63.7 per cent women among its 3,076 contingent faculty respondents (AFT 2020), which suggests a greater presence of women in this category. Table 4.2 shows the trends over approximately three decades, indicating that post-secondary institutions today are populated almost equally by full-time and

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Table 4.1  Growth of Faculty Positions by Type of Employment from 1995 to 2011 in the United States. Percentage Change between 1995 and 2011 Growth in Faculty by Type of Employment

Percentages

Full-time tenured track positions Contingent faculty, full-time Contingent faculty, part-time Graduate student teaching assistants

 10 109 101  64

Source: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System 1995–2011, cited in GAO (2017).

Table 4.2  Number of Faculty in Degree-Granting Post-secondary Institutions in the United States by Employment Status and Sex, Evolution from 1989 to 2016 Year

Full-Time

Part-Time

Per cent Full-Time

Per cent Women

Total Employees

1989 1999 2009 2016

524,416 520,937 729,152 815,760

299,794 436,893 709,922 732,972

63.6 57.5 50.7 52.7

35.20 41.04 47.10 49.30

   824,220 1,027,830 1,439,074 1,548,732

Source: Institute of Education Sciences, Digest of Education Statistics: 2017, Table  325.10 (Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education 2017).

part-time faculty members. The increasing proportion of temporary and parttime faculty alone raises doubts about the nature of colleges and universities as stable, self-governed institutions. From an organizational perspective, there is no vital reason that more than half of an institution’s academic personnel has to be full-time. But for a university – an organization that claims self-governance for its faculty as a key principle  – employing over half of its faculty on parttime, temporary status seriously challenges the possibility of widespread and stable participation. There are strong manifestations of declining professorial loyalty to their home institutions as temporary and part-time appointments grow (Finkelstein 2009) and as permanent faculty develop identities centred on their disciplines rather than on their own universities or colleagues who work in them. We can therefore ask: what is the glue that holds universities together? Or have they become merely holding companies for a variety of strictly individual interests? The fundamental problem associated with part-time or temporary work modalities today is that these positions have been used to generate precarious



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work as salaries tend to be extremely low and benefits commonly associated with formal employment are seriously curtailed (sick leave, medical insurance, pension plans, professional development and opportunities for promotion) (CAW 2012; Allison, Lynn and Hoverman 2014; CCSE 2014; US GAO 2017). Contingent faculty, whose task typically involves exclusively teaching, are usually unpaid for course development and work beyond the classroom, such as student advisement (Evans 2015). Moreover, they are assigned to large classes, typically having about thirty-five to forty students. Frequently, contingent faculty have no free access to an office or facilities such as copy machines. From their perspective, in a number of instances they are treated with little respect by the tenured faculty (Evans 2015), so many of the contingent faculty express a lack of social recognition. Generally, contingent faculty do not participate (or are not allowed) in institutional decision-making, often not even in matters pertaining to that which they do most – teaching. Contingent faculty also remark that those in online positions experience even worse conditions as they work in isolation, have no control over their work (they are handed fixed course syllabi) and experience frustration at having no say in matters pertaining to students and faculty. Contrary to the myth that contingents are mainly older professionals willing to share their expertise while engaged in regular jobs linked to their various disciplines, large segments of the contingent faculty today are young graduates who depend on university employment for their livelihood and would like to secure full-time and permanent jobs. US data indicate that only 25 per cent of contingent faculty at all types of institutions have annual or multi-year contracts, which means most of them function with either semester or course arrangements; this situation is worse at for-profit institutions (US GAO 2017). In 2015, 25 per cent of the part-time college faculty received some form of state or federal public assistance (Murray 2019). The use of private agencies for recruitment of contingents has not improved their situation; in fact, it has been found that ‘private employment agencies produce insecurity and poverty in the lives of workers, widen inequality and degrade employment’ (Van Arsdale 2016: 185). A final point of disadvantage is that, although not usually acknowledged as such, contingent faculty status is a terminal position inasmuch as the demands on teaching are so heavy that, without a post-doctorate and commensurate research experience, it is unlikely that a young contingent faculty member will be able to develop a research profile adequate to become competitive with other candidates when a position for tenure track becomes available.

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A conceptual anchoring Neoliberalism, broadly defined as an economic and political theory that assigns the market a hegemonic role and reduces the state functions in social life, provides a potent framework for understanding changes in higher education. It has been empirically demonstrated that the economic and political rationalities of neoliberalism have led to consequences for universities in tangible ways:  reduced public funding, increased searching for contracts and grants, heightened competition for rankings at the institutional and individual levels, intensified pre-eminence of science and technology and increased pressure to serve the labour market. From an institutional governance perspective, neoliberalism has resulted in a mushrooming of decision-making in the hands of a growing diversity of university administrators and a substantial increase of temporary and part-time academics who, by the nature of their appointments, play limited roles in the conduct of their institutions. As well recognized by now, neoliberalism operates at three levels:  At the social level, it has introduced changes in the nature of the economy through widespread market competition and reduced state engagement. The importance of markets has meant decreased support by the state and virtual dispossession of public universities. The ‘knowledge society’ brought by the returns accruing to value-added trade and services has fostered significant student enrolment growth at all levels; the massification of higher education has been intense, particularly at the undergraduate level. At the institutional level, neoliberalism has legitimized the emergence of for-profit universities and imposition of student fees. The increased student enrolment as well as the variability of course enrolments requires flexibility in faculty hiring. This flexibility has resulted in the procurement of faculty with low salaries, little job security and deplorable working conditions; known as contingent faculty, they constitute today proletarian academics. At the individual level, neoliberalism has reinforced selfish feelings, justified survival behaviours and brought transformation in what it means to be an academic. It is appropriate to consider the university a dispossessed institution. Harvey (2006) coined the concept of dispossession to explain the kind of accumulation going on in contemporary societies. He uses dispossession to explain how capitalism continues to search for profits, especially in the contemporary neoliberal and globalized era, creating an unstoppable centralization of wealth and power that relies on new forms of privatization and commodification both in advanced capitalist countries and in low-income capitalist countries.



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According to Harvey, dispossession occurs through three main mechanisms: (1) external coercion by superior powers, (2)  willingness by subordinate groups to collaborate with external capitalist power to gain control of their own surpluses and (3)  cannibalization of assets by destroying rivals and engaging in geopolitical manoeuvres. I  would argue that the university (both public and private) has been dispossessed in the sense that it functions at the mercy of external sources of revenue. I would submit that the third mechanism – the cannibalization of assets – is very much at work. However, it does not directly occur by destroying rivals but, instead, through readjusting budgetary resources by utilizing personnel that, while central to the mission of the university, can be paid considerably less than regular faculty. In so doing, it challenges the traditional professorial identity and brings new ways of conceptualizing those who labour in academic settings. Studies of neoliberalism’s impact on higher education have tended to focus of new forms of leadership, the increasing changes in shared governance and university government councils, the prioritization of research in terms of quantity, the domination of science and technology over social science and humanistic disciplines and the commodification of advanced learning (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Olssen and Peters 2005; Aronowitz and Giroux 2008; Rhoades 2014; Halffman and Radder 2015). Surprisingly, the expansion of contingent faculty – one of the most transformative changes in higher education – occurs beneath the radar of research in higher education. Limited research, mostly in the form of articles, has focused on this university working force. Salient works on the topic include Rhoads and Rhoades (2005), Levin and Shaker (2011), Kezar and Sam (2011), Hoeller (2014a) and Tierney (2016). Tierney reiterates that higher education has been reduced to training for the workforce, but he is one of the few to refer to contingents, as he notes, ‘Academic freedom has been structurally weakened either by the transformation of the faculty into a primarily adjuncts workforce or by those who should take intellectual risks being acquiescent’ (Tierney 2016: 15). Although focusing on information technology, a report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017: 85) summarizes research on contingent faculty well: ‘Scholarship is at an early stage when it comes to analyzing the scope of contingent work, and the implications of each type of employment structures, employment relations, and the welfare of workers.’ As I examine the influence of neoliberalism, I see it as a force that is not just unidirectional but also one that creates contradictions and, moreover, generates resistance among individuals and groups negatively affected

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by them. The adopted conceptual framework makes us consider not only the role of neoliberalism’s constituting principles in altering the identity of the professoriate but also how resistance is being expressed by the most affected actors, that is, the contingent faculty themselves. Notably, labour unions have existed as forms of collective action to advance the conditions of workers across multiple types of labour. Therefore, it becomes central to probe the contingents’ burgeoning collective agency and their efforts at formal unionization in recent years. Since the identity of the professoriate is predicated on its commitment to social values such as truth and democracy, we could expect that the university would be insulated from the stark individualism fostered by neoliberalism and that more solidary behaviours would be expressed by regular faculty. In other words, we should find active supportive action by the regular professors towards the contingent faculty rather than acquiescence. Obviously, this is not what has taken place. This chapter seeks to contribute to the literature on contingent faculty by arguing that neoliberalism’s effects at the individual level have been enormous but that the traditional identity of regular academic professors as persons with autonomy and prestige has functioned to impede solidarity with contingent faculty, thus provoking reactions of self-defence from the latter leading to a divide in the professoriate as well as the emergence of new ways of looking at those who teach in higher education settings.

Responses from traditional academics Two recent documents about the nature of the university, amply endorsed throughout the world, are the Magna Charta Universitatum (September 1988; signed by 889 universities across the world by 2018)  and the ‘Declaration of Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy’ (June 2019). The first document asserts two principles highly relevant to the question of contingent faculty: freedom in research and teaching and the inseparable nature of research and teaching. The second document asserts that the university ‘plays an essential role in democratic societies’ and that ‘campuses must be fora of vigorous debate and honest pursuit of truth’. Boyer (1990), an influential scholar in defining the US academic, has continuously remarked that university teachers and researchers should be attentive to social problems, research them and refer to those social problems to define the agenda for scholarly integration. If we recognize the plight of contingent faculty, their situation should be a matter of



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concern. So, what forces impede either a political or even emotional response by regular faculty? Impelled by the need to be efficient and competitive, university strategic plans (both mid- and long-term) exist in most universities (93 per cent) but these plans –produced with varying levels of faculty participation – focus on academic quality, enrolment growth and improved facilities and technology (Evans 2015). While these plans pay increasing attention to diversity issues and express concern for and identify measures to correct the under-representation of some groups, the emphasis is on marginalized ethnic groups and, to lesser extent, on gender. Strategic plans make no reference to contingent faculty, despite their considerable presence. Regular faculty in elite research universities are not unionized and are very unlikely to do so (Cross and Goldenberg 2009). For many years, the academic ethos was that individual faculty should negotiate their own salaries rather than depend on standardized remuneration schedules. Many US professors still see collective bargaining as not being consistent with professional status and autonomy (Herbert and Apkarian 2017). In accordance with this position, for more than fifty years the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) held that unions were not proper for academic professions and that a professional society of academics should neither join a union nor comport itself as one (Metzger 1987: 171). AAUP opposed collective bargaining until 1972, when its sister organization, AAUP-Collective Bargaining Congress (CBC), declared its independence, although it remains affiliated to the AAUP. Today, AAUP-CBC has some eighty collective-bargaining chapters (Cross and Goldenberg 2009).5 Casualization of faculty as well as their large numbers is eroding one of the key dimensions of professoriate identity, the principle of shared governance – a prerequisite to academic autonomy. This principle today runs shallow for several reasons:  (1) intense specialization is creating a separation between professors and their institutions since the key referent for most professors is not the university in which they work but colleagues in the same fields elsewhere, even outside the country; (2)  given the exigencies of work, many regular professors, including those without a particular research contract or grant, find themselves extremely busy complying with research demands and various forms of accountability that require frequent reports on personal performance; (3) the participation of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in institutional governance is constrained by policies that put a premium on research productivity and entrepreneurship, as opposed to reflection and social critique; (4) in the absence of faculty involvement in their traditional roles of governance, all areas of

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decision-making are increasingly devolving to non-academic managers. It is the administrators who inevitably emerge as those with sufficiently deep knowledge of this increasingly complex institution to tackle the great responsibility for its everyday conduct and decision-making in key functions and strategies shaping its future. Despite the severity of these threats to regular faculty autonomy and shared governance, I  could identify only two instances of protection of contingent faculty by permanent faculty. One falls beyond the scope of this study since it refers to joint action by tenured professors and contract faculty in Ontario, Canada, where the union, which represents both regular and contingent faculty, has been requesting equal pay for equal work, a 50:50 full-time to part-time ratio (as opposed to the current 30:70), better living conditions as well as equity issues regarding teaching loads and barriers to progress in academic ranks (Fick and Stephenson 2018). The second instance, weaker in organization and demands, regards a recently formed group in the United States called ‘Tenure for the Common Good’. This group comprises about 350 tenured professors who seek to use their privileged position to attain employment justice in their institutions as well as in other universities across the country. It argues that ‘the exploitation of contingent faculty degrades us all’ (Betensky 2017) and that ‘tenure allies must talk about the erosion of tenure lines as if it were a problem of the gravest urgency  – because it is one (Tenure for the Common Good 2017). It further declares: ‘It may sound quixotic to try to get tenured professors to fight for the common good, but we just don’t have the time for feeling powerless when we haven’t exercised the power we have’ (Tenure for the Common Good 2017). I could not find instances of specific actions by this group. To be sure, in the discussion of regular and contingent faculty, it must be recognized that these two types of academic position are subject to different procedures for incorporation, performance evaluation and promotion. Most contingent faculty are not recruited under the same criteria as permanent teachers (Van Arsdale 2016). Contingent faculty – especially those who are parttime and hired at the last minute to handle unexpected enrolments – are typically recruited by word of mouth and personal contact. They can also be hired with no substantial review of their dossier and thus have relatively easy access to those positions. Contingent teachers seldom teach courses at the master’s or doctoral levels. In contrast, tenured faculty are expected to publish, so they must provide constant attention to research. They serve in various academic committees at their program, department and university levels; they supervise advanced students’ theses and dissertations. Their performance is usually evaluated on an



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annual basis; and a strong system of peer review for both research and promotion functions to discipline their behaviour.

Internal differences in field hierarchies While significant differences in the status of disciplines and fields of study and their relative influence have long existed in academic settings (Bourdieu 1988; Henkel 2009), neoliberalism has unleashed a climate of vigorous competitiveness in the university. To respond to the need for greater revenues, fields and disciplines that generate ideas or goods for sale are receiving great attention and respect. This has meant in many US universities, particularly in researchintensive universities, most recognition is given to the physical sciences and fields such as engineering and computer science, that is, those most likely to receive contracts and grants from the government, large corporations or even philanthropic organizations. The emergence of a faculty deeply fragmented according to field is creating a culture in which highly impermeable hierarchies are the new reality. Specialization is also creating separate professoriate identities that, according to Becher and Trowler (2001: 204), have contributed to ‘reducing the internal sense of community across academic fields’. In keeping with the entrepreneurial trend, many professors and researchers in the physical sciences tend to define themselves as scientists, not intellectuals or scholars. Moreover, many of them are not integrated into the university as much as working in the university. The trend towards field separation is also felt in the social sciences and the humanities. The pressures in these fields are less intense, but nonetheless equally real: since the procurement of external revenues is critical to university survival today, many fields in the ‘soft sciences’ are being asked to increase the enrolment of students, to offer new programs and degrees, to prepare winning research proposals. In a parallel development, fields that do not generate large contracts are being slowly discarded. These fields are all in the humanities. Student enrolments in English, languages, history and philosophy have declined significantly. History and philosophy, two of the most reflective disciplines, are common casualties of the dispossessed university. Such disciplines remain in only a small number of universities.

The growing division between research and teaching Yet another hierarchical divide is cutting across the university:  the growing importance of research and the shrinking recognition of teaching. In earlier

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times, at least among universities following the Humboldtian tradition, research and teaching were seen as intimately linked, the understanding being that research was meant to enrich teaching, providing it with the most recent and first-hand knowledge. As several observers (Enders and de Weert 2009b; Musselin 2009) remind us, in the new university, teaching and research compete for time and resources, so they are no longer complementary. In the United States, contingent faculty today represent about two-thirds of the academic body and these professionals are estimated to teach between 45 per cent and 54 per cent of all courses at four-year institutions and even greater percentages in community colleges (US GAO 2017). With the time demands imposed on research efforts and the growing numbers of students at the bachelor’s level, teaching is being relegated to young professors coming into the academy but increasingly (and now mostly) to part-time personnel, that is, the contingent faculty. The growing modality of distance education, particularly in industrialized countries, also favours the use of contingent faculty to respond to the demand for degrees and specific courses. These internal differences are moving the regular faculty into two different types from the administrators’ point of view: those who generate revenues (usually those in science and technology) and those who don’t (typically those in the humanities and the social sciences).6 The latter are accepted but a silent message challenges their existence: are they really necessary or are they living off the toil of others? This distinction is demoralizing for those not on the winning side. Academics have traditionally advocated critical thinking and problemposing behaviours. It now seems that they seldom apply these approaches to their own immediate environment. Many academics would claim to be rational, systematic, critical, sceptical and innovative (Teichler 2006), and many more would see themselves as being supportive of equality and democracy. In several disciplines, professors study power, its workings and its consequences.7 Yet, regular academics are resistant to engage with current situations that deeply affect their professional identity. If we observe the growing precarious existence of contingent faculty, the support given to them by the permanent faculty is weak. The response by tenured faculty is the product of both omission and commission. Established faculty members have simply not acknowledged the situation of contingent faculty, despite the fact that this also hurts the regular faculty by making them a minority, increasing their committee work, and diminishing their participation in the governance of their institutions. A similar pattern of weak protection of contingent faculty has characterized educational organizations and unions in the United States.



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It must be recognized that today the concept of ‘shared-governance’ in which faculty and administrators partake in the life of the university is really ‘divided governance’. Tenured and tenure-track professors in the United States have autonomy over their own academic work: hiring and promotion of faculty, hiring part-time faculty and declining to renew their contracts, identifying and designing course offerings, setting criteria for course performance and requirements for attaining degrees. But there are many other important decisions in which the permanent faculty have little say and in which, conversely, administrators have the greatest role to play and certainly the final decision. These regard operational management (pay levels of administrators and faculty, new buildings for certain fields or purposes [athletics, libraries], infrastructure maintenance, tuition fees, decisions to hire academic ‘stars’ to increase university rankings). We can wonder what kinds of professoriate identity can develop where neoliberal thought fosters a growing divide between research and teaching functions  – functions that already receive clearly differential valuation. What kind of professional identity can contingent faculty, who are now the majority of the professoriate, nurture when they have to work at several institutions in order to augment their salaries? What kinds of professional identity can develop when contingent faculty are not allowed to play a role in the governance of their institutions?

The role of traditional unions In the United States, there are two major teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Teacher Association (NEA), both of which have traditionally organized teachers in K-12; in recent years, however, both have started to represent faculty in higher education institutions. At the higher education level, the AAUP has long functioned as a source of support for academic identity for the regular professors, although as noted above its sister organization, the AAUP-CBC, is specifically identified as a labour union. Several observers argue that these traditional education unions (AFT, NEA and AAUP-CBC) have protected the full-time faculty that dominate such unions and ‘have failed to bargain any meaningful job security for the contingent faculty’ (Hoeller 2014b:  145). Taylor (2003:  83) concurs with Hoeller, remarking that ‘academics … criticize managerialism in private but acquiesce in the day-to-day working environment’. It has been argued that the conditions of employment for contingent faculty are in the hands of university management; however, this is not entirely accurate

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as many regular faculty also function as academic managers. It is the regular faculty who report to administrators on the needs for additional instructors depending on course enrolments for the new semester or academic year. It is true nonetheless that administrators promote the hiring of temporary workers when they reduce the budgets of the various colleges and schools under their supervision, and when departments are forced to reduce costs, the easy solution becomes the recruitment of non-tenure track personnel. The scant consideration given to contingent faculty as well as their position with little or no upper mobility within the university is creating the equivalent of cast systems that place contingent faculty in clear and permanent lower tiers (Cortes, Karimi and Arvelo 2017).

The emergence of a new professorial identity Until a few years ago, contingent faculty organized in mixed unions, in which the dominant group was full-time, permanent faculty. A  common complaint regarding these unions was that tenured members gave priority to resolving their own problems (Hoeller 2018). Today, contingent faculty are organizing independently (Rhoades 2014). It has taken a long time to act in self-defence because, as Berry (2017) laments, reflecting on his union organizing experience, ‘Little energy [is] left for strategic thinking because the immediate is so engrossing to people who are worried about next month’s rent.’ He adds, ‘Organizing parttime [labour] by itself is not attractive to unions financially because they cannot charge them much’ (personal interview). This is changing. Initiatives by contingent faculty range from mobilizations on university campuses to seeking membership in unions that have not traditionally served workers in educational systems. Contingent faculty as well as graduate student instructors have also been active making presentations and lobbying in state legislatures. On-campus efforts to raise awareness of the precarious conditions affecting contingent faculty have included the celebration of ‘Campus Equity Week’ in several US universities. More combative is the strategy of signing with non-education labour unions willing to take up the cause of contingent faculty. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is emerging as the main alternative teacher union. SEIU represents 1.9 million workers in over one hundred occupations, including those in the healthcare sector, property service and public service workers, among many others. According to its own declarations, SEIU comprised 120,000



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higher education workers by 2017.8 SEIU defines itself as a social movement organizing for social justice on such issues as gender, environment and economic justice. Its leaders remark that forty-six states spend less today on full-time state personnel than in 2008 and complained that budget cuts in this area have been on average about 20 per cent per year. SEIU claims that its ‘Faculty Forward’ coalition has more than fifty-three thousand members and is present in over fifty campuses across the United States (SEIU 2019).9 Another active non-traditional union for education labour is the United Auto Workers, which has recruited at New York University and at the New School, both in New York City. AFT, the largest traditional US teacher union, has organized tenured and tenure-track and adjuncts at public colleges and universities only. SEIU, in contrast, has largely organized contingent-only faculty at private institutions (Miller 2015), thus seeking a more focused strategy.10 It is estimated that about 20 per cent of contingent faculty are organized in the United States (Berry 2017; Murray 2019). Almost half of unionized contingents are in only six states (California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin). They are organized in very large public systems such as the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY). In addition to the unions cited above, two major organizations currently work in support of contingents: the Coalition on Academic Work (CAW), a group of twenty-six higher education associations, disciplinary associations and faculty organizations; this organization has promoted the production of statements on the condition and rights of contingent faculty. The other group is the New Faculty Majority (NFM), which consists of two affiliated bodies:  the National Coalition of Adjunct and Contingent Faculty and the NFM Foundation. NFM works with the United Steelworkers, SEIU, AFT and NEA. Active on the internet is a third group, the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), which organizes contingent faculty through the social media and annual conferences. SEIU has a Faculty Forward campaign, started in 2016, which supports more than fifty thousand faculty and graduate teacher workers in forming unions on their respective campuses. Organized in twenty SEIU unions in thirteen states, Faculty Forward claims to represent a nationwide movement of faculty members, graduate student workers, students, families and community members. Faculty Forward declares to be ‘fighting for good jobs for all campus employees and affordable accessible quality higher education for all’ (SEIU Faculty Forward 2017), and claims success in organizing faculty and graduate student workers on many campuses, asserting that 60 per cent of the contracts negotiated through SEIU include salary raises that are at least 20 per cent for the lowest-paid faculty

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and 70 per cent of its contracts include professional development programmes. Faculty Forward also addresses the problem of student debt. This is a very important development because the struggle for better working conditions is creating alliances between contingent faculty and graduate student workers, a process that is likely to expand the notion of who is an academic. The clear organization of contingent faculty as workers signals a departure from previous academic identities as strictly intellectual. Now, intellectual labour is not seen as different from manual work and thus academics are recognizing that they are workers, just as anyone else who has a remunerated job.

Consequences for the professorial identity It is evident that we need to see the university as an organization characterized by (1) growing differentiation between universities (by student selectivity, research emphasis, governance, reputation) and by (2) growing internal differentiation of the faculty within universities (differences in recruitment, monitoring, moving through ranks, advancing knowledge and role in governance). Neoliberalism has affected the university and in its wake it has seriously affected the professoriate. Today, there is a clear although silent rupture in the academy, with regular professors unsupportive or indifferent to contingent faculty. This has generated distrust and latent resentment from the contingent faculty who see the regular academics as participants in their exploitation and having access to unfair benefits. The increased polarization between regular and contingent faculty is reflected in common statements by contingents in favour of the elimination of tenure. The increasing unionization of contingent faculty as workers is creating a hybrid identity, one in which academics are no longer only intellectuals but also persons whose labour must be remunerated to ensure a decent living. Another element of the new identity – emerging de facto rather than formally – is that most contingents see no need to combine research and teaching. Being a teacher is seen as a complete cognitive task. As the institution becomes populated by a majority of part-time and temporary workers, this hybrid identity becomes pervasive and will continue to shape the academy. The university itself will also change in structure and mission:  there will be less participation of faculty in shared governance and, conversely, a greater role will be played by administrators not only in key infrastructural but also in programmatic and academic decisions. Table 4.3 presents in schematic form my perceived evolution of the professoriate identity across time.



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Table 4.3  Evolution in Academic Identity and Institutional Characteristics Past

Present

Equally divided teaching and research functions among tenured professors Dominant role in research by tenured faculty Shared governance

Teaching done primarily by contingent faculty

Intellectual pursuit: broad No financial crisis; constant state support Some differentiation of higher education Low unionization of faculty

Future

Only graduate-level teaching by tenured professors Will likely increase Administrators will shape research agenda Greater decision-making Administrators will role by administrators dominate Very specialized Extremely specialized Diminished stated support Constant budgetary crisis Privatization will become the prevailing financial mode Dramatic increase Highly differentiated in institutional and rigid institutional differentiation differentiation Moderate unionization of Increased unionization of faculty faculty, especially among contingent faculty

Conclusions and recommendations Assuming that present trends continue, the university of the future will be characterized by persistent multiple conflicts:  regular professors versus administrators, regular professors versus contingent, full-time versus part-time faculty, humanities/social sciences versus physical sciences. The university of the future, thus, will be a strange institution, whose claim to embody the values of mutual respect, collaboration and solidarity will have faded away. Can this scenario be avoided? To be congruent with still existing social expectations about the university mission, academics in permanent positions must engage in more and deeper self-reflection of the growing disconnect between their traditional values and current practices, and must question their behaviour toward less fortunate colleagues in the university. It is evident that in many instances, the permanent faculty are protecting their own financial and academic interests, not democratic principles. Some authors refer to ‘institutional failure’ to support faculty on short-term contracts (Kezar, Maxey and Holcombe 2016). I  would like to be more specific and refer to the failure of permanent faculty to come to the aid of contingent faculty. There is consensus that new modes of internal governance have emerged in higher education institutions and

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that corporate styles of institutional management are common (Enders and de Weert 2009a). But, despite greater administrative inroads into decision-making, academics are partly responsible for the reshaping of their work scenarios. As Trowler, Saunders and Bamber (2012: 258) remind us, tenured faculty are not devoid of power as they can ‘oppose, accommodate, reinterpret or embrace nondisciplinary influences’. Various solutions to the growing plight of the contingent faculty have been proposed, some more realistic than others. Among the unions, different strategies have emerged:  The AAUP and AFT recommend converting the contingent faculty as much as possible to tenured and tenure status. The NEA emphasizes improvement of the working conditions of the contingent faculty. Kezar, Maxey and Holcombe (2016:  1), along with other researchers, believe that a ‘return [to] a largely tenure-track faculty model is unlikely, given current economic realities’, so they argue in favour of designing a new faculty model. Several union activists want the abolition of the two-track system, the creation of a single salary scale and a single scale for raises and a single set of procedures for job security and grievances (Forum 2011; Hoeller 2014b; Longmate 2014). Gross and Goldenberg (2009) propose an expansion of the NEA proposal: not only improved conditions for contingents but also a set limit to the number of teaching-only faculty and contingent access to university governance. Observers in various educational positions argue that increasing salaries is only part of the problem and that institutional incentives to reduce the use of fixed-term contracts must be put into effect to reduce irregularity in employment and recognize worker’s rights. Levin and Shaker (2011:  1481) are in favour of a new nomenclature that eliminates negatives such as ‘non-tenure track’ and ‘contingent’. They propose eliminating the distinction between research and teaching, and the creation of new categories such as ‘experts in online teaching’, education technology or other departmental needs. Each of these recommendations will require intensive discussion as well as engagement with university leaders and administrators. Whatever solution is chosen, it will be the responsibility of regular faculty not only to talk to faculty in other disciplines who may be less aware of this aspect of higher education but also to take an active part in subjecting the process of casualization to greater analysis, in seeking fairness, and in attempting to stem the advance of precarious working conditions in the university. The recruitment of more permanent teaching personnel will certainly require greater public investment in these institutions. We need to struggle against the disinvestment of the state in public education and against the simultaneous enlargement of financial rationales



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within institutions of higher education. We need to begin by attending the pressing issues of contingent faculty. A healthy professorial identity must lead us to recognize our unavoidable responsibility to act. Coser (1972) and others have long maintained that the university remains the most favourable institution for the open expression of ideas. In the social imaginary, universities are still considered to be the best expressions of humanity. Universities have been upheld and defended as crucial sites for the articulation and defence of democracy, justice and solidarity. They have also been identified as sites for the advancement of progressive values, including feminism and anti-colonialism (Morley 2005). This chapter has demonstrated that, despite the enormous transformations in the professoriate and thus the challenge both to universities and the regular professors, the established professors have not come to the help of an increasing marginalized faculty who, recognizing their situation of economic exploitation, are organizing themselves as workers and forging a hybrid identity that combines intellectual performance with workers’ rights and that sees teaching as an activity central to the university and thus needing to be recognized as highly meritorious in nature.

Notes 1 LERU was created in 2002 by twelve leading universities to further the understanding and knowledge of politicians, policymakers and opinion leaders about the role and activities of research-intensive universities. By 2017 it comprised twenty-three universities in twelve European countries. 2 The equivalent of the temporary, part-time personnel in the university goes under multiple names: with slight variations in working conditions: casualized faculty, contingent faculty, adjuncts, clinicals, part-time, non-tenure track, non-standard, peripheral, external, ad hoc, limited contract, new model, occasional, seasonal (Miller 2015). For simplification purposes, I will use the term ‘contingent’. Part-time instructors also encompass graduate students and undergraduate students serving as teaching assistants and ‘fractionals’, as they are called in the UK. 3 For simplification purposes, this chapter will refer to the tenured and tenure-track faculty as regular faculty and to the part-time or temporary faculty as contingent faculty. 4 Another issue that should be of concern to scholars who seek social justice and equality is the condition of student loans. In 2018, graduate student debt in the United States was $37.4 billion (Miller 2020, citing data from the National Center for Education Statistics).

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5 AAUP declares having two sister organizations: AAUP-CBC, which engages in collective bargaining, and the AAUP foundation, which gives grants to support academic freedom and the quality of higher education. 6 This argument is not quite correct, because the humanities and the social sciences handle large undergraduate courses, thereby contributing to university revenues via tuition. 7 Surprisingly, courses on higher education in the United States tend to focus on issues regarding the functioning of universities, such as organizational theories in higher education, leadership, bureaucratic and political perspectives, human resources and student services, equity towards students, accountability/ accreditation practices and university ranking. Seldom is attention given to conditions of employment in the university itself. 8 Graduate students are also organizing. One estimate indicates that by 2017 there were more than thirty collective bargaining units representing more than sixtyfive thousand graduate students across the United States. Most of those groups are at public universities, which are governed by state laws. But the statistics are not clear. SEIU reports organizing more than 1,400 ‘graduate workers’, a small number compared to the previous figures. Graduate student mobilization organized under SEIU in Washington, DC, was critical to the success in protecting the student loan interest deductions in the tax reform signed by President Trump in 2017. 9 These universities included large and prestigious institutions such as Northeastern University, Boston University and Washington University in St. Louis. 10 More recently, however, AFT has become active in advocating better conditions for contingent faculty. In June 2018 it was successful in negotiations with the University of Michigan to secure salary increases, health care, job security, and university contributions towards retirement of instructors in its three campuses.

References AFT (2020). An Army of Temps: AFT 2020 Adjunct Faculty Quality of Work/Life Report, Washington DC: American Federation of Teachers. Allison, M., R. Lynn and V. Hoverman (2014), Indispensable but Invisible: A Report on the Working Climate of Non-Tenure Track Faculty, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University. Allport, C., K. McAlpine and S. Roberts (2010), ‘Collective Bargaining in Higher Education’, in P. Peterson, E. Baker and B. McGaw (eds), International Encyclopedia of Education, 491–8, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Aronowitz, S., and H. Giroux (2008), ‘The Corporate University and the Politics of Education’, The Educational Forum, 64(4): 332–9.



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Becher, T., and P. Trowler (2001), Academic Tribes and Territories, Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Berry, J. (2017), Personal interview, 20 August. Betensky, C. (2017), ‘Welcome to Tenure for the Common Good’, Tenure for the Common Good. Available online: http://tenureforthecommongood.org/ uncategorized/hello-world/ (accessed 10 October 2019). Bourdieu, P. (1988), Acts of Resistance: Against the Theory of the Market, New York: New Press. Boyer, E. (1990), Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Lawrenceville, GA: Jossey-Bass. Cantwell, B. (2011), ‘Transnational Mobility and International Academic Employment: Gatekeeping in an Academic Competition Arena’, Minerva, 49(4): 425–45. CAW (2012), ‘A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members: A Summary of Findings on Part-Time Faculty Respondents on the Condition of the Academic Workforce Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors’, The Coalition on the Academic Workforce, June 2012, Available online: http://www.academicworkforce. org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019). CCSE (2014), Contingent Commitments: Bringing Part-Time Faculty into Focus, Austin: University of Texas at Austin. Cortes, I., N. Karimi and Z. Arvelo (2017), ‘Neoliberalism and Higher Education: A Collective Autoethnography of Brown Women Teaching Assistants’, Gender and Education, 29(1): 48–65. Coser, L. (1972), ‘Academic Intellectuals’, in C. Anderson and J. Murray (eds), The Professors: Work and Life among Academicians, Cambridge: Schenkman. Cross, J., and E. Goldenberg (2009), Off-Track Profs: Non-Tenured Teachers in Higher Education, Cambridge: MIT Press. Declaration on Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy (2019), ‘Declaration on Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy’, Academe Blog: The Blog of Academe Magazine, 7 July. Available online: https://academeblog. org/2019/07/07/declaration-of-the-global-forum-on academic freedominstitutional-autonomy-and-the-future-of-democracy/ (accessed 10 October 2019). Deneulin, S. (2006), The Capability Approach and the Praxis of Development, Houndsmills: Palgrave. Enders, J., and E. de Weert (2009a), ‘Introduction’, in J. Enders and E. de Weert (eds), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives, 1–12, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Enders J., and E. de Weert (2009b), ‘The Organized Contradictions of Teaching and Research: Reshaping the Academic Profession’, in J. Enders and E. de Weert (eds), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives, 134– 54, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Evans, L. (2015), ‘A Changing Role for University Professors? Professorial Academic Leadership Is Education as Perceived by “The Led” ’, British Educational Research Journal, 41(4): 666–85. Fanghanel, J. (2012), Being an Academic, London: Routledge. Fick, E., and G. Stephenson (2018), ‘An Important Show of Unity in Precarious Employment’, University World Press, 26 January. Available online: https://www. universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20180124083515112 (accessed 10 October 2019). Finkelstein, M. (2009), ‘Changing Employment Relationships in North America: Academic Work in the United States, Canada, and Mexico’, in J. Enders and E. de Weert (eds), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives, 218–47, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forum (2011), ‘The Future of Faculty Unions’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 July. Available online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Forum-The-Future-ofFaculty/128305 (accessed 10 October 2019). Halffman, W., and H. Radder (2015), ‘The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University’, Minerva, 53(2): 165–87. Harvey, D. (2006), Spaces of Global Capitalism, London: Verso. Henderson, P., W. Urban, and P. Wolman (2004), Teacher Unions and Education Policy: Retrenchment or Reform, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Henkel, M. (2009), ‘Policy Changes and the Challenge to Academic Identities’, in J. Enders and E. de Weert (eds), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives, 78–95, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herbert, W., and J. Apkarian (2017), ‘Everything Passes, Everything Changes: Unionization and Collective Bargaining in Higher Education’, Perspectives on Work. Available online: https://works.bepress.com/william_herbert/33/ (accessed 8 October 2019). Hoeller, K., ed. (2014a), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Hoeller, K. (2014b), ‘The Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid’, in K. Hoeller (ed.), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, 116–55, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Hoeller, K. (2018), ‘Why the Supreme Court Ruling on Unions Could Be Good for Adjuncts’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 June. Available online: https:// www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-Supreme-Court-Ruling/243805 (accessed 10 October 2019). Hudzik, J., B. Streitwieser, and F. Marmolejo (2018), ‘Renovating Internationalization for the 21st Century’, University World News, 8 June. Available online: https:// www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20180606110124870 (accessed 7 October 2019). Institute of Education Sciences (2017), Digest of Education Statistics: 2017, Washington, DC: US Department of Education.



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Kezar, A., and C. Sam (2011), ‘Understanding Non-Tenure Track Faculty: New Assumptions and Theories for Conceptualizing Behavior’, American Behavioral Scientist, 55(11): 1419–42. Kezar, A., D. Maxey, and E. Holcombe (2016), ‘The Professoriate Reconsidered: A Study of New Faculty Models’, NEA Thought and Action. Available online: www.nea.org/ home/68481.htm (accessed 7 October 2019). LERU (2002), ‘Research-Intensive Universities as Engines for the “Europe of Knowledge’ ”, League of European Research Universities, August. Available online: https://www.leru.org/publications/research-intensive-universities-asengines-for-the-europe-of-knowledge (accessed 7 October 2019). Levin, J., and G. Shaker (2011), ‘The Hybrid and Dualistic Identity of Full-Time NonTenure-Track Faculty’, American Behavioral Scientist, 55(11): 1461–84. Longmate. J. (2014), ‘The Question of Academic Unions: Community (or Conflict) of Interest?’, in K. Hoeller (ed.), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the TwoTier System, 156–72, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Metzger, W. (1987), ‘The Academic Profession in the United States’, in C. Burton (ed.), The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings, 123–74, Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, B. (2020), ‘Graduate School Debt’. Center for American Progress, 13 January, Washington, DC: Center for American Progress. Miller, J. (2015), ‘When Adjuncts Go Union’, American Prospect, 30 June. Available online: https://prospect.org/labor/adjuncts-go-union/ (accessed 7 October 2019). Morley, L. (2005), ‘Opportunity or Exploitation? Women and Quality Assurance in Higher Education’, Gender and Education, 17(4): 411–29. Moser, R. (2014), ‘Organizing the New Faculty Majority’, in K. Keller (ed.), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, 74–115, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Murray, D. (2019), ‘The Precarious New Faculty Majority: Communication and Instruction Research and Contingent Labor in the US’, Communication Education, 68(2): 235–45. Musselin, C. (2009), ‘The Academic Professions in the Global Era’, in J. Enders and E. de Weert (eds), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives, 117–33, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017), Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here, Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Olssen, M., and M. Peters (2005), ‘Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism’, Journal of Education Policy, 20(3): 313–45. Rhoades, G. (2014), ‘Extending Capitalism by Foreground Academic Labor’, in B. Cantwell and I. Kauppinen (eds), Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 113–36, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Rhoads, G., and R. Rhoades (2005), ‘Graduate Employee Unionization as a Symbol of and Challenge to the Corporatization of US Research Universities’, Journal of Higher Education, 76(3): 243–75. Robinson, D. (2006), The Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Brussels: Education International. SEIU (2019), ‘Services Employees International Union’, Wikipedia, 27 September. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Employees_International_ Union (accessed 10 October 2019). SEIU Faculty Forward (2017), Uniting to Transform Higher Education, SEIU Faculty Forward, 2 March. Available online: http://seiufacultyforward.org/about/ (accessed 10 October 2019). Slaughter, L., and G. Rhoades (2004), Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Standing, G. (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury. Taylor, P. (2003), ‘Humboldt’s Rift: Managerialism in Education, and Complicit Intellectuals’, European Political Science, 3(1): 75–84. Teichler, U. (2006), ‘Changing Structures of the Higher Education System: The Increasing Complexity of Underlying Forces’, Higher Education Policy, 19(4): 447–61. Tenure for the Common Good (2017), ‘About’, Tenure for the Common Good, 2017. Available online: http://tenureforthecommongood.org/about/ (accessed 10 October 2019). Tierney, W. (2016), ‘Portrait of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University” ’, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 19(1): 5–16. Trowler, P., M. Saunders and V. Bamber (2012), ‘Conclusion: Academic Practices and the Disciplines in the 21st Century’, in P. Trowler, M. Saunders and V. Bamber (eds), Tribes and Territories in the 21st Century: Rethinking the Significance of Disciplines in Higher Education, New York: Routledge. US GAO (October 2017), Contingent Workforce: Size, Characteristics, Compensation, and Work Experiences of Adjuncts and Other Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, Washington, DC: US Government Accountability Office. Van Arsdale, D. (2016), The Poverty of Work: Selling Servants, Slaves and Temporary Labor in the Free Market, Leiden: Brill. West, J., and J. Curtis (2006), Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006, Washington, DC: AAUP.

5

Global Citizenship in Motion: Comparing Cross-Border Practices in German Schools Abroad Simona Szakács-Behling, Annekatrin Bock, Catharina I. Keßler, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Riem Spielhaus

Introduction Debates on global citizenship education (GCE) are flourishing in a context of profound technological, environmental and societal transformation as well as a perceived urgent need to address the ‘global condition’ of our times.1 Normative positions of what GCE should be and pedagogical approaches to how global citizenship (GC) could be taught and learned, abound (Tarozzi and Torres 2016; Davies et al. 2018). In the emerging empirical, analytical and critical approaches to GCE, two trends are noteworthy. First, empirical studies trace GCE ideals in diverse temporal, geographical and stakeholder contexts. Studies have analysed, for instance, how the content of education (e.g. curricula and textbooks) changes to more global conceptions of citizenship in particular countries, e.g. Suárez (2008) for Costa Rica and Argentina; Moon and Koo (2011) for Korea; Engel (2014) for Spain; Zimenkova (2016) for Russia; regions, e.g. Philippou, Keating and Ortloff (2009) for Europe; Soysal and Wong (2006) for Europe and Asia; or worldwide, e.g. Jimenez, Lerch and Bromley (2017). Further studies consider power structures and the role of elite international education in constructing and claiming ‘global imaginaries’ of citizenship, e.g. Hobson and Silova (2014) and Keßler et al. (2015). Empirical work has investigated how different actors across various localities  – albeit mostly in the Western world and mostly within singular national contexts – make sense of GCE, e.g. teachers in Israel (Goren and Yemini 2016), the UK (Osler 2011), Canada (Schweisfurth 2006) and Germany (Ortloff 2011) or students in

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the United States (Rapoport 2017) and Israel (Yemini and Furstenburg 2018). While acknowledging the variety of content, structure and involvement in GCE in different contexts, most of these studies remain focused on single regions, countries, groups or subject positionings. They have not tended to identify or examine boundary transgressions. The extant literature lacks a comparative approach that moves consistently beyond dichotomist spatial imaginations (Beech and Larsen 2014). Second, increasingly analytical, critical work has begun to unravel the various discursive ideologies associated with the concept of ‘global citizenship’ and how they underlie particular national and international GCE policy agendas, for example in the work of a youth organization in Australia (Hartung 2017), UNESCO documents (VanderDussen Toukan 2018) or OECD and UNESCO’s frameworks for global (citizenship) education/competencies (Vaccari and Gardinier 2019). These studies critically deconstruct notions of GCE as a set of ideas with various intellectual traditions, used in different ways, at different times, by different stakeholders. This work exemplifies the normativity and instrumentality involved in GCE (Marshall 2011). However, we still know little about how GC notions are used in educational practice across various populations and national boundaries (Goren and Yemini 2017). Considering these trends reveals blind spots in GCE research. What is missing is (1) a methodological approach that spans a variety of contexts without assuming these to be, ab initio, mutually exclusive national, inter-national and/ or global ‘entities’, ‘levels’ or ‘scales’; (2) an empirical focus on practices of GCE to complement existing work on policies, discourses or concepts. Addressing these two lacunae requires a comparative perspective that departs from ‘methodologically nation-statist’ approaches (Robertson and Dale 2008) and challenges the idea of context, time and space as clearly bounded entities that coincide with national education systems. It requires the examination of school practices across and beyond temporalities, localities, actors/subjects and levels of analysis. This chapter draws on a multisited research study (Marcus 1995) that addresses this gap and includes an ethnographically informed investigation of GC practices in transnationally located schools. After presenting the study and our methodological approach, we introduce Oxley and Morris’s (2013) typology of GC as a heuristic device to make sense of our empirical observations of GCE practices. We then group these observations along three modes of cross-border engagements which we call ecological, solidarity and democracy engagements, and discuss how each mobilizes different variants and sub-variants of GC



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from Oxley and Morris’s typology. We conclude by reflecting on the mismatch between conceptual work on GCE and the observable ‘messy’, on-the-ground practices. We consider ongoing debates in comparative education in our reflection on the dynamics between ‘global’ norms and ‘local’ appropriations (e.g. Anderson-Levitt 2003; Ramirez 2012; Schriewer 2012; Steiner-Khamsi 2012). The conclusion also reflects on the (un)feasibility of testing GCE, given the observable non-coherence of practices.

Methodological approach Research design and data collection methods We draw on data from an interdisciplinary research project centred on how GC is enacted in everyday practices in six German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen, DAS) in North America, South America, Northern Africa, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Western Europe. Our approach is inspired by transnational studies (Levitt and Khagram 2007; Amelina and Faist 2012). The research design heeds calls to overcome methodological nationalism in the social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Beck and Sznaider 2006). It does not consider countries as default ‘containers’ for GCE, but instead allows ‘the national’ to emerge as relevant (or not) from the empirical data (Keßler and Szakács-Behling 2020). Rather than comparing how GCE is enacted in different countries, we consider practices in a network of schools with similar curricula, qualifications, financing structures and so forth, spanning various ‘non-national’ locations. We thus allow time, space and context to be seen in their situatedness and constructedness rather than taking them for granted as default explanans of observed practices. This focus on historically and socially located school practices is ethnographically informed. We adopt an applied ethnographic perspective: that is, we investigate various practices of GCE rather than ‘what happens in German Schools Abroad’ more generally.2 Instead of taking GCE as outlined in international documents (e.g. UNESCO, OECD) as a singular blueprint and checking it against nationally produced texts or programmes, we look at GCE as ‘situated practices’ (Knutsson and Lindberg 2017) caught in a web of entanglements that we aim to identify. Data was collected at six schools between June and December 2017 by an interdisciplinary team of five German-based researchers during research stays of approximately three weeks. We focussed on GCE-in-practice within the

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secondary schools rather than on predefined notions of where GCE could or should occur. Following an iterative, recursive and abductive approach (Agar 2006), our selection of relevant practices to observe and explore in more depth was guided by each ‘local’ situation; the school subjects and extracurricular activities we focussed on at each data collection site differed, therefore, between locations. We observed history, ethics, politics, social studies, IT and art, as well as extracurricular project work (e.g. debating club, green school programme, school networking activities). Our data consisted of classroom observations, field notes, semi-guided interviews with teachers and other staff, group interviews with pupils, informal chats, documents (curricula, policy documents) and media (textbooks, apps and other media used or produced in class).

Researching German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen, DAS) German Schools Abroad are well-placed for an investigation into practices of GCE because they are uniquely transnational education establishments (Weiler and Hahm 2014; Adick 2018; Herzner 2018). These schools are located outside Germany but are accredited, coordinated and supported pedagogically and financially through a centralized structure within the German Federal Ministry of Administration (Bundesverwaltungsamt):  The Central Office for Schooling Abroad (Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen, ZfA). They teach in German and at least one other language and offer internationally recognized qualifications. Although under the jurisdiction of the German state education system, they operate as private schools within their host country’s system, thus abiding by the legal frameworks of two different states. There are currently over 140 German Schools Abroad, with vastly differing histories of when, how and by whom they were established, particularly in the context of former colonies and of newer expatriate communities (Herzner 2018). In some schools, the majority of pupils are German expatriates whose parents are transnationally mobile; in others, the majority are the children of local elites (who can afford the school fees). These schools thus bring together: (1) international and national, public and private organizational and financial frameworks, (2)  cross-border education policy and content (textbooks and curricula developed in one country with a ‘national’ audience in mind, but transported elsewhere and also used by nonnationals) and (3)  transnationally mobile individuals (teachers, pupils, staff). They thus provide excellent opportunities to study what Hornberg (2010)



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and Adick (2005) call ‘transnational educational spaces’. In line with the ‘transnational social spaces’ theorized in the sociology of migration by Pries (2008) and Faist (1998), ‘transnational educational spaces’ are characterized by intense and durable cross-border practices, symbols and artefacts evident in a ‘neither-here-nor-there’ transmigrant lifestyle. Space is not understood in a geographical sense, but in terms of ‘relatively stable, national-borders-exceeding relationships between protagonists’ whereby social closeness trumps territorial proximity (Hornberg 2014: 172). These transnational relationships are reflected in the lives of these schools’ protagonists, and are structured by cross-border practices (e.g. mobility and exchange, classroom and extracurricular activities, etc.), symbols (e.g. logos, language) and artefacts (e.g. textbooks, classroom educational material, etc.).

Oxley and Morris’s (2013) typology The typology offered by Oxley and Morris (2013) critically systematizes the field by identifying various understandings and perspectives that differentiate GC based on underpinning ideologies. The resulting typology is comprehensive and flexible enough to be a useful heuristic backdrop against which to analyse our field data. The typology distinguishes eight conceptions of GC grouped into ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘advocacy’ types, and identifies the intellectual genealogy of each. While the first group brings together mostly mainstream ideas resting on universalist cosmopolitan perspectives and the second involves mostly alternative ideas (more relativist and anti-individualistic), both dominant and radical sub-variants can be identified in both groups (Oxley and Morris 2013: 305). The cosmopolitan branch, which dominates the empirical landscape (Goren and Yemini 2017: 174), divides into ‘political’, ‘moral’, ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ branches. Political GC models focus on the idea of citizenship as a status and on the relationship between individual and state; sub-variants engage with notions of cosmopolitan democracy, world-state or anarcho-cosmopolitanism (the most radical variant in this branch). Moral GC focuses on the values/ norms that bind individuals together and distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘rooted’ variants. Economic GC focuses on power, capital, labour and resources; it includes variants centred on neoliberal notions, corporate/global business or international development. Cultural GC focuses on the symbols binding individuals together and covers ideas of cultured/sophisticated ‘world citizens’ as well as the role of globalized media and the arts.

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The advocacy branch is divided into ‘social’, ‘critical’, ‘environmental’ and ‘spiritual’ branches. Social GC focuses on transnational activism and the bonds that tie individuals to each other beyond national borders, but in contrast to anarcho-cosmopolitanism, its goals are particularistic rather than universalist. Critical GC is focused on social justice, is deeply transformationalist and aims at a ‘deconstruction of oppressive global structures’, often in opposition to cosmopolitan forms (Oxley and Morris 2013: 312–13). It draws on a postcolonial, counter-hegemonic perspective and can promote both relativist and universalist agendas. Environmental GC focuses on sustainability and human environmental impact; it distinguishes between anthropocentric (mainstream) and ecocentric (alternative) positions, depending on whether nature can be considered as a ‘subject’ endowed with rights or not. Finally, spiritual GC focuses on intangible (inter)connections between humans from a holistic perspective; it is concerned with global social justice but through an emotional/religious understanding of the world rather than a rationalist viewpoint. A key strength of the typology is that the ‘categories are not fixed or absolute:  many conceptions of GC traverse categories and combine a variety of different elements from each’ (Oxley and Morris 2013:  316). This enables contradictions to become visible rather than only foregrounding coherence. Oxley and Morris showed how all eight categories could be mobilized in a single policy text, albeit with different emphases. We also considered these eight conceptions not as fixed types to be mapped one-to-one onto practices but as heuristic devices to help us understand how actors may invoke different concepts of GC in various situations.

Cross-border practices of GC in German Schools Abroad How is GC enacted in German Schools Abroad? Our data shows that despite strong commonalities in all locations with what we could call ‘thin’ (abstract, largely uncritical and non-self-reflexive) engagements with GC, there is also richness deriving from the ways in which GC conceptions are brought together across locations, actors and levels. Similar educational practices were identified across locations, as well as different, sometimes conflicting, appropriations of GC. In other words, we cannot pinpoint the dominance of one ‘type’ over another in different schools. Instead, we identified the various ways in which the conceptions from Oxley and Morris’s typology are combined to give ‘situated’



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meaning to observed practices. We illustrate this below with examples from the six schools, grouped into what we will call eco, solidarity and democracy engagements. Each is interwoven with different conceptions from the typology. These engagements are considered as practices of GCE because they involve some form of border-crossing, whether real or imagined, national or social in a transnational educational context.

Eco-engagements Environmental themes were approached by all six schools through the formal curriculum and extracurricular activities (e.g. growing organic vegetables, visiting landfill sites or receiving visits from environmentally responsible businesses, NGOs, etc.). One school was participating in a four-week ‘Green-school’ project3 during our visit. This allowed us to observe a range of concerted eco-engagements in practice. Pupils were organized into several teams, each assigned a different task, and each with a teacher coordinator and a parents’ committee overseeing their activities. Teams designed posters, flyers and presentations, and wrote articles for a school newsletter (eco-journalism), to raise awareness within the school community. They planned, researched and evaluated outcomes (e.g. going around classrooms to check whether lights had been switched off, measuring how many kilograms of waste had been recycled per week). A key finding is the decoupling between the imagery, activities and rationales utilized during the eco-activities. While global imagery, with stereotypical images of planet earth/ nature, was used to promote the programme via the website, posters and so forth, the activities undertaken and the rationales invoked were underpinned by economic and individualistic logics. For example, a presentation on the programme’s progress held by pupils in front of the teaching staff included data on printer and paper usage by teachers, and argued that the school could save large amounts of money if teachers changed from colour to black and white and from single-sided to double-sided printing. Fellow pupils were not motivated to recycle by slogans about saving the planet or generally doing good for humankind, but via images of an individually enjoyed commodity (e.g. free pizza for everyone if we win!) and by instilling a deeply competitive spirit (e.g. graphs tracking amount of waste reduced). We observed an underlying logic of entrepreneurship oriented towards results, coupled with economic rather than environment arguments.

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When asked why they joined the programme, participating pupils first mentioned school improvement, personal reasons and self/student empowerment, whereas environmental reasons came last: S1: I don’t have a reason. S2: They come as a group to class and say we have this … and we make this, when you want you can sign your email and we signed. [indiscernible] … S3: Yes, so I think it’s just a nice idea to, like, search for ideas to help the school get better … S4: … I first heard about it 3 years ago when it was first started because my mom was part of founding it. S5: I thought that was nice to be involved and be able to tell them what would work. S6: And protecting the environment which is a good thing, making it better for future generations (School 1, group interview with six pupils participating in the programme)

Following Oxley and Morris, we note conflicting threads:  On the one hand, the environmental conception of GC belonging to the ‘advocacy’ category (especially its ecocentric variant) prevails in some of the imagery mobilized to promote activities within the programme, whereby the image of ‘planet earth’ is central. At the same time, we see an economic conception of GC in its corporate/ business GC variant in the way the programme is ‘sold’ to stakeholders (e.g. teachers, headmaster). A neoliberal variant of economic GC is also evident in terms of the skills exercised by pupils to promote the environment advocacy agenda, the incentives provided for various participant groups (e.g. businessminded argumentation, result orientation, data, measurement) and the reasons why pupils joined (e.g. improving the competitive edge of the school, selfrealization, individual student empowerment). This threefold entanglement shows how the audience – not only the author – affect meaning-making and how different arguments can be successfully used to promote the same ideal. More importantly, it demonstrates a disconnection between levels, between an abstract universal ideal of environmentalism and how this ideal permeates everyday life. This resonates with what Goren and Yemini (2017) refer to as a ‘multidimensional citizenship model’ which disconnects ‘the global’ from ‘the local’ as separate, mutually exclusive, levels; this in turn opens the way to possible non-critical perspectives and may ‘[leave] students with only a vague understanding of how global citizenship ties into their everyday lives



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and experiences’ (Goren and Yemini 2017: 176). But the decoupling of ideals and the legitimizing frameworks mobilized to enact them could also be interpreted as reflecting the institutionalization of a globally legitimated environmental concern in school discourses and practices (as argued, e.g. in Bromley, Meyer and Ramirez 2011). In such a reading, the lack of coherence between means and ends, just as that between policy and practice, is to be expected in an organizational setting such as a school (see Bromley and Powell 2012) where the logic of appropriateness trumps the logic of consequentiality (March and Olsen 1989). Our analysis reveals an equally non-consequential picture in school practices:  several conflicting but equally legitimate approaches in the context of the school are mobilized at the same time  – all resonating with a cultural repertoire available to the protagonists in this specific situation.

Solidarity engagements A preoccupation with global social justice coupled with a critical and selfreflexive perspective on engaging disadvantaged ‘others’ was not prevalent in any of the schools. However, socially relevant projects traversing national, regional and local boundaries were observable in some schools, in which different concepts of GC activism were mobilized. Two forms of engaging in solidarity practices were particularly noticeable across all the schools. They echo what Andreotti (2014) calls ‘soft’ versus ‘critical’ GC in differentiating GC along different ‘notions of power, voice and difference’ (ibid.:  49) while calling for critical literacy. The first form of engagement we observed was abstract and distant, involving the sporadic provision of help across national and regional borders, but lacking personal contact with those in need. The second was a locally anchored, long-term engagement, whereby the crossing of borders involved interpersonal experiences and opened up the possibility of a critical view. Within the first form, most practices involved charity work beyond national borders. For example, one school was collecting Christmas gifts to be sent to needy children in areas envisioned as being among ‘the poorest and most remote parts of the world’. Another school organized a marathon to raise money for a German education organization in an African country with which the school had a long-term partnership. However, the border-crossing aspect applied only to material goods. The gifts or money raised were sent to ‘vulnerable’ persons ‘overseas’ without interpersonal contact between donor and recipient. Apart from the exchange of Christmas cards between the donating and receiving

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schools (of which pupils were aware, but not involved), engagement in these activities remained anonymous, faceless and mediated for the participants themselves. Posters advertising the gift collection did not mention where the boxes would be sent; ‘I don’t know. Somewhere where poor people live,’ replied a year ten pupil when asked about the recipients’ location. The school website gave little information about the situation of those in need and instead focused on the individual achievements of the pupils in promoting a good cause. In some interviews with pupils and teachers involved in social outreach activities, reasons such as accumulating extracurricular experience, voluntary work to add to a CV and admission to university were mentioned as motivation, thus drawing on a neoliberal self-realization and competitive logic to justify GC activities, rather than foregrounding the goal of global justice. This is not to say that protagonists at these two schools were oblivious to their own position of power. A teacher recounted how he tried to help pupils reflect on the global impact of their actions, for instance by making them aware of consumer/corporate choices affecting the environment, or their own privilege in the context of global inequalities. He highlighted notions of individualized global responsibility and the avoidance of personal ‘guilt’: T: … our topic was … how do we produce and consume things and what are the impacts, the global impacts, for example? And I showed them, … there [is] so much plastic in the seas and the oceans; and the second one was in Africa, … I  really noticed that they were very shocked, of course, it was a shocking moment, much more than I thought …, but there was never a connection or a link like, how do I live in a very wealthy environment? How do I consume, and what are the impacts on the other side of the world, … I just wanted to, not to bring the situation to be, how do you say, to feel guilty about this because they are young and so on, cool, they have their own responsibility of course, but I just want to say that it’s not only the neighbour or the other country. … If you talk about globalization, if you talk about [indiscernible] sorry, global citizenry, if you talk about environment, whatever, it starts with you. (School 1, interview with ethics teacher)

Some pupils also brought up debates about empowering those affected by global injustice to help themselves rather than providing help from elsewhere. However, such arguments mostly echoed an impersonal debating logic rather than a postcolonial or critical perspective: S4: And that came up in the ‘Europe is failing Africa’ debate as well. … it’s sort of the idea that Africa needs to help itself, it needs to build itself up. … that we



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shouldn’t be looking down on it and say, ‘Oh, we need to help it.’ That we should actually give it the due respect it deserves and just have fair trade all across, to allow Africa to, you know. (School 2, focus group with pupils engaged in school-level democratic representation)

Within the second form of engaging in solidarity practices, a more personal approach was observed, albeit crossing boundaries other than those of nation or class. A  school mostly attended by highly mobile German expatriates organized trips for pupils to meet local refugee children and donate money to improve their education facilities. Reports of how the pupils perceived their personal encounter with the disadvantaged ‘others’ were included on the school’s website, revealing that the school’s public identity revolves more around an emphasis on personal contact than the acquisition of sellable skills. In an initial meeting of the project group, the teachers planned for pupils from both schools to run in a charity event together, but without first consulting the other school on whether they would welcome such an activity. In this primary phase, the refugees were projected as being matter-of-factly on the receiving end of charity organized for them rather than with them, thus constructing ‘self ’ and ‘other’ in a hierarchical way. A  critical perspective was however developed by one of the teachers at the end of the meeting, thus showing GC practices as being in flux rather than fixed. Another school in a different world region displayed local solidarity by organizing school trips to the city slums. This allowed the school’s pupils, who were mostly from privileged local elites, to witness the conditions in which disadvantaged children live and to attempt to better their situation through donations. The annual Christmas market organized by this school4 was a key event for charity fundraising, indicating a strong local commitment. A long-term involvement in social projects allowing for personal contact between pupils and those in need was also visible in the activities of the school’s ‘social committee’ where teachers and pupils engaged in local causes (e.g. collection and delivery of goods and money for local orphanages, hospitals or special-needs schools). Finally, a school in another region of the world showed similarly intense social engagement. Its long-standing solidarity programme targeted a socioeconomically disadvantaged region of the country that pupils and teachers visited every year for a week. Their overall activities included:  helping to reconstruct/refurbish a school, delivering donations of basic goods, fundraising or the knitting of patchwork blankets for a children’s hospital.

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To conclude, in the first form of solidarity engagement, which we could call ‘disengaged engagement’, we observed a depersonalization and abstraction from the critical potential of socially relevant activities performed in school. The transformative possibilities of these practices were not actualized through personal and self-reflexive engagement with realities of injustice and inequality worldwide, nor through an understanding of one’s own position in the ‘global scheme of things’. While their intent may resonate with a critical GC agenda, they were enacted and reflected upon by protagonists in a ‘soft’ sense:  pupils did not engage closely with disempowered populations and did not address the root causes of injustice. The recipients of charitable activity remained distant, in an overseas, often unnamed location, and were assigned the role of passive beneficiary through the provision of charity rather than contact, exchange and empowerment. While these activities did expose pupils to global injustice and poverty, they primarily exercised fundraising skills, PR campaigning and team and project work. These practices, one could argue, are oriented more towards future employability than addressing global injustice. The second form of solidarity engagement is more attuned to Andreotti’s critical GC. Some of these activities involved not only a closer, more personal and direct engagement with socio-economic inequalities but also a more material one: pupils were producing an object with their own hands, repairing it or distributing it personally to less privileged others. The aspect of local/regional activism and the notion of solidarity cutting across class borders that shone through these practices is a form of engagement that emphasizes human rights and matches the moral GC category of cosmopolitan types proposed by Oxley and Morris. Despite such engagements being closer to a critical conception of GC, they still left rich/poor dichotomies and power relations largely unchallenged. What becomes clear is that schools cannot be neatly categorized into either moral or social, economic or critical notions of GC, but that elements of each appear in a complex entanglement within what we might call varieties of solidarity engagements.

Democracy engagements Extracurricular Model United Nations (MUN) simulations are widespread both in pre-university and higher education around the world and are often hailed for pedagogical benefits such as experiential learning and political/civic engagement (McCartney 2006; Obendorf and Randerson 2012). Originating in the United States in the 1920s and first emulating the work of the League of Nations and



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later of the UN, the MUN simulates democratic debate in an international context. Pupils are invited to represent a country other than their own. Current estimates suggest four hundred thousand pupils around the world participate each year in MUN conferences organized by national or local associations (Van Dyke 2017). The MUN can thus be seen as an educational practice spanning different countries, regions and localities, in which pupils engage with global issues. We gathered data about MUN activities from schools’ websites and from participants in four schools, as well as information about one school’s Model EU activity. In one school, located in an affluent area, the MUN was presented (1)  by teachers as an entirely student affair allowing them to discuss world politics, (2) on the website of the school as an example of an annual international activity reflecting the global reach of pupils’ interests and their individual accomplishments and (3) by some of the pupils as an opportunity to ‘play grownups’ in a highly competitive world. The MUN conferences held outside the school at a nearby university were considered ‘fun’ by the pupils insofar as they could ‘wear business attire’,5 whereas the meetings of the MUN club were deprecated for being ‘unproductive’ and not ‘serious enough’ (e.g. more snacking than academic study). Perhaps unsurprising for this school (geographically situated in an area marked by high competitiveness, entrepreneurship and economic prowess), pupils made sense of their participation in the MUN club in pragmatic and selfenhancement terms. For them, the practice enabled the exercise of a business skill anchored in personal interest, rather than a political citizenship skill reflecting a global interest. The latter was, however, emphasized by teachers and the MUN associations’ motto (‘fostering global citizenship for 90+ years’). Other rationales were applied in another school in a different world region. One teacher envisioned MUN as a pedagogical space for pupils’ personal growth, mastering challenges and developing self-management skills (including learning to find consensus with others). Another prioritized global thinking and described it as a space where pupils learn to change perspectives and reflect upon positions other than their own. The second teacher alluded to a more critical thread of GC by positioning the MUN in relation to inequality and global social justice, while recognizing the pupils’ privileged and limited view on the world. Pupils, on the other hand, emphasized other aspects, such as debating and meeting other people, especially in a setting framed as international. They thus prioritized a cultural conception of GC. A similar argument was made by pupils in a school in another city who engaged in what they called ‘a little mock European Council debate’. Here, a

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student interwove arguments about authenticity, real-life experience and becoming aware of how European affairs affect everyday life with a culturalist understanding of GC. He did so by highlighting cosmopolitan encounters afforded by travel, and self-development through meeting with ‘other cultures’ rather than the possibility to ‘change the world’ through democratic means. His participation was ‘a perspective changer’, as he said, S2: … You can spend a lot of your life like kind of, taking something like just at face value and being like, ‘Oh yeah, … that’s how it is in my country, so that must be how it is everywhere.’ But I think, to me it’s like getting exposure to … things, like the European Council work. And then I also like traveling and like meeting people from other schools. And like for myself going to two schools abroad in my lifetime. You realize that there are some things that definitely are true across the world but there’s some things that aren’t … it can rock the foundations of your kind of world. (School 2, focus group with pupils engaged in school-level democratic representation)

To sum up, in these examples participation in the MUN is imbued with different meanings of GC taken from the typology of Oxley and Morris. On the one hand, the official format is meant to provide an opportunity to engage with political GC in terms of cosmopolitan democracy ideals and to activate moral GC in terms of internationally sanctioned norms and values, such as human rights. On the other hand, protagonists in these schools highlight different GC components in their accounts of MUN, more or less aligned with its official rendition:  (1) from school-level and teacher perspectives it emerges as an experientially rich exercise of engagement with global issues – thus echoing a political-cosmopolitan understanding of GC; (2) in teacher and pupil discourses it emerges as an opportunity to experience self-actualization and individual success, thus reflecting an economic-neoliberal understanding of GC; (3)  in pupils’ accounts, it takes the shape of cultural GC in terms of gaining cultural competences and meeting ‘the other’ as an enriching personal experience.

Conclusions Presenting snapshots from six German Schools Abroad in different parts of the world, we employed the typology of global citizenship (GC) conceptions developed



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by Oxley and Morris (2013) to shed light on GCE practices in a transnational context. We grouped these into three sets of cross-border engagements, centring on environmentalism, solidarity and democratic participation based on observations of how pupils, teachers and other staff enacted GC. We suggested that such forms of cross-border engagement interweave different categories from the typology. They do not coincide, as perhaps expected, with environmental, social and political GC. The categories cannot be neatly mapped onto different locations, schools or participants in these schools. For each form of cross-border engagement we showed how the eight conceptions from the typology are mobilized differently at different times by different groups and individuals to give ‘situated’ meanings to their practices. In the case of eco-engagements, we noted a discrepancy between imagery, activities and rationales mobilized during the eco-activities, some of which brought together environmental and economic threads in both neoliberal and corporate conceptions of GC. In the case of solidarity engagements, two approaches emerged across schools:  a more abstract, sporadic and ‘soft’ engagement, projecting ‘global’ involvement far beyond national borders and reinforcing global inequalities through the implicit disempowerment of recipients of charity; the other a more personal, long-standing and more ‘critical’ engagement, crossing class boundaries rather than state borders, and building bridges between participants, albeit without entirely piercing the bubble of privilege. Both approaches conjoin several conceptions from the typology (critical, moral, economic and social GC), even when these conflicted with one another. Finally, in the context of democracy engagements, teachers’ and pupils’ accounts of the practice of the MUN diverged. Where pupils mobilized more cultural and economic GC, teachers primarily invoked political and economic GC conceptions. To conclude, we reflect on the practical/political, theoretical and methodological implications of this study. First, practical politics:  The practices we observed strongly suggest that the conceptions offered by Oxley and Morris, or indeed those within other typologies, should not be seen as ‘boxes’ into which GCE practices fit, but ‘threads’ available to participants who interweave them in their situated practices, anchored in a complex web of transnational flows and interconnections. These conceptions are best seen in a sociological key echoing Swidler’s (1986) conceptualization of ‘culture in action’ – constituting a cultural toolkit that is available to, and used by, different actors/subjects at different times. In this sense, the value of international tests involving GC models (such as the PISA metric for ‘global competency’)

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can be questioned. If each situated practice enacts GC so differently, with so many interconnected, sometimes conflicting, conceptions mobilized in each setting, what value can decontextualized test results have – apart from arguably institutionalizing the dominant logic underlying the agendas of particular organizations, such as the OECD (see Auld and Morris 2019)? Indeed, does the very process of testing enact GC as a ‘universal’ concept, thus undermining efforts to decolonize and ‘provincialize’ the knowledge which sits at the heart of critical approaches to GCE proposed by postcolonial and critical scholars (Marshall 2011; Andreotti 2014)? This study suggests instead that although some threads (e.g. economic, cultural) are currently most prominent, other threads could become more prominent. Given the surge in young people’s interest in environmental issues (e.g. Fridays for Future) since our data was gathered, the environmental thread may have become far more prominent, potentially prioritizing more critical threads. No test could capture these shifting priorities. Second, theory: Our findings reveal a series of disconnections and ruptures that speak to the ways in which the issue of worldwide diffusion versus local appropriation of global norms is conceptualized in the field of comparative education (Anderson-Levitt 2003; Silova 2009; Carney, Rappleye and Silova 2012; Ramirez 2012; Schriewer 2012). ‘As they move, they morph’ (Cowen 2009) is a well-known dictum contesting the idea of a convergent world culture of educational ideas and expressing how educational policies, ideas and techniques shape-shift as they move between different localities. GCE can be (and has been) seen as just such a globally adaptable set of ‘fix-it’ ideas, particularly in the international arena where most normative documents on GCE and its most dominant terminologies originate (Tarozzi and Torres 2016). However, there are limits to seeing GCE as a consensually, internationally produced ‘blueprint’ applicable to different national contexts (cf. mutatis mutandis, Carney, Rappleye and Silova 2012). The idea of shape-shifting implies a single, original, ‘thing’ that is travelling and morphing as it meets local configurations. Prominent conceptualizations of educational transfer processes may thus suffer from what we might call ‘entitivity’ and ‘scalitis’. Meaning, first:  they could assume fixed entities transferred from A to B, even if just in discursive terms (Waldow 2009; Steiner-Khamsi 2012). Second, they may be caught in binary orthodoxies of spatiality. Context appears as an unproblematic container, and the researcher’s role in producing this assumption is sidelined (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017). Space and place continue to be imagined as hierarchical levels, or as global versus local



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scales (Carney 2010; Beech and Larsen 2014). We argue that the only way out of these conundrums is methodological. Thus, third, methodology:  By zooming in ethnographically to observe the complexity of practice in specific settings, and identifying the use of several, sometimes conflicting, GCE conceptions in each setting, we address the perils of ‘entitization’ in some accounts of global norms travelling and adapting to local (qua national) forms. We show not only how a diverse constellation of meanings is available within the broader cultural repertoires informing everyday school situations but also how they can be differently  – sometimes contradictorily  – mobilized in practice, even by the same individuals and in the same schools, with no loss of legitimacy. These ‘meaning constellations’ (Schriewer 2012) emerged not from policy analysis but from observing interactions and the arguments mobilized by the protagonists of school life. This methodology also addresses what we call ‘scalitis’:  A transnational comparative strategy of observing GC practices in a network of schools with similar organizational and legal frameworks but in different localities allowed us to ‘move beyond scale’ by looking ‘relationally at connections and flows across territorial entities and boundaries’ (Knutsson and Lindberg 2017:  720). With this approach we aim to avoid reifying levels or contexts. Instead we ‘read the global’ through a fresh anthropological lens attempting to reach ‘(well) beyond the nation state’ (Carney 2010). The goal is to deconstruct the ‘spatial empires of the mind’ (Beech and Larsen 2014), that is, to no longer see ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as separate, mutually exclusive contexts for locating social and educational phenomena. Overall, by orienting ourselves with situated practices in transnational schooling contexts, our hope is to ‘complicate the concept of culture’ (Anderson-Levitt 2012) underlying GCE by subverting its assumptions of ‘homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness’ (Abu-Lughod 1991:  476). This enables a critical interrogation of the concept of identity in the field of comparative education by seeing it as a process (i.e. ‘doing identity’) rather than an entity. Diverse mobilizations of GCE make sense in a processual understanding of individual schools as a symbolic order where variously assembled identities are played out, sometimes non-coherently. This entails an understanding of how school is (pluri-)locally done (Keßler 2017), while setting a new agenda through which to approach GCE comparatively – not as norm, model or discourse whose output is testable but as messy ‘situated practices’ in our rapidly changing world.

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Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to the German Federal Foreign Office for funding this project. Our thanks also go to the participating schools for their cooperation and to the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes 1 Similarly to Harriett Marshall (2011), we use ‘global citizenship education’ (henceforth GCE) loosely to include a myriad of concepts or practices that can be classed as promoting global citizenship through education. We are not examining a specific programme or set of recommendations from a particular institution (e.g. UNESCO), but a wider set of ideas resonating with global citizenship and permeating educational contexts in a variety of ways. 2 A ‘focused’ (Knoblauch 2005) or ‘applied’ (Agar 2006) ethnographic approach differs from traditional ethnography primarily through its focus on a specific problem investigated in the short term rather than on a community explored for a lengthy period of time. 3 The name of the programme (in which several schools in our study took part) has been changed. 4 The organization of ‘German’ Christmas markets was a highly visible practice of ‘cultural tourism’ observed in two other locations in the study. 5 The wearing of business attire is meant, according to the MUN website, to instil a sense of formality, rigour and seriousness to the political debate rather than business-like professionalism.

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Suárez, D. (2008), ‘Rewriting Citizenship? Civic Education in Costa Rica and Argentina’, Comparative Education, 44(4): 485–503. Swidler, A. (1986), ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review, 51(2): 273–86. Tarozzi, M., and C. A. Torres (2016), Global Citizenship Education and the Crises of Multiculturalism Comparative Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury. Vaccari, V., and M. Gardinier (2019), ‘Toward One World or Many? A Comparative Analysis of OECD and UNESCO Global Education Policy Documents’, International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 11(1): 68–86. Van Dyke, G. J. (December 2017), ‘Model UN and Model EU Programs’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, 1–29. Available online: https:// oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/ acrefore-9780190846626-e-264 (accessed 10 September 2020). VanderDussen Toukan, E. (2018), ‘Educating Citizens of “The Global”: Mapping Textual Constructs of UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education 2012–2015’, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 13(1): 51–64. Waldow, F. (2009), ‘Undeclared Imports: Silent Borrowing in Educational PolicyMaking and Research in Sweden’, Comparative Education, 45(4): 477–94. Weiler, A., and E. Hahm (2014), ‘Deutsche Auslandsschularbeit auf dem Weg zum transnationalen Bildungsraum – Das Fallbeispiel Mexiko’, in Transnationale Bildungsräume in der globalen Welt, 66–75, Oldenbourg: Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissen. Wimmer, A., and N. Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 2(4): 301–34. Yemini, M., and S. Furstenburg (2018), ‘Students’ Perceptions of Global Citizenship at a Local and an International School in Israel’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 48(6): 715–33. Zimenkova, T. (2016), ‘Educating “Supermen” and “Superwomen”: Global Citizenship Education’, in Z. Millei and R. Imre (eds), Childhood and Nation, 229–52, New York: Palgrave.

6

The Politics of Fear and Hope: Europe at the Crossroads Ruth Wodak

Hope is nothing but unsteady joy, arising from the image of a future or past thing about whose issue we are in doubt. Fear, on the other hand, is an unsteady sorrow, arising from the image of a doubtful thing. If the doubt be removed from these affects, then hope and fear become confidence and despair, that is to say, joy or sorrow, arising from the image of a thing for which we have hoped or which we have feared. (Baruch Spinoza 2001: 113)

Introduction When interpreting Spinoza’s analysis of the two salient emotions of ‘hope and fear’, it seems as if they are interchangeable concepts (Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2017). They coexist in a framework of uncertainty and are interdependent, as there are events when we hope for something to happen or not to happen, or we fear something occurring. In these cases, hope and fear then change to joy or sorrow once uncertainty is lifted. Especially since the financial crisis in 2008, hope and fear (and other emotions such as resentment) have been widely instrumentalized by political parties, in manifestos and speeches, on posters, in debates, interviews, social media and other genres. This is because topics such as migration, climate change, ‘national’ nostalgia for the past and the destabilization of liberal democracies are dominating the public debate in all the EU member states and beyond (Bevelander and Wodak 2019a; Wodak 2021). Apart from the impact of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, the Brexit referendum in 2016, Trump’s election to the US presidency in 2016 and the changing global balance of power between

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China, Russia and the United States ever since, the rise of far-right populist parties in the wake of such developments has been a cause of great concern to the EU establishment and many national mainstream parties (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Rydgren 2017; Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2017). Interestingly, however, the apparent chaos in UK politics while Britain negotiates its exit from the EU has led to much greater cohesion and unity among the remaining twenty-seven member states than anybody would have expected. When studying the results from the recent European Parliament election (23–26 May 2019), it is obvious that both the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost a number of seats when compared to the 2014 election. The far right, however, made major gains, but less than predicted in many opinion polls. Moreover, the Green Party and the Liberal Party also won many seats; in this way, the long-term coalition between the EPP and the S&D will hold no longer, new alliances and coalitions will have to be negotiated (see Figure 6.1). Moreover, British Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) had to leave the European Parliament, because the UK exited the EU on 31 October 2019  – this causeed more uncertainty, more hope and fear, more negotiations and changes. Nevertheless, although Eurosceptic voices are loud, they are no longer campaigning to leave the EU; they would like to strengthen national sovereignty without cutting all their ties to the EU. Accordingly, the latest Eurobarometer Survey from spring 2019 states that ‘the European sense of togetherness does not seem to have weakened. Continued support for EU membership goes with a strong belief (68 per cent) that EU countries overall have benefited from being part of the EU – equalling the highest level recorded since 1983.’1 In addition, 61 per cent of respondents say their country’s EU membership is a good thing. However, approximately 50 per cent of EU respondents feel things are not going in the right direction in either the EU or their own country; however, half of the respondents (51 per cent) believe their voice does count in the EU. Interestingly, and in contrast to the frequently explicitly xenophobic campaigns of many conservative mainstream and farright parties, the top priorities have gradually changed – from uncertainty and fear of immigration as the main agenda – to economy and growth (50 per cent), as well as youth unemployment (49 per cent).2 Nevertheless, in his widely acclaimed book After Europe (Europadämmerung) (2017), the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev maintains that migration remains the single most important factor behind the rising discontent in Eastern and Western European countries and the significant cleavage between them. It



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Figure 6.1  Political groups in the European Parliament, after the election in May 2019. Source: European Parliament in collaboration with Kantar.

is not the numbers of refugees and migrants that are of such importance, he continues, it is the brain drain from Eastern European countries, with millions of Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Slovaks and Romanians having left and continuing to leave their homes, leaving many people afraid that ‘their’ culture, language and traditions might literally die out. This is why, Krastev argues, they close their borders to migrants and refugees coming from elsewhere, especially if the latter are Muslim; they are convinced that such people don’t belong in Europe and would actually threaten European traditions and an allegedly homogeneous Christian-European culture. Moreover, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2003) emphasizes the many problematic issues arising in our globalized cities (and societies) when the host population necessarily confronts ‘strangers’ who come from elsewhere. Of

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course, Bauman argues, migration has always existed, and fear of strangers has always been a widely shared sentiment (e.g. Wodak 2015). Strangers are defined as ‘agents moved by intentions that one can at best guess but would never know for sure’ (2003: 26). Furthermore, while focusing on the effect of migrants on everyday life in Europe’s cities, Bauman states, Whatever happens to cities in their history and however drastically their spatial structure, look, and style may transform over years and centuries, one feature remains constant:  cities are spaces where strangers stay and move in close proximity to each other. Being a permanent component of city life, the ubiquitous presence of strangers within sight and reach adds a measure of perpetual uncertainty to all city dwellers’ life pursuits; that presence, impossible to avoid for more than a brief moment, is a never drying source of anxiety and of the usually dormant, yet time and again erupting, aggressiveness. (Bauman 2003: 27)

Krastev and Bauman both point to the fear that many people have of ‘others’ – fear that is then used for political ends by far-right populist parties. However, as Bevelander and Wodak (2019b) elaborate, there exist many different forms of mobility and, therefore, a range of different categories of migrants; in other words, migrants do not form one homogeneous group. Significant differences exist between, for example, asylum seekers, refugees, various types of migrants and tourists. Only specific – Muslim – migrants and asylum seekers are usually instrumentalized as scapegoats for all the common woes, a very simplistic explanation of complex social, economic and political challenges. The populist far-right politics of fear continues to fuel such arguments: a fear of foreigners, a fear of losing out, a fear of being ‘invaded’ – which is substantiated by manifold threat scenarios proclaiming an apocalyptic catastrophe if the imaginary of a pluralistic, multilingual, cosmopolitan and diverse EU were to win over a nativist body-and-border politics that suggests the closing of ever more borders in order to protect the ‘true’ Austrians, Finns, Hungarians or French (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou and Wodak 2018). From such a perspective, images of old enemies are evoked, related to – among others – traditional antisemitic stereotypes of world conspiracy, and metonymically condensed on/ in the many posters and slogans directed by the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, against the American Jewish philanthropist George Soros, who is allegedly masterminding the immigration of refugees to both Europe and the United States (Balcer 2019; Grabbe and Lehne 2019). ‘Taking back control’ has thus become the slogan of choice for the far right, drawing on the pro-Brexit campaign (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017; Bevelander and Wodak 2019b).



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In spite of the obvious shift to the political right, and alongside the move to more so-called ‘illiberal democracies’ (Wodak 2019a, b), a range of different standpoints and positions exist among the EU leaders and governing parties. In examining the discursive-political changes and shifts that dominate European debates and developments, I  focus on the genre of ‘speculative speeches’ (see below). I  will juxtapose two contrary visions for Europe and the EU, metonymically identified with Emanuel Macron and Victor Orbán, respectively, in order to illustrate the existing huge tensions. Before analysing  – at least briefly – two speculative/visionary speeches by these two prominent politicians, it is necessary to elaborate what kind of ideological agenda ‘far-right populism’ implies and how to analyse, interpret and explain the related rhetoric. Moreover, I  review relevant theories about the construction of fear and hope before illustrating the theoretical claims with empirical data.

Analysing far-right populism ‘Populism simplifies complex developments by looking for a culprit’, states the political scientist Anton Pelinka (2013: 8). He argues, As the enemy  – the foreigner, the foreign culture  – has already succeeded in breaking into the fortress of the nation state, someone must be responsible. The élites are the secondary ‘defining others’, responsible for the liberal democratic policies of accepting cultural diversity. The populist answer to the complexities of a more and more pluralistic society is not multiculturalism … right-wing populism sees multiculturalism as a recipe to denationalize one’s (own) nation, to deconstruct one’s (own) people. (Ibid.)

Far-right populist rhetoric relies on the construction of a distinct dichotomy which aims to divide the people living in a country into two quasi-homogeneous blocs:  the people are juxtaposed with the élites within a specific narrative of threat and betrayal, accusing the so-called establishment of having intentionally or subconsciously neglected the so-called ‘people’, having instead pursued only their own interests, thus failing to protect the people and to voice their interests, and having ignored the obvious anxieties of the people. The narrative arbitrarily constructs two groups via texts and images in manifold ways. Such a Manichean opposition portrays these two groups as vehemently opposed to each other, two epistemic communities, one defined as powerless, the other as powerful; the former described as good, innocent and hard-working, the latter as bad, corrupt, criminal, lazy and unjustly privileged and so forth. For far-right populists,

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immigration constitutes a threat to the presumed (constructed) homogeneous identity of the people and their traditional values. In this way, far-right populist parties seem to offer simple and clear-cut answers to all the fears and challenges mentioned above, by constructing scapegoats and enemies – ‘Others’ which are to blame for our current woes – by frequently tapping into traditional collective stereotypes and images of the enemy. The definition of the other varies pursuant to nationally specific conditions. In Hungary, the targets include Roma and Jewish minorities, while the Tea Party and Trump focus on Mexicans and other immigrants from Latin America. Sometimes, the scapegoats are Jews, sometimes Muslims, sometimes Roma or other minorities, sometimes capitalists, socialists, career women, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the EU, the United Nations, the United States or Communists, the governing parties, the elites, the media and so forth. ‘They’ are foreigners, defined by ‘race’, religion or language. ‘They’ are elites not only within the respective country but also on the European stage (‘Brussels’) and the global level (‘Financial Capital’) (Wodak 2017). Important fissures and divides within a society, such as class, caste, religion, gender and so forth, are neglected in focusing on such ‘Others’ or are interpreted as the result of ‘elitist conspiracies’. The discursive strategies of ‘victim-perpetrator reversal’, ‘scapegoating’ and the ‘construction of conspiracy theories’ therefore belong to the necessary ‘toolkit’ of far-right populist rhetoric. Following an aggressive campaign mode implies the use of ad hominem arguments as well as other fallacies such as the straw-man fallacy or the hasty generalization fallacy (an intentionally deceptive argument). Politicians tend to deny and justify even obvious failures (euphemistically labelled as ‘mistakes’) and quickly find somebody else to blame while cleverly employing manifold strategies of blame avoidance (Hansson 2015); under much pressure, ambiguous, evasive and insincere apologies may be made – or no apologies given at all (see Figure 6.2, which maps ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the far-right populist mindset). In short, anybody can potentially be constructed as a dangerous ‘Other’, should it become expedient for specific strategic and manipulative purposes. It also becomes apparent that – apart from the exclusion of ‘others outside’ – far-right populist ‘othering’ also targets ‘others below’, that is, homeless people, the unemployed and beggars, usually discriminated against for being ‘lazy’, ‘spongers’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘scum’ and even ‘parasites’. Frequently, it is presupposed that these people are foreigners or of ‘foreign/migrant’ origin, but not necessarily so. In any case, these groups are, these parties assume, allegedly not willing to work,



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DIVIDING THE WORLD decent, honest, good, industrious, duful, noble, charismac, honourable, brave, trustworthy, incorrupble

The good The true The upright The vicms

WE

‘The true people’, represented by the populists

amoral, deceiul, lazy, without conscience, evil, bad, cowardly, criminal

The ‘good’ fight ‘The others’ are a threat to us! We must fear ‘the others’! We have the right to defend ourselves against ‘the others’!

THE OTHERS

The bad The fake The liars The perps

Those up there The elites, policians, upper classes, the ‘east coast’, fake media Those out there Asylum seekers, economic refugees, welfare tourists Those down there Spongers, ‘parasites’, the work-shy

Figure 6.2  The far-right populist mindset. Adapted from Wodak (2019b: 76).

they don’t comply with neoliberal policies, they live of ‘our’ social benefits. These ‘others’ should be distinguished carefully from the so-called ‘modernizationlosers’, ‘our people’ who have been ‘left behind’, that is, people who would like to work but have no chance because of ‘globalization’ or because ‘the elites have not listened to them’, have not taken them seriously or even belittled them and so forth.3 In this context, Burgoon et al. (2019: 52–3) observe the salient role of positional deprivation which helps explain variation in support for radical right and radical left parties. We define positional deprivation as a situation where the increase (decrease) in disposable income of an individual is smaller (larger) relative to the growth in income of other groups in the same country’s income distribution. We expect such positional deprivation to foster feelings of unjust misfortune, resentments which in turn get channelled towards blaming mainstream political institutions and parties. As a result, positional deprivation can be expected to spur a retreat from mainstream politics and an embrace of anti-elite radical parties and party programmes.

The assumption of a Manichean division in society is, of course, not new. In Marxian terms, for example, the proletariat was contrasted to the capitalists who possessed the means of production; in the French Revolution, the ‘people’ opposed the aristocrats; in colonial societies, the imperialists oppressed the native population; in racist societies, dichotomies continue to be constructed according to imagined racialized biological characteristics; and  – as Norbert

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Elias and John L. Scotson (2016) were able to prove in their seminal empirical study of ‘Winston Parva’ (the pseudonym for a small community near Leicester, UK), The Established and the Outsiders – insiders and outsiders are frequently created due to their group’s cohesion and the duration of their residence in a specific region. The old inhabitants, having lived there for a long time, indeed for many generations, were labelled as the establishment, whereas the newcomers, the authors argue, were stigmatized, on the ground that they had little or no knowledge of the existing norms and rules, values and aspirations – although these newcomers had the same ethnicity, belonged to the same nation state and spoke the same language. Furthermore, Elias and Scotson (ibid.) illustrate that economic reasons (struggles for limited resources) were not the only cause for the stigmatization of the newcomers; fear of change, of losing one’s precious – established – identity, was also a salient factor. Instead, ‘feelings of belonging and not-belonging’, of being perceived as authentic or not, gain in importance. Elias and Scotson’s arguments resonate well with Hochschild’s (2016) claim about the ‘deep story’ at the heart of Trump’s victory:  the feelings of non-belonging, of white male patriarchy being challenged, of having lost out to or being sidelined by ‘others’, that is, African Americans, Latinos, career women and so forth; in other words, strong feelings of resentment emerge. It is therefore important to understand and explain how far-right populist parties continuously construct fear in order to address the collective common ground, as well as their reasons and (rhetorical and communicative) means. This is necessary in order to understand why and how far-right populist parties are achieving ever more success across Europe and beyond, especially in recent national and European elections. A context-dependent investigation is necessary because far-right populist parties across Europe and beyond draw on and combine different political imaginaries and different traditions, evoke (and construct) different nationalist pasts in the form of identity narratives and emphasize a range of different issues in everyday politics: thus, some parties gain support by flaunting an ambivalent relationship with fascist and Nazi pasts (e.g. in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Romania and France); some parties, in contrast, focus primarily on a perceived threat from Islam (e.g. in the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland); some parties restrict their propaganda to a perceived danger to their national identities from ethnic minorities and migrants (e.g. in Hungary, Greece, Italy and the UK); and some parties primarily endorse a traditional Christian (fundamentalist) conservative-reactionary agenda (e.g. in the United States). In their free-for-all rush for votes, most far-right populist parties evidently pursue several such strategies at



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once, depending on the specific audience and context; thus, the aforementioned distinctions are primarily of an analytic nature. Left-wing populist parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have also succeeded in winning in national elections due to the severe economic recession since 2008, the negative impact of austerity politics in Greece and Spain and the eurozone crisis. While both far-right and left-wing populist parties regard the EU as part of the élite, the latter do so with social rather than nationalist-nativist arguments.4

Creating fear: Legitimizing a politics of exclusion Obviously, the phenomena of right-wing extremism and a populist far right are not new. And neither is their focus on fear. As social historian Gianni Silei (2019) notes, ‘Fear and insecurity are dimensions that apparently characterise the European Zeitgeist of the beginning of the twentieth-first century, but they actually are as ancient as humankind.’ He continues his comprehensive ‘social history of Europe’s fears’ by claiming that ‘the origins of the third millennium’s fears are deeply rooted in the twentieth century: they represent a sort of mixture between the modern age and post-modern fears, and both originated from phases of great transformations and apparent optimism.’ Silei traces the re/emergence of fear and uncertainty through the manifold crises in the twentieth century, especially in the interwar period (1918–39). He concludes – and this point is indeed salient with respect to the agenda of the far right in the twenty-first century  – that the idea of the decline of Western civilization, the ‘demographic panic’, is becoming dominant via frequently evoked and repeated threat scenarios and apocalyptic dystopias. Hence, following Silei (2019), ‘fear can assume both positive and negative implications. It can be a factor of decline or progress. Fear is, above all a question of political responsibility.’ Silei quotes Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) who claimed that ‘civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security’, thus underlining the intimate connection between security and freedom. As will be elaborated below, the interdependence between fear, hope, security and freedom is complex, volatile, constantly shifting, easily exploited and instrumentalized for political ends. As Cap (2017:  9) rightly maintains, ‘The construal of imminent danger paves the way for legitimization of preventive measures in a vast number of public discourses.’ Accordingly, many people seem to quite easily renounce some democratic rights if promised more protection and security.

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Far-right populist parties successfully create fear and legitimize their policy proposals (usually related to restricting immigration and so forth)5 with an appeal to the necessities of security. Such arguments became eminent after the end of the Cold War in 1989 and were, of course, forcefully invigorated after 9/11, in the course of the refugee movement in 2015–16 (usually referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’), and when confronting the terrorist activities engaged in by ISIS and extreme-right terrorists. Each crisis contributes to such scenarios, as can be observed with respect to the financial crisis and the euro crisis (Stråth and Wodak 2009; Angouri and Wodak 2014). In such crisis situations, both politics and media tend to reduce complex historical processes to snapshots which enable the construction and triggering of Manichean dichotomies – friends and foes, perpetrators and victims and so forth. As argued by Murray Edelman in his seminal book The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1967), crises are promoted to serve the interests of political leaders and other interest groups that will most certainly benefit from such definitions (e.g. Altheide 2002: 12). We are therefore confronted by a contingency of factors that serve to facilitate dichotomist perspectives, create scapegoats and play into the hands of far-right populist parties: traditional and new threat scenarios, real and exaggerated crises as well as related horror and moral narratives, real and exaggerated security issues, media reporting that reproduces fear scenarios and political parties which instrumentalize all these factors to legitimize exclusionary policies. It is evident that all of these factors are related to each other: that they are, in fact, interdependent.

Speculative speeches: Contrasting ‘hope’ with ‘fear’ Speculative talk on Europe primarily reveals an interplay of two salient dimensions and respective goals (Weiss 2002): (a) Making meaning of Europe (ideational dimension), (b)  Organizing Europe (organizational dimension). It is the specific relationship of these two dimensions that constitutes the form of the text and talk. The first dimension refers to what Weiss (2002) labels the idea/s of Europe, the manifold meanings in use. The second dimension reflects the question of how Europe shall be organized, which institutional forms of decision-making and political framework might be appropriate for the future. These two dimensions are connected with at least two forms of legitimizing the political construction of the EU:  (a) legitimation through ideas (identity, history, culture), (b) legitimation through procedures (participation, democracy,



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efficiency).6 Both legitimation strategies touch on essential problems of political representation. In an interdisciplinary research project (2000–3), we analysed a corpus of twenty-eight speeches given by a range of prominent European politicians in the context of the Millennium. It became apparent that all twenty-eight speeches (mostly from British, French, Spanish and German politicians) began with an overview of the EU’s history and a reference to the so-called founding fathers, thus temporalizing the EU via its creation and the expectations raised by this new transnational entity. Furthermore, all speeches defined Europe as a territory, a geographical space, albeit in different ways (e.g. including or excluding Turkey). Another similar element consists of a fundamental dualism created between so-called experts and ‘the people’ (i.e. the citizens). Whereas the experts are believed to be guided by rationality, the people are perceived as irrational, uninformed and full of fear and uncertainty (see also Wodak 2018). All the speeches also delved into  – what we labelled as  – competitiveness and globalization rhetoric, proposals to solve problems and master the complex future. Accordingly, Europe should strive to be a ‘global player’, economically speaking. Of course, the sociopolitical context in 1999/2000 differed massively and significantly to that in 2018; thus, in 2000, most speeches also emphasized the necessity of enlargement and integration, whereas in 2018, the priorities concerned migration, human rights and diversity. At this point, it is important to elaborate – albeit very briefly – one of the first speculative speeches, given by the then foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who initiated the speculative talk about Europe at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in May 2000, with the title Vom Staatenverbund zur Föderation – Gedanken über die Finalität der europäischen Integration. The title focuses on the two notions that constitute Fischer’s perspective:  ‘finality’ and ‘integration’. Fischer’s focus is to ‘finalize’ Europe, that is, to complete the European project, to bring it to an end. In other words, what has to be finalized in Fischer’s view is European integration. Integration, for Fischer, has two central meanings:  (a) the then hugely debated enlargement of the EU (which happened in 2004, 2007 and 2008) and (b) political integration. The latter refers mainly to the strengthening of the so-called ‘capacity to act’ of the EU, that is, reform of the institutions. Integration as ‘Eastern enlargement’, however, clearly ranks first on Fischer’s list. Fischer also proposes several policy instruments to strengthen the federal character of the Union:  A constitution is needed  – particularly in order to regulate the ‘division of sovereignty between the Union and the nation-states’. For Fischer (2000), however, this does not mean the abolition of the nation state:

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Diese drei Reformen: die Lösung des Demokratieproblems sowie das Erfordernis einer grundlegenden Neuordnung der Kompetenzen sowohl horizontal, d.h. zwischen den europäischen Institutionen, als auch vertikal, also zwischen Europa, Nationalstaat und Regionen, wird nur durch eine konstitutionelle Neugründung Europas gelingen können, also durch die Realisierung des Projekts einer europäischen Verfassung, deren Kern die Verankerung der Grund-, Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, einer gleichgewichtigen Gewaltenteilung zwischen den europäischen Institutionen und einer präzisen Abgrenzung zwischen der europäischen und der nationalstaatlichen Ebene sein muss. Die Hauptsache einer solchen europäischen Verfassung wird dabei das Verhältnis zwischen Föderation und Nationalstaat bilden. [These three reforms  – the solution of the democracy problem and the need for fundamental reordering of competences both horizontally, i.e. among the European institutions, and vertically, i.e. between Europe, the nation state and the regions – will only be able to succeed if Europe is established anew with a constitution. In other words: through the realization of the project of a European constitution centred around basic, human and civil rights, an equal division of powers between the European institutions and a precise delineation between European and nation state level. The main axis for such a European constitution will be the relationship between the Federation and the nation state.]

These statements are important because they manifest some of the main characteristics of the, at that time, prominent so-called ‘German talk about Europe’. The primary focus was on legal-institutional procedures. Accordingly, following Fischer’s arguments, the legitimation of the ‘new’ Europe would primarily be one achieved through procedures. Basically, this position can be understood as Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism) in the Habermasian sense (Habermas 1997: 147–8; Weiss 2002), which is transferred here from the national to the supranational level. Such a Verfassungspatriotismus is based on, to use Habermas’s words, ‘a proceduralist theory of morals and law’ (1997:  93). Eighteen years later, in 2018, the European Union continues to  – still or again  – search for its identity/ies in spite of the many procedural and constitutional changes since 2000 due to the vast global and glocal sociopolitical developments (Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber 2007; Wodak 2019c).

Two visions of Europe While examining the discursive-political changes and shifts dominating European debates and developments with respect to definitions of European and



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national identities and narratives of the past, I  briefly juxtapose two contrary visions for Europe and the EU, metonymically identified with French president Emanuel Macron, on the one hand, and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, on the other, to illustrate the huge polarization dominating recent European political debates, between Europhiles and Eurosceptics, between those claiming to have learnt their lessons from the past and those who are overwhelmed with nostalgia for an imagined grand past (as heroes) or who want to correct perceived injustices (as victims) inflicted upon them. For example, May 2018 saw two remarkable speeches: Macron was awarded the ‘Karl’s Prize’ in Germany, while Orbán inaugurated his new government, after having been re-elected with an impressive majority for his far-right/ national-conservative party, Fidesz. Although both countries are EU member states, the two speeches staked out two significantly different positions on migration and diversity, on nationalism and globalization. They also offered two incommensurable visions for the future of European democracies and the European Union, thus also differing interpretations of the past. Most importantly, what are the lessons of the past is assessed very differently. The construction of a nation’s collective past often takes the form of a (heroic) narrative. Significantly, such narrativization entails the selection and representation of, inter alia, key events, actors and places to establish a meaningful framework in which to interpret the existence and continuity of the nation or people, given that communities of this scale or nature are not real but imagined, in Benedict Anderson’s (1983) sense. Due to their reach and salience, albeit in strikingly different ways, commemorative (and other official hortatory) speeches as a genre of political discourse present salient aspects of the discursive construction of national identities (Rheindorf and Wodak 2017). In his speech, Macron made the case for a ‘united Europe’, that is, a ‘Europe of hope’, in four appeals (labelled as imperatives) to European citizens (I list the relevant text extracts below; italics by Wodak):7 The first imperative is simple: let’s not be weak and let’s not be passive! We’re facing major threats, major imbalances that are unsettling our people and adding to their worries every day. The question being asked of each one of us is: do we want to be passive? Do we accept others’ rules or the tyranny of events, or do we make the choice to decide for our fellow citizens the rules that protect their private lives? … If we decide that a major digital player can decide on secrecy or tax rules, we’re no longer sovereign and the debate is invalid; if we decide that such-and-such a major international energy group decides on our climate policy for us, we’re no longer in a position to decide and to have a democratic debate.

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Our second imperative is:  let’s not be divided. The temptation is great, in this troubled period of self-absorption and nationalism, to think that at national level we’ll control things better and regain a share of this sovereignty, which is still too ephemeral or nascent at [the] European level. We had this alarm bell with Brexit, but we’re also hearing it from the Italian elections to Hungary, Poland and everywhere in Europe … Many would like to see history repeating itself and have our peoples believe we’ll be more effective this time. In the face of all the risks I’ve just described, division would be fatal; it would further reduce our actual sovereignty. Barbed wire is reappearing everywhere across Europe, including in people’s minds … But our only solution is unity; divisions push us only towards inaction. Our third imperative, my friends, is: let’s not be afraid, let’s not be afraid of the world we’re living in, let’s not be afraid of our principles, let’s not be afraid of what we are, and let’s not betray it. Today we’re facing all kinds of anger and uncertainty, and confronting temptation, sometimes of the worst kind:  the temptation to abandon the very foundations of our democracies and our rule of law. Let’s not give up any, any of it! … Europe is civility is the Europe of cafés, debates, universities, the conflict of ideas, the opposition of ideas that rejects both state violence and street violence but believes in the strength of truth because it believes in the strength of the democratic confrontation of ideas. Finally, I  believe the last imperative is that we mustn’t wait and that the time is now!

In this way, while reminding his audience of Europe’s dark heritage, he argued against new walls and fences (‘barbed wire’), against divisive nationalisms which – as he maintains – are very dangerous for the EU and, as he stated later, built upon a politics of fear instead of hope: ‘Let’s not be afraid; it means not being afraid of one another. … We have got to fight for something which is greater than ourselves, a new stronger Europe again!’ Macron repeatedly uses the topos of history (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 43–50). As Forchtner (2014: 21) states, ‘It is the specific context of our time, “the age of apology” … which renders possible a variety of uses of historia magistra vitae.’ Forchtner distinguishes four functions of this topos, which may also be combined in specific contexts: rhetorics of judging (i.e. because cooperation with dictators is wrong, we need to learn the lesson that we have to oppose dictators now), rhetorics of failing (i.e. because a terrible wrongdoing was committed in the past, we need to remain alert and prevent a repetition), rhetorics of penitence (because we were responsible for wrongdoing, we have to constantly monitor ourselves to prevent repetition of our past failures) and, finally, rhetorics of judge-penitence



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(we were responsible for past wrongdoings and we have learnt our lesson, thus we are morally superior vis-à-vis those countries and groups and peoples who have not learnt this lesson) (ibid., 26–38). This range of topoi is always integrated with types of narratives that represent specific interpretations of past events, according to the context and intentions of the speaker, as well as the expectations of the recipients. Forchtner (2016: 117) argues that a rhetoric of penitence strongly fuses past and present:  ‘There is a complex dialectic of rupture and continuity at work as the in-group embodies a temporal continuum which, at the same time, cannot be affirmed in a straightforward, heroic way.’ While acknowledging past wrongdoings of the in-group, the narrative also requires a demarcation from those past wrongdoings, a sort of internal othering. Thus, ‘being pushed and pulled between continuity and rupture’, the collective We is reconstituted as a reformed moral being, both good now and forever marred by what We did then. Macron’s speech extract above foregrounds rhetorics of failing combined with rhetorics of penitence: The wrongdoings of the tragic past have to be remembered in order to prevent such tragedies being repeated. Such rhetoric allows for collective learning processes, for a ‘Never again!’ In contrast, Orbán argued for a different future, for a Christian-based, illiberal democracy, maintaining that everything should be done to ensure the ‘survival’ of the Hungarian nation. Of course, the two contexts are very different  – Macron is speaking in a foreign country, Germany, and is reaching out to a huge international audience; while conversely, Orbán is primarily addressing his fellow Hungarians. Nevertheless, both politicians used the respective occasions for programmatic, rhetorically well-polished and persuasive statements and, crucially, for elaborating their respective views of the future: In my view, the age of liberal democracy is at an end. Liberal democracy is no longer able to protect people’s dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security or maintain Christian culture … We are Christian democrats and we want Christian democracy … The survival of Hungarians as a nation is not automatic. Hungarian policy should be predicated on the possibility that we could disappear, we could become extinct. Survival is a question of life force. We are a unique species. We have a language that is unique to us. There is a world which we alone see. I am convinced that migration eventually leads to the disintegration of nations and states:  national languages weaken, borders become blurred, national cultures dissolve; and what remains is a single ‘open society’. Finally, the merging of European societies makes such headway that a single, unified European

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government can come into being. This is the fate that awaits those who fail to defend themselves against migration  – perhaps not tomorrow, but within the foreseeable future. This is the name of the game; this is the true master plan. I  will not conceal our intentions:  here before you I  am making it clear that, acting in the name of Hungarian freedom, my government will be a determined opponent of this plan, the process that has led here and its intermediate steps. Multiculturalism was the first such step. Political correctness, which muzzles freedom of speech, was the second. This is where Europe stands today. The third step would be the mandatory migrant resettlement quotas. We must and we will enter the arena of European politics, in order to stop the Europe that we love – and for which we are ready to make major sacrifices – climbing to the next step towards self-immolation. We shall oppose the mandatory quotas, stand up for Christian culture, and fight to defend borders.8

The crisis was 2008, the financial crisis. Subsequently, reforms, Orbán concludes in his argument, have become necessary, in order to protect the Hungarian nation state, indeed establish a new Hungary. Although he endorses ‘democracy’ at the outset of his speech, he then moves on to the vision of a centralist state with long-term plans, decided by Fidesz’s majority. The fear of a changing demographic due to enormous emigration and the brain drain from Hungary to ‘the West’ should be countered by new economic and demographic policies. Hungarian women should thus give birth to many Hungarian children. More importantly and related to his definition of illiberal democracy, Orbán rhetorically constructs an imminent danger scenario (alluding to Soros’s ‘open society’) which frames his rationalization-legitimation of his agenda: He appeals predominantly to fear, fear of being invaded (by so-called illegal migrants) equated with, and alluded to as, having been invaded by the Soviets in 1956. This fallacy, a topos of history (the analogy between poor and destitute refugees and the strong and victorious Soviet army), is foregrounded, whereas Hungary’s own fascist past in the 1930s and the occupation by Nazi Germany is not even mentioned in this speech. In this way, he depicts a dystopian future should the EU’s migration and integration policies proceed. He endorses nationalism and uniqueness as alternatives, not the EU’s values of unity and diversity. It is primarily a rhetoric of judging which – as Forchtner (2014: 39) illustrates – usually blocks collective learning processes due to the silencing of internal doubts as a potential motor of learning. The most perilous danger, Orbán suggests in his rhetorical list of three, is ‘multiculturalism’ which would destroy the allegedly homogeneous Hungarian people. Second, political correctness and respect for others are perceived as



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‘muzzling’ (i.e. restricting) freedom of speech  – of the people. However, it is obvious, as mentioned above, that Fidesz and Orbán control the media and have no problem whatsoever in restricting the opposition’s opinions and any form of criticism. Hence, freedom of speech here refers to a specific aspect of Hungarian citizens, true Hungarians. And third, Orbán rejects the European Commission’s demands to distribute refugees via a quota system across EU member states. These three aspects are, he claims, part and parcel of migration which should therefore be prevented at any cost.

Conclusions It seems that, from the French perspective, the contents and idea of France are linked to the contents and idea of Europe. The content is defined, as argued by Weiss (2002), by the French concept of ‘civilisation’, similar to the speeches of former French prime minister Jospin in 2000:  ‘L’Europe est un modèle de civilisation. … Une civilisation où la démocratie, la liberté  – les libertés  – s’epanouissent’ (9 May 2000). The model of civilization that is referred to implies, of course, the principles of the French Revolution. In other words, l’Europe is the civilizational project of the French Revolution, of enlightenment, oriented towards the future. This l’Europe is the salient counter-concept of the so-called ‘Christian Abendland’. Abendland is directed to the past, it construes an origin, it refers to Christian roots. Historically speaking, the political unit representing the Abendland was the Holy Roman Empire. For most of the second Millennium, Habsburg-Austria represented the institutions of the Occident. The political unit representing l’Europe and the new civilizational mission was France, the so-called grande nation. This civilizational mission was based on three elements:  Democracy, Liberalism and Nationhood (nation in the sense of a political community of will, a matter of free decision) (Schulze 1999: 169; Weiss 2002). Hence, we conclude that – again – the legitimation that Europe in the twentyfirst century requires is not so much one through procedure but a legitimation through ideas. Without the latter, a true ‘political identity’ of Europe cannot be constructed. Indeed, the few extracts of the two antagonistic speculative speeches illustrate the differences between the national cultures (traditions, past, roots, heritage), on the one hand, and the universal idea of the civilizational project, the aims of enlightenment (directed to the future, political will, community of values), on the other.

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It becomes apparent that the European Union is polarized by these two conflicting visions. Put simply, Europe is at a crossroads: either opting for some necessary reforms, remaining a bulwark of liberal democracy and human rights, and fighting for solidarity, diversity and more equality – thus, a ‘Europe of hope’ – or, instead, redefining itself as a mainly economic, nationalistic federation of states that would exclude all non-Christians, aiming to dismantle the very concept of liberal democracy. Both visions draw on memories and histories, but on different ones  – or on different interpretations of the same facts. Of course, the reasons for such a polarization are manifold, historical, sociopolitical economic and influenced by global as well as glocal developments, which cannot be elaborated in this chapter.9 There obviously exist many ‘in-between’ positions, apart from these two totally polarized views (Plešu 2018).

Notes 1 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190417IPR41755/ support-for-eu-remains-at-historically-high-level-despite-sceptics. 2 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190417IPR41755/supportfor-eu-remains-at-historically-high-level-despite-sceptics (accessed 12 August 2019). 3 See, e.g., Hochschild (2016). 4 See Stavrakakis and Katsambekis (2014) and Zakaria (2016: 9). 5 See Wodak and Boukala (2014, 2015); Cap (2017); Rheindorf and Wodak (2018). 6 The formula ‘legitimation through procedure’ draws on the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann: Legitimation durch Verfahren (e.g. Luhmann 1969). 7 Due to space restrictions, a detailed and comprehensive text analysis cannot be presented here; see Wodak (2019c) for an example of such a systematic analysis following the discourse-historical approach. 8 See https://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-sspeeches/prime-minister-viktor-Orbán-s-address-after-swearing-the-primeministerial-oath-of-office; see also K. Verseck (2018), ‘Viktor Orbán – Osteuropas Anti-Macron?’, Deutsche Welle, 15 May 2018. Available online: www.dw.com/de/ viktor-orb%C3%A1n-osteuropas-anti-macron/a-43789383 (accessed 16 May 2018) 9 For a range of interdisciplinary approaches and the vast number of studies attempting to cover and explain the rise of populism and the differences between East and West, North and South, see e.g. Finchelstein (2014); Krastev (2017); Lamont (2018); Mouffe (2018); Müller (2016); Salzborn (2014); Snyder (2018); Stavrakakis and Katsambekis (2014); Wodak (2015, 2021).



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References Altheide, D. L. (2002), Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis, New York: Transaction. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Angouri, J., and R. Wodak (2014), ‘ “They Became Big in the Shadow of the Crisis”: The Greek Success Story and the Rise of the Far Right’, Discourse & Society, 25(4): 540–65. Balcer, A. (2019), ‘Islamophobia without Muslims as a Social and Political Phenomenon. The case of Poland’, in P. Bevelander and R. Wodak (eds), Europe at the Crossroads, 207–28, Lund: Nordicum. Bauman, Z. (2003), City of Fears, City of Hopes, London: Goldsmith’s College. Bevelander, P., and R. Wodak, eds (2019a), Europe at the Crossroads, Lund: Nordicum. Bevelander, P., and R. Wodak (2019b), ‘Europe at the Crossroads: An Introduction’, in P. Bevelander and R. Wodak (eds), Europe at the Crossroads, 7–22, Lund: Nordicum. Boukala, S., and D. Dimitrakopoulou (2017), ‘The Politics of Fear vs. the Politics of Hope: Analyzing the 2015 Greek Election and Referendum Campaigns’, Critical Discourse Studies, 14(1): 39–55. Burgoon, B., S. van Noort, Μ. Rooduijn and G. Underhill (2019), ‘Positional Deprivation and Support for Radical Right and Radical Left Parties’, Economic Policy, 34: 49–93. Cap, P. (2017), The Language of Fear, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Edelman, M. (1967), The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Elias, N., and J. Scotson (2016), Etablierte und Außenseiter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Finchelstein, F. (2014), ‘Returning Populism to History’, Constellations, 21(4): 467–82. Fischer, J. (2000), ‘Vom Staatenverbund zur Föderation – Gedanken über die Finalität der Europäischen Integration. “Humboldt-Rede” ’, Themenportal: Europaïsche Geschichte, 12 May. Available online: https://www.europa.clio-online.de/quelle/id/ q63-28290 (accessed 10 October 2019). Forchtner, B. (2014), ‘Rhetorics of Judge-Penitence: Claiming Moral Superiority through Admissions of Past Wrongdoing’, Memory Studies, 7(4): 409–24. Forchtner, B. (2016), Lessons from the Past? Memory, Narrativity and Subjectivity, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Goodwin, M., and C. Milazzo (2017), ‘Taking Back Control? Investigating the Role of Immigration in the 2016 Vote for Brexit’, Journal of Politics & International Relations, 19(3): 450–64. Grabbe, H., and S. Lehne (2019), ‘The EU’s Values Crisis: Past and Future Responses to Threats to the Rule of Law and Democratic Principles’, in P. Bevelander and R. Wodak (eds), Europe at the Crossroads, 49–62, Lund: Nordicum. Habermas, J. (1997), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur Politischen Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Schulze, H. (1999), Staat und Nation in der Europäischen Geschichte, München: Beck Verlag Silei, G. (2019), I fantasmi della golden age. Paura e incertezza nell’immaginario collettivo dell’Europa occidentale (1945–1975). Milano: FrancoAngeli (Uncertain Continent: A Social History of Western Europe through its Fears (1945–2001)) (translation into the English, in press). Snyder, T. (2018), The Road to Unfreedom, New York: Duggan Books. Spinoza, B. (2001), Ethics, London: Wordsworth Classics. Stavrakakis, Y., and G. Katsambekis (2014), ‘Left-Wing Populism in the European Periphery: The case of SYRIZA’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 19(2): 119–42. Stråth, B., and R. Wodak (2009), ‘Europe – Discourse – Politics – Media – History: Constructing Crises?’, in A. Triandafyllidou, R. Wodak and M. Krzyżanowski (eds), European Media and the European Public Sphere, 15–33, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weiss, G. (2002), ‘Searching for Europe: The Problem of Legitimisation and Representation in Recent Political Speeches on Europe’, Journal of Language and Politics, 1(1): 59–83. Wodak, R. (2015), The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2017), ‘The “Establishment”, the “Elites”, and the “People”: Who’s Who?’, Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4): 471–84. Wodak, R. (2018), ‘ “We Have the Character of an Island Nation”: A DiscourseHistorical Analysis of David Cameron’s “Bloomberg Speech” on the European Union’, in M. Kranert and G. Horan (eds), Doing Politics, 27–58, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wodak, R. (2019a), ‘Entering the “Post-Shame Era”: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, Populism and Neo-Authoritarianism in Europe’, Global Discourse, 9(1): 195–213. Wodak, R. (2019b), ‘Analysing the Micropolitics of the Populist Far Right in the “PostShame Era” ’, in P. Bevelander and R. Wodak (eds), Europe at the Crossroads, 63–92, Lund: Nordicum. Wodak, R. (2019c), ‘Discourse and European Integration’, in A. Wiener, T. Börne and T. Risse (eds), European Integration, 151–73, Oxford: Elsevier. Wodak, R. (2021), The Politics of Fear: The Shameless Normalization of Far-Right Populist Discourse, 2nd revised and extended edition, London: Sage. Wodak, R., and M. Krzyżanowski (2017), ‘Right-Wing Populism in Europe and USA: Contesting Politics and Discourse beyond “Orbánism” and “Trumpism” ’, Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4): 471–84. Wodak, R., and S. Boukala (2014), ‘Talking about Solidarity and Security in the Age of Crisis: The Revival of Nationalism and Protectionism in the European Union – A Discourse-Historical Approach’, in C. Carta and J.-F. Morin (eds), EU Foreign Policy through the Lens of Discourse Analysis, 171–90, Farnham: Ashgate.

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7

Right-Wing Populism, Educational Media, and Schools in Times of Crisis Christoph Kohl

Introduction In various countries around the world, right-wing populist discourse has enjoyed growing popularity. Many of these countries have experienced some sort of profound crisis, be it economic, financial, political or cultural. In many settings, right-wing populist discourses  – and not only and not necessarily populist political parties – have emerged as part of mainstream discourses. In many countries, it has created a policy backlash at the expense of what could be termed ‘progressive’ societies and politics. As a result, populist discourse has partly entered an alliance with more mainstream (neo)conservative or neoliberal policies and discourses. Right-wing populism as a stylistic and discursive phenomenon makes use of nativist and authoritarian features, being thus a radical interpretation of mainstream political values (Mudde 2010). Populists have claimed to represent the voice of ‘the people’ more authentically than ‘elites’ and other ‘established’ political parties and politicians, and have been challenging the education systems and educational media, notably school textbooks and curricula. This chapter adopts a transnational perspective to analyse how, and to what extent, education systems and educational media have been affected or targeted by right-wing populist policies. Starting with the discussion of populism and the presentation of a definition that serves to compare various national and thematic cases, the chapter will identify a number of strategies and targets pursued by populist leaders. It will then examine evidence from several countries. I intend to show how ideas are sometimes translated differently in different country settings. ‘Vernacularization’ (Levitt and Merry 2009) refers to the

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translation of ideas, norms, concepts, images and so forth from one sociocultural, political and/or geographic context to another, a process in which they are recontextualized and consequently embedded and translated into local terms and concepts (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Merry 2006; Levitt and Merry 2009). In their new context, travelling models are subject to innovations and transformations (Kaufmann and Rottenburg 2012). However, in many cases, trajectories of ideas are not always traceable. Even more importantly, it cannot be denied that sometimes similar ideas can develop independently from each other in different geographic settings and/or at different times, originating against different ideological backgrounds. I argue that populist discourse either translates strategies from one setting to another or independently develops similar arguments and strategies, resulting in many similarities of approaches between countries. Successful strategies can be copied and translated into local contexts. In some cases, the examples presented here have already been given attention by scholarly research; in other cases  – given the novelty of populist educational policies  – only journalistic articles or primary sources could be used for analysis. Criteria for the selection of cases were countries that possess political arenas in which right-wing populist discourses and performances have entered mainstream politics and policies in recent years. Instead of presenting a fully fledged comparative analysis, this chapter offers new insights in populist discourse in the education sectors of various countries, serving to identify knowledge gaps and directions for future in-depth comparative research. Populist discourse in numerous country settings is often about a supposedly corrupt and morally bankrupt elite that has reputedly contributed to a distortion of and remoteness from what is framed as the ‘people’s reality’ in the education sector and educational media of a specific country. Meanwhile, the success of populist discourse with regard to the attempted spread of alternative, supposedly more authentic, historical narratives and memories in educational media is closely related to teaching practices in schools. For many years, if not decades, didactic experts have demanded that the focus of history and social science education change from an emphasis on historical coherence and continuity to approaches that put the teaching of methodological skills – such as the contextualization of past events and the analysis of multiperspectivity – at their centre. Yet, although these demands have been broadly accepted, prompting some school administrations to incorporate methodological skills in their curricula and teacher training, many learners still have very limited or even no competence in critically analysing the past and source materials. This



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plays into the hands of populists who, in fact, aim to eliminate any form of polyperspectivity or contingency. They wish instead to undermine critical analysis and return to unambiguous messages and authentic ‘truths’. To date, there has been surprisingly little research on the interrelationship between right-wing populist political discourses and the education sector and educational media. Very often, studies are disparate and idiosyncratic, revealing different understandings and definitions of populism (Mudde 2017:  28, 38). Despite the fact that populism has become a major topic of scholarly research, cross-regional studies remain few and far between (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013: 147–8). Some authors associate the term ‘populism’ primarily with rightwing populist movements (e.g. Decker 2006; Mudde 2017:  37) or equate the notion with politico-economic neoliberalism (e.g. Beach 2017; Macedo 2017), whereas others use the term without defining populism at all, indicating an element of arbitrariness (e.g. Gamal and Swanson 2017). Moreover, the particular studies available often have diverging approaches to and perspectives on education (see e.g. the edited volume by Akbaba and Jeffrey 2017). Similarly, comparison is also complicated by the fact that research is often limited to single case studies. In addition, some studies – as promising as their titles may sound – only deal with the interrelationship between populism and education as a marginal issue (see e.g. Ranieri 2016). This neglect is all the more astonishing since the populist right has long discovered that young people are an important receiving audience. For years, they have intensified their efforts to tap the motivation of youth to change the world, their longing to belong to a group and their desire to ascribe meaning to the world. Populists have done this in particular by networking on social media platforms and by winning the support of popular musicians or sports stars, for example (Krasteva and Lazaridis 2016). Surprisingly, even the recently released Oxford Handbook of Populism (Kaltwasser, Taggart, Espeja and Ostiguy 2017) does not include a separate chapter on education or youth. This is despite the fact that historically, education has been an important policy area for some populist parties and politicians, such as in the United States and Canada in the 1930s (Taggart 2000: 37–8, 70). Recently, in many European countries right-wing populists have discovered the education sector as an important field of activity. The contradiction between populist discursive ideals and reality could still serve as a starting point for a profound analysis:  ‘It is something of a curiosity that populism, which seeks to take its wisdom from the people, often puts much effort into educating those same people concerning their wisdom’ (Taggart 2000:  70). Indeed, ‘the most powerful players in the policy game are the educated, the wealthy, and

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the well-connected’ (Achen and Bartels 2016: 325). Hence, intensified (political) education and information at schools could possibly help to influence populist voters’ minds and knowledge (see Achen and Bartels 2016: 40–1).

Approaching populism How can populism be defined to enable it to serve as the basis for a crosscountry analysis of the relationship between right-wing populist discourse and education? First, analytical perspectives have to be separated from the views of actors. In public debate, for example, the term ‘populism’ is often used pejoratively (Marchart 2017:  11) while in academia populism is (supposed to be) used as a neutral, analytical tool. Yet, as with popular parlance, in academic circles the concept often has negative connotations (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013:  149). Second, ‘the concept of populism has been contested for decades’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013: 149). Therefore, a consensual definition does not exist. The conceptualization of populism  – both right- and left-wing  – as an ideology has gained much ground in past years (Mudde 2004, 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013) and has been successfully employed in comparative studies (e.g. Hawkins, Riding and Mudde 2012). This chapter, however, rather seeks to conceive populism as a discourse and performance. This understanding attempts to transcend the dichotomic distinction between populism and non-populism. Following Ernesto Laclau (2005), populism is a specific mode of articulation. First, populist discourses aim at morally distinguishing an ‘authentic’, ‘pristine’, ‘honest’ people from a ‘corrupt’, ‘pathological’ and ‘dishonest’ elite that betrays the former. Both categories are regarded as homogeneous, monolithic communities. Populists claim to be different from the establishment (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 391). Accordingly, populist discourse demands that politics should be an expression of the general will of ‘the people’ (Mudde 2004: 543). Second, populists do not only construct a vertical antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ but also a horizontal tension between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (Lewandowsky 2017:  6). Outsiders are demonized as puppets and tools of malignant elites. Right-wing populist discourse is ‘primarily preoccupied with questions pertaining to national identity and national security – and their “negative” doubles immigration, multiculturalism, Islamist threat’ (Rydgren 2017: 1). Conversely, while excluding certain groups, populist discourse creates



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a new, integrative sense of belonging among those imagined as ‘excluded’ and ‘marginalized’. Third, a basic axiom of populist discourse is an appeal to common sense based on concrete, life-worldly, everyday experience and an undistorted access to justice, reality and truth, thus, in opposition to intellectual, supposedly elitist reflection and expert knowledge (Priester 2012:  4; Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 391, 393; see e.g. Rex Tillerson quoted in Baker 2018). Fourth, populist discourse draws major support during periods of perceived or suspected crisis, breakdown, conspiracy or emergency (Taggart 2000:  1; Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 391–2). Inversely, populists behave and present themselves as victims of a supposed crisis-laden situation, ‘hostile media’, the collapse of public order or a threat (Müller 2016:  42; Manucci 2017:  471). Fifth, performance frames populist discourse (Ekström, Patrona and Thornborrow 2018; Sorensen 2018). Populist performance entails the increasing ‘stylization’ and ‘spectularization’ of the political, prompted by an increased mediatization (Moffitt and Tormey 2014:  387). This entails a typical language style, a black-and-white crisis and emergency rhetoric, dramatization, emotionalization, moralization, scandalization and spectacularization (Wirth et al. 2016; Chakravartty and Roy 2017: 4079; Manucci 2017: 472). The populist appeal also comprises a disregard for ‘appropriate behaviour’ and frequent displays of ‘bad manners’ (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 392–4; Moffitt 2016: 43–5; Maldonado 2017). These characteristics can be found to varying degrees in the country cases cited in the following analysis, demonstrating the extent to which populist discourse has made inroads into mainstream policies.

Populism and education What do these points mean for our analysis? Most importantly, ‘not everyone who criticizes elites is a populist’ (Müller 2016: 101). As mentioned above, the term ‘populism’ has been transformed into a fighting word in recent years. Due to a lack of a clear definition across the political spectrum, that is, from left to right, it has often been employed by both media and established politicians to denounce politics and policies of the respective other political side. For instance, often it is denounced as ‘populist’ anything that appears as a political alternative to the neoliberal dogma to which the parties of the entire traditional spectrum are attached with only slight variation: unrestricted rule of markets in all spheres of life, clearance of public

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goods, constitutionalization of the austerity regime, dismantling of social security systems, extension of the low-wage sector global ‘competitiveness’. (Marchart 2017: 12; author’s translation)

In contrast to non-populist political discourses that refer to an opposition between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’, populist discourse emphasizes the issue of morality, opposing ‘the immoral elite’ to ‘the moral people’ (Mudde 2017: 29–30). Further, as discussed before, the employment of a specific performance is a fundamental aspect of populist discourse. These distinctions also play a role when analysing the interrelation between populist discourse and education. Conversely, as we shall see, conservative and neoliberal policies have in many cases adopted populist discourses. Because the notion of ‘populism’ is used in a large variety of different ways, some conceptions represented in scholarly literature do not correspond to our definition. Two examples from Brazil and Norway illustrate this point. Brazil’s reformist education movement in the 1960s and 1970s was inspired by Catholic liberation theology and aimed at overcoming underdevelopment by challenging teachers’ authority while assigning students the role of agents in the learning process. Accordingly, the students were supposed to define teaching programmes. This approach has been dubbed as ‘pedagogic populism’, based on the conviction of educators and intellectuals ‘that the solutions to problems experienced by the people should spring from the people themselves’ (Paiva 1995:  155). It represented a form of anti-intellectualism that contrasted, according to Paiva, a ‘corrupted elite’ with the supposed ‘wisdom and purity of the people’ (Paiva 1995: 155). What appears at first glance to be the use of the term ‘populism’, as described above, emerges on closer inspection to be a misleading choice of terminology. Of course, one can criticize this Brazilian education approach; yet, employing the term ‘populism’ is problematic as the educators’ approach was anti-authoritarian and pluralist and did not conceive society as two opposing, homogeneous entities as claimed by the author. It is worth noting that the term ‘populism’ in Brazil is commonly ascribed to the period of populist governments from the 1930s until the military coup in 1964 (see also Feres Júnior and Gagliardi forthcoming). Furthermore, the oftenquoted use of the word ‘populist’ by one of Brazil’s most famous educators, Paulo Freire, does not correspond to our understanding outlined here. In fact, his talk of a ‘populist dialogue’ as a prerequisite for a left-wing revolution in the English translation of his monograph (Freire 1970) is actually a poor translation of ‘diálogo popular’, thus ‘popular dialogue’, in the Portuguese original.



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The case of Norway illustrates how a local, popular understanding of the term ‘populism’ contrasts with the analytical usage as proposed by Cas Mudde. In the Norwegian context, ‘educational populism’ (Tjeldvoll 2002) refers to ‘a communalist defence of peasanthood against intrusion from the outside’ (Lauglo 1995b:  261). This kind of populism, which is rooted in nineteenth-century cultural populism, emphasizes ‘native language, literature, and historiography that celebrate pupils’ own cultural roots’ (Lauglo 1995b:  262). Norway’s educational populism thus stresses the importance of learning arenas other than schools:  the home, the community, the workplace. It supports the importance of learning from experience, of practical knowledge which is not formally structured … Thus, a populist view of education values skills that can be applied to practical tasks and problems outside of school, in the home, the workplace and the local community. (Lauglo 1995a: 287–8).

This entails, conversely, that ‘neither classical languages nor modern abstract art have any place among its educational ideals’ (Lauglo 1995b: 262). Although this education concept is based on a distinction between the elite and the people, an authoritarian understanding referring to a supposedly morally corrupt elite remains absent, and so does the construction of a general will. These examples make it clear how varied conceptualization of populism in academia can be, and how popular and scholarly usages of the term can differ.

Populist attacks on education in international perspective In the following, I identify a number of educational fields in which right-wing populist discourses have promoted or demanded changes. The examples stem primarily from countries in the Global North and in some cases represent declarations of intent which the respective populist parties would implement, should they gain power. A comparative look reveals that populist discourses have pursued a number of strategies, and although there is common ground across national boundaries, objectives and rationales may differ from country to country.

Claiming to make peoples’ voice heard, pretending to fight political indoctrination In both Germany and Austria, the respective right-wing populist parties Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) have

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started initiatives to counter what they criticize as an alleged ‘political indoctrination’ (Klovert 2018) of pupils by school teachers. In early 2017, the Austrian FPÖ presented a new website called ‘Non-party school’ where users could anonymously denounce political statements by teachers who, for example, associated the FPÖ with right-wing extremism (Kontrast 2017). According to the party, ‘verbal lapses’ and other violations of ‘objectivity’ by teachers should be anonymously reported, irrespective of political alignments. After heavy protests from other political parties and teachers’ unions that decried intimidation and denunciation, the party logo disappeared from the website in an apparent attempt by the FPÖ to portray the project as politically non-partisan. Even prior to the introduction of the website, violations could be reported to the state education authorities, although most cases failed due to a lack of evidence (OÖNachrichten 2017; Pfandler 2017). The website was soon taken offline, officially for maintenance work (FPÖ Fails 2018). A year later, in mid-2018, the German AfD followed suit to fight pretended ‘political correctness’. AfD politicians in the federal states of Bremen and Hamburg announced a plan to create an internet platform (downplayed as a ‘complaints box’, or Kummerkasten in German) where teachers, parents and pupils could report anti-AfD incidents. According to one AfD politician, ‘political education’ was often confused with ‘political indoctrination’, which infringed the ‘principle of neutrality’. In response, the leading teachers’ union referred to the 1976 Beutelsbach Consensus (Munzinger 2018; Schlink 2018; Vieth-Entus 2018). According to this agreement, it is not permissible to catch pupils unprepared or unawares – by whatever means – for the sake of imparting desirable opinions and to hinder them from ‘forming an independent judgement’. It is precisely at this point that the dividing line runs between political education and indoctrination. Indoctrination is incompatible with the role of a teacher in a democratic society and the universally accepted objective of making pupils capable of independent judgement. (Beutelsbach Consensus 1976)

The AfD was consequently accused of knowingly confusing illegitimate, manipulative indoctrination with open, free and heated debate (Engartner 2018; Schlink 2018). Like the situation in Austria, the AfD attempted to portray itself and the students as victims of a politically motivated campaign of intimidation and conspiracy (Klovert 2018; Munzinger 2018; Thorwarth 2018) that was intended to suppress critical and pluralist discussions. Again, similar to the Austrian case, teachers unions and the school authorities condemned the plans



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while the AfD claimed to have been misunderstood (AFP 2018; NDR 2018). The AfD increasingly perceives teachers and other representatives of the state as ‘collaborators’ and fantasizes about their ‘disposal’, demonstrating a linguistic as well as a political radicalization. Disciplinary complaints are one means with which the AfD has attempted to silence ‘indoctrinated’ teachers who they accuse of ‘thinking socialistically’ and advocating an ‘ideological re-education’ (News4Teachers 2018a, 2018b). By late 2018, the AfD had set up online portals in five federal states, and platforms in at least three other states were pending. However, serious reports were rare; in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt only fifteen out of one thousand reports were found to be genuine (Prinz-Klause 2018). Meanwhile, politicians encouraged teachers and condemned intimidation attempts (e.g. Die Welt 2018), and such platforms were soon ruled to be illegal (Prinz-Klause 2018). Similar attempts to fight a supposed leftist ‘political indoctrination’ of students have been reported in Brazil. Here, an initiative called Escola sem Partido (School without Party) has lobbied for the last couple of years against tendentious school textbooks – especially at municipal and federal levels. They predominantly criticize the spread of a ‘gender ideology’ and LGBTI principles. Apart from its website the initiative has a very low profile, but research suggests that it is closely connected to ultraconservative, populist evangelical politicians (Roza forthcoming).

Religious pressures on school sex and gender education In fact, this dimension covers three closely related aspects that are much connected to identity, that is, (a) school sex education and its relationship with morals and ethics, (b) the opposition of creationism and evolutionism and their connection to religion as well as (c) religion as both an inclusive and exclusive characteristic of social and individual identification. These dimensions actually represent two sides of one coin: on the one hand, the politicization of religion by populist discourse; on the other hand, the sacralization of politics, two phenomena that may not be clear-cut (Zúquette 2017: 454). Populist missionary discourse in fact ‘upholds, and contributes to, the formation and mobilization’ (ibid.:  455) of a sacred framework for identity, evoking most notably a moral community to contend against the ‘evil’. In so doing, populist and missionary discourses combine two facets that powerfully appeal to people’s identity and moral commitment.

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In a recently published, pioneering edited volume, various authors have analysed religiously motivated anti-gender campaigns, challenging supposedly either leftist or communist ‘gender ideology’ throughout Europe (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). They have shown how, particularly in Catholic countries, populist discourse has entered an alliance with religiously connoted anti-gender movements. Germany is but one example:  some Christian fundamentalists, among them members of the German AfD, claim to be exercising ‘common sense’ while trying to discredit gender mainstreaming approaches. At rallies they have produced false, homophobic arguments against school sex education claiming it constitutes ‘early sexualization’ that supposedly violates ‘parental education sovereignty’ and paves the way to a ‘pornographized youth’ (Hoffmann 2017). Other countries that have seen similar opposition include Brazil – as mentioned above – and the United States (Paiva and Silva 2015). Trump’s election victory in particular has resulted in a rolling back of robust, anti-discriminatory protection for gender diverse children that was implemented by the previous Obama administration (Galman 2017). Let us here examine more closely the case of the United States. Education in the United States has been subject to the influence of powerful religious groups for decades. Liberal views became marginalized with the advent of conservative evangelicalism in the 1940s and 1950s – a development that gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s when many from the emergent middle class converted to evangelicalism and began to disseminate conservative world views. They had a strong sense of being on a mission, trying to convert those in their immediate environment. In the 1980s, a model was developed by a religious think tank, the Institute for Creation Research, that has become a blueprint for legislation throughout the country. In effect, under the guise of pluralism, equal teaching time was demanded for both evolutionary theory and creationist approaches. In 1999, Kansas decided to remove any reference to evolution from the curriculum, thus setting the example for other states. Self-censorship among textbook publishing houses was a key effect as they removed controversial content. A cornerstone of many populist, authoritarian evangelical discourses is the belief in social degeneration due to a supposed attack against Christian values, as embodied for example by the LGBTI movement and school sex education being pushed forward by ‘liberal’ elites. They firmly believe in one ‘true’, objective history (‘we want our history back’), regarding openness, scientific findings, heterogeneity and pluralism in general as a threat. Similar to other populist movements they see themselves as victims of a policy of sidelining and silencing and regard themselves as ‘real Americans’. Their moral conservatism is paired with a



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belief in free markets and enterprises (Apple 2001). In recent years, creationist stakeholders have adapted their strategy to constitutional norms that prohibit ‘an establishment of religion’. They are now promoting ‘academic freedom’ laws that have been enacted in several states over the past decade. Thus, instead of mentioning controversial terms like ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ they pretend to advocate critical thinking and pluralism. With the inauguration of the Trump administration in 2017, religious-populist movements have gained momentum: Secretary of Education Elisabeth deVos – who once qualified her educational approach as a contribution to ‘advance God’s kingdom’ (Glinskis 2017) – Vice President Mike Pence and Donald Trump’s former attorney general Jeff Sessions have identified themselves as proponents of a Christian, populist agenda (Glinskis 2017; Haberman 2017). This mixing of a belief in state-free, unrestrained capitalism under religious auspices also affects another cluster of populist education arenas, that is, the basic structuring of the school system.

Neoliberal pressures for education privatization Both in the United States and Brazil, anti-factual populist political discourses have been dedicated to the cuts of expenditures, flexibilization, a neoliberal emphasis on ‘skills’ and ‘competences’ and ‘school choice’ since the governments of presidents Donald Trump in the United States and Michel Temer in Brazil took office. That way, they tacitly seek to reinforce social divisions and to delegitimize affirmative action measures (Dennis 2017; Macedo 2017). In the United States, the school choice movement has been active for decades but has found prominent advocates in the Trump administration, notably embodied by Secretary of Education Elisabeth deVos. During his term as governor of Indiana, Mike Pence reinforced voucher programmes that supported the transfer of learners from public to private schools, many of them religious ones. While this privatization has proven expensive and has had negative effects on learners’ performance and achievements, these programmes clearly support religious schools. They do not have to meet the same requirements that public schools have to, such as the respect of gender pluralism, anti-discriminatory measures and religious neutrality (Weaver 2018; also more generally Mulder 2018). France’s National Rally, formerly known as the National Front, has criticized high expenditure in the present education system that, on paper at least, favours integration and egalitarianism. Instead, the National Rally argues against any kind of positive discrimination, that is, affirmative action, demanding increased competition and selection procedures based on merit. At the same time, it claims

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that the ‘authority and respect of the teacher’ should be re-established and that education in general should be (re-)centralized (Houel 2016; Jarraud 2017). Most importantly, however, the National Rally intends to focus basic education on ‘core subjects’, that is, French – half of school hours should be dedicated to French courses  – history and maths, with the aim of not only strengthening national identity but also orienting learners primarily towards vocational training at the expense of university studies. According to the National Rally, foreign language courses for migrants and their descendants should be abolished and school courses for foreign learners should incur charges (Houel 2016; Piquemal 2017; Zerouala 2017). The cases presented show how conceptions that combine both conservative and neoliberal strands to varying degrees have integrated populist discourses in the above-mentioned countries. The subtle hostility to new pedagogic approaches and tacit anti-scientific world views also play a role in the following cluster. Closely tied to financial arguments, populist calls for a restructured school education reveal yet another aspect:  in some countries, populist parties have made calls to exclude students with migration backgrounds. France’s National Rally, for example, has demanded a stop to the schooling of illegal immigrants because they did not intend to allow ‘people who violate the law [to] benefit from our public services’ (Alain Avello quoted in Piquemal 2017; author’s translation). Like the National Rally in France, the German AfD claims to speak in favour of the average man or woman but actually advocates an education system based on unequal opportunities and social injustice (Meyer-Erlach 2017:  10–11, 12, 14–17).

Factual knowledge instead of methodology Based on ideological premises and with reference to ‘common-sense’ arguments, populist discourse and parties have sought to readjust teacher training, which was supposed to focus on factual knowledge rather than education theory and didactics. One example is Denmark. Without specifying any details, the programme of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party (2002) demands that ‘pupils should be instilled with useful knowledge’, leaving open, however, what the party understands by ‘useful knowledge’. Another case is France. In 2017 the National Rally demanded a radical change in teacher training: ‘We must focus the training on disciplinary knowledge only, and no longer teach pedagogy. This is nonsense that is wasting everyone’s time



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because pedagogy is not a science, it’s an art’ (Alain Avello quoted in Piquemal 2017; author’s translation). The party also demanded that school education should be ‘less creative’ as learners were not ‘guinea pigs’, its leader Marine Le Pen calling for an end of any reform or experiments. Instead, education should be more down to earth and practical (Houel 2016). In this vein, the party announced the replacement of philosophy by technological and patriotic instruction (Piquemal 2017). Another example is Germany’s AfD. Although the party professes to oppose the economization of education, performance and competition are paramount and are supposed to contribute to Germany’s economic strength and development (Alternative für Deutschland 2016:  53; Meyer-Erlach 2017:  12). Against that background, the AfD makes it clear that they ‘call for the renunciation of gossiping [sic] competence orientation and the return to imparting expertise as a central concern of the school’. Their hostility towards methodological competences is clearly expressed in the subsequent paragraph where the election manifesto argues against ‘the so-called “new learning culture”; class-led teaching through self-directed, competence-oriented learning’ (Alternative für Deutschland 2017: 43; Meyer-Erlach 2017: 13). Instead, the AfD demands that ‘the transfer of knowledge (proficiency, skills, capabilities, learning strategies) must remain a central concern of the school. We want to work to ensure that in secondary schools, educational content is once again the focus of instruction taught by the subject teacher’ (Alternative für Deutschland 2016: 53). Hence, both populist and non-populist political parties can pursue similar objectives. A main difference may be the style or the wording of how demands are made. At least in the case of the German AfD or the French National Rally, claims appear to be expressed in a much shriller, alarmist tone.

New school syllabuses and textbook content Right-wing populist discourses often focus on the reform of school curricula and textbook content, following a conservative approach that tends to ‘rewrite’ the past in a nationalist fashion, thus marginalizing critical approaches, didactics, multiperspectivity and history from below. Often, new versions of the past accompany exclusionary measures. In Poland, for instance, the government elected in 2018 has introduced a profound education reform where military history and national political and religious heroes are brought to the fore while the role of social history is diminished (Sawicka and Skibicki 2017). In a similar fashion, Hungarian

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populist politics has removed from the curriculum personalities that did not fit into the government’s conservative approach (Pető 2016) while, more generally, revised history education is supposed to ‘enact a sense of national belonging and pride, as well as resentment against foreigners’ (Benazzo 2017). Whitewashing Hungarian interwar history and presenting the country as a victim contributes to the avoidance of critical questions and to a more chauvinistic narrative (Benziger 2017: 82–3). Similar views and intentions have been expressed by German AfD politicians. One of the AfD’s leading members, part of the party’s right wing, declared in 2017: ‘Instead of bringing the younger generation in touch with the great benefactors, the well-known, world-moving philosophers, the musicians, the ingenious discoverers and inventors of whom we have so many … perhaps more than any other people in the world … instead of introducing our school students to this story, German history is made mean and ridiculous’ (Björn Höcke quoted in News4Teachers 2018b; author’s translation). In India, the populist, right-wing conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won parliamentary elections and formed a government, which has been led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014, re-elected in 2019. The BJP government places a strong emphasis on Hindu religion, aiming at a marginalization of Muslims in historical representations. According to a populist reading of history, politics was pure as long as it was dominated by both religious and political elites. Following this elitist interpretation, politics only became corrupted when low-caste politicians were incorporated into politics under leftist and pro-inclusion Congress Party rule. Although this elitist discourse betrays the BJP’s populist and pro-people rhetoric, they have managed to unite their voters by employing a Manichean religious separation. In this way, they have constructed a glorified Hindu version of the country’s past that, at the same time, demonises past Muslim rulers. Although older school textbooks continue to be used – including, most notably, progressive textbook editions released after 2005 that placed much emphasis on methodology – the government intends to release a new set of history textbooks that reinterprets the past in their world view. Yet, a lack of academic support means the government has struggled to identify qualified researchers to undertake this task. However, even before the BJP and Prime Minister Modi came to national power in 2014, new textbooks that sought to diffuse nationalist and anti-Muslim narratives had already been edited in federal states governed by the nationalists (Sethi forthcoming). In Brazil although the situation is rather different, there are still similarities. A document that forms the basis of the National Textbook Programme (PNLD) for the approval of school textbooks demands content that is free of racism,



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divisionism and sexism as well as the inclusion of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian perspectives. From this state body’s point of view, textbooks should be free of party politics. Instead, they should provide inclusive narratives and skills to critically analyse narratives (Roza 2017). In recent years, however, particularly since the downfall of the government led by President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, a conservative and populist rollback has been in evidence that has been accelerated by the victory of right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro who took office in January 2019. Affirmative action programmes and pro-social, democratic inclusion policies have come under severe pressure. As a result, politics dominated by neoliberal-conservative agrarian and commercial elites as well as emergent upper-middle classes have entered into a coalition with evangelical groups that aim at a revision of educational policies. Not only do they criticize school sex education (Paiva and Silva 2015), these populists have also spoken out against content that targeted the incorporation of previously neglected Afro-Brazilian (Roza 2017) and indigenous memories. At both local and federal state levels their efforts have been considered a success (Roza forthcoming). Populist politics are able to pursue many different strands of policies that are translated into various different country settings. Yet, the most important strategy relates to the revision of school syllabuses and school textbooks and other educational media as these have the potential to most lastingly influence and shape learners’ perception of state and society, social cohesion and justice.

Conclusion The examples analysed here draw upon country cases that have demonstrated the extent to which right-wing populist discourse has forged alliances with strands of conservative, religious and neoliberal political thought and practice. In some cases, this discourse has entered the mainstream to challenge ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ political educational agendas. The case of ‘anti-gender-ideology’ movements in Germany and many other countries that have integrated or aligned with populist discourse illustrates this trend. The same holds true for demands to return to the teaching of more factual knowledge  – instead of fostering methodological skills and multi-perspective concepts. Likewise, critical attitudes towards a supposed ‘ideologization’ of school education and educational media also found among conservative and religious environments have been appropriated by populist political discourses. The French National

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Rally’s demand to ‘purge’ school education of reputedly ‘unnecessary’ content, rather than being an isolated radical perspective, may be found within conservative and neoliberal circles. The examples from the United States show how populist discourses have entered mainstream politics long before Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. These findings thus support the theoretical claim made in this article that (right-wing) populism is less a fully fledged ideology – a very ‘thin-centred’ one (Mudde 2004, 2017), if at all – but instead a discourse and performance or style that can integrate well and thus translate elements stemming from other, more established political tendencies, such as conservatism or neoliberalism. Hence, to tap prevailing grievances and resentment and thus attract new electorates populist discourse has partly entered an alliance with more mainstream (neo) conservative or neoliberal policies and discourses. To achieve this objective, right-wing populism as a stylistic and discursive phenomenon makes use of nativist and authoritarian features, being thus a radical interpretation of mainstream political values. On the other hand, we also find we have also identified political campaigns that seem to be a ‘unique selling point’ of populist actors in different parts of the world, as expressed by the establishment of like-minded online portals that serve to denounce supposedly ‘left-wing’, ‘partidarian’ instruction. Yet, this latter example highlights the limitations of a model that departs from the assumption of translation of ideas: while similar developments can be observed at times in different country settings, it is in many cases difficult to trace if policies and approaches facilitated by populist discourse and reproduced across national boundaries are in fact either translations (‘vernacularizations’) or independent developments. This holds true for the online complaint portals that can be at least observed in two European countries (Austria and Germany) and Brazil. Although it appears at first glance that one populist movement translated (or ‘vernacularized’) an idea to their own settings, this consideration could not be substantiated. Rather, it appears that in the two geographic settings the idea to set up online complaint portals emerged independently from one another. In other words, at a theoretical level it appears too simple to diagnose processes of vernacularization. In practice, though, it is sometimes very difficult to identify such vernacularization unless references are either unambiguous or those people behind them explicitly confirm a translation. This chapter intended to call attention to populist approaches in the education sector taking examples from various country settings, aiming to contribute to the strengthening the conceptualization of the notion of populism.



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Far more systematic research on these issues is necessary. Yet, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn on how academia and the education sector respond to the challenges posed by populist protagonists and parties in the various countries. Crucially, it is necessary to readjust higher education (including teacher training) and school education, to try to counter what both neoliberal and right-wing populist education policies have undermined in some countries over the past two or three decades: there should be a renewed focus on humanities and citizenship studies at the expense of teaching of ‘useful’ and ‘transferrable’ skills to critical and independent individuals and move away from streamlined, ‘economic-practical’ subjects (Behr 2017: 77). In fact, scientific evidence suggests ‘that a better educated wider population means a swing to right-wing populist politics is less likely’ (Waller et  al. 2017:  384)  – even though a higher than average education level is not a guarantee that people will not turn to populist arguments. Conversely, independent-minded, open and international education against anti-pluralistic, anti-expert and anti-establishment populist policies and reasoning makes universities, teacher training centres and schools vulnerable targets for populist agitation (Waller et al. 2017: 384). Populism itself must also be addressed in educational institutions as it becomes a major global challenge (Mårdh and Tryggvason 2017: 611). We should not give up our efforts of striving for a better, democratically minded and open society.

References Achen, H., and L. Bartels (2016), Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. AFP (2018), ‘Ausgangsmeldung: Onlinepranger für AfD-kritische Lehrer? Zoff um angekündigte Internetplattform’, Merkur.de, 17 December. Available online: https:// www.merkur.de/politik/onlinepranger-fuer-afd-kritische-lehrer-laut-landtagsjuristen-illegal-zr-9913824.html (accessed 25 November 2019). Akbaba, Y., and B. Jeffrey, eds (2017), The Implications of ‘New Populism’ for Education, New Cottage: E&E. Alternative für Deutschland (2016), ‘Programm für Deutschland. Das Grundsatzprogramm der Alternative für Deutschland’. Available online: https:// www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2018/01/Programm_AfD_Druck_ Online_190118.pdf (accessed 8 December 2018). Alternative für Deutschland (2017), ‘Programm für Deutschland. Wahlprogramm der Alternative für Deutschland für die Wahl zum Deutschen Bundestag am 24. September 2017. Leitantrag der Bundesprogrammkommission zum Bundesparteitag

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The Slowing Global Order: Boredom and Affect in Criss-Crossing Comparative Education Research Noah W. Sobe

Introduction This chapter takes up notions of acceleration and deceleration, specifically as they relate to the ways that human bodies experience space and time in the broad sense. It puts forth a social analysis that uses an affect lens to grapple with the embodied, textured experience of time and space. It proposes that an affect approach opens up important new perspectives on educational engagement, disengagement and aspirations – not to mention insights into the embodiments and actualizations of policies and pedagogies. First delivered as the Joseph Lauwerys Lecture at the 2018 Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), this chapter attempts to honour Lauwerys’s contributions to establishing the field of comparative education by proposing that it would be profitable to take up affect as a ‘unit idea’ within comparative education research (Cowen 2002). Yet, studying affect in comparative education requires a new repertoire of concepts and methods. This chapter uses elements of a crisscrossing approach (Sobe 2018b) to study affect and education in relation to what I describe as a slowing global order. Concretely, the central concern of this chapter is the problem of boredom (Sobe 2012, 2015, 2018a). Most teachers and students have passing or perhaps intimate familiarity with the gnawing discomforts of the ‘time-stilled and space-slowed’ (Anderson 2004) situational boredom experienced in classrooms and other school spaces. In this chapter, however, I  choose to focus more on the ways that schooling is implicated in the circulation of, and distribution of, more existential forms of boredom. In contrast to situational boredom,

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which is place-based and time-bound, existential boredom is a more general and consistent form of ennui. Neither situational nor existential boredom is automatically undesirable. Each, in its own way, may at times generate creativity, insight and action that might result in quite good ends. It is not the purpose of this particular chapter to adjudicate the damage done and/or possible good ends that are opened up through existential boredom. Instead, my analytic ambition is to explore existential boredom as one of the ways that the malaise of feeling out of step and misaligned with circumstance and expectations surfaces in the contemporary world – and the complicity of education in this. While perhaps not constant, existential boredom does not dissipate when situations shift. Nonetheless, as with situational boredom, the human experience of temporality and spatiality configures existential boredom. And, as noted, I will argue that it also merits consideration as a form of boredom produced by schooling. To grapple with existential boredom, it will be necessary to treat the entanglement of temporality and spatiality in a very specific way. The chapter does not, for example, approach time and space as abstract epiphenomenal theoretical concepts forming a framework for social science inquiry. Nor are temporality and spatiality seen here in purely epistemological terms, as social constructs which can be subjected to deconstruction. Instead, drawing on affect theory approaches, space and time are seen as historically contoured entities that operate on and through us, captured in human bodies but also exceeding them. Much contemporary writing on affect draws on Brian Massumi and Eve Sedgewick’s work dating to the 1990s, as well as on Gilles Deleuze, and in fact reaches back several centuries to some concepts laid out by Baruch Spinoza (Sobe 2012). In this tradition, to think in terms of affect is to focus on how human bodies are affected and how they affect others (Clough 2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Importantly, the affective turn surfaces the ontological, affords new ways of thinking about bodies and allows some escape from the constraints of exclusively epistemological framings (Sobe 2012). Nonetheless, an affect lens is not without its own limitations as a form of social analysis (Hemmings 2005), several of which will be discussed in the conclusion. Methodologically, with the goal of understanding boredom in relation to how bodies are affected and affect others, I  employ an entangled, to-and-fro approach that I  have named criss-crossing comparison (Sobe 2018b). This means that I am more interested in relationships and relationality than I am in the boundedness of discrete cases and discrete units of analysis. I pursue this by weaving around and across a set of entangled artefacts which I relate to the uneven space-times of our contemporary world. At the outset I will explain in



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greater depth what is meant by this notion of the unevenness of space-times. I then move into a discussion of the twinned experiences of ‘acceleration’ and ‘deceleration’ and conclude with an exploration of the operation of some of the space-time inscriptions in education. This strategy is intended to help us circle around and readjust our understandings of what it means to encounter and experience ‘a slowing global order’ and how education and existential boredom are related to it, and to each other.

Uneven space-times For many centuries, time has been privileged in Western thought as the arena of dynamism and progress while space was considered static and devoid of meaningful politics (Sobe and Fischer 2009). The idea here is that a particular Western notion of ‘progress’ has privileged linear advancement though time, while the spaces in which ‘progress’ has occurred are a neutral and mostly malleable backdrop. Below I  will discuss some of the ways that the field of comparative education has been complicit in and been shaped by this history. To begin, though, it is important to note the recent intellectual call for refocused thinking about space and spatiality, sometimes called the ‘spatial turn’; Larsen and Beech (2014) have done fine  – and indeed much overdue  – work in comparative and international education to show the importance of space as an area of governance. Nonetheless, taking space and time separately has the danger of reinscribing a core duality. For that reason, here I  will talk about ‘space-times’, a concept that has been equally effectively referred to by May and Thrift (2001) as ‘TimeSpace’. Multiple, heterogeneous, uneven and integrally linked together, space-times or TimeSpace responds to a picture of ‘the various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field’ (May and Thrift 2001: 5). The concept of speed is one of the best illustrations of just how artificial it is to separate temporality and spatiality. After all, the mathematical formula d ) is distance travelled divided by time taken. In tandem with for velocity (v = – t Nóvoa’s (2018) call to recognize that different spatialities coexist in the same space and that different temporalities exist in the same time, this chapter invokes the argument that we cannot examine one or the other without also understanding that temporalities and spatialities only exist in relation to one another. Acceleration – sometimes mapped as time-space compression (Harvey 1989) – is one of the alleged hallmarks of our current globalization era, and in

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fact has been discussed as a key feature of modernity broadly (Bloch 1935). In fact Paul Virilio (1986) even argues that speed more than class or economics is the key force shaping modernity. Yet because time-space comparisons are relational and relative (and the mathematical equation presents one incontrovertible illustration of this), any story of acceleration cannot be told without a related story of deceleration. Accordingly, this chapter will explore both the ‘globalization acceleration’ story and a ‘slowing global order’ story that reviews the de-globalism of Brexit; the isolationism of the Trump presidency in the United States; potential changes in international student mobility; and the problem of boredom in Bucharest, Romania, and Dogondoutch, Niger, among other places. These acceleration and deceleration stories are not separate stories but are linked in many key ways, products of some of the same processes, actors and networks. Viewing ‘speed’ and ‘slowness’ in this manner speaks to the basic unevenness of space-times (McLeod, Seddon and Sobe 2018). As briefly discussed below, even within projects that seek to smooth, uniformize and globalize space-time, there is striation, division and diversion. Accordingly, our research endeavours need to pay attention to the multiplicity of space-times and adjust their methods and approaches to the combinations, discrepancies and unevenness of these space-time multiplicities. If we do not recognize striation as both already-there and produced through politics then we will fail to adequately understand the constitutive and ongoing role that space-time plays in human lives.

Stories of global acceleration and slowing The increasing speed of communications, travel and exchange (economic, social, political and cultural) are key elements of the global acceleration story. Quite often acceleration is joined by narratives of intensification, thickening and ‘complexification’, the key idea being that increased speed binds individuals, societies and economies ever closer together. Importantly, these stories are not merely derived from social science investigation (Harvey 1989; Castells 1996) but rather are told in numerous ways in different settings around the globe. I propose that it is useful to approach the global acceleration narrative as an interpretive schema and a system self-observation through which different actors and institutions attempt to understand the environments they inhabit – as well as attempt to enlist others into that same shared understanding.



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Financial and technology companies rank high among the parties with intense interests in the global acceleration story. As an illustration, I turn to a CISCO systems advertising campaign from 2007/2008.1 Under the heading of ‘Welcome to the Human Network’ the internet hardware company prepared a series of videos of varying length whose narration was voiced by a young girl and presented a ‘brave new world’ story of the possibilities for human connection that technology  – specifically CISCO devices  – afforded. The ninety-second version of the advertisement included the following voice-over: welcome welcome to a brand new day a new way of getting things done welcome to a place where maps are rewritten and remote villages are included a place where body language is business language where people subscribe to people not magazines and the team you follow now follows you welcome to a place where books rewrite themselves where you can drag and drop people wherever they want to go and a phone doubles as a train ticket, plane ticket, or lift ticket welcome to a place where a wedding is captured and recaptured again and again where a home video is experienced everywhere at once where a library travels across the world where business are born countries are transformed and we’re more powerful together than we ever could be apart welcome to the human network

With driving rock n’ roll background music (an instrumental version of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Reilly’) that is edited to build to a fast-paced crescendo, the aural effect is one of safely navigated speed. The serenity of the narrator’s dulcet, soft tones replaces the song’s original lyrics, whose chorus repeatedly features the phrase ‘teenage wasteland’. The irony of this omission notwithstanding, the story told though voice and sound is one of comforting belonging, possibility and connection. A number of the innovations described (e.g. using a mobile phone as train ticket or plane ticket) were futuristic at the time of the release of the ad campaign but have become commonplace more than a decade later. As Goldman and Papson (2011) point out, CISCO’s ‘Welcome to the Human Network’ ad campaign sketches out an ontology of social life wherein ‘society’ is replaced by ‘network’ (Castells 1996) and where empowerment and emancipation are the dominant themes. Within this, it is the networking capacities of ICT that promise

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to furnish the mechanisms of inclusion that previously had been negotiated in the political sphere and in relation to state power. The visuals that accompany the music and narration emphasize technologically mediated co-presence as they show people using laptops, tablets and phones to communicate and to share experiences across clear geographic separations. Such ‘telepresence’ (Bracken and Skalski 2010) utilizes the virtual to achieve time-space compression (Harvey 1989). The advertisement advances an inclusionary argument through its rhetoric of encompassment (‘remote villages are included’) and through visual montages, several of which depict school-related scenarios. In one, a young girl of colour who appears to be in a Global north setting is engaged in a laptop-enabled co-present activity with a group of children in a Central Asia location. Images suggest that they are collectively co-editing a Wikipedia page, which itself is an important allusion to a technological medium that purports to democratize knowledge production. A second key aspect of the advertisement is what I  would call its ‘technological humanism’, the suggestion that ICT technology is ultimately humanist – in a ‘human network’ people subscribe to people (though there is the awkward suggestion that humans can be ‘dragged and dropped’). The key to this technological humanism is its combinatory power:  ‘We’re more powerful together than we ever could be apart.’ The third crucial motif that runs through the CISCO Systems story of global acceleration is one of intense affective engagement. The line ‘the team you follow now follows you’ is accompanied by imagery of an engrossed, enthused football fan in London’s Trafalgar square watching a match on his phone, a match that is clearly taking place in a very different part of the world. Across the advertisement we see human bodies affected by and affecting others and in fact this commercial is a useful object lesson in the circulation of affects. In this regard it is worth noting that affect is often theorized as different than emotion. To speak of the ‘affective’ maps a wider terrain and one that is concerned with the body in ways that the ‘emotional’ does not fully capture. As a subset of affect, an emotion can be said to be a culturally identifiable/identified and named state of feeling that qualifies the intensity of affective experience (Massumi 2002). To claim that intense affective engagement is a feature of the global acceleration story under examination here is both to point to the strong emotion-display content and also the intended emotion-invoking dimension. Inclusionary co-presence, technological humanism and intense affective experience converge in the management of bodies’ capacities to act, engage and connect. In its remapping of the social; in the reworking of power in terms of



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combinatory effects; and in the presentation of affective engagement as a key surface for materialization of technological, economic and cultural projects, the 2007 CISCO systems advertisement constructs a powerful story around global acceleration. Global acceleration stories have an extensive history and a broad diffusion that goes well beyond CISCO systems. Crossing over to the US domestic education reform discourse, we can look at Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education:  How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (2010) as an influential example of the global acceleration narrative touching down in a particular setting. Darling-Hammond’s book is also an iconic example of the way that time-space compression – particularly as it increasingly transpires virtually (recall that the book’s cover features a child of colour with a laptop lying atop a world map)  – has become global planet-speak today, informing many domestic reform agendas. Of course it was not only researchers in the early decades of the twenty-first century who were noticing the acceleration of time and the shrinking of distance. Nor was it only critical scholars like Harvey and Virilio who were surfacing this problem at the end of the twentieth century as it moved into broader general public awareness (e.g. Friedman 2005). One only need to recall Karl Marx’s description of the progressive ‘annihilation of space by time’ to realize that we have had ‘great acceleration’ stories at least since the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Jon May and Nigel Thrift (2001) who are involved in the body of work sometimes called Non-Representational Theory have argued that the modernity-as-acceleration argument is somewhat overblown. They propose that changes from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century were not ‘as disorienting as is usually assumed’ (May and Thrift 2001: 12). The acceleration argument is overdrawn, they argue, particularly when we consider that many changes were occurring over the course of an entire human lifespan. Even the standardizations that came with railway time and clock time were adjusted to quite easily, they point out. Similar to Doreen Massey’s (1992) observations about the uneven geographies that accompanied time-space compression, May and Thrift argue that changes in the experience of time-space are in fact profoundly uneven (in fact one might even see evidence of gaps in the very obsessiveness with which the ‘Welcome to the Human Network’ advertisement attempts to establish simultaneity, co-presence and synchronicity). Key to the argument developed in the second half of this chapter is that acceleration is inherently a relative concept. With increased speed comes new awareness of, or new definitions of, slowness. As May and Thrift (2001:  19) put it, ‘The coming of railways made travel between one place and another

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considerably faster, but … in and of itself this very sense of speed rendered other forms of transportation seem much slower than they had once appeared.’ A  contemporary example would be the computer/device operating system or hardware update being that which makes old technology that was previously entirely serviceable now seem slow. Accompanying stories of global acceleration are noteworthy stories of global slowing. In both academic and popular media, one encounters an ‘antiglobalization’ explanation attached to observations about the dissolution of arms-control treaties, withdrawals from trade pacts and exits from regional partnerships. The July 2017 cover of the Harvard Business Review poignantly featured a deflated globe under the title ‘The truth about globalization’. Collapsing globalisms, which is to say a refiguring of cosmopolitan orientations to global connectedness, are one form of the deceleration story. Another is presently unfolding in US higher education where the maverick policies of the Trump administration appear to be leading to significant changes in the structural patterns of international student mobility, with fewer students ending up at US institutions. An important form of ‘deceleration’ concerns those who are left behind and marginalized from the global acceleration-inclusion narrative. I propose that the boredom of college graduates discussed next is one significant form of global slowing – and something that should be particularly troubling to all of us engaged in education as it raises searching questions about the consequences of our labours.

Boredom and disengagement In the previous section, I attempted to pick apart a particular telling of the story of global acceleration. And, I made the suggestion that deceleration and slowness needed more attention as phenomena concurrent to and intertwined with acceleration. Here I will try to disentangle the ways that ‘the human network’ produces its obverse exclusions when expectations fail to meet realities. It is important to understand disengagement not as a simple individual problem or ‘pathology’. Educational disengagement in particular – whether manifesting through low student achievement, schooling resistance or dropping out  – is often highly linked into social, cultural, economic, even political contexts that extend well beyond the immediate social worlds of any particular individuals. This is the angle from which I approach boredom here.



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Schools are boring; however, as noted in the introduction, here we will skip over situational boredom and instead discuss what happens afterwards. This is to speak of existential boredom, specifically those instances where schooling makes people bored with their lives even after they escape classrooms and lecture halls and are out in the world, diplomas in hand. Higher education is a particularly potent site for the production of existential boredom. Since at least the nineteenth century, observers have remarked on the entitlement demands of university graduates. A twentieth-century vignette from Socialist Yugoslavia will nicely illustrate the point. Writing in the 1950s on the changes in civil service hiring procedures that had recently gone into effect in Tito’s Yugoslavia, an American comparative education researcher, Czech émigré Joseph Roucek, described the dissatisfaction that Yugoslav university graduates had with their employment prospects. According to Roucek, great numbers of disaffected young adults ‘roam the streets and infest the cafes of all the major cities’. Taking a jaundiced view, Roucek commented that ‘these slackers take the attitude that only peasants and fools work in the provinces’ (1954: 502). A good education will truly corrupt a person! The important point is that these young Yugoslavs had been educated with the expectation that their university degrees would be put to a particular kind of elite use. And, the absence of anticipated opportunity generated an all-too-familiar disengagement. More than sixty years later, the underemployment of university graduates is a significant problem around the globe. One might even posit that with the movement towards ‘knowledge economies’ there is an even sharper disconnect when trained ‘knowledge workers’ end up in service or other professional positions that fail to tap their highly refined knowledge, skills and competencies. College and university completion rates have dramatically risen from the 1950s and continue to grow, yet the number of high-level employment positions has not kept pace. Human capital logics that link educational expansion with economic growth have been powerfully ‘black-boxed’ (Resnik 2006), meaning that the labour and evidence that went into their construction is now obscured, and their self-evident facticity is difficult to question. Nonetheless, increasingly significant theoretical and empirical challenges to human capital theory continue to emerge (Rappleye and Komatsu 2016). As education systems reach higher and higher levels, particularly when they are targeted on success in a ‘knowledge economy’, the promises increasingly resemble ‘field-of-dreams’ arguments  – the reference here is to an American movie about an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in one of his cornfields, convinced that classic ballplayers

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from the 1920s will appear for a game. Applied to higher education, the hope would be ‘if you educate them, jobs will come’. Knowledge economy rhetoric continues to need more extensive deconstruction that I will attempt here. Perhaps the easiest point to agree upon is that there is not a 1:1 correspondence between the production of one additional highly skilled college graduate and the generation of one additional new employment position requiring a highly educated and highly skilled employee. Increasingly, we face a merit bottleneck problem where elite opportunities don’t match educational preparations. The existential boredom and despair of unfulfilled expectations can be considered a form of global slowing that is exposed, in the words of Yasmine Musharbash who studied boredom in indigenous communities in Australia, ‘when values and circumstances fail to correspond, [and] when ways of being in the world and the world jar’ (Musharbash 2007:  315). An extensive recent anthropological literature links boredom to globalization. And, with striking frequency it is university graduates who figure prominently. This work includes Craig Jeffrey et al.’s (2008) ethnography in Meerut, India, a medium-sized city in Uttar Pradesh, where he found a group of university graduates who had founded a club called ‘Generation Nowhere’. In Dogondoutch, Niger (Masquelier 2013), in the urban metropoles of Ethiopia (Mains 2007) and in rural Egypt (Schielke 2008) anthropologists have found the mismatch between educational attainment and employment opportunities generating forms of ennui and disengagement. Taken as a whole, this literature suggests that boredom appears as peripheral milieus become more strongly connected with metropolitan flows of ideas, goods and labour. The ‘globalization of boredom’ occurs precisely as acceleration and deceleration stories converge. One of the most vivid accounts of this is Bruce O’Neill’s (2017) excellent ethnography of homeless men in Bucharest, Romania. He explores what has happened in the wake of post-1989 efforts to integrate Romania into the global economy. Instead of easy absorption into the accelerating global world that we earlier saw pictured in the Cisco Systems advertisement, O’Neill (2017: 3) argues that ‘market pressures intended to heighten production and consumption had instead the opposite effect’. The Romanian economy buckled and while some were swept up into the new ‘drag and drop’ world, many more were displaced from it. Doing ethnographic research in Bucharest both before and after the 2008 financial crisis, O’Neill found that ‘rather than speed and excitement, boredom define[d]‌downwardly mobile men’s and women’s engagement with the global economy’ (O’Neill 2017: 3). While O’Neill portrays



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a very particular time-space of ‘boredom’, one located within post-socialism, we see similar dynamics at play in Saskia Sassen’s (2014) writings on the concept of ‘expulsions’. Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman (2004) writes of ‘wasted lives’, reminding us of Michel Foucault’s work on the biopolitics of ‘letting die’. At the margins of the global economy there are multiple, manifold forms of boredom. Education is implicated in many of these boredoms  – by virtue of its role in preparing expectations that fray when ways of being in the world fail to match what one has been given to expect of the world.

Boredom in the space-times of comparative education Taking up space-times in comparative education scholarship is fraught with difficulty, particularly because of the implication of education scholarship in colonial paradigms that fail to respect ontological and epistemic diversity. From the field’s famed founding in the hands of a minor French intellectual, MarcAntoine Jullien (Sobe 2002), comparative education has been a space where the coloniality of power is enacted (Sobe 2017). The idea that difference was in some part locatable in time  – less advanced/advanced, with the researcher as time traveller – became the lynchpin of comparison across the social sciences generally. This legacy heightens the stakes of time-space inscriptions, underscoring the importance of insuring that the recognition of multiple temporalities does not perpetuate injustices. The global deceleration stories explored above speak to the marginalization that occurs as certain people/s are pushed to the outside of the ‘global now’. Johannes Fabian’s 1983 Time and the Other How Anthropology Makes Its Object remains one of the most salient cautions about the recognition of the multiplicity of temporality. He tells the story of how notions of linear Judeo-Christian time were transmuted into a secularized linear time and from there into a naturalized time and evolutionary time. Archaeologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began applying these logics to bring order to a fragmentary geological and paleontological record. Then by the end of the nineteenth century, this had been taken up by anthropologists who conceived of a temporal slope that placed past and present cultures in a stream of time. Today, even when Eurocentric notions of civilization, progress and development are loudly declaimed, the trappings of evolutionary time continue to percolate through social and political projects. Fabian (1983) famously pointed to ‘the denial of coevality’ as a colonial strategy of inscribing inferiority and superiority by ascribing different, unequal

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time-spaces to different peoples, societies and cultures. In projects that fabricate ‘global one-worldness’ – whether that be CISCO systems’ rhetoric and imagery or the visualizations of PISA results with their disturbing trend-norming temporalizations of space – marginalization can be organized through the very ordering of multiplicity as coevality is presented and retracted. Different temporalities are not facts of the world to be discovered; they are produced realities fabricated within power/knowledge relations. Accordingly, the task of the comparative researcher should not be simply to map, but to interrogate the production of uneven space-times. Here I  have proposed that using an affect approach has considerable promise for imbuing comparative education research with a constructive critical angle that generates rich understanding. Turning our attention to the production of existential boredom shows that schooling is implicated in circuits of inclusion and exclusion (1) not merely on the basis of who has access and who is out of school, and (2)  not merely on the basis of internal sorting and meritocratic sorting mechanisms, but (3) also on the basis of the role schools play in conjuring expectations that jar and unsettle when they meet other realities of the world. Affect is an active force shaping people and the world. In this piece I  have attempted to understand the acts of affect through a to-and-fro criss-crossing research method (Sobe 2018b) that looked at the affective power of a CISCO systems advertisement as one global acceleration story that relates in significant ways to a variety of deceleration stories. On the one hand, these deceleration stories have nothing to do with internet hardware technology. But, on the other hand, when viewed in terms of the circulation of affects, have everything to do with it (see Carney (2008) for a similar relationally oriented attempt to break from traditional ‘cases’ and ‘units’ of analysis). My criss-crossing approach was intended to support an investigation into the experiences of human bodies in space and time and to open up ways for researching boredom in the field of comparative education. The production and circulation of affect is one of the core educational operations. For this reason alone, affect should be central to the field of comparative education. Introducing affect as a ‘unit idea’ in comparative education can enrich our field by allowing new thinking about relationality, connections and entanglements (see Sobe 2013; Sobe and Kowalczyk 2017). An affect lens also invites comparative education scholars to research gaps, silences, inactivity  – to see significance in disengagement and what does not happen, as well as what happens. In like manner, the study of comparative education has something to offer affect theory as well. One frequent critique (e.g. Hemmings 2005) is that in the rush to escape determinist analytic paradigms, the liberatory, free-play aspects



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of affects are overemphasized. Education provides a productive terrain for more realistically exploring the agentic ways that individuals are affected by and affect others but simultaneously recognizing the institutional, social, cultural, economic phenomena and processes within and across which this takes place. Directing attention to affect further promises to yield important perspectives on engagement, disengagement and aspirations, as well as insights into the embodiments and actualizations of policies and pedagogies.

Notes 1 Information on the campaign is archived at: Cisco Archive (2006), ‘Welcome to the Human Network’, Cisco Archive. Available online: http://ciscoarchive.lunaimaging. com/luna/servlet/detail/CHMC~4~4~354~2633:Welcome-to-the-Human-Network (accessed 13 March 2020).   The advertisement discussed above: Cisco Commercial: Welcome to the Human Network (2007), YouTube Video. Available online: https://youtu.be/lxwNMMiHVXg (accessed 13 March 2020).

References Anderson, B. (2004), ‘Time-Stilled Space-Slowed: How Boredom Matters’, Geoforum, 35(6): 739–54. Bauman, Z. (2004), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Berkshire: McGraw-Hill Education. Bloch, E. (1935), Heritage of Our Times, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bracken, C., and P. Skalski, eds (2010), Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Carney, S. (2008), ‘Negotiating Policy in an Age of Globalization: Exploring Educational “Policyscapes” in Denmark, Nepal, and China’, Comparative Education Review, 53(1): 63–88. Castells, M. (1996), The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Clough, P. (2008), ‘(De)coding the Subject-in-affect’, Subjectivity, 23(1): 140–55. Cowen, R. (2002), ‘Moments of Time: A Comparative Note’, History of Education, 31(5): 413–24. Darling-Hammond, L. (2010), The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, New York: Teachers College Press.

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Fabian, J. (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Friedman, T. (2005), The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Goldman, R., and S. Papson (2011), Landscapes of Capital, Cambridge: Polity. Gregg, M., and G. Seigworth, eds (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, D. (1989), The Urban Experience, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hemmings, C. (2005), ‘Invoking Affect’, Cultural Studies, 19(5): 548–67. Jeffrey, C., P. Jeffery and R. Jeffery (2008), Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Larsen, M., and J. Beech (2014), ‘Spatial Theorizing in Comparative and International Education Research’, Comparative Education Review, 58(2): 191–214. Mains, D. (2007), ‘Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia’, American Ethnologist, 34(4): 659–73. Masquelier, A. (2013), ‘Teatime: Boredom and the Temporalities of Young Men in Niger’, Africa, 83(3): 470–91. Massey, D. (1992), ‘Politics and Space/time’, New Left Review, 196: 65–84. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. May, J., and N. Thrift, eds (2001), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, London: Routledge. McLeod, J., T. Seddon and N. W. Sobe, eds (2018), World Yearbook of Education 2018. Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, London: Routledge. Musharbash, Y. (2007), ‘Boredom, Time, and Modernity: An Example from Aboriginal Australia’, American Anthropologist, 109(2): 307–17. Nóvoa, A. (2018), ‘Comparing Southern Europe: The Difference, the Public, and the Common’, Comparative Education, 54(4): 548–61. O’Neill, B. (2017), The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rappleye, J., and H. Komatsu (2016), ‘Living on Borrowed Time: Rethinking Temporality, Self, Nihilism, and Schooling’, Comparative Education, 52(2): 177–201. Resnik, J. (2006), ‘International Organizations, the “Education–Economic Growth” Black Box, and the Development of World Education Culture’, Comparative Education Review, 50(2): 173–95. Roucek, J. (1954), ‘Yugoslavia’s Higher Institutions of Learning’, Journal of Higher Education, 25(9): 478–80, 502–3. Sassen, S. (2014), Expulsions, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.



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Schielke, S. (2008), ‘Boredom and Despair in Rural Egypt’, Contemporary Islam, 2(3): 251–70. Sobe, N. W. (2002), ‘Travel, Social Science and the Making of Nations in Early 19th Century Comparative Education’, in M. Caruso and H.-E. Tenorth (eds), Internationalization: Comparing Educational Systems and Semantics, 141–66, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Sobe, N. W. (2012), ‘Researching Emotion and Affect in the History of Education’, History of Education, 41(5): 689–95. Sobe, N. W. (2013), ‘Entanglement and Transnationalism in the History of American Education’, in T. Popkewitz (ed.), Rethinking the History of Education, 93–107, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sobe, N. W. (2015), ‘Attention and Boredom in the 19th-Century American School: The “Drudgery” of Learning and Teaching and the Common School Reform Movement’, in S. Reh, K. Berdelmann and J. Dinkelaker (eds), Aufmerksamkeit Zur Geschichte, Theorie und Empirie eines pädagogischen Phänomens, 55–70, Wiesbaden: Springer. Sobe, N. W. (2017), ‘Travelling Researchers, Colonial Difference: Comparative Education in an Age of Exploration’, Compare, 47(3): 332–43. Sobe, N. W. (2018a), ‘Boredom and Classroom Design: The Affective Economies of School Engagement’, in I. Grosvenor and L. Rasmussen (eds), Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance, 157–69, Wiesbaden: Springer Sobe, N. W. (2018b), ‘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., and J. Kowalczyk (2017), ‘Context, Entanglement and Assemblage as Matters of Concern in Comparative Education Research’, in J. McLeod, N. W. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018. Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, 197–204, London: Routledge. Sobe, N. W., and M. G. Fischer (2009), ‘Mobilities, Migration, Minorities and Education’, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 359–71, Dordrecht: Springer. Virilio, P. (1986), Speed and Politics, New York: Semiotext(e).

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Identity Formation through Consumer Products in Late Modern Hyperculture: A Pedagogic Analysis of Playmobil Figures Phillip D. Th. Knobloch

Introduction In the beginning there were knights, Indians and construction workers. They were all male when Playmobil came on the market in 1974, and had the same hairstyle, the same face, the same body structure and the same light skin colour. The Playmobil world, which was initially limited to these three play worlds and basically to a single standard figure, became increasingly differentiated. Two years later, women could be acquired for the first time: In the beginning the Indians had to cook their own food, but now – following the photos on the packaging – their wives did so. The knights were joined by queens and princesses, and even in the modern world of construction workers, who, by the way, usually had a crate of beer with them at the time, women now also took up occupations, such as doctors, nurses or cleaning women; or was the figure with the article number 3315, to which vacuum cleaners, brooms, carpet beaters, buckets, hand brushes and dustpan had been added, supposed to represent a housewife? At the very least, it is clear that new jobs in the police and fire brigade were reserved only for Playmobil men, and that no women worked at the station (Hennel 2009). This brief insight into the early days of Playmobil suggests that these toys conveyed above all traditional gender and professional roles, perhaps even a very conservative view of the world as a whole. This was at least the conclusion reached by the German writer Florian Illies in his confrontation with his own generation, born between 1965 and 1975. ‘Playmobil is certainly the most influential thing that has happened to our generation. … Those who bought

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Playmobil bought half-timbered houses, knight’s castles, farms. They bought a sense of tradition, historical preservation, conservatism’ (Illies 2003: 19–20). It is certainly very daring to claim that Playmobil has given an entire generation a conservative and traditionalist view of the world. However, it can hardly be denied that consumer products – including toys from Playmobil – shape people and can influence their view of themselves and of the world. Products, as the Canadian consumer researcher Grant McCracken (1986) already noted, can transport and convey cultural meanings. And, as Arnould and Thompson (2005) emphasize, that is why they can also influence processes of identity formation. Historian Frank Trentmann (2017:  484) comes to the same conclusion:  ‘Consumption shapes identities. How we dress and eat, where we shop, whether we drive an SUV or an electric car, go to the opera or a football match, all these practices announce who we are and who we’d like others to think we are.’ One can therefore at least follow Illies to the extent that consumer products such as Playmobil can play an important role in identity formation. If one compares the current range of Playmobil figures with that of the early years, it quickly becomes clear that the Playmobil world has undergone significant change in recent decades. In the meantime, it has become a matter of course that both women and men work for the police and fire brigade. The figures now have different hairstyles, faces and skin colours and sometimes a different physique. There are people with disabilities, and the school building is barrier-free so that even children who use a wheelchair can be schooled inclusively. And there is even an organic shop where (ethical) Playmobil consumers buy their vegetables. The Playmobil world has thus become much more colourful, plural, diverse and sustainable. While there is much to suggest that Playmobil no longer stands for a sense of tradition, the preservation of history and conservatism  – as Illies stated in retrospect of his childhood – there are also signs of a development that point in a different direction. While the Playmobil figures were previously anonymous in the sense that they had no equivalent in the ‘real’ world, we now see historical figures taken from various national, regional, cultural, religious or art histories as Playmobil figures. Examples include Luther, Goethe and Dürer, Zeus and Athene, Caesar and Cleopatra. We can also meet Playmobil figures from the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt. These figures not only belong to so-called high culture but are also important representatives of specific national cultures. The question arises as to whether they also convey traditional, conservative and classical ideas of culture and nation. Do two different cultures meet today in the



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Playmobil world, one pluralistically and cosmopolitan, the other traditional and national? Are we dealing with another ‘clash of civilizations’? In order to assess the significance for identity-building processes of toy figures and consumer products, it is important to understand the messages they convey. The examination of such product messages, which articulate socially controversial and contested political positions, is certainly explosive. Since culturally charged products can undoubtedly also play a role in educational contexts, the examination of product-based offers of identity is an important topic for educational science. In such cases, the normative question of the correct, pedagogically necessary handling of these products inevitably arises. In addition, educational science is interested in the epistemological and methodological aspects of dealing with products that convey specific ideas of culture and nation. Against the background of a now widespread critique of traditional and essentialist concepts of culture and nation, special attention is paid to the processes in which such ideas are constructed (cf. e.g. Mecheril et al. 2010). On the one hand, it is observed how the various actors engaged in pedagogical contexts are involved in such constructions. On the other hand, educational science also focuses on itself and the concepts of culture and nation used in its own studies, as becomes clear, for example, in the discussions on so-called methodological nationalism in comparative education (Adick 2008: 184–211, 2014). Against the background of these discussions, I recently presented the concept of consumer culture and argued that this is a new cultural concept that can serve as an informative orientation framework for comparative education (Knobloch 2016a, 2016b, 2017). The reference to this concept seems informative for two reasons when dealing with the Playmobil figures. On the one hand, it makes it possible to understand ‘our’ culture as a consumer culture that transcends the boundaries of traditional and national cultural concepts in the direction of a global culture. On the other hand, it allows us to associate the construction of specific, even traditional, ideas of culture and nation with practices of consumption. This chapter has three objectives: (1) Historical Playmobil figures like those mentioned above will be examined with regard to the identity offerings they convey, drawing on the concept of consumer culture. (2) It is important to clarify how these figures are to be evaluated pedagogically. (3) Furthermore, it should be shown whether this investigation can also contribute to the epistemological and methodological discussions within comparative education on the categories of culture and nation. The procedure is divided into four steps:  (1) In a first

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step, the concept of consumer culture is presented as a new framework for contemporary educational research. (2)  Then the objects of investigation, a selection of specific Playmobil figures, will be presented. (3)  This is followed by the actual analysis, for which on the one hand a thing hermeneutics based on Schleiermacher is used, on the other hand the concepts of hyperculture and cultural essentialism, which the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2013, 2016, 2017) recently outlined for the characterization of late modern societies. (4) The chapter ends with a conclusion, which is related to the three objectives mentioned above.

Consumer culture in comparative perspective: A new framework for educational research For comparative education, the reference to the categories of nation and culture was constitutive and for a long time self-evident (Klerides 2009: 1225). Comparing developments in other countries, comparative educationalists in the nineteenth century attempted to gain insights into the design and improvement of educational systems in their own countries (Waterkamp 2006:  18). Since it was often assumed that the different nations each have a specific character and a peculiar culture, and that educational institutions should contribute to the formation of the national identity of the population, the study of national characters and national cultures played an important role. However, the concept of national character has been called into question in comparative education (Allemann-Ghionda 2004:  23). It was above all the examination of post-structuralist, postmodern and postcolonial theories that questioned classical, essentialist notions of culture and nation. ‘In light of deconstructive views, treating nationhood and cultural identity within CE as essential, unified, eternal and fixed is problematic’ (Klerides 2009: 1234). Nations and cultures are not natural entities, but should rather be regarded as discursively produced constructions. According to Klerides (ibid.), specific practices such as the production, distribution and consumption of textbooks contribute to the discursive construction of national cultures, stories and characters. In order to examine processes of national and cultural identity formation, it therefore makes sense to take a closer look at the involved practices of consumption and the identity offerings of consumer products. Since the concept of consumer culture provides an enlightening theoretical basis for this, it is now presented in broad outlines.



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The term consumer culture can be used to describe a culture in which consumer products not only have a utility value but also a cultural significance. The fact that consumer products are also ascribed a cultural meaning is anything but unusual, but rather characteristic of the modern concept of culture which, according to Niklas Luhmann, is already emerging in the eighteenth century: ‘Pots are on the one hand pots, but on the other hand also signs of a certain culture which differs from other cultures by the form of its pots’ (Luhmann 1996: 226). According to the modern concept of culture, consumer products, in this case pots, have not only a utility value but also a cultural meaning, inasmuch as they are identified with the culture of a specific nation. ‘Comparisons of nations … now take the form of cultural comparisons’ (ibid.). In today’s consumer culture, however, products do not only refer to specific nations and national cultures, they do not only have a national origin or nationality, but can also convey completely different cultural meanings. Cars, suits or juice presses, for example, can refer to specific milieus and lifestyles, bread boxes, rain jackets and satchels to this or that gender and certain articles of clothing to a specific religion (Knobloch 2018a); some toasters can promise comfort because of their design, certain hand mixers or skin creams radiate virginity, other consumer products can stage potency (Ullrich 2012: 65–118). In order to further approximate the meaning of the term ‘consumer culture’, it is helpful to distinguish between a modern and a pre-modern concept of culture (Knobloch 2019). The difference between these two uses of the term can be seen in the fact that the pre-modern concept of culture was always used with genitive, and, as becomes clear in the classical examples cultura agri or cultura animi, it referred to the cultivation or worship of something. Accordingly, consumer culture can therefore initially be understood, in the sense of this pre-modern concept of culture, as the cultivation of consumption. This cultivation can then include corresponding activities, first, of producers, designers, marketing experts or advertising agencies; second, of consumers; and third, of other actors such as journalists or bloggers who enhance, ‘auratize’ or otherwise make particularly interesting the consumption of specific products and the products themselves. In contrast to the pre-modern understanding of culture, the genitive is no longer used in modern terminology:  culture is now a unit that encompasses everything that has been produced by human beings. Cultures in the plural can be spoken of in the modern sense in order to distinguish or compare different cultures or the cultures of different groups. Accordingly, the term ‘consumer culture’ can also refer to specific contemporary or historical groups or societies and their totality of consumer products and practices. According to this

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understanding, national consumer cultures can then be compared in a variety of ways. The term ‘consumer culture’ remains blurred, of course, as long as it is not clarified what is meant by consumption. According to current consumer research, the term is now very widely used, at least in the academic field. Today, ‘consumption’ no longer only refers to the acquisition or consumption of goods or services but also to everything or at least much that ‘happens before, during and after the planning and execution of the acquisition’ (Hellmann 2012:  4). Accordingly, ‘consumption … can be understood as the acquisition of goods within the framework of market relations, the subsequent use and consumption, but also the pre-purchase examination of the product’ (Kühschelm, Eder and Siegrist 2012:  10). Consumer research therefore does not only deal with shopping but also with ‘searching, selecting, trying out, taking away, storing, using, consuming and disposing of any goods or services, including all activities that may take place in their environment, such as showing, communicating, sharing, lending, giving away, collecting, indicating, envying, criticizing, boycotting, etc. Even subjectively experienced daydreams, fantasies, imaginations, i.e. purely inner-psychic processes, are now counted as consumption’ (Hellmann 2012: 4). If we take up this broad understanding of consumption, we can draw the conclusion that there have been consumer cultures through time and across place – in the sense of both the pre-modern and the modern concept of culture. However, the term ‘consumer culture’ thus becomes unclear, and its use for current educational research is questionable. Further criteria must therefore be found so that the concept of consumer culture can be sharpened with regard to the current situation and distinguished from other forms of consumer culture. When we speak of contemporary consumer culture here, we can contour it above all in relation to aesthetic capitalism or cultural capitalism. According to the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2013, 2017), this specific postindustrial economy is characterized by the fact that consumers are no longer primarily interested in the function and functionality of products, but above all in their cultural value and qualities. ‘Since the 1980s, the Western economy has transformed itself from an economy of standardized mass goods to an economy of singularities’ (Reckwitz 2017: 111). According to Reckwitz, not only things but also media formats, services and events become culturalized, that is, charged with cultural value and cultural significance. From the consumer’s point of view, the value of culturalization can be seen in the positive sensation that is made possible in this way. At least, cultural or culturalized goods promise ‘joy,



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tension, enrichment of the self, the feeling of doing something meaningful, etc.’ (ibid.: 121). At the centre of aesthetic capitalism is therefore the creative economy, to which one can usually add architecture, design and fashion, meanwhile also advertising, film and many others – such as sport and tourism – in addition to the classical fields of fine and performing arts, music and literature (ibid.: 115). What is decisive, however, is that the ‘entire production of goods and services in the Western economy … is increasingly becoming post-industrialized’ (ibid.: 116). In the meantime, goods are also being culturalized that until recently would hardly have been associated with culture: ‘Agriculture, the automobile or construction industries, the production of functional goods such as watches or running shoes, or traditional services such as gastronomy or medical treatment are increasingly abandoning the old logic of mass production of functional goods in favor of a post-industrialized logic of cultural singularity goods’ (ibid.). As a consequence, this development of cultural capitalism, which is accompanied by an increasing culturalization of the economy, leads to the fact that the social spheres of the economy on the one hand and art or high culture on the other hand can no longer be distinguished as sharply as previously assumed (Hutter 2015). Consequently, the Austrian author Robert Misik (2007: 13) has also pointed out that the often critically diagnosed economization of culture is at the same time a culturalization of the economy. If one takes note of the increasing culturalization of consumer products, it should not come as a surprise that art and literature scholars are now dealing with consumer products: While the literary scholar Heinz Drügh (2015), for example, deals with the aesthetics of the supermarket, the art historian Wolfgang Ullrich (2012) analyses the aesthetics of consumer culture. Starting from the distinction between the utility value and the fictional value of consumer products, Ullrich creates analogies between works of high culture, primarily visual art and literature, on the one hand, and consumer products, on the other, without, of course, equating these areas without differentiation. It may therefore be characteristic of late modern consumer culture that profane consumer products are viewed and perceived in a similar way to works of fine art, but as a consequence also artworks are viewed and perceived as consumer products (Ullrich 2016; Knobloch 2018b). Just as the work of art has always been a special good in the sense that it could assert originality, uniqueness and cultural value, and an attribution to an author function took place, so also the goods of the creative economy increasingly

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receive the character of works in a broader sense. This applies to the creation of the top chef as well as to the designer’s piece of furniture, the style of a football team or the solitary architecture. (Reckwitz 2017: 117)

But this also applies to mineral water, shower gel and sausage, even if the analogy to art in these cases may not always be immediately obvious (Knobloch and Schütte 2017; Knobloch 2018b). In summary, it thus makes sense to distinguish between three different understandings of consumer culture, namely between a pre-modern, a modern and a late modern or contemporary concept. In order to avoid misunderstandings regarding this classification, it must be stressed that it can of course also make sense to use the pre-modern and modern concepts in contemporary studies, or, as will be shown immediately, to relate different concepts. While the premodern concept of consumer culture is derived from the pre-modern concept of culture, and the modern concept of consumer culture from the modern concept of culture, the late modern concept is close to global concepts of culture, such as that of world culture theorists like John Meyer (2005). Globally oriented concepts such as that of world culture (Meyer), of world society (Luhmann) or of the modern world system (Wallerstein) are used in comparative education to refer to global educational developments (Adick 2008:  200–11). Comparative education criticized above all the assumption of world culture theory that the global spread of a culture originally based on Western principles  – so-called world culture  – would increasingly lead to convergences in the field of education in all countries (cf. e.g. Carney, Rappleye and Silova 2012). Despite this justified criticism, the concept of world culture seems suitable for getting a better view of certain aspects of consumer culture. The concept of world culture is informative and connectable for the examination of consumer culture above all because two different levels of culture are related here. This is because world culture, which is allegedly spreading increasingly globally, is not only based on Western principles – human rights, socio-economic development and environmental protection are mentioned here quite centrally – but, according to Meyer (2005), also disseminates a very specific understanding of culture. This is mainly the modern concept of national culture and thus the idea that all people can be attributed to specific cultures. However, according to Meyer, only those cultural practices, artefacts and ideas that are in harmony with the principles of world culture are recognized as legitimate in the eyes of world culture. While this understanding of culture, which is based on these principles, is allegedly increasingly spread and propagated, the agents



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of world culture keep silent that these principles themselves have a cultural character. World culture and late modern consumer culture therefore coincide because they are both global cultural concepts. A  central difference, however, is that, according to Meyer, world culture conveys a specific understanding of culture, whereas the concept of late modern consumer culture is an analytical framework that does not predefine which notions of culture or which cultural meanings are conveyed by the products and practices of consumption examined in each case. Using the example of German bread culture promoted by UNESCO, for example, I  was able to show how bread is charged and ‘auratized’ with a traditional and essentialist fiction of German culture (Knobloch 2016a:  114– 16). In the same article I refuted Meyer’s assumption that world culture has no expressive elements by analysing so-called sustainable products. Both studies are important for the understanding of late modern consumer culture insofar as they clearly show that it is primarily products and not peoples, other social groups, institutions or organizations that are regarded from this research perspective as carriers of culture (see also Knobloch 2017). Against this background, however, the question arises as to whether the comparison of pedagogically relevant consumer products, similar to the comparison of textbooks (Klerides 2009), falls within the scope of comparative education. Irrespective of the question which areas of educational science are responsible for product comparison, the investigation of the Playmobil figures currently appears to be necessary solely because their offers of identity – if the previous interpretation proves to be correct – should be understood as political positioning within current social disputes. This is because it makes sense to associate the tendencies of pluralization and individualization in Playmobil described in the introduction with those that the sociologist Richard Münch diagnosed with regard to European nations. Thus Münch observed a ‘pluralization of identities’, which goes hand in hand with the ‘emancipation of national identities’ and the establishment of a ‘pluralistic world culture’ (Münch 2010: 8–9). In the meantime, however, it is increasingly questioned whether societies are really developing in the direction of a pluralistic world culture, or whether individualistic pluralism is being displaced by group particularism (ibid.). Francis Fukuyama (2019), for example, observes with concern that in liberal democracies many people identify less and less with society as a whole and increasingly with specific groups. ‘Identity politics is the lens through which social problems today are observed across the entire ideological spectrum’

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(ibid.:  149). The rise of right-wing populism, which can be understood as a countermovement to the global opening of societies, is probably the clearest sign that national identities have meanwhile regained importance in liberal democracies (cf. also Koppetsch 2019). Are the historical Playmobil figures mentioned above close to right-wing populism?

(Highly cultural) Playmobil figures as an object of research If one looks at toys, it probably becomes clearer than referring to bread, sausages or water that these are products that not only have a utility value but also cultural significance or a fictional value. If you take Playmobil figures, for example, the utility value in the narrower sense is quite manageable: you can put the figures up, make them sit and lie down, you can turn their head, move their arms up and down and you can put something in their hands. That’s actually it. Of course, you can not only move the figures but also play with them, which raises the question of whether the play value of toys should not form part of the utility value. Already with the first Playmobil figures from 1974 one can recognize a complex utility value in so far as these figures are staged or costumed as knights, Indians and construction workers and can be used as such in the game. However, it should be borne in mind that the consumers, that is, the players, must have cultural prior knowledge so that knights, Indians and construction workers can be perceived as such at all. If a Playmobil figure is identified as a knight, then this notion is a cultural meaning, a fiction or imagination with which the figure is charged, so to speak, and which is perceived, read, even consumed here. The phenomenon that toys are charged with cultural meanings is neither a rare exception nor a specific feature of late modern consumer culture. If one thinks just of historical dolls and tin soldiers, for example, it becomes clear that toys have been associated with specific cultural notions for centuries, and that these are intended to convey them to children – for example, gender and professional roles (Bauer 1980). It therefore does not seem extraordinary that Playmobil’s products are also connected or charged with cultural notions and fictions, but rather the questions are interesting what these notions are and how they are to be evaluated pedagogically. With the newer Playmobil figures, which are interesting for our considerations, it is actually quite clear which cultural meaning they carry and convey. The figure with the article number 6107, for example, is currently painting a self-portrait that uniquely identifies this Playmobil person, even if no name is mentioned on the package itself: It must be Albrecht Dürer, who stands here with brush and



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palette in front of his painting realized in 1498 – which, by the way, can be seen in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The photo in the background of Dürer is blurred in the distance, but the Sinwell Tower of the Imperial Castle Nuremberg can still be identified (Figure 9.2). Also on the package with the article number 9124 it is not indicated, who is offered here for sale. However, the figure not only has a hat and a tailcoat on, and a pen in its left hand, but also stretches an open book out to the viewer with its other hand. On the right side of the book you can read: ‘Faust. A tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’. This Playmobil figure thus represents Goethe, as the photo in the background also suggests. It shows Goethe’s garden house in the Park at the river Ilm in Weimar, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On the package you can also read ‘Free State of Thuringia’, right next to the coat of arms of the federal state. This indicates that this consumer article, like most special figures, is a co-production (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as Playmobil figure. Photo Copyright: Thüringer Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und digitale Gesellschaft, with friendly permission of geobra Brandstätter Stiftung & Co. KG.

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Figure 9.2  Martin Luther and Albrecht Dürer as Playmobil figures. Photo Copyright: Phillip Knobloch, with kind permission of the Congress- und Tourismus-Zentrale Nürnberg.

While Dürer and Goethe are suitable for children between 4 and 10 years of age according to the package imprint, the Playmobil figure with article number 9325 is also recommended for significantly older people, namely for 4–99-yearolds. In this case, the Playmobil person offered here is quickly identified, as his name and the reason for manufacturing this product are written on the package: Luther, 2017, 500 Years of Reformation. This is the official Luther logo of the Evangelic Church in Germany for the anniversary year of the Reformation. The figure depicted on the package and contained in it, Martin Luther, is holding a pen in his right hand and a book in his left, which must be the Bible. On the left you can read ‘Books of the Old Testament’, on the right ‘The New Testament translated by Doctor Martin Luther’. Playmobil-Luther, like Dürer and Goethe, has also been placed or mounted in a photo on the picture of the package: The reformer stands here in a gate passage of the Wartburg Castle (Figure 9.2). The author Theodor Fontane, who was sold by the Fontane town of Neuruppin with article number 9326 as a Playmobil figure, certainly fits well into the company of Dürer, Goethe and Luther. Part of the special figures from the German-speaking countries, which are interesting due to their cultural



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significance, are also the jeans producer Levi Strauss (Art. No. 9295) from Markt Buttenheim, as well as the Prussian King Frederick the Great (Art. No. 6799) and Henry the Lion (Art. No. 6925), the Schwabacher Goldschläger (Art. No. 9211), the Magdeburger Reiter (Art. No. 6101), the Bamberger Reiter (Art. No. 4739) and the historical Lebküchner (Art. No. 9392) from Nuremberg, which was produced for the ninetieth anniversary of a gingerbread company. Ludwig Erhard (Art. No. 9452), a German politician of the twentieth century, has also penetrated or risen into the Playmobil world. By the way, he holds his own book in his hand, which bears the hopeful title ‘Prosperity for all’. Special Playmobil figures with cultural significance can also be found in other countries. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, offers three Playmobil articles containing figures from famous paintings: These are the two figures Marten and Oopjen (Art. No. 9483), which according to the website of the museum shop, were specially designed for the Rijksmuseum and inspired by two masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn. These are the two full body portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppt painted by Rembrandt in 1634 on the occasion of their marriage. Also inspired by a painting by Rembrandt are the two bearded Playmobil figures that the museum sells with article number 5090. According to the museum’s website, they are Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, who are depicted in the famous painting The Night Watch (1642). Inspired not by Rembrandt but by Jan Vermeer’s perhaps most famous painting is the Playmobil woman The Milkmaid (Art. No. 5067). In keeping with the scene of the oil painting from 1660, she is delivered with a milk jug, a bread basket, a table and some other props. Also in Greece, current Playmobil products carry cultural meaning linked to ancient Greek mythology. The official Greek Playmobil website presents Zeus (Art. No. 9149), Athena (Art. No. 9150), Poseidon (Art. No. 9523), Hermes (Art. No. 9524), Artemis (Art. No. 9525) and Demeter (Art. No. 9526). Surely interesting is that these gods are offered in the series ‘History’, although their historical existence is at least extremely questionable. By the way, there are very similar problems with the assignment to existing Playmobil worlds in the case of Noah’s Ark (Art. No. 9373), which, in addition to off-road vehicles and a small airplane, has been classified in the ‘Wild Life’ series  – which is actually quite obviously about safari adventures. The cultural significance of the Playmobil figures mentioned is relatively clear insofar as they stand for themselves and refer to themselves:  The PlaymobilDürer refers to the painter Albrecht Dürer, the Playmobil-Goethe to the writer

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Wolfgang von Goethe, the Playmobil-Marten and the Playmobil-Oopjen refer to the portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppt, but above all to the painter Rembrandt. In addition, these Playmobil figures are also national identification figures:  Dürer, Goethe, Luther and Fontane are regarded as outstanding intellectual greats of German culture, Rembrandt and Vermeer as outstanding Dutch national artists and the Greek gods symbolically refer to early Greek high culture. The national importance of these Playmobil figures is also supported by the fact that – unlike Noah and his Ark – they are not distributed worldwide, but only in the respective countries, often only in individual cities or shops. In Mexico, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera can certainly also be regarded as national identification figures, who have now also seen the light of day as Playmobil figures. The two artists are clearly recognizable in the photographs of Mexican designer Julio Chavez alias Dalio, which show on the internet these figures that he himself has staged or configured. In contrast to the Playmobil figures of Dürer, Goethe and Luther, for example, there is no cooperation between Playmobil and other institutions behind these individual pieces. Rather, they are creative works by the – as he calls himself – Playmobil lover Dalio. While in this case, these so-called custom figures were assembled from regular Playmobil parts, in other cases figures and individual parts are at least partially developed and produced by Playmobil lovers themselves. If one looks at the large number of Playmobil figures and productions of Dalio on Instagram or Pinterest, one can see that in many cases reference is made to Mexican history and culture, from the pre-Columbian civilizations through the Conquista to the Zapatistas.

Between hyperculture and cultural essentialism: Playmobil in late modernity If one assumes that consumer products, such as Playmobil’s toys, can have a cultural significance beyond their utility value, it makes sense to assume a language of things or products in analogy to texts. Therefore, I recently took up Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in order to apply them not only – as he actually thought – to texts but also to things. The aim was to highlight the basic features of a pedagogical hermeneutics of things (Knobloch 2018a). The leading question here is which identity offers are made by the Playmobil figures. Schleiermacher’s statement that the meaning of language or of text is never unambiguous, and that the search for an understanding can never be conclusive,



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provides a starting point for interpretation. On the one hand, language is something general, since linguistic communication is only possible if different people share a common language; on the other hand, language is always something individual, since only individual speakers or authors can make individual use of it. Schleiermacher concludes from this that an understanding of a text can be opened up by looking alternately and in relation to each other at the (general) language and the (individual) author, asking for general and individual meanings. Both in the case of the language and in the case of the author, comparative and divinatory methods can be applied:  while the comparison with other texts can show earlier and present meanings, divinatory methods try to anticipate possible meanings in the future (ibid.). If one now transfers Schleiermacher’s thoughts to the Playmobil figures, one can also assume here that their meaning can never be determined unambiguously and conclusively. This can be justified by the fact that the figures can also be attributed general meanings on the one hand, and individual meanings on the other. A generally understandable meaning is to be assumed in so far as otherwise nobody would know what to do with the Playmobil figures. And there are certainly (implicit) comparisons that suggest to us that we are dealing here first and foremost with the representation of people. Through comparative procedures it can also become clear that the Goethe figure, for example, is a man, while Milkmaid, Athena or Demeter are women. The comparison can also show that these figures wear historical garments that can be more or less precisely defined and contextualized. Similar to texts, it makes sense to look at the authors or producers and their intentions with regard to the Playmobil figures in order to approach the individual meaning of the figures. This way it becomes quickly clear that this is not just a historical male figure, but rather, for example, Goethe, not just any historical Greek female figure, but especially Athena. If these individual meanings are not already noted on the package, then comparisons can also help here. But according to the dialectic of the general and the particular, one can also ask what significance the individual historical figures have  – both in general and in individual terms. In individual respects, the focus can, for example, be on Goethe as a writer, and thus on his work and impact  – or on Athena or Demeter as specific figures of the gods of ancient Greek mythology. From a general point of view, however, one can also ask whether the figures refer beyond their individual meaning to something overarching, to something they have in common with other fi ­ gures  – or other products. As seen, a comparison of the selected Playmobil figures can show that the persons they represent are all

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symbolic figures of so-called high culture, and also national symbolic figures. While this is common to all these figures, they can also be assigned to individual nations or national cultures – of course also regional cultures or individual cities and so forth – and grouped separately. In the end, these considerations coincide with the understanding that was the basis of this article from the very beginning. Beyond that, however, one can at least take seriously the hint from this hermeneutic perspective that the process of reconstructive understanding is never complete, since perfect understanding cannot be achieved. So if we now attribute a highly cultural and national or national cultural significance to the figures, we must bear in mind that the figures also have, can have or will have other meanings at some point. The one does not exclude the other. Nevertheless, we will return to the question of how these highly or nationally cultural meanings are to be evaluated. Can’t thinghermeneutics help us with the question of whether such meanings support more conservative or more progressive attitudes? The hermeneutic perspective developed in the style of Schleiermacher remains largely helpless with regard to the most recently raised questions. This is due to the fact that this is a general hermeneutics, not a special hermeneutics. Specific concepts and theories are therefore necessary in order to approach the meaning of national and highly cultural languages. In our case, Reckwitz’s current reflections are an appropriate approach, since for him the understanding of culture is the decisive key to approaching contemporary social formations. The subject is highly sensitive insofar as a deep rift runs through late modern societies, which divides and separates the population from each other. Not unlike a cultural conflict (or clash of civilizations) at first glance, this is a conflict between two regimes of culturalization, which Reckwitz (2016, 2017) describes on the one hand as hyperculture and on the other as cultural essentialism. In order to clarify the difference between hyperculture and cultural essentialism, it is important to first clarify the concept of culturalization. Reckwitz distinguishes between the cultural in a weak or broad sense and culture in a strong or narrower sense. By cultural in the weak sense I mean the total of all collective contexts of meaning or orders of knowledge that are processed in social practices and with the help of which the world is meaningfully classified. With culture in the strong or narrower sense, however, I want to describe the sphere of all that is attributed value in a social context, namely intrinsic, own value. (Reckwitz 2016: 3)



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Reckwitz assigns all practices and objects, but also all places and subjects to which cultural intrinsic value is ascribed in a society, to the ‘sphere of culture’, one could probably also say to ‘high culture’, or even to ‘culture in the narrower sense’. Thus, processes of culturalization run diametrically opposed to those of rationalization. ‘In rationalization, an objectifying reduction of affects takes place; in culturalization, on the other hand, an intensification of affects in relation to the valuable takes place. Rationalization profanizes things, culturalization sacralizes them’ (ibid.). While modern society can be characterized primarily by processes of rationalization, processes of culturalization in late modernity have shaped society to a previously unknown extent. However – and this is central to our considerations  – processes of hypercultural and cultural-essentialist culturalization must be distinguished. It is characteristic of hypercultural forms of culturalization that individuals select and valorize or culturalize those from all the cultural resources available to them that seem particularly suitable or helpful to them for their own self-realization. The origin or affiliation of the cultural goods plays no role here:  ‘Regardless of which regional, national or continental, contemporary or historical, highly cultural or popular cultural origin the cultural goods are – the decisive factor is that they can become a resource of subjective self-development’ (ibid., 5). This form of culturalization is especially typical for the well and mostly academically educated new middle class. ‘At its core, it takes the form of an expansive aestheticization … of lifestyles, an aestheticization of profession and personal relationships, of eating, living, travelling and the body, guided by the ideal of a “good life” ’ (ibid.: 4). The situation is quite different with cultural-essentialist forms of culturalization. For here one is not guided by the idea of individual self-realization, but rather by the cultivation and veneration of the culture of a specific group, namely one’s own. Therefore the distinction between inside and outside, between ‘us’ and ‘the others’, is fundamental: ‘one’s own superior nation against the foreign ones (nationalism), one’s own religion against the unbelievers (fundamentalism), the people against the cosmopolitan elites (right-wing populism)’ (ibid.: 6). While one’s own culture and group are valued, there is often simultaneous devaluation and contempt for all others. According to Reckwitz, the development of these new identitary groups  – for him also ethnic communities, new nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms and right-wing populism belong to them – is based on the one hand on ‘the cultural vacuum of the rationalism of organized modernity’ (ibid.); on the other hand, these cultural essentialisms should be understood as a countermovement to hyperculture.

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With regard to the significance of the ‘national’ and ‘highly cultural’ Playmobil figures, it therefore makes a big difference whether one approaches them from a hypercultural or a cultural-essentialist perspective. If one is culturally essentialistic, one is likely to be primarily interested in whether the figures belong to one’s ‘own’ culture or to another; they are then evaluated accordingly, that is, upgraded or devalued. This would also explain why the Greek gods are only distributed in Greece, Goethe, Fontane and the other German figures only in Germany, the Rembrandt figures in a Dutch museum and the Mexican figures not at all commercially. In contrast, from a hypercultural perspective it does not really matter whether the figures refer to a specific national – or also regional or otherwise defined – culture, and it is not so important who is represented here. What is decisive is whether the figures in their respective meaning are capable of triggering intense feelings and affects, or great notions and dreams. It is probably not at all decisive which meaning the figures convey exactly, but that it is as much meaning as possible. However, the large and famous national symbolic figures seem to be excellently suited for this and make these Playmobil toys really interesting, especially for hyperculturally oriented adults, worldwide. Looking at the selected and presented figures, it seems reasonable to assume that national cultural symbols – or cultural national symbols – have a great fictional value in the Playmobil world.

Conclusion Three questions were fundamental for this examination of exemplarily selected figures from the toy brand Playmobil. First, what cultural identity positions are offered by these figures? Second, how can we evaluate these identity positions in pedagogical terms? Finally, how and to what extent can this investigation also contribute to the epistemological and methodological discussions on the categories of culture and nation conducted in comparative education? We took the first categories to describe Playmobil toys from the writer Florian Illies (2003), for whom Playmobil stood for tradition and conservatism in retrospect of his childhood. The comparison with current Playmobil products suggested that there have been fundamental transformations in the Playmobil world, and that these toys are now to be re-evaluated. In the meantime, they seem to stand for pluralism and diversity and thus for progressive world views, as was heuristically assumed.



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However, the question arose as to whether the historical Playmobil figures, which have only recently appeared, such as Luther, Goethe, Zeus or Demeter, are again being used to make conservative offers of identity. As a heuristic assessment suggested, these figures can be interpreted as symbols for high culture as well as for specific national cultures. By referring to epistemological and methodological discussions within educational science, in which traditional concepts of culture or national culture are criticized and problematized because of their essentialist constitution, the assumption was supported that Playmobil figures, which are interpreted as representatives of specific national cultures, offer a traditionally national, conservative identity. On the basis of these assumptions, I have tried to analyse the historical toy figures in more detail using a specific hermeneutics as well as a current cultural concept. At first, a pedagogical hermeneutics of things (Knobloch 2018a), based on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, was used to interpret the language of things, here: the language of these Playmobil figures. This way, it was possible to show how certain meanings can be revealed by an alternating reference to general and individual characteristics as well as by the combination of comparative and divinatory methods. However, the findings remained very limited and hardly went beyond the heuristic assumptions. What seemed important, however, was the advice taken from Schleiermacher that meanings of texts  – and things  – can never be determined unambiguously and forever, and that it can therefore sometimes be useful to search for new meanings even in objects that one actually already considers to be sufficiently understood. In order to search for further meanings and offers of identity from the Playmobil figures, reference was made to Reckwitz’s (2016; 2017) current diagnosis of society, which is based on the distinction between hyperculture and cultural essentialism. This showed that practices of culturalization must be considered in order to interpret the identity offers of the Playmobil figures. If one follows Reckwitz, then the question about the offers of identity cannot be answered independently of the question about the forms of culturalization involved. Accordingly, the figures can make different offers of cultural identity, depending on whether and how cultural value is attributed to the figures. The pedagogical evaluation of the figures and their identity offerings thus depends on whether a hypercultural or a cultural-essentialist pedagogical agenda is pursued. For a cultural-essentialist pedagogy, only those figures can make valuable offers of identity that refer to the ‘own’ culture or to the ‘own’ community. From this perspective, figures who represent ‘foreign’ cultures appear to be a danger in so far as the ‘foreign’ may possibly be upgraded.

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On the other hand, for a hypercultural pedagogy all figures appear in principle to be culturally valuable, at least when they are hyperculturally culturalized. Only cultural-essentialist practices of culturalization appear problematic here, through which the Playmobil figures of ‘one’s own’ culture are upgraded while those of others are devalued. On the other hand, the appreciation of several figures representing different cultures seems desirable from this perspective. Since self-realization is of great importance in hyperculture, it is of course also fine from this perspective if the Playmobil figures are not given any cultural value at all, for example because of a foible for other products or toys. However, with regard to the pedagogical evaluation of the figures, it should also be considered that in most cases it may not be quite easy to switch between hypercultural and cultural-essentialist attitudes, world views and lifestyles. The analyses by Reckwitz (2016, 2017) indicate that certain social conditions also dispose of certain forms of culturalization. While hyperculture is mainly carried and lived by the new academic middle class, cultural essentialism is supported by the old middle class and the new underclass. The various cultural-essentialist movements must also be understood as critical reactions to hyperculture. A  naive affirmation of hypercultural pedagogy therefore appears problematic solely because of excluding effects. Even if the Playmobil figures can be used and instrumentalized in the sense of hypercultural or cultural-essentialist pedagogical intentions, their pedagogical value seems to me to lie elsewhere. They can be used to show how even profane products can be charged with great cultural significance in consumer culture. The awareness of these forms of culturalization of products seems important since culturalized products play a central role in current political and social conflicts. The Playmobil figures become pedagogically significant above all when they help to convey an understanding of the currently predominant consumer culture. There is much to be said for the fact that it has been shown that ‘our’ culture should first and foremost be understood as a consumer culture. The culturalization of consumer products is a broad phenomenon in late modern consumer culture, while hypercultural and cultural-essential forms of culturalization can only be regarded as specific variants. This also confirms the thesis already presented elsewhere (Knobloch 2016a) that the concept of consumer culture represents an important framework for educational research. In addition, it has now become clear that forms of culturalization and practices of cultural valorization of products must also be addressed in the educational science discussions on cultural concepts. It is also



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important to discuss the extent to which the concept of juxtaposing hyperculture and cultural essentialism is relevant. In addition, comparative education has the task of dealing with the field of consumer-aesthetic education. This specific form of education has, among other things, the important task to clarify and explain late modern consumer culture, cultural capitalism, practices of culturalization and the associated political and social disputes. It is therefore important to see which concepts have already been developed and to what extent this form of education has already been established and institutionalized in the various countries. It can at least be said that the Playmobil figures examined in this study point to such an orientation in comparative education. This indicates that the comparison of pedagogically relevant culturalized products also falls within the scope of comparative education.

References Adick, Ch. (2008), Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Adick, Ch. (2014), ‘Der Μethodologische Nationalismus und Kulturalismus in der Vergleichenden Erziehungswissenschaftʼ, in S. Rühle, A. Müller and Ph. D. Th. Knobloch (eds), Mehrsprachigkeit – Diversität – Internationalität. Erziehungswissenschaft im Τransnationalen Bildungsraum, 225–41, Münster: Waxmann. Allemann-Ghionda, C. (2004), Einführung in die Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft, Weinheim: Beltz. Arnould, E., and C. Thompson (2005), ‘Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4): 868–82. Bauer, K. (1980), ‘Spielen. Big Jim und die Computerʼ, in K. Bauer and H. Hengst (eds), Wirklichkeit aus zweiter Hand. Kindheit in der Erfahrungswelt von Spielwaren und Medienprodukten, 125–50, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Carney, S., J. Rappleye and I. Silova (2012), ‘Between Faith and Science: World Culture Theory and Comparative Education’, Comparative Education Review, 56(3): 366–93. Drügh, H. (2015), Ästhetik des Supermarkts, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Fukuyama, F. (2019), Identität. Wie der Verlust der Würde unsere Demokratie gefährdet, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Hellmann, K.-U. (2012), ‘Konsum. Eine kurze Bestandsaufnahme aus Sicht der Forschung’, Praxis Politik, 6: 4–9. Hennel, A. (2009), Playmobil Collector (1974–2009), Dreieich: Fantasia Verlag.

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Hutter, M. (2015), Ernste Spiele. Geschichten vom Aufstieg des Ästhetischen Kapitalismus, Paderborn: Fink. Illies, F. (2003), Generation Golf, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Klerides, E. (2009), ‘National Cultural Identities, Discourse Analysis and Comparative Educationʼ, in R. Cowen and A. Kazamias (eds), International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1225–47, Dordrecht: Springer. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2016a), ‘Educational Spaces of Cultural Capitalism: The Concept of Consumer Culture as a New Framework for Contemporary Educational Research’, European Education, 48(2): 104–19. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2016b), ‘Education for Autonomy in the Context of Consumer Cultureʼ, in J. Drerup, G. Graf, Ch. Schickhardt and G. Schweiger (eds), Justice, Education and the Politics of Childhood, 221–33, Dordrecht: Springer. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2017), ‘(Globale) Kultur(en) und kulturelle Diversität: Perspektiven kulturwissenschaftlicher Hermeneutik’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 93(1): 12–27. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2018a), ‘Die Sprache(n) der Dinge verstehen. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Revision der Hermeneutik Schleiermachers’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(3): 419–35. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2018b), ‘Revision ästhetischer Bildung. Neue Perspektiven über Siegerkunst’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(4): 539–51. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th. (2019), ‘Kulturʼ, in G. Schweiger and J. Drerup (eds), Handbuch Philosophie der Kindheit, 137–44, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Knobloch, Ph. D. Th., and A. Schütte (2017), ‘Konsumästhetik und Bildung. Grundzüge Einer Theorie Konsumästhetischer Bildungsprozesseʼ, in Ch. Thompson, R. Casale and N. Ricken (eds), Die Sache(n) der Bildung, 87–103, Paderborn: Schöningh. Koppetsch, C. (2019), Die Gesellschaft des Zorns. Rechtspopulismus im globalen Zeitalter, Bielefeld: transcript. Kühschelm, O., F. Eder and H. Siegrist (2012), ‘Einleitung. Konsum und Nationʼ, in O. Kühschelm, F. Eder and H. Siegrist (eds), Konsum und Nation. Zur Geschichte nationalisierender Inszenierungen in der Produktkommunikation, 7–44, Bielefeld: transcript. Luhmann, N. (1996), ‘Jenseits von Barbareiʼ, in M. Miller and H.-G. Soeffner (eds), Modernität und Barbarei. Soziologische Zeitdiagnosen am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, 219–30, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. McCracken, G. (1986), ‘Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods’, Journal of Consumer Research, 13(1): 71–84. Mecheril, P., M. d. M. Castro Varela, İ. Dirim, A. Kalpaka and C. Melter, eds (2010), Migrationspädagogik, Weinheim: Beltz. Meyer, J. (2005), Weltkultur. Wie die Westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.



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Misik, R. (2007), Das Kult-Buch. Glanz und Elend der Kommerzkultur, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Münch, R. (2010), Das Regime des Pluralismus. Zivilgesellschaft im Kontext der Globalisierung, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Reckwitz, A. (2013), Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Reckwitz, A. (2016), ‘Zwischen Hyperkultur und Kulturessenzialismus. Die Spätmoderne im Widerstreit Zweier Kulturalisierungsregimes’, Soziopolis: Gesellschaft beobachten, 24 October. Available online: https://soziopolis. de/beobachten/kultur/artikel/zwischen-hyperkultur-und-kulturessenzialismus/ (accessed 1 August 2019). Reckwitz, A. (2017), Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Trentmann, F. (2017), Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first, London: Penguin Books. Ullrich, W. (2012), Haben Wollen. Wie Funktioniert die Konsumkultur? Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Ullrich, W. (2016), Siegerkunst. Neuer Adel, teure Lust, Berlin: Wagenbach. Waterkamp, D. (2006), Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft. Ein Lehrbuch, Münster: Waxmann.

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A Longer View: Conceptualizing Education, Identity and the Public Good in 1917 and 2016 Elaine Unterhalter

Introduction 2016 is widely regarded as a year of disjunctures, possibly signalling an end of many of the institutions that marked the twentieth century. Some examples of end points are the aerial bombardment of civilians in Aleppo throughout the year. Attacks of that form for a sustained length of time and intensity without regard to international conventions had not been seen, according to some commentators, since the Second World War.1 The war in Syria contributed to the enormous numbers of refugees crossing the world, again reaching figures not seen since the 1940s. The outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK called into question the post-war European project, in the same way that the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States called into question particular assumptions about national and foreign policy in that country. The decision of the United States and Israel to withdraw from UNESCO in 2017, and of the United States to end engagement with multilateral projects on climate change and nuclear weapons in Iran, amplifies the sense of endings. What is interesting about all the events that took place in 2016 is that they were generally not predicted. They were shocking partly because they were unexpected. Adam Tooze (2016) compares 2016 and 1917. In 1917, he writes, three similarly world-shattering, but unexpected events took place in a way ushering in the twentieth century. Lenin took a train from Zurich back to Russia, a decisive move in the history of Bolshevik leadership of the Russian revolution. Woodrow Wilson, who had pledged American neutrality at the beginning of the First World War, decisively entered the war in Europe, and began a chapter of American

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global interventionism. Gandhi, who had returned to India from South Africa in 1915, began the movement of peasants, farmers and urban labourers that was to build towards the anti-colonial and national movements that successfully came to challenge colonial rule in Asia and Africa. Each of these trends can be attached to a moment of identification by each of these figures with a historical tide that formulated ideas about particular kinds of futures. Implicit in this process is an explicit or implicit expression of a notion of public good. We could multiply these examples, adding in many other significant moments in 1917 that were to shape the century, considering issues of identity they raise. Something about women’s suffrage seems an obvious omission. However, since reading Tooze’s article, I have been interested to uncover not just further changes of direction to supplement his analysis but also to consider what the education ideas were that were circulating in 1916–17 and the assumptions about identity and public good they express.2 I want to build from this long perspective comparatively across a century to help with disentangling some contemporary ideas in this area. In the process I want to examine how shifts in the notion of identity, public and private good have been made across the one hundred years from 1917 to the present. I will use this analysis to consider some of the re-articulations of the notion of public good that are currently being made in education, some of the difficulties these present and pose some questions about formulations of identity.

Education, identity and public good in 1917 Here are three formulations of links between identity, education, public and private good circulating in 1917. This is not a comprehensive list, but resonates with the events Tooze singles out as path-breaking. A first formulation portrays education as a practice that forms knowledgeable, rational and humane identities. In 1917 this was not a new perspective. It had been a key thread in liberal, anarchist and socialist ideas about education, and throughout the nineteenth century had been linked with the potential of Enlightenment rationality (Suissa 2006; Biesta 2015a). But in 1917, under the shadow of a ferocious and brutal World War, in which governments mobilized education systems not for public good, but for wholly destructive forms of public bad, the idea of nurturing a peace-loving human identity had particular resonance. This is exemplified in the writings in 1917 of the South African novelist and women’s rights campaigner, Olive Schreiner, a close friend of Eleanor Marx, and her network of socialist and Communist friends in London (First and Scott



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1984: 304–18). Schreiner gave support to the Union of Democratic Control and the Non-Conscription Fellowship, a transnational social movement opposed to the First World War. She wrote a letter to a peace meeting, which took place in London: Many hundreds of thousands, who have not desired war, and who are determined that when the peace comes it shall be a reality, and not a hotbed for the raising of future wars … We feel that as the Governments have made the wars – the peoples themselves must make the peace! We are organizing ourselves, that, when the time comes, we may be able effectively to act. Our second aim is to educate ourselves and others to this end. (Schreiner [1916] 1924)

This vision of education and new identities made, despite the actions of warmongering governments, uniting ‘people themselves’, partly because of their capacity to educate themselves, even in the face of personal and emotional difficulties, such as those Schreiner faced in taking this stance (First and Scott 1984). This is a hopeful vision of identification with the idea of public good. This notion of education connecting the hearts of people, who wished for peace in the shadow of war, was to find its way into the Preamble to the Constitution of UNESCO: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’ It can be seen here that the form of identity that is invoked is the identity of being human, working to defend peace. This hopeful idea about education in 1917 had a counterpart that was less optimistic. Here education was seen to be entangled with identifications of division which undermined or compromised ideas about public good. This second idea about education, circulating in 1917, was much more critical of the identities that education could form, and hence more sceptical of the immediate relationship of education with public good. This view noted how education systems and associated practices, such as the forming of public opinion through the press, shaped identities that reflected existing hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity or nationality. This perspective noted how relationships formed by colonial projects sorted the educated, the educable and the uneducated. Through this process huge differences in well-being were established for these different groups. For many this was associated with appalling levels of exploitation, dispossession and violence. In some cases, genocide ensued. These actions were often defended using discourses about education and civilization (e.g. Soudien 2015; Heller and McElhinny 2017). Some writings circulating in 1917 acknowledged these processes of distancing and the distortions that followed. Sol Plaatje, a South African contemporary of Gandhi, exemplifies this

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in his writing. Plaatje made a similar journey across identities to Gandhi. He changed from a youthful embracing of the culture of the colonial rulers of South Africa to profound criticism of their political and economic policies (Willan 1984). In 1916 Plaatje published Native Life in South Africa. This was an account of the dispossession, poverty and distress associated with the 1913 Land Act. A key idea in the book is how the views of Africans in South Africa with direct experience of the effects of colonialism and racism are not heard when policy is made. The process of educating the public thus is not one of accurate portrayal, but of distortion: Here is a paper, South African in title and in pretensions, which cannot even boast of a South African native paper on its exchange list! What information, then, can the editors of such an exclusive London paper possess about an Act [1913 Land Act] specifically enacted to operate against Natives? (Plaatje 1916: 210)

For Plaatje, it is the failure of policymakers to talk to and engage with the people who experience the decisions of colonial rulers that drives some of the dispossession and injustice. The sphere of the public good is therefore diminished because of the failures of education to attend to suffering and go beyond a reproduction of existing processes of distancing and distortion. Plaatje suggests that if a listening stance was adopted, better information could infuse policy for public good. A third theme evident at this time is that public good may be an outcome of education systems and practices under certain conditions. This is exemplified in the writings of John Dewey, who published Democracy and Education in 1916. Dewey’s core idea was that school was the place where the personal and the social connected. Here democracy as a lived relationship between people could be fashioned. In schools a democratic citizenship that took mutuality and equality seriously could be constructed by a government under certain conditions: The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. (Dewey 1916: 66)



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Dewey, like Schreiner, gives attention to education forming identities of human solidarity around notions of public good. Plaatje notes how his identity as an ‘ideal’ colonial subject has not secured land rights or forms of public good for people who share his race and national affiliations. We thus see in these three formulations both hopeful and critical formulations of the relationship of education and public good, with identity playing different roles in different versions of the argument. I acknowledge that for the sake of making this analysis I am not mentioning a host of other writers working in 1917 connecting education and public good. My contention is that while some of these stressed patriotism, obedience and hierarchy, others noted dark features of the enlightenment and formulations of common good for some groups, excluding others. A  handful acknowledged the complexity and difficulties of mixing education ideas about public and private (Fitzpatrick 2002; Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick 2011). All formulations appearing in English delineated a connection which considered the link between education and public good as possible in some of the ways outlined by Schreiner, difficult as delineated by Plaatje or contingent as analysed by Dewey. For Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey, a key shared assumption is that education is a public project. It is a project that happens despite the actions of contemporary governments, which all three see as failing to support or provide adequately for appropriate kinds of knowledge and forms of education. For all three identity is made, not given, and is associated with some form of personal good. They associated the public good with an identification with being human, rather than with belonging to a particular group.

Education, identity and public good in 2016 If I fast forward from these generally hopeful delineations of identity, education and the public good in 1916–17 to the present and consider some ideas about education circulating that help to frame the unexpected disjunctures of 2016, I  note a repositioning of the relationship of public and private good and a reframing of ideas about identity. Here are three contemporary re-articulations of earlier ideas. The liberal Enlightenment view, articulated by Schreiner, linked education to a process of identification associated with peacebuilding. In her discussion, education has the potential to liberate or uncover humane and generous qualities so that private good, realized through education, is an expression of public good. However, many articulations of this vision developed over the twentieth century

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do not give detail of the kinds of educational processes entailed to secure these outcomes. This silence has meant that in 2016 a position has emerged that the form of organization of education is not as relevant as the processes enacted or the outcomes achieved or desired. This form of the argument has come to be associated with the private sector’s role in education, particularly for-profit forms, which has accelerated markedly in the twenty-first century (Robertson et  al. 2012; Draxler 2016). In some formulations of this relationship, private good, through enhanced earning capacity or skill, expands public good, because of economic growth, improved productivity and the trickle-down benefits (World Bank 2018). The idea is neatly encapsulated by Sonny Varkey of the Global Education Management Systems (GEMS) network of private schools, who advocates cheap private schools as well as expensive ones, comparing this to the way airlines supply budget as well as luxury travel (Woodward 2005). The assumption is whatever way you go, you get to your destination. The argument made here is that education, and the identities it produces, increases public good over time. In this form there is nothing special about education as a public site as these identities can be produced through any kind of relationship. This point is made often by advocates of private schools and universities, by public higher education institutions that recruit disproportionately from private schools and by supporters of various kinds of public private partnerships (PPPs) that public good at a range of levels can be produced regardless of the form of the education institutions, which can be public, private or some mix (Kenway et  al. 2017; Levin 2018). Private and public good merge in this process. The market form of the social contract, according to this argument, has much in common with democratic forms of the state (Fine and Saad-Filho 2017). This isomorphism means we should not distinguish between public and private forms of education because both deliver on aspects of freedoms and opportunities. Much of this argument turns on a very loose formulation of the idea of public good that does not specify its relation to reproducing inequality. Many accounts of private schools aimed at poor communities highlight the ways in which they increase inequalities (Draxler 2016; Verger, Bonal and Zancajo 2016). They are often associated with fiscal arrangements which fail to adequately fund free public schools (Alcott and Rose 2017; Edwards, Klees and Wildish 2017; Sahoo 2017; Unterhalter et  al. 2020). The argument made by defenders of low-cost private schools is that educated identities and social relationships associated with inequality can be treated as separate spheres. Public good is portrayed as an aggregated process of individual or family cost-benefit calculations (Tooley 2013; Zulikowski, Piper, Ong’ele and Kiminza 2018). This contrasts with the



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solidaristic notion of public good, articulated in different ways by Plaatje, Schreiner and Dewey in 1917. Improving learning outcomes is a key element of the case made for the efficacy of expanding private provision. Many advocates of low-cost private schools rest their case on studies which show learning outcomes in a limited range of subjects (usually reading and arithmetic) are higher in private, as compared to public schools (Tooley, Dixon and Olwanleraju 2005; Singh 2015). The widespread concern with poor learning outcomes, particularly for children from the lowest socio-economic quintiles, despite these children spending years in school (UNESCO 2017; World Bank 2018), has fuelled arguments that any form of provision – public, private or PPP – is useful if it raises learning outcomes (Pearlman Robinson and Winthrop 2016). It can be seen that this notion takes an element of the writings from 1916 to 1917 by Plaatje, Schreiner and Dewey, which centres on the individual, whose heart and mind is developed through education. The argument works to associate the liberal notion of the identity of the person as rights holder and duty bearer with any form of an institution which delivers those rights and duties. Metonymically the institution is associated with learning outcomes. Thus, the argument waves away the distinction between private and public institutions and suggests each is equivalent in creating identities which advance public good. The critics of the emergence of private schools note that in different national and transnational contexts, hierarchies emerge between different kinds of public and private institutions (Ron Balsera et al. 2016). Thus, we cannot simply assume an unproblematic public good will be generated by education institutions that reproduce inequalities. To take Varkey’s aeroplane analogy, whether you travel first class or economy may have considerable bearing on how you are treated and experience your journey, view your destination and what happens to you when you get there. Thus your identification is tied up with your experience. Expanding private education provision is marked by intersecting inequalities. This has considerable bearing for how one thinks about how to define public good and any relationship with identities. In a second contemporary idea of education, that reformulates the older idea, exemplified above in the writing of Sol Plaatje, critiquing schools for their association with colonial or class projects, schools are noted in a considerable body of research and policy literature as settings for gender-based violence. Here ideas about public and private good and their links with identity are reconfigured. The critical writing of 1917 about the way that education was implicated in projects to advance colonialism or divert the working classes from an understanding of

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exploitation did not pay particular note to the ways in which education was involved in forms of gender division and exclusion. Silence, secrecy and shame were common responses to sexual assault and harassment (Harrington 2016). From the 1970s, there has been growing attention to forms of gender-based violence, and research began to uncover education institutions as one setting for this. The HIV epidemic placed many of these concerns on the international agenda (Morrell et al. 2009; Parkes 2016). In 2016, UNESCO defined schoolrelated gender-based violence (SRGBV) as acts or threats of sexual, physical or psychological violence occurring in and around schools, perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes, and enforced by unequal power dynamics (UNESCO/UN Women 2016). Forms of SRGBV highlight the vulnerability of particular forms of identity associated, for example, with intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexuality. They include bullying, corporal punishment, sexual violence and abuse, sexual harassment and intimate partner violence (IPV), and can include forms of violence linked with adolescent dating. SRGBV is seen as a violation of children’s human rights and a form of gender discrimination (UNESCO/UN Women 2016). It has been noted as particularly acute when gender inequalities combine with other inequalities, such as poverty, for example in the case of school girls coerced into sex by older men to pay for school fees (Parkes and Unterhalter 2015). A  working group convened by UN Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI) has documented the many settings in which SRGBV takes place, and the ways in which schools sometimes reinforce violence through curricula, pedagogies, management structures and inequitable systems (Heslop et  al. 2017). Vanner’s (2018) empirical work in Kenya revealed a link between the pressures and public shaming teachers are subjected to in an era of high-stakes testing and the corporal punishment they inflict on children who do not succeed in tests. Parkes (2016) writes about understanding SRGBV not just in terms of the acts and their effects but also the causes of violence in everyday interactions, norms, institutions and structures of inequality. These are associated with relationships in health, housing and a range of social infrastructure. Thus identifications at many different levels are entailed. Around 1916–17, schools were noted as sites where particular ideas about class or nation or colonial identity could be inculcated. They also held the potential, implicit in the analysis Plaatje makes, for unmasking true relationships, allowing for the experiences of the dispossessed to be heard and acted on. Consideration of SRGBV in 2016 has similar contours, noting schools as sites where gender violence may be enacted, but also expressing the hopeful concern that with good information and forms of practice schools can undo



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some of this harm (Parkes et al. 2016). The writings on SRGBV highlight that the assumption held by Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey that education could undo public bad is not always realized. I read the work in 1916 as indicating a certain ‘innocence’. At that time education systems as major undertakings of states and transnational organizations only existed in a handful of places. Nowhere were these settings for attempts at universal inclusion and full delivery of the idea of the public good across a wide range of identifications that has become standard since the middle of the twentieth century. This process has accelerated markedly since 1990 (UNESCO 2015). Thus the ideal form of education and the public good articulated in 1916 contrasts markedly with the more battered form of 2016, which we read through multiple contexts of experience with difficult delivery. Nonetheless, what is interesting about the policy and practice initiatives to end SRGBV, which in some ways provide a foretaste of the highprofile #MeToo campaign of 2017/18, is that the public sphere of debate, revelation and critiquing power is positioned as a key site for advancing public good. The recounting of individual stories of identification specifying assault, humiliation and vulnerability is the major genre though which these insights proceed (PLAN 2013; Global Working Group to end SRGBV and UNGEI 2019). A crucial thread in all these campaigns is that openness, the use of the public sphere and the calling of abusive power to account is a key educative process. Thus, although sexual harassment, abuse or violence may be experienced in private, and may undermine educational attainment or identification, the naming of this in public and the affirmation that the personal is political and professional is a key reclaiming and re-articulation of the notion of public good inflected by an understanding of private suffering. Some of this affirmation of personal experience was a thread in the writings of Dewey, Schreiner and Plaatje. For all three the public educational setting of the novel, journalism or academic discussion is portrayed as a space to articulate identities of private suffering and build some of the insight to change prevailing knowledge forms, social relations and challenge political power. What is interesting about the work on SRGBV, as advanced by UNESCO and UN Women, is that they take this insight from the educational realm of ideas and opinions, articulated initially by the press, and in a small number of local studies, and seek to institutionalize this in the management of schools, and through the institutional formations of education system planning, teacher training, codes of practice and metrics for evaluation (Parkes et  al. 2016; Unterhalter and North 2017). Public good, in this institutionalized formation, is thus a form of hardwiring into education of values associated with the public sphere. Forms of the state and transnational

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organization are, from this perspective, central to allowing this process to happen. This linking of the form of the state with the nature of the education system involving whole populations was very far from the experience of education writers in 1917. At that time, notions about education were still largely expressed as ideals not as systems in practice. One question I will return to in conclusion is whether in the contemporary focus on the education system, the idea of the personal experience of public good comes to be under-played. A third education idea circulating in 2016 concerns the debate about decolonizing knowledge, with implications about pluralizing not just ideas of what are considered morally good but also the notion of different publics. This casts understandings of public good and education in a different light to that expressed in 1917. Events in South Africa crystalize some of these issues. In March 2015, students and staff at the University of Cape Town (UCT) successfully campaigned for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a late nineteenth-century university benefactor, mining magnate and political advocate of imperial land dispossession, war and highly exploitative social and economic relationships. The #Rhodes must fall (RMF) movement sparked protests over three years across a number of South African campuses about the persistence of inequalities associated with income (linked with the later #Fees must fall and #Outsourcing must fall campaigns) and the slow pace of change in some universities to address issues of colonialism and racial inequalities (Nyamnjoh 2016; Jansen and Walters 2018; Jansen 2019). RMF resonated with students on a number of other campuses, where Rhodes had been a benefactor, and where relationships with a colonial past had often not been reviewed (de Sousa Santos 2018). The process for university transformation assumed many forms, including challenging governance structures, examining financing, debating curricula, the profile of staff and students, and raising questions of epistemic access and justice. The slow pace of many initiatives in South Africa, the UK and the United States was trenchantly critiqued by student activists and academic commentators as indicating how neoliberalism, colonialism and racism were intertwined with the establishment of educational institutions. Many highlighted how some forms of disciplinary knowledge and associated pedagogy were profoundly resistant to change. A range of informal networks, media campaigns and communities of practice were involved in raising the issue of decolonizing universities and a number of scholarly works have deepened consideration of this theme (Barnes 2019; Jansen 2019). These call into question in a number of profound ways the ideas of education and the public good articulated by Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey.



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To exemplify this contrast, I want to look in detail at an extract from a collection of writings by student activists published at the time of RMF through a collective discussion distilled as the work of the Department of Black Imagination, UCT and the Johannesburg salon: We are writing collectively for instance, really investigating the collaborative nature of knowledge, using our process to deconstruct liberal ideals like individualism, which serve to uphold white patriarchy. In writing therefore, we contribute to a global project, long since underway – the radical project of decolonising our minds, our souls, our institutions and our societies. Forward to something new. (Gamedze and Gamedze 2015)

It can be seen that here public good is a process of critique of power, but that this entails a profound engagement with identity and subjectivity, through ‘decolonizing our minds’ and writing collectively. For Schreiner, public good was to be brought out of the hearts of men and women through education, and for Plaatje access to information could prompt this. For Dewey, the experience of schools could establish the social relationships for democracy. But this formulation from within RMF recalls older critiques of liberal education in the work of South African scholar/activists like Steve Biko and Neville Alexander (Alexander 2013; Biko 2015). In their analysis processes of colonialism had so imposed themselves on consciousness that they could not easily be undone. Public good was thus not simply a matter of good management or honest information. These were necessary, but not sufficient. Public good in this formulation requires radical forms of scrutiny of the everyday practices of education, and the identities associated with this, exposing hidden assumptions that mask privilege, inequality and exclusion. The ideas in this passage also invoke notions of collective solidarity, care and forms of common good that are active, not just symbolic ties of affiliation and identity. These formulations suggest the ‘objective’ features of public good, such as improved economic growth, or more open institutions, have to be accompanied by forms of consciousness linked to a public sphere idea of public good, an unfinished project in which identity and common good for different collectivities is evolving.

Conceptualizing education, identities and public good In comparing ideas about education, forms of identity and private and public good at two moments of global disjuncture – 1917 and 2016 – some illuminating

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shifts are evident. In the earlier period, ideas about identities are linked with cultivating and endorsing forms of humanity which, it is assumed, help to build public good. In the later period, these identities come to be linked with learning outcomes, vulnerability to SRGBV and formations of colonialism. While education may nurture insight, understanding and critique, it is highly contingent whether it will or will not do so. This means that the simple idea of a relationship between peace-loving or democratic identities, education and the public good, widely shared in 1917, no longer provides a simply articulated and generally agreed discursive frame. The literature on education, identity and the public good, chiefly written in the last twenty years, can be analysed as facing in four slightly differently inflected directions. This work has partly been written focusing on higher education (Marginson 2011, 2016; Szadkowski 2018) and on school systems (Biesta 2015a; Hadjar and Gross 2016). Here four somewhat different meanings are formulated with different resonances with the two periods considered. The vectors can thus be shown diagrammatically in four different formations, as summarized in Figure 10.1. First, there is a version of the relationship between identity, public and private good that is plural. There are many public and private goods and forms of identification with these spheres can be made or not made through

(a)

PG

I

(b)

PG

I

(c)

PG

I

(d)

PG = I

Figure 10.1  Contrasting vectors linking public good (PG) and educated identities (I).

d).

PG = I



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production and consumption of education. Identity and the public good are not necessarily linked, as there were in the formulation presented from 1917. This idea connects with various articulations that defend private schools outlined above. In Figure 10.1 (see Figure 10.1.a), this disconnection can be associated with Samuelson’s (1954) notion of public goods (plural) which are nonrivalrous and non-excludable. Stiglitz (2005:  149–50) distinguished between pure and impure public goods. Pure public goods, in the sense sketched by Samuelson (1954), are non-rivalrous in terms of consumption and public and private identities are not much part of the analysis. For example, if one person learns from the outcome of a research project, the knowledge, as a nonrivalrous public good, remains for others to use and any identities involved are not part of the analysis. Public goods are also non-excludable, in that it is very difficult, or almost impossible, to exclude people, whatever their identity, from enjoying them. Much of the information circulating on the internet takes this form. However, knowledge can take the form of an impure public good, because there are pay walls, or forms of patent or other aspects of exclusion associated with its circulation. Thus, identity linked with income, wealth, nationality or group affiliation may be in play. Although in theory public goods universalize knowledge, information and facilitate the ideal of mobility, as they are not bounded by locale or identity and can be national or global, in practice identities and geographies limit access to public goods. Although arguments are made that education, regardless of its governance, maximizes public goods (e.g. World Bank 2018), in many contexts identities shape the experience of education and limit enjoyment of public goods, as the critique of private schooling highlights. A second form of the relationship positions public good as a form of positive freedoms, which secures private good and forms of identity (see Figure 10.1.b). All three forms of ideas described above circulating in 2016 exemplify this. In this relationship the outcomes of education are linked with improved health or economic growth, or more developed forms of citizenship and democratic participation (McGrath and Gu 2015; Alexander 2016; Brighouse et al. 2018). This link between education and public good is often accompanied by a stress on openness, transparency and accountability of education systems and institutions, with citizens’ voice used both strategically and tactically to ensure these features of education (Fox 2015; UNESCO 2017). This singular ideal of public good is often expressed in university mission statements but versions of it can be found in national curricula or education vision statements for national education systems and transnational education organizations. Here, an explicit

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or implicit formulation is that better identities which more fully express public good, are brought into being through more rigorous forms of education. Third, there is a notion that is political, indicating that the public good is made through practice, closely linked to social justice, and these practices include performances of identity, often linked with challenging subordination (see Figure 10.1.c). This draws on the notion of the public sphere and reverses the relational direction associated with the causal links in the second formulation. The public sphere is a site of critique and examination of power, close enough to talk the language of power, but also removed from the terrain of elites so that their assumptions and actions can be questioned. Identities of critic, interlocutor or reflexive analyst are in play to shape the public sphere. Many of the discussions of decolonization of education outlined above take this form. Fourth, there is a formulation that is communitarian and expresses values of collaboration and belonging, sometimes interpreted as inclusion, not always involving the state, where forms of a singular identity become merged to create a wider set of connections (see Figure 10.1.d). In recent work, Marginson has linked higher education with a form of the idea of public good, which he terms common good, an idea associated for him with a form of open, solidaristic engagement, for which he draws on the concept of fraternity (Marginson 2016: 8–9). However, there are a range of different meanings of common good that circulate linked to education, some drawing explicitly on Aquinas and Christian teaching, and some, noting the need to build ‘good life’ for people and the communities, they belong to as an explicitly ethically informed undertaking within and beyond education (Deneulin and Townsend 2007). This idea of common good is often refracted through notions of citizenship or national, religious or ethnic belonging, or it can take communitarian forms associated with smaller groupings, some linked to particular locales or interest groups aiming to widen or universalize their specific ideas of what is good or right. A number of articulations of ideas of common good in basic education stress particular features of identification, notably inclusion, care, aspects of freedom and compassion, as key values (Hinchcilff 2018; Lynch et al. 2009). How do these four contemporary formations of the relationship of education, identity and public good compare with education ideas being formulated in 1917? Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey were all in their time formulating counterhegemonic ideas with a kind of organic connection to the movements that came to define the twentieth century. All drew on transnational movements, rather than states to sustain these ideas  – the international peace movement, anti-colonial networks and associations of democratic schools and universities,



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sometimes linked with political movements. All placed considerable emphasis on reshaped identities that educational relationships could fashion to enhance understanding. By contrast, the three ideas associated with 2016 I have outlined above are not all counter-hegemonic, and two are associated very centrally with states and transnational organizations that support states. All three articulate a notion of identities formed through education, but the moral compass associated with the earlier ideas is muted. Only one on decolonization echoes the 1916/17 formulations of direct critique. Ideas about SRGBV, while for decades the counter-hegemonic ideas of the women’s movement, have become mainstream for some governments and international organizations which support them.

Conclusion In thinking about education and the public good in 2016, we are probably much less simply optimistic than Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey were in 1916–17 because so much more has happened in education. We have to engage with the possibility that features of education may be associated with a public bad, forms of marketized individualism, commodification and orientations that pull in two directions, appearing to lean towards social justice, while wrenched in other directions to reinforce hierarchies and exclusion. Indeed, ideas about public good may be confusingly deployed in this process (Unterhalter 2017). Identities which may have the potential to support care, hope, solidarity, sustainability or universal access to education or health may be placed under stress. Thus we need a contemporary Gramscian pessimism of the intellect about how public good and education are and are not being linked in practice. This may presage more engaged work to deliver on an optimism of the will that takes account of some of the different meanings of public good I have examined. But the conditions to achieve this kind of fruitful outcome need careful description, assessment, understanding and a range of collaborations. In 1917, the ideas Schreiner, Plaatje and Dewey formulated were being read or heard at a time of immense suffering, violence and war, when all governments were not fully democratic. Identities of division were commonplace. The international order was primarily shaped by relationships of colonialism and imperialism. In 2016, ideas about privatization of education, SRGBV and decolonization are being read in a world where wars and the associated suffering are confined to particular regions. Inequality, particularly with regard to income and wealth, is immense. In recent years the politics of austerity has imposed exclusions and vulnerabilities in the

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middle of great affluence. Frequently unidimensional identities are used to divide and exclude people. An uneasy multipolar politics is in play. The UN system, although associated with values that express many meanings of public good and education, and visions of identity linked to equality, is financially and politically constrained from delivering on this because of the complexities of local conditions evident in states and transnational organizations. We have seen the emergence of authoritarian democracies, and the education relationships they generate are yet to be fully analysed. From the perspective of the contemporary moment, the ideas about education, identities and public good I  have examined, which form part of a framing of the unexpected epoch-changing disjunctures of 2016, need to be set in a comparative context. We cannot turn to education theorizing on its own for causal, correlational or communitarian explanations of the relationships between identities, public good and the disjunctures we are living through. But we can try to deepen our understanding drawing on some comparative reflections. The big education ideas of our time may be appearing as slogans painted on a wall in a refugee settlement or among a community at risk of flooding or lack of food. They are almost certainly not being expressed in English. I  think we will only be able to be alert enough to them, and the forms of community, state or transnational networks that may sustain them, if we take a critical view of the conditions that have generated our current vocabularies about education, identity, public, private and common good, using a longer comparative view.

Note 1 See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/aleppo-war-horrorsbombing-hospitals-geneva-conventions; https://www.itv.com/news/2017-03-15/ the-syrian-civil-war-which-has-lasted-longer-than-wwii/. 2 A version of this chapter was presented at a seminar organized by the GCRF-funded Equality and Public Private Partnerships (EQUIPPPs) network in Cape Town in October 2017, an African Studies seminar at UCL in March 2018, and at the CESE conference in Cyprus, May 2018. I am grateful for the questions and comments from audiences at all three discussions. Some of the ideas explored in this chapter have drawn from my participation in the ESRC/Newton/NRF-funded research project on Higher education, inequality and the public good (HEIPuG). My thanks to co-researchers on EQUIPPPs and HEIPuG both for many useful discussions and to the editors of this volume for their helpful suggestions on developing the analysis.



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11

Victimization and Villainification as Affective Technologies in the Cyprus Conflict: The Case of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ Education Policy Michalinos Zembylas

Introduction Issues of identities, memories and emotions have been the topic of ongoing pedagogical concern in comparative education, especially in conflict and postconflict societies. These issues receive growing attention and significance in an age of crisis dominated by efforts to right past injustices and commemorate trauma and victimization (Zembylas 2015a; Goldberg 2017). One of the major processes of identity-formation in conflict and post-conflict societies is the creation of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ or ‘villains’  – that is, the consideration of the Other as the face of evil and harm (van Kessel and Crowley 2017). In this chapter, I want to theorize the processes of victimization and villainification as technologies of affect (Zembylas 2015b) and show how they are used in educational policies to perpetuate inclusion/exclusion categories of ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’. By ‘technologies of affect’ I  refer to various apparatuses (e.g. texts, discourses, practices) that organize and mediate how affects and emotions are developed, spread or resisted. As Anderson (2014) argues, nation states target and work through affective life, by using these apparatuses to create and perpetuate certain structures of affect at the macro- and/or micro-level. Rethinking villainification and victimization as technologies of affect in schools can be the starting point for a vision of educational politics and practice that might attend to the multiplicity and complexity of affective encounters and identity perceptions and practices. My analysis focuses specifically on what villainification and victimization as technologies of affect do (cf. Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011; Anderson 2014) in relation to educational policy. I  argue

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that unless we grapple with the processes of victimization and villainification as affective practices, that is, as doings that have specific consequences in schools, and understand how these doings come to be operationalized as technologies of differentiation through educational policies, I am afraid we will fail to appreciate the tenacity and force of manifestations of ethnic or other forms of identity in schools, especially in conflict-affected societies. To show this argument, my chapter focuses on the conflict-affected society of Cyprus, and particularly on the affective-discursive practices identified in an educational policy that has been deeply influential in the Greek-Cypriot educational system over the last four decades: the Den Xehno (I Don’t Forget) policy (Zembylas 2018). The educational policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ became prominent in the Greek-Cypriot national curriculum in the years after the Turkish military offensive of 1974 that divided the country into the Turkishoccupied north and the Republic of Cyprus’s controlled south. This policy aimed at teaching Greek-Cypriot children and youth to preserve history, memory and identity so that they would never forget the occupied territories by Turkey and they would care enough to carry on the struggle to liberate those territories. My analysis attempts to show that the affective-discursive orthodoxies that have been set up both in the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ and its practice over the years demonstrate how emotions and affects are constitutive components of the national emotional archive involved in processes of (re)construction of national memory, history and identity in schools. In what follows, I  begin with a brief presentation of the sociopolitical and historical realities of the Cyprus conflict, including a discussion on the role of education. Then, I outline some theoretical concepts from affect theory and its implications for theorizing issues of memory, history and identity in education, and I use those concepts to analyze the example of the educational policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. I end with a discussion of some implications of my analysis for educational policymaking, focusing especially on the affective technologies that are employed by education policies.

The Cyprus Conflict and its contexts The Cyprus Conflict (also referred to as the ‘Cyprus Issue’ or the ‘Cyprus Problem’) refers to the interethnic conflict between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots on the island and the interventions of Greece (coup) and Turkey (military offensive) in 1974. The conflict includes collective narratives of



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both communities making different claims about Cyprus: Greek-Cypriots base their claims on the ‘historical Greekness’ of the island since its colonization by the Myceneans towards the end of the second millennium bc; while TurkishCypriots base their claims on their centuries-long presence on the island, for which Turkish soldiers have shed their blood (Bryant 2004). Historically speaking, the Ottomans conquered the island in 1571 and ruled until 1878, when the island was leased to Britain. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a gradual rise first of Greek nationalism and later of Turkish nationalism; both communities in Cyprus began to form strong attachments to their respective ‘motherlands’ – Greece and Turkey – and, under the influence of the Greek and Turkish nationalism as well as the historical burden of previous Graeco-Turkish warfare, they developed antagonistic visions over the political future of Cyprus (Kizilyürek 1999a). During the last half of the twentieth century in particular, there were certain events that marked the history of Cyprus and poisoned the relations between GreekCypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. First, in the mid-1950s, there was the guerrilla struggle by Greek-Cypriots (the majority, 80 per cent) and the organization EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωση Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών  – National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) against the British colonial rule. The Greek-Cypriot rebellion against the British Rule contributed to the development of antagonistic feelings between the two communities, as it did not aim towards independence but enosis, union with ‘motherland’ Greece (Kizilyürek 1999a). During the same time, Turkish-Cypriots (18 per cent) set up TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilati – Turkish Resistance Organization), in an effort to counteract EOKA; TMT aimed at taksim, that is, ethnic partition, followed by a union of part of the island with ‘motherland’ Turkey. The 1950s was a period of intense interethnic mistrust and fears between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. The Zurich-London Agreements in 1959 gave birth to the Republic of Cyprus, a sovereign and independent state in 1960. The independence document was drafted by Britain, Greece and Turkey (who were to act as guarantor powers of the sovereignty of the new state), leaving the political aspirations of both communities’ – for union with Greece and partition of the island respectively – unfulfilled. During the 1960s, both ethnic groups continued to pursue their separate objectives, a decade in which Cyprus witnessed intense interethnic violence, primarily in the years 1963–4 and 1967 (Attalides 1979; Calotychos 1998). After disagreement over proposed constitutional changes by Greek-Cypriots, the Turkish-Cypriots decided to withdraw from the government and relocate into enclaves. Around one-fifth of the Turkish-Cypriot population was displaced and

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moved to areas that gradually became armed enclaves under their control. By 1964, hundreds of Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots were killed or went missing, presumed dead. These events resulted to the creation of a ‘Green Line’, a dividing line in the capital Nicosia to keep the two factions apart; the line was patrolled by the United Nations Peace Keeping Force. During this period, the Turkish-Cypriots suffered the greater losses (Kizilyürek 1999a). The enclave period significantly contributed to the further deterioration of relations between the two communities; Turkish-Cypriots became completely dependent on Turkey, both economically and culturally (Morag 2004). Since this time, the Republic of Cyprus has been run exclusively by the Greek-Cypriots. During the second half of the twentieth century, the public discourses circulating within the Greek-Cypriot community were characterized by a longstanding ideological polarity between Hellenocentrism and Cypriocentrism (Mavratsas 1998). The former (traditionally associated with the political right) describes a form of ethno-nationalism which foregrounds the Greekness of Greek-Cypriots, while the latter (traditionally associated with the Cypriot left) refers to a form of civic nationalism that emphasizes the Cypriotness of Greek-Cyprtios and Turkish-Cypriots and stresses the importance of locality and citizenship. Hellenocentrism has historically dominated Greek-Cypriot public discourses and official culture, while Cypriocentrism assumed a largely marginal position, restricted to the circles of the leftist party AKEL and of leftist activists. In 1974, with nationalist sentiments on the rise and with support from the Greek junta, a Greek-Cypriot paramilitary organization (EOKA B) staged a coup against the elected president Archbishop Makarios. To this, Turkey reacted with a military operation which resulted in heavy Greek-Cypriot casualties, the occupation of the northern part of the island, the de facto division of the island into two ethnically homogenous parts and the forced mass dislocation of a considerable part of the island’s populations. Some 160,000 Greek-Cypriots (one-third of the total population) were displaced to the south (Hitchens 1984; Mallinson 2005) and 45,000 Turkish-Cypriots (one-fourth of the total population) to the north. After the declaration of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ in 1983 (considered legally invalid by the United Nations (UN) and recognized only by Turkey), there are in effect two rival states in situ (Constantinou and Papadakis 2001), which lack any sort of substantial contact. Furthermore, soon after the division of 1974, the Turkish government also began a policy of settling Anatolian Turks in formerly Greek-Cypriot villages (Morag 2004), a practice which over the years changed significantly the demographic composition in the



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north, creating what has become known as ‘the settlers’ problem’, along with immigrants from Turkey who came in search of better prospects. In April 2003, the two hitherto isolated communities had for the first time (since 1974, or for some areas even 1963) the chance to cross the imposed ‘borders’. The possibility granted by the Turkish-Cypriot side for unfettered access across the dividing Green Line (with the requirement of showing passports or identity cards) rekindled hopes for a final settlement before Cyprus’ accession to the European Union (EU) in May of 2004. In 2003, there were mass demonstrations of Turkish-Cypriots in the north in favour of a comprehensive UN proposal for reunification on the basis of a bizonal, bicommunal federation – known as the Annan Plan. A few days before Cyprus’s accession to the EU, the Annan Plan was put to simultaneous referenda on both sides, but led to failure, with a 65 per cent ‘yes’ vote by the Turkish-Cypriots but a 76 per cent ‘no’ vote by the GreekCypriots. On the 1 May 2004, Cyprus entered the EU. Today, there are Cypriots from both communities who continue to cross the Green Line for various reasons (Dikomitis 2005), but there are also those who consistently refuse to do so. Looking at the history of Cyprus, one can easily find competing discourses of trauma and suffering within both communities. The Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots construct narratives that are different with respect to how the ethnic Other is portrayed, but the common themes focus on the victimization of the ethnic self and the villainification of the ethnic Other (Mavratsas 1998; Kizilyürek 1999a). Greek-Cypriots choose to talk about the suffering from the ‘1974 Turkish invasion,’ and Turkish-Cypriots focus on their suffering in 1963 and the enclave period. The ‘chosen traumas’ (Volkan 1979; Volkan and Itzkowitz 1994) of each community are particularly reflected in their educational systems (which have always been segregated). There is now ample evidence from various studies that school textbooks and curricula, as well as ceremonies and symbols used in schools of both communities, create dehumanized images of the Other in each community and inspire negative stereotypes and hatred (Kizilyürek 1999b, 2001; Bryant 2004; Spyrou 2006; Zembylas 2008, 2015a). For example, it is shown that school textbooks urge students to remember each side’s glories and to honor the heroes who fought (Papadakis 2008). There is also ethnographic evidence indicating how individuals as well as organized groups from both communities in Cyprus systematically attempt to nationalize suffering and highlight the need to remember what ‘the enemy’ perpetrated in the past (Loizos 1998; Sant Cassia 2005). In the Greek-Cypriot community, the educational objective of Den Xehno (I Don’t Forget), on which I focus my analysis, became prominent in the school

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curriculum in the years after the Turkish invasion of 1974. The most prominent themes of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ campaign focus on remembrance of the Turkish invasion, the thousands of refugees, the missing, those who live in enclaves in the occupied north, the violation of human rights and the destruction of ancient Greek archaeological sites in Cyprus. At the elementary school level, special textbooks have been produced to aid teachers in creating lesson plans on the themes of ‘I Don’t Forget’ and integrating them into courses such as Greek language, history, geography, music and the visual arts (Christou 2006). In general, the other community’s perspective is systematically excluded and demonized (Zembylas 2008, 2015). Today, the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy remains an active goal of Greek-Cypriot education, although its patriotic militancy has been softened considerably during the last few years (Christou 2006).

Theoretical concepts The complex intertwining among emotion/affect, identity and memory has received increased attention in recent years, especially from the perspective of what is known as the ‘politics of memory’, that is, the political dimensions of remembering, recording or forgetting particular events by different groups of people. Understanding the politics of memory as more than struggles over legitimate representations of the past, it is argued that these struggles are always performed and felt and thus always work through entangled forces of emotion/ affect, identity and memory (Curti 2008). As Curti explains, ‘the role of emotion as an adhesive of experience cannot be separated from that of memory:  it is not either memory or emotion that adhere together blocs of experiences in (re) creations of identity, but both together working through a reflexive embodied symbiosis’ (2008: 107, original emphasis). Fights over representations of the past ‘are always performed and felt between, in and through bodies and thus always work through entangled forces of emotion, affect and memory’ (ibid.: 108). For example, the perception of the Berlin Wall, or the West Bank separation wall, or the walls that separate Catholics and Protestants in Belfast neighborhoods, exists emotionally and performatively through the memories, bodies and identities of the people who live(d) in both sides of the wall, albeit in very different ways. How this wall is felt within a society is very much relevant to the ways in which it functions – in relation to perceptions of identity and history – as an affective-discursive practice. Knowledge of the past is both product and source of historicization, namely, how people perceive emotionally the past and



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themselves in relation to past events (Hermann 2005). The implications of this intertwining among emotion, identity and memory are particularly important for educators and schooling. Schooling has always functioned as an important arena for cultivating certain memories of the past together with certain emotions and affects (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). The term ‘schooling of emotion’ (Worhsam 2001) reflects the idea that schools perform certain pedagogies of emotion and affect, and as such they are effective ways of anchoring students and teachers in a particular way of life (Zembylas 2015a). For example, schools in conflicttroubled societies are seen as prime sites in which the traumatic experiences that shape collective historical narratives are re-created, passed on to future generations as postmemories – namely, memories which do not refer to or draw on a person’s actual past experiences, but rather memories generated through the lens of a preceding generation marked by trauma (Hirsch 2001, 2008) – and used to strengthen dichotomies between we and they, victims and perpetrators (Davies 2004; Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). The schooling of emotion, then, may establish, assert, challenge or reinforce particular ‘emotional hegemonies’ (Jaggar 1989) or canonic emotions about what students and teachers should feel. Despite the evidence of this process taking place, there have been very few sustained investigations in educational policymaking focusing on how exactly the entanglement of emotion/affect, identity and memory takes place  – for example, in curricular documents, textbooks and policy statements – and what kind of emotional subjects are invoked. As Mckenzie writes, it is important to explore ‘why certain policies are appealing or felt necessary at different times, why particular policy actors are motivated to champion or adopt such policies, or in what sentiments are mobilized to encourage policy engagement in sites of uptake’ (2017: 187–8). In other words, by examining the entanglement between affects and educational policies within specific historical and political contexts, we may better understand the influences and possibilities under which policies operate. More importantly, we may gain a deeper understanding of what it would take to break down the emotional hegemonies created by certain policies and encourage the interrogation of canonic emotions and affects. Pursuing, then, this line of analysis, this chapter draws on two main ideas to analyze what affect does in relation to educational policies in conflict-affected societies: first, the notion of ‘affective-discursive entanglements’; and second, the idea of villainification and victimization as ‘affective technologies’. The first idea employed in this chapter is grounded in Wetherell’s (2012; Wetherell et al. 2015) ‘social practice approach’, namely, the notion that every

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social practice has an affective and discursive dimension that are entangled. ‘Social practice’ is understood here as both doings and sayings that are space- and time-bounded (Reckwitz 2012); this notion includes manifestations of everyday life from social events to media and texts. This approach, then, focuses on the analysis of patterns of affective-discursive material as evident in social practices. For example, exploring the affective-discursive entanglements of identity in relation to nation-building requires looking at the affective components of identity and identifying what Wetherell et al. (2015) call the ‘affective-discursive canon’ or ‘emotion canon’ found in pedagogical practices and texts (e.g. policies and textbooks). ‘By “affective-discursive canon”,’ write Wetherell et al., ‘we mean the established, immediately familiar and orthodox procedures for emoting and making sense’ (ibid.: 60) found in different manifestations of social practice. In reference to the specific context of Cyprus and the perceived role of education, for instance, this means to identify the affective-discursive orthodoxies that are present in curricular and policy documents over a time period or how these orthodoxies are manifested in everyday school practices. The second idea that guides my analysis here is the notion of ‘affective technology’ (Zembylas 2015b). The notion of ‘technology’ (which comes from Foucault 1977) refers to assemblages of knowledges, practices, techniques and discourses used by human beings on others or on themselves to achieve particular ends (see also Hook 2007; Rose 1998). Take the processes of victimization and villainification, for example. Victimization refers to the processes of using the position of ‘the victim’ as a cultural construct produced and supported by multiple tools (of the nation state) to score moral and political points and justify actions taken against other groups (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). Villainification refers to diffusing blame into others, often to an amorphous entity (e.g. society), while ignoring one’s own complicity in the other’s suffering or failing to recognize how one perpetuates evil through his or her daily actions (van Kessel and Crowley 2017). Thus, the processes of victimization and villainification can be understood as affective technologies, because they circumscribe what someone is affectively capable of feeling/doing in relation to the Self and the Other. Victimization and villainification as affective technologies highlight the relations and connections among material, affective and conceptual elements that produce feelings of victimization or villainification; these elements might include cultural practices, law, language and history through which the perception of victimization or villainification is produced. What this means is that exclusion, abjection, hatred and other emotions about others are at once



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embodied, affective and socially produced. Hence, the notions of victimization and villainification must be approached as functions of affective modes of constitution and affirmation through the systematic generation of disqualified abject Others. This theoretical approach demonstrates the importance of examining how victimization and villainification are materialized through affective practices and discourses that legitimate certain inclusions/exclusions. In other words, following Butler (1997), there is no ‘identity’ (e.g. ‘victim’ or ‘villain’) prior to its materialization, and if affect and emotion are part of this materialization and occurs through the affective investment in processes such as victimization and villainification, then it would seem important to understand how such processes are played out in texts and practices such as education policies and pedagogies. Connecting these two theoretical concepts – namely, the notion of ‘affectivediscursive entanglements’, and the idea of victimization and villainification as affective technologies  – to considerations of educational policy, we can then ask: How does a policy use affect to mobilize particular affective technologies within an educational system or society (Anderson 2014) and to what extent do the practices and bodily capacities of policy actors (e.g. teachers, students) perpetuate or resist such technologies? The remaining chapter utilizes these two ideas – to critically analyse the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. But first, and drawing on existing ethnographic studies, I offer a brief overview of the policy and its practice, focusing especially on the affective overtones of ‘I Don’t Forget’.

The ‘I Don’t Forget’ education policy and practice As noted earlier, what is known as the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ had become prominent in the school curriculum soon after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and for more than four decades has aimed to teach students about the disastrous consequences of the invasion and to transmit information about the occupied territories and its pre-1974 Greek-Cypriot life. The ‘I Don’t Forget’ slogan in the Greek-Cypriot community has become the symbol of communal trauma and suffering from the Turkish invasion of 1974 (Roudometof and Christou 2011). In what follows, I offer two examples that show the affective-discursive structures of ‘I Don’t Forget’. The first example focuses on the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ over time and traces its historical trajectory. The second example summarizes the results of ethnographic studies on ‘I Don’t Forget’ over the last decade or so,

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focusing in particular on one ethnographic study that I conducted and which explored specifically the affective practices of this policy in schools.

The policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ Before even becoming an educational policy, the phrase ‘I Don’t Forget’ had previously been established as a powerful emotional slogan in Greek-Cypriot society. It is worth noticing that the color of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ image is white on blue background (i.e. Greek) while the occupied part of Cyprus is marked in red (i.e. blood, violence, Turkey). Papadakis describes how the ‘I Don’t Forget’ slogan, especially a few years after the events of 1974, has permeated all facets of the Greek-Cypriot society: ‘I Don’t Forget.’ These words were a symbol found everywhere in Cyprus. They were on school exercise books and on photos of villages under occupation. Children saw them every day they went to school, every time they had to write. Every night, before the main evening news, the photo of an occupied village was shown with ‘I Don’t Forget’ underneath. What should not be forgotten was so clear that there was no need to say more. ‘The memories of our occupied villages, our ancestral hearths, our graveyards, our occupied churches, our occupied homes, our gardens, our orchards.’ (Papadakis 2005: 61)

By the mid-1980s, the slogan ‘I Don’t Forget’ dominated Greek-Cypriot educational culture through abundant photographic displays of places in the north in educational spaces, profuse references to the losses of the war and regular commemorations of the ‘lost lands’ on given occasions. In the early 1990s, the Ministry of Education of Cyprus proceeded with a production of a series of school textbooks on the topic of ‘I Don’t Forget’, which provided rich textual and photographic material for cross-curricular use. More than fifteen years after the dislocation of 1974, the purpose of ‘I Don’t Forget’, however, had to be redefined towards the construction  – rather than the preservation – of ‘collective memories’ of the northern territories, since the younger generations neither lived before the war of 1974 nor could visit the occupied areas (access was prohibited by the Turkish-Cypriot authorities until 2003). The preface of the general director of primary education in a 1992 school textbook captures clearly the intended social and political functionality of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy: This textbook is yet another attempt to deal with the consequences of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus, based on the awareness of our homeland’s amputation …



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The invader attempts to obliterate memory, to change place names, to load the occupied territories with settlers … Yet, we want our children to be rememberers of their fathers’ land and fighters for the restoration of justice. In this respect, this book with its pictures, maps and texts is a strong weapon in the hands of students and teachers. I am sure that teachers, as genuine Greeks of Cyprus, do not need further incentives to take advantage of this excellent book … I hope that the militancy of each of us is constantly escalating until the just solution of our problem (Ministry of Education and Culture 1992: 7).

This preface reflects the belief that education should be at the forefront of national struggles. The excerpt very consistently interweaves the need to know and remember lost homelands (‘awareness of our homeland’s amputation’, ‘rememberers of their fathers’ land’, ‘the invader … obliterates memory’) with the need to fight for justice and vindication. A series of lexical choices reinforces a pervasive sense of ‘being embattled’ (‘invader’, ‘fighters’, ‘weapon’, ‘militancy’), which justifies the need to assign to education the duty to evoke patriotism (‘as genuine Greeks of Cyprus’) and, ultimately, instigate actual struggle against the invader. This text deploys the familiar rhetoric of ‘we’ along with the ‘proper feelings’ and relations that are clearly prescribed to formulate ‘proper’ history: A collective ‘we’ is imagined, supplied with strong claims (‘the invader attempts to obliterate memory’), ways of organizing behavior (‘we want our children to be rememberers’), and crucially with emotions, evaluations and motivations (‘as genuine Greeks of Cyprus… the militancy of each of us …’). More importantly, the inclusion of the redefined slogan ‘I Know, I  Don’t Forget and I  Struggle’ as a separate school subject in the new curriculum of 1996 marks an important step in normalizing it within educational policy and school life and transferring the traumatic memory of 1974 to the new generation (Routometof and Christou 2011). In the section of the curriculum devoted to the subject ‘I Know, I Don’t Forget and I Struggle’ (Ministry of Education and Culture 1996: 93–7), the emotional tone is rather strong and indicative of the affective-discursive practices of grievance for the injustices and sufferings that continue to trouble the Greek-Cypriot community. For example, the following excerpt from the 1996 curriculum shows how ‘I Don’t Forget’ aims explicitly to nationalize children and teachers’ emotions about refugees: [The students need] to mention and justify the elements that keep refugees and generally the [Greek-Cypriot] people emotionally tied to their land …; to become emotionally moved through experiencing customs and traditions of our occupied land …; to learn about the living of the inhabitants of occupied Cyprus

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before and after the invasion, and to collect information that shows nostalgia for return from those who were uprooted (ibid.: 96).

The nationalization of emotions aims to invest students and teachers with national norms that reify particular perceptions (e.g. the Greekness of the land, the emotional ties of refugees with their land, the need to be emotionally moved and committed to the struggle for liberating Cyprus and so on; for more details, see Zembylas 2015a). A new reform of the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ came in 2001, aiming to substantially ‘upgrade’ and ‘prioritize’ it as an educational objective in GreekCypriot primary schools. The circular F:7.11.13.3 (Ministry of Education and Culture 2001) came with the acknowledgement that recently ‘students’ knowledge and interest in the occupied territories and in various aspects of our national problem has diminished and became attenuated’. According to this circular: We expect that the correct development of our students is based on the cultivation and invigoration of their national and fighting spirit; on their knowledge of the occupied territories and the preservation of their memory of them; and on the realization of their obligations and rights in a semi-occupied homeland with European orientations and away from intolerance.

Since the opening of the checkpoints in April 2003, and for about a decade (until September 2013), the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ was considerably toned down in terms of both its patriotic militancy (Christou 2006) and its demands for implementation (see also Zembylas 2015a). Although still active as a policy framework, the Ministry of Education and Culture refrained from issuing any further circulars and instead restricted itself to scattered references to the 2001 circular only. The potential for new generations to visit the northern part of the island themselves might have somewhat diminished the urgency to get students to ‘know’ the occupied territories, while other developments such as the EU accession could have heightened a sense of the policy being worn out.

The practice of ‘I Don’t Forget’ Ethnographic research conducted in Greek-Cypriot secondary schools in the early 2000s confirmed students’ diminishing knowledge and interest in the occupied territories (Christou 2006, 2007). The research showed that although the cognitive aims seemed to be achieved  – students seemed to know about and ‘remember’ the occupied areas  – the policy’s prescriptive part  – evoking



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patriotism and instigating struggle  – did not appear particularly effective in practice. According to Christou (2006), the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ failed to construct an imagination of what the future could look like in a reunified federal Cyprus, thus leaving the goal for national struggle ‘discursively empty’. More recent ethnographic research indicates that the themes of victimization and villainification, in particular, have not completely faded though in the practice of ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy in schools (Panteli and Zembylas 2013; Zembylas 2013; Zembylas et  al. 2016; Antoniou and Zembylas 2019). For example, Panteli and Zembylas (2013) have investigated Greek-Cypriot teachers’ perceptions regarding the role that national identity and its intersection with gender play in representations of the past. The study has shown that the majority of participating teachers were not aware of the gender politics in representations of the past, including those related to ‘I Don’t Forget’, which seemed to be working at an affective or unconscious level. Also, Antoniou and Zembylas (2019) have explored the perceptions and practices of Greek-Cypriot teachers for the cultivation of ‘refugee consciousness’, in relation to ‘I Don’t Forget’, at the primary school level. Against legal definitions of refugee and internally displaced people, it has been shown that participants’ understandings of refugeedom, memory and identity were rooted in their emotional experiences of uprootedness, of loss of home and of lack of belonging. Similarly, a two-year ethnographic study (2009–11) of a new educational objective introduced in 2008, asking all Greek-Cypriot public schools to aim for cultivating ‘a culture of peaceful coexistence’ between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, has also demonstrated the multiple challenges and complexities this policy faced at different levels, and the impact on teachers’ discourses, emotional expressions and practices (Zembylas 2018). Finally, drawing evidence from a large ethnographic research project in which issues of national memory, identity and emotion were studied in GreekCypriot schools between 2007 and 2011, I  focused specifically on examining how emotions were practiced in schools by teachers and students in relation to ‘I Don’t Forget’, past trauma and the ongoing unresolved ethnic conflict in Cyprus (Zembylas 2013). The study explored the emotional aspects of memorial ceremonies at schools and the power relations that were marshalled to mobilize certain emotions for particular versions of national memory. In my analysis, I show that the slogan of ‘I Don’t Forget’ still highlights the emotional themes of Greek-Cypriot heroism and victimhood. The affective practice of this policy stresses emotional identification with victimhood and the emulation of heroes who sacrificed their lives for the country; also, it reinforces past-oriented hero/

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victim discourses and practices of grief. For example, in the majority of the schools that I  visited, the commemoration organized resembled Papadakis’s (2003) description of commemorations by the Greek-Cypriot political right. In other words, there were many symbolic messages grounded in a strong and absolute emotional distinction between ‘we-the-good’ and ‘they-the-evil’. By focusing exclusively on the feelings of victimization for the Greek-Cypriot community, while ignoring Turkish-Cypriot suffering, the emotion discourses floating around reaffirm the linkage between national memory and the emotional canon:  a ‘community of suffering’ consisted of one ethnic group  – which establishes and strengthens its sense of victimhood – stands opposing the Other community, that of the perpetrators. Interestingly, a few schools chose to highlight different emotional themes such as peace and common pain between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots (Zembylas 2013). However, it was also fascinating to realize through this ethnographic study that the exclusive focus on the feelings of victimization for the Greek-Cypriot community did not necessarily ‘translate’ into students’ identification with trauma experienced by others (e.g. the students’ parents and grandparents); therefore, it might lead to the trauma being fetishized, which thereby condenses the trauma in self-repetition and habituated banality (see also Zembylas 2016). Some evidence of this was documented in the superficial sentimentality that was constructed through some parts of the memorial ceremony (e.g. flamboyant emotional gestures and scripts, over-dramatization, intense emotional speeches about one’s duty to the nation, etc.). When students or teachers were asked about the ceremony, for instance, what impressed them more or what they had learned from it about the occupied territories, most participants shared superficial expressions of sadness or general feelings of victimhood without being able to further articulate these feelings. In general, school memorial ceremonies can be a powerful means by which particular emotional communities can be enacted, manifesting the processes of victimization and villainification. The linkage, then, between emotion and power relations in school memorial ceremonies and pedagogical practices is not solely a theoretical one; it is also a specific medium for governing or interrogating emotional meanings about national belonging. Needless to say, students and teachers play a large part in their own control in the form of techniques or technologies for the conduct of one’s relation with oneself. These technologies are embodied through non-discursive actions, emotional gestures and rhythms, spatial and temporal organization of individuals and performances, forms of engagement, flows of emotional energy, group



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interactions and enactments (Rose 1998; Collins 2004). Consequently, the decoupling of canonic emotions and national memory has to happen along the affective dimension too – for example, by weakening processes of victimization and villainification, and by highlighting messages of friendship, empathy, solidarity and care for the Other. In the remaining chapter, I will focus more specifically on analyzing how the affective technologies of victimization and villainification are identified in the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy and what implications these technologies have.

The affective technologies of victimization and villainification in the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy Discourse analysis of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy text as well as results of ethnographic studies shared earlier underscore two major themes concerning the affects and emotions of victimization and villainification (for more details, see Zembylas 2018): feelings of victimhood and loss, and feelings of bitterness and resentment. In theorizing victimization and villainification as technologies of affect, I  hope to capture the mental, emotional and bodily dimensions of victimization and villainification in schools of conflict-affected societies such as Cyprus. Affective technologies include the mechanisms through which affects and emotions come to be instrumentalized, containing certain social norms and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion with respect to one’s self and an Other (Leonardo and Zembylas 2013). Here, I discuss the two themes emerging from a combination of analysis of the text and results of ethnographic studies, focusing in particular on how the affective technologies of victimization and villainification are established and function to sustain the emotional distinction between ‘we-the-good’ and ‘they-the-evil’. Feelings of victimhood and loss in the text of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy were particularly strong in the early years following the 1974 Turkish invasion. The ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy implored Greek-Cypriot children and youth to remember the community’s losses and victimization by the Other (Turkish side), while silencing the traumatic experiences of Turkish-Cypriots; this has become known in the literature as one-sided victimization narrative (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). Also, the policy framework of ‘I Don’t Forget’ provided the emotional platform to imbue the need to cultivate remembrance for the occupied territories. Yet this discourse disallowed, for the most part, any representations of victimization experienced by the Other but rather portrayed the Turkish

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side (often with no distinction between Turks and Turkish-Cypriots) as the ultimate villains. The dualist repertoires utilized – namely, us/them: good/evil – mobilized clear affective-discursive subject positions for Greek-Cypriot students and teachers: Greek-Cypriots fight for justice, while the other side is positioned as unjust and apathetic to Greek-Cypriot suffering. The affective technology of victimization offers a viable way of theorizing how bodies, texts, images, practices, material arrangements and discourses come together in specific practical entanglements that enable certain doings and restrict others. For example, the feeling of victimization becomes an ethnicized mode of affective engagement that is maintained through the cultivation of particular embodiments – for example, through the use of images of the occupied territories, memorial ceremonies and so on – that become normalized. These everyday technologies in schools instill certain affective modalities and inhibit the creation of affective relations that promote friendship, empathy, solidarity and care for the Other (i.e. Turkish-Cypriots). The processes of victimization, then, highlight the insidious affective power and tenacity through which certain manifestations of memory and identity are maintained. The affective-discursive position and repertoire of endless suffering  – which is often portrayed as an ‘open wound’ among Greek-Cypriots – remains prominent in the ‘I Don’t Forget’ over the years. The second theme emerging from this policy text concerns feelings of bitterness and resentment. Bitterness and resentment become part of an affectivediscursive position in all aspects of everyday life (including schooling) that constitutes Greek-Cypriots as eternal ‘victims’ of Turkish perpetratorship and expansionism (Papadakis 2008); these feelings become an integral part of GreekCypriot identity, to the point that challenging them one risks being branded a traitor. This stickiness works through affective-discursive rituals that render bitterness a justifiable emotional response to the evil-Other. The villainification of the Other, then, is galvanized by a range of feelings about displacement such as fear, anxiety, depression, vulnerability, helplessness, resentment and bitterness (see Loizos 1981, 1998; Zetter 1991, 1999). The affective technology of villainification operates as a process of differentiating ethnic Others as villains, deploying certain affective positions of moving away from them (Ahmed 2004). This movement away from them – those who have caused and still cause so much suffering to ‘us’ – is clearly an ideological maneuver (Hook 2007), yet one that is linked in turn to specific strategies of disciplinary power. Villainification as affective technology, in other words, is not a byproduct of political life; it is, rather, constitutive of that life in its various



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manifestations and has particular ends:  the dis-identification with the ‘evilOther’, emotionally, morally and politically (Zembylas 2015b). Consequently, ‘such utilizations of affect should be approached as instrumentalized avenues along which precise political aims may be pursued’ (Hook 2005:  93–4). Inevitably, the idea of thinking of villainification as affective technology makes us reconsider nationalism by paying attention to the unrelenting processes of differentiation at work in everyday interactions (e.g. in schools). Interestingly though, the affective technologies of victimization and villainification have also some unintended consequences. As Roudometof and Chirstou (2011) have argued, the ‘I Don’t Forget’ policy is paradoxical because it demands that new generations identify with the memory and suffering of events not personally experienced. It is not surprising, then, that some of the affectivediscursive positions seem to have toned down over the years (Christou 2006, 2007). The toning down of the affective-discursive positions is not irrelevant to invoking ‘instrumental’ or ‘cheap’ sentimentality to students about their occupied homeland (Zembylas 2013, 2016). On the one hand, the aim of the policy is to align students’ feelings with the trauma and victimhood of their community. The emotional distress or inspiration that accompany this alignment grounds the claim for students’ political transformation and their commitment to keep the traumatic event of 1974 open, which means communicating it in a way that keeps it traumatic for them (Berlant 2001). On the other hand, however, as Berlant (2000, 2001) warns us, there is not only the danger to an impasse in terms of connecting with trauma not experienced, but also it threatens to diminish the implications of trauma – which seems to be acknowledged by policy documents of ‘I Don’t Forget’ as time goes by, especially since 2001. Importantly, then, the historicization of the policy’s framings indicates a sentimentalized shift that is linked to the toning down of the affective-discursive positions promoted by Greek-Cypriot education. My analysis turns attention to the delineation of how victimization and villainification manifest as apparatuses and technologies of affect that produce and perpetuate perceptions of one-sided victimhood and resentment towards the Other, ossifying certain identities and preventing new affective connections with Others on the basis of solidarity and mutual suffering. The notion of ‘technology’, as pointed out earlier, enables us to pay attention to those knowledges, practices, techniques and discourses, used by teachers and students to achieve particular ends. In particular, there are two kinds of technologies that work here:  one based on discipline and normalization  – technologies of power – and the other based on care of the self – technologies of the self. On

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the one hand, then, technologies of power focus on the relationship between discourses and regimes of power/knowledge and are internalized and selfregulating. On the other hand, technologies of the self describe how individuals control their own bodies and feelings, thoughts, conduct and ways of being. I argue, then, that unless educational scholars engage with a theoretical analysis of how victimization and villainification are manifest as affective technologies, we will fail to appreciate the important implications of this idea for educational policymaking and practice. To sum up, I have suggested that the affective technologies of victimization and villainification project the dominant emotional archive emerging from historical and political positions prescribing certain feeling rules for the new generation. Thus, political agendas connect with specific affective technologies of educational policies, mobilizing a national emotional temper for memory, identity and trauma. A consideration of the emotional archive of this particular education policy shows how emotion, identity and memory are all intertwined and have important implications for how affective-discursive entanglements are integral to education policies. A greater attention to the emotional archive and affective-discursive entanglements for education policy will also provide opportunities to critically examine and challenge the affective-discursive canon and its intelligibility.

Conclusion Theorizing processes of villainification and victimization in schools as technologies of affect disrupts conventional understandings of identity as something that individuals possess and looks at identity as something that bodies do in interaction through the affective relations they form with other bodies. It is important to recognize that emotions in schools are powerful forces involved in the reproduction of national memory, history and identity, and, as such, in the maintenance of particular hegemonies  – particularly in relation to narratives about villains and victims. At the same time, emotions are not only involved in the reproduction of hegemonic national memory; they are also involved in processes of resisting and rupturing such memory  – often unexpectedly and unintentionally. The instrumental sentimentality or superficiality emerging in the policy of ‘I Don’t Forget’ over the years may sometimes subvert the process of cooptation of national memory, fading away the emotional power of villainification and victimization. But how this is done in practice or how



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much tenacity these processes have are topics that certainly deserve further attention in the future. Continuing to explore and address the varied, subtle and unpredictable ways with which affects and emotions are entangled with memory and identity in schools can help us grapple more productively with the affective tensions that need to be confronted.

References Ahmed, S. (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Anderson, B. (2014), Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions, Burlington: Ashgate. Antoniou, P., and M. Zembylas (2019), ‘Conceptualizing and Defining the term Refugee in Education: A Phenomenological Study of Teachers and Students’ Perceptions in a Conflict-affected Country’, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 13(2): 97–112. Attalides, M. (1979), Cyprus, Nationalism, and International Politics, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bekerman, Z., and M. Zembylas (2012), Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, L. (2000), ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics’, in S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil and B. Skeggs (eds), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, 33–47, London: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2001), ‘Trauma and Ineloquence’, Cultural Values, 5(1): 41–58. Berlant, L. (2011), Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press. Bryant, R. (2004), Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London: I.B. Tauris. Butler, J. (1997), Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Calotychos, V., ed. (1998), Cyprus and its People: Nation, Identity and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997, Boulder: Westview Press. Christou, M. (2006), ‘A Double Imagination: Memory and Education in Cyprus’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 24(2): 285–306. Christou, M. (2007), ‘The Language of Patriotism: Sacred History and Dangerous Memories’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(6): 709–22. Collins, R. (2004), Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Constantinou, C., and Y. Papadakis (2001), ‘The Cypriot State(s) in Situ: Cross-ethnic Contact and the Discourse of Recognition’, Global Society, 15(2): 125–48. Curti, G. (2008), ‘From a Wall of Bodies to a Body of Walls: Politics of Affect| Politics of Memory| Politics of War’, Emotion, Space and Society, 1(2): 106–18.

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Davies, L. (2004), Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos, New York: Routledge. Dikomitis, L. (2005), ‘Three Readings of a Border: Greek-Cypriots Crossing the Green Line in Cyprus’, Anthropology Today, 21(5): 7–12. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. Goldberg, T. (2017), ‘Between Trauma and Perpetration: Psychoanalytical and Social Psychological Perspectives on Difficult Histories in the Israeli Context’, Theory & Research in Social Education, 45(3): 349–77. Hermann, A. (2005), ‘Emotions and the Relevance of the Past: Historicity and Ethnicity among the Banabans of Fiji’, History and Anthropology, 16(3): 275–91. Hirsch, M. (2001), ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14(1): 5–37. Hirsch, M. (2008), ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29(1): 103–28. Hitchens, C. (1984), Cyprus, London: Quartet Books. Hook, D. (2005), ‘Affecting Whiteness: Racism as Technology of Affect’, International Journal of Critical Psychology, 16(1): 74–99. Hook, D. (2007), Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power, New York: Palgrave. Jaggar, A. (1989), ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’, in A. Jaggar and S. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowledge, 145–71, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kizilyürek, N. (1999a), Cyprus: The Impasse of Nationalisms, Athens: Mauri Lista [in Greek]. Kizilyürek, N. (1999b), ‘National Memory and Turkish-Cypriot Textbooks’, Internationale Schulbuchforschung, 21(4): 387–96. Kizilyürek, N. (2001), ‘History Textbooks and Nationalism’, in C. Koulouri (ed.), Teaching the History of Southeastern Europe, 431–42, Thessaloniki: Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe. Leonardo, Z. and M.Zembylas (2013), ‘Whiteness as Technology of Affect: Implications for Educational Theory and Praxis’, Equity and Excellence in Education, 46(1): 150–65. Loizos, P. (1981), The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loizos, P. (1998), ‘How Might Turkish and Greek-Cypriots See Each Other More Clearly?’, in V. Calotychos (ed.), Cyprus and its People: Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997, 35–52, Boulder: Westview Press. Mallinson, W. (2005), Cyprus: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris. Mavratsas, C. (1998), Facets of Greek Nationalism in Cyprus: Ideological Contest and the Social Construction of Greek-Cypriot Identity 1974–1996, Athens: Katarti [in Greek]. McKenzie, M. (2017), ‘Affect Theory and Policy Mobility: Challenges and Possibilities for Critical Policy Research’, Critical Studies in Education, 58(2): 187–204.



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Ministry of Education and Culture (1992), I Don’t Forget and I Struggle. For Grades Third and Fourth, Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture [in Greek]. Ministry of Education and Culture (1996), Curriculum for Primary Education – in the Framework of 9-year Education, Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture [in Greek]. Ministry of Education and Culture (2001), ‘F:7.11.13.3, 15 October 2001’, Upgrade of the Objective ‘I Know, I Don’t Forget and I Struggle’ in Primary Schools, Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture [in Greeek]. Morag, N. (2004), ‘Cyprus and the Clash of Greek and Turkish Nationalisms’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 10(4): 595–624. Panteli, Y., and M. Zembylas (2013), ‘Teachers’ Perceptions of National Identity and its Intersection with Gender: A Phenomenological Study in a Conflict Society’, Gender & Education, 25(4): 379–95. Papadakis, Y. (2003), ‘Nation, Narrative and Commemoration: Political Ritual in Divided Cyprus’, History and Anthropology, 14(3): 253–70. Papadakis, Y. (2005), Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, London: I.B. Tauris. Papadakis, Y. (2008), ‘Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus’, History & Memory, 20(2): 128–48. Reckwitz, A. (2012), ‘Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook’, Rethinking History, 16(2): 241–58. Rose, N. (1998), Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roudometof, V., and M. Christou (2011), ‘1974 and Greek-Cypriot Identity: The Division of Cyprus as Cultural Trauma’, in R. Eyerman, J. Alexander and E. Butler Breese (eds), Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, 163–87, Boulder: Paradigm. Sant Cassia, P. (2005), Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus, New York: Berghahn. Spyrou, S. (2006), ‘Constructing “the Turk” as an Enemy: The Complexity of Stereotypes in Children’s Everyday Worlds’, South European Society and Politics, 11(1): 95–110. Van Kessel, C., and R. M. Crowley (2017), ‘Villanification and Evil in Social Studies Education’, Theory & Research in Social Education, 45(4): 427–55. Volkan, V. (1979), Cyprus: War and Adaptation, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Volkan, V., and N. Itzkowitz (1994), Turks and Greeks: Neighbours in Conflict, Cambridgeshire: Eothen Press. Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage. Wetherell, M., T. McCreanor, A. McConville, H. Moewaka Barnes and J. Le Grice (2015), ‘Settling Space and Covering the Nation: Some Conceptual Considerations in Analyzing Affect and Discourse’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16: 58–64.

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Worsham, L. (2001), ‘Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion’, in H. Giroux and K. Myrisides (eds), Beyond the Corporate University, 229–65, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Zembylas, M. (2008), The Politics of Trauma in Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zembylas, M. (2013), ‘Memorial Ceremonies in Schools: Analyzing the Entanglement of Emotions and Power’, Journal of Political Power, 6(3): 477–93. Zembylas, M. (2015a), Emotion and Traumatic Conflict: Re-claiming Healing in Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zembylas, M. (2015b), ‘Rethinking Race and Racism as Technologies of Affect: Theorizing the Implications for Antiracist Politics and Practice in Education’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(2): 145–62. Zembylas, M. (2016), ‘Toward a Critical-sentimental Orientation in Human Rights Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(11): 1151–67. Zembylas, M. (2018), ‘The Affective-discursive Orthodoxies of the ‘I Don’t Forget’ Education Policy in Cyprus’, in J. McLeod, N. Sobe and T. Seddon (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices, 148–64, London: Routledge. Zetter, R. (1991), ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 4(1): 39–62. Zetter, R. (1999), ‘Reconceptualizing the Myth of Return: Continuity and Transition Amongst the Greek-Cypriot Refugees of 1974’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 12(1): 1–22.

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The Return of the Comparativist: Estrangement, Intercession and Profanation António Nóvoa

Devoted to the search for truth, we do not always reach it; if and when we arrive through analyses or equations, experiments or formal proofs, but also through experimentation, sometimes, and, when experimentation doesn’t get you there, let the story go there, if it can; if meditation fails, why not try narrative? (Michel Serres 1997: 165–6)

Introduction Comparative Education is at a moment of expansion and hesitation. On the one hand, there is much noteworthy work that reveals the importance and strength of comparative approaches in education. On the other hand, there is a proliferation of ‘comparative educations’ (Cowen 2014: 3), which reveal very different uses of comparison, not only in the academic field, but also in the political, social and economic spheres. Robert Cowen is one of the most insightful authors who have reflected on this reality, even arguing that in the last decade Comparative Education has changed: Now, it is very clear that there are forms of ‘comparative education’ aimed at solutions to economic problems (the World Bank, OECD); forms of comparative education aimed at ‘closing gaps’ and developing the Third World; and forms of comparative education, in many countries, which are university-based and worry a lot about epistemology and modes of academic understanding (2014: 3).

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The growing interest in comparative approaches, in different circles and with different objectives, is well documented. But if claims of comparison are ubiquitous, then where does the field of Comparative Education stand? If comparison is understood to be everywhere, it runs the risk of becoming useless as an instrument of research and knowledge. Earlier, I have argued about the importance of the difference, the public and the common in Comparative Education.1 Now, I intend to deepen this reflection, presenting three tensions that today mark our doubts and questions about the world, education and comparison and have a profound influence on the way of thinking and acting in the field of Comparative Education. The answer to these tensions needs to be found in a third term, in a third position, in a third point of view. No answers will be uncovered on a single side, let alone in a dichotomous war between the margins. What counts, if we may resort to João Guimarães Rosa’s figure of speech (1968), is the third bank of the river, that is, the river itself, because there lies the current, the movement, the ability to think and act. In essence, I am arguing that the comparativist will not resort to the usual dichotomies (national/international, local/global, etc.) or in binary thinking but will be able to bring a personal point of view, built on unique experience and knowledge. One of the outstanding features of Comparative Education has always been the organization of typologies and categorizations of different education systems. In the 1980s and 1990s, the discipline became richer with a set of explanatory theories, well expounded by authors such as John Meyer, Rolland Paulston, Jürgen Schriewer and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, among many others. This theoretical dimension is well presented in the monumental International Handbook of Comparative Education, edited by Robert Cowen and Andreas Kazamias (2009). However, at the turn of the century, comparative approaches became very popular due to the explosion of large international student assessment surveys, starting with the most well-known one, OECD’s PISA. Comparison, which had previously acquired an important theoretical density, now gained the concurrence of approaches that viewed it, above all, as a powerful new mode of governance (see Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Ozga et al. 2011). The emergence of big data, with its immense possibilities for cross-checking data and information, brings new challenges for Comparative Education. This is the reason for my text. Recognizing that the entire heritage of the discipline needs to be incorporated into our work, I  propose a return of the comparativist, that is, an acknowledgement of each comparativist’s own specific, unique look, the fruit of his/her history and experience, of his/her research and



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ability to bring us an insightful and intelligent narrative. In fact, Comparative Education often seems to be a prisoner of typologies and big data, as if a personal mode of writing, a singular way of observing, could no longer exist. I argue that we need to value the comparativist’s point of view that derives from his/her subjectivity and is reflected in his/her ability to tell us a story. What we expect from the comparativist is a third point of view. This doesn’t mean we should deny the importance of typologies, surveys or data, let  alone the scientific references of Comparative Education, but that it is time to value its literary disposition as well, which in turn makes it necessary to also value the position of the comparativist and his/her ability to surprise. This is why I use, as an epigraph, Michel Serres’s expression in The Troubadour of Knowledge: ‘why not try narrative?’ (1997: 166).

A third point of view: The world, education and comparison The world After several decades of a continuous process of globalization, strongly based on the ‘revolution of connectivity’, the world is witnessing the emergence of nationalist and identitarian movements, sometimes with great intolerance and violence. Numerous texts and authors have been addressing this phenomenon. One such example is In the Name of Identity, in which Amin Maalouf aims to identify movements which have since grown exponentially: So we are living in an age of both harmonisation and dissonance. Never have men had so many things in common – knowledge, points of reference, images, words, instruments and tools of all kinds. But this only increases their desire to assert their differences. (1998: 93)

The tension between globalization and identitarianism runs through contemporary debates. Michel Serres (2009) also mentions it, explaining the difference between the ‘essential identities’ and the different senses of belonging that we build throughout our lives: ‘To reduce someone to one of his affiliations can condemn him to persecution. But this mistake, or this insult we commit when we say: religious identity, cultural, national … No, it is about belonging.’ This topic is decisive for Comparative Education, a field that cannot be limited to a confrontation that sometimes projects a globalizing vision of educational processes and others yields to local and communitarian references.

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The globalizing vision is common in academic work, particularly in perspectives that, from high on up, see the earth as a tiny, uniform point in the universe. Global, universal explanations are very powerful but often translate into confirmation of previously elaborated theories. In this sense, they assert themselves more as pre-established theories than as processes of problematization. The globalizing vision also finds its place in politics, particularly when it is defined by the results of powerful international benchmarking instruments, such as PISA and others. The localist or communitarian view is very much present in numerous comparative studies dedicated to showing the specificity of certain countries and cultures. There are many studies that, based on the need to explain the diversity of histories and contexts, end up producing identity realities that are of little interest for comparative analysis, even when put side by side. Here, too, there are resonances of a social and political point of view, with the resurgence of nationalisms and identities based on ‘locked communities’, in which no one can enter and no one can leave. Neither globalism nor localism enables us to move forward in deep comparative reflection. To think about the world today we need a third term, a third approach, a third point of view, allowing us to understand the tension between these two poles, without choosing a single side but rather comprehending and elucidating these processes in their dynamics and contradictions. The place of the comparativist is on the third bank in the movement of thought.

Education Education is beset by many tensions around the world. I’d like to highlight one of these tensions that have become dominant in general discourse and politics: the tension between those who envision a ‘privatized’ education, conducted in various family and social environments through different community networks and digital tools, and those who believe in ‘public’ education as a common good, based on a renovation of school spaces and environments. It is easy to identify the two main influences on twenty-first-century educational debates:  digital technology and the neurosciences. On the one hand, the numerous discourses, prospects and prophecies about the future of digital education that have led many authors to predict the death of the school, of the school institution, and its substitution by technological devices and individualized learning dynamics, mostly supported by the advances of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the impressive body of work and research being



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done in the field of learning sciences, in particular brain and neuroscience studies, which intends to open up a ‘new era’ in pedagogical practices and educational processes. These are two very distinct trends, but both have contributed to enclose education in private spheres or, more accurately, to reinforce a consumerist view of education. David Labaree, in a particularly stimulating text, mentions how, in the twenty-first century, education becomes not only a private good but also an exchange value, whose primary worth is as a kind of currency for buying access to a good job and a good life. The OECD approach serves to narrow the learning outcomes of schooling and educational knowledge production to whatever is in service to economic development. But the consumer approach is even more radical, since it undermines the role of schooling as an institution for learning. (Labaree 2017: 282)

Today we witness an amalgam of discourses and trends that contribute to accentuate the consumerist perspective, which reinforces the idea of ‘privatized’ education. On the other side of this tension are those who defend school and underline its importance, namely, as a space for socialization and conviviality. This defence sometimes translates into a static and immobile attitude that refuses to understand all the consequences of the profound changes that are taking place in knowledge-access and learning processes, which will inevitably transform school and its organization model. That is why, when thinking about the present and future of education, it is necessary to resort to a third perspective, a third point of view, which clearly highlights the importance of discussions on digital and learning sciences on the one hand, and, of school as a public space for education and a place of the production of the common, of a common life, on the other. This requires recognizing the need for a metamorphosis of school. I use the concept of metamorphosis in the sense given to it by Edgar Morin (2010) when he explains that when a system is unable to address its vital problems, either it degrades, disintegrates or is capable of a metamorphic process: ‘The probable outcome is the disintegration. The unlikely but possible is the metamorphosis.’ Edgar Morin refers to the Earth system but it is possible, by analogy, to apply his reasoning to the Education system:  ‘Human history has often changed course. Everything starts, always, with an innovation, a new deviant, marginal message, often invisible to contemporaries. … We are at the stage of beginnings, modest, invisible, marginal, scattered’ (ibid.).

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Education and teaching are nowadays at this point in history, in this transitional phase. The metamorphosis of school can be a new origin, a new starting point. It contains an organizational dimension (the transformation of the school model as we know it) and a social dimension (the construction of a public space for education, with capillary networks and presences). As Maxine Greene states, in the remarkable article Public Education and the Public Space, it is impossible to ‘imagine a coherent sense of purpose in education if something common does not arise in a public space’ (1982:  8). A  public space that ‘is defined by principles that enable diverse human beings to act in common and to be recognized for what they do’ (ibid.: 6). This is the meaning of the metamorphosis of school:  to assert school as a place of the common, of common work, of common work in a public space. To walk this path, we need to escape the usual dichotomies, to bring together the two terms of the tension described above and have the courage to take a third route. Nothing will be accomplished on the margins but rather by occupying the third bank, where movement, change and metamorphosis can be found.

Comparison Comparison occupies an increasingly important place in contemporary societies. Evaluation and benchmarking have invaded all social spaces and become the absolute principle of economic and political decision making. Nothing can be decided without a solid basis of comparison. Take, for example, the decisive role that rating agencies play in the contemporary world. Also in the case of education, comparison increasingly tends to be an important part of the political decision and governance strategies of education systems (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003). Several authors have explained how major international education surveys, starting with the most influential of all, OECD’s PISA, use comparison as a tool for building public education policies. Obviously, the tension between educational comparison as policy or as science runs through the whole history of the discipline. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, big data and extraordinary computational capabilities provide new and unexpected possibilities for the use of comparison in political action. This phenomenon has already been thoroughly explained by comparativists. However, the new computational reality of learning machines and artificial intelligence has not always been properly understood. It is now possible to process enormous amounts of data within seconds, producing and comparing



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a similarly impressive mass of information. In fact, algorithms work by experience and comparison. Learning machines operate with a double logic: on the one hand, by a trial-and-error process, through which they build ‘experience’ that enables them to make the best decisions; on the other hand, by systematic comparisons that allow them to identify the most capable or effective decisions. What has not been properly considered is how these systems do not simply describe or compile a given reality but act on it, predicting the results that will be obtained. Among the vast literature denouncing the ‘numerical administration of the world’ (Sadin 2013), one of the most important is Cathy O’Neil’s wellknown work, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy: ‘Many of the WMDs I’ll be discussing in this book, including the Washington school district’s value added-model, behave like that. They define their own reality and use it to justify their results. This type of model is self-perpetuating, highly destructive – and very common’ (2016: 7). In the French edition afterword, the author claims that we must learn not only to question algorithms but also the data collection process, leading us to a broader question about the nature of the evidence itself. Indeed, each discipline has a very different conception of what constitutes proof; mathematicians rely on logical proofs, which seem quite infallible, when in fact they are not. No discipline holds the absolute truth. Instead of being stumped by our disagreements, we should draw additional strength from these multiple points of view (O’Neil 2018). The paradox of multiplying data to infinity lies in the illusion of ‘total knowledge’, which leads to ignorance. The capacity for data production of various national and international institutions is devastating for any comparativist. Unfortunately, the interpretation of these data almost always translates into a self-fulfilling prophecy, a confirmation of the starting assumptions in data collection and compilation. That is why, today, the main purpose of Comparative Education is not to contribute to this vertigo of data but rather to produce an intelligent view  of the multiple educational realities. For this  – and here lies the central idea of​​ this text – it is necessary to value a third point of view, the point of view of the comparativist. We need him/her to bring us a reflection based on his/her personal experience, knowledge of reality, conversations and dialogues, a reflection that illuminates aspects that otherwise wouldn’t be revealed, a reflection that surprises with its lucidity, insight and the ability to make sense. It is this return of the comparativist that I advocate throughout the text.

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Three gestures of the comparativist: Estrangement, intercession and profanation This part of the text focuses on the importance of comparative gestures as a way of constructing a narrative, an account, an interpretation that can inspire and open up new perspectives of knowledge. It is time to value the comparativist’s own point of view, based on experience, research and science but not limited to the infinite reproduction of data and statistics, surveys and typologies. Theoretical and statistical sophistication cannot be achieved at the expense of erasing or diminishing the comparativist as an author. If we want to develop new knowledge and produce a type of Comparative Education that does not merely reproduce what we already know, I  believe there are three absolutely necessary gestures:  estrangement, intercession and profanation. Next, I will explain each of these gestures, insisting on their potential for the production of new comparative knowledge.

Estrangement: Defamiliarizing the known Consider a famous passage from Daniel Boorstin’s, The Discoverers: ‘The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge’ (1983:  86). In a later essay, the same author goes even further: ‘I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not sceptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress’ (Boorstin 1990: 24). What is true for discoverers is true for comparativists. Their most common mistake is the illusion of knowledge, an illusion that is fatal for the effort of understanding, particularly of an understanding that must be shaped by difference. It is indeed easier to start from a predefined scheme and to fit different realities into it, either through typologies, classifications or tables. A  more difficult, but necessary, path is to create distance from one’s own categories and to see all realities with estrangement. Going back to its artistic origins of the early twentieth century, this exercise of ‘defamiliarization’ clears our eyes and allows us to see what would otherwise be unnoticed. To defamiliarize is to unnaturalize, to unknow in order to reknow, to know in another way. In their respective fields, a sociologist and a philosopher both invite us to this necessary exercise for understanding.



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See Pierre Bourdieu’s proposal in Homo Academicus when referring to the sociologist who chooses to study his/her own world through its nearest and most familiar aspects, who should not ‘domesticate the exotic’ but instead ‘exoticize the domestic’, through a break ‘with his initial relation of intimacy with modes of life and thought which remain opaque to him because they are too familiar’ (1988: xi). This exercise to ‘exoticize the domestic’ is fundamental to the comparativist, under penalty of permanent repetition of ‘domestic knowledge’, a knowledge that is illusion and not discovery. See also how Roland Barthes refers to the need to ‘pluralize’, to ‘refine continually’, so that we can make progress in understanding differences. His reflection alerts us to the weight of doxa, understood as ‘opinion’:  ‘The Doxa is current opinion, meaning repeated as if nothing had happened. It is Medusa: who petrifies those who look at her. Which means that it is evident. Is it seen? Not even that:  a gelatinous mass which sticks onto the retina’ (1977: 122). The doxa speaks, Barthes tells us, and he hears it, but distances himself:  ‘A man of paradox, like any writer, I  am indeed behind the door; certainly I should like to pass through, certainly I should like to see what is being said, I too participate in the communal scene; I am constantly listening to what I  am excluded from’ (ibid.:  123). This is the attitude expected of a comparativist, someone who does not give in to the doxa and is able to look at what is not apparent at first glance. The gesture of estrangement leads us to detachment, not to disengagement, leads us to look away in order to attain a different angle of view. In this sense, we expect from the comparativist an attitude of dissonance rather than resonance or reverberation of what is popularized. The multiplicity of points of view, their unfolding, is a necessary condition for a comparative work that has meaning and is able to provide new paths of understanding. Comparison only exists within dissemblance, not resemblance. Whenever we try to amalgamate what is different, we end up producing a gelatinous mass lacking any interest. The certainty of certainty clouds the eyes, creates new forms of blindness. Certainty is a delusion. Only doubt can open us up to a new intelligence of things. Doubt and creative disobedience, as Michel Serres explains so well in his last book, Morales espiègles: ‘We change, progress and regress, we invent the future because, deprogrammed, we disobey. Is this the driving force behind history?’ (2019: 10). Obediently, we are condemned to repetition. With disobedience, we may have the opportunity of creation. In conformity, we will be another echo of the

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doxa. As strangers, we can achieve a voice of our own. This is what is expected from a comparativist.

Intercession: Transforming reflection through relationship The comparativist is an intercessor, someone who comes into a relationship. To do this, we need to recognize the difference, the differences, but also to create the common spaces in which interaction takes place. The two primary errors of the comparativist are well known:  to identify differences so extreme that comparison becomes impossible and to identify similarities so extreme that the comparison ceases to have any interest. Jacques Derrida’s reflection is precious when he brings together the concepts of iteration and alteration:  ‘The meaning always comes from the other and always goes to the other’ (Vergani 2006: 109). This exchange defines the work of the comparativist, who occupies the ‘middle space’ and, from there, becomes a producer of meanings. Interposition is the position of the comparativist. Gilles Deleuze explains the role of intercessors or mediators:  ‘If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is interplay an exchange: it all turns on giving or taking. Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens’ (1995: 125). And he adds: ‘So, to the established fictions that are always rooted in a colonist’s discourse, we oppose a minority discourse, with mediators. This idea that truth isn’t something already out there we have to discover, but has to be created in every domain, is obvious in the sciences, for instance’ (ibid.: 126). In this light, the role of the comparativist takes on new proportions. Its intermediation does not exist in a flux, without roots and interruptions. Mediator is not synonymous with facilitator. The comparativist works on interruption, disturbance, noise. It is this gesture that allows seeing what would otherwise remain hidden. Iteration is alteration. There is no inference without interference. When arranging his/her ‘device for seeing’, the comparativist knows that he/she is introducing a disturbance into the relationship, but it is this disturbance that sets the conditions for understanding what lies beyond the surface of things. Simple description or juxtaposition is not comparison. On the one hand, realities follow one another with their irreducible specificity, and all we can do is observe every one of them, and their meaning. On the other hand, joining several realities in an aggregate sum does not open up any possibility of comparison. This is why we need a third element, which acts as the key to comparative work. Comparative understanding implies the existence of a third in the relationship.



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There can be no comparison without choices. They define our position and our way of seeing. In a remarkable presentation, Arjun Appadurai claimed that no one can enter into dialogue without taking serious risks: The first risk of dialogue is that the other party, whether the party is a person, a community, an organization, a state, whatever it may be, may not understand what you mean. The risk of misunderstanding is inherent to all human communication. … The second risk of dialogue is exactly the opposite, and that is the risk that we may in fact be understood clearly. This paradox is partly based on the worry that the other party may see through our surface expressions and understand motives or intentions we prefer to conceal. (2018: 5–6)

Appadurai argues that this is a risk because dialogue is not about everything: ‘To be effective, dialogue must be, to some extent, about shared ground, selective agreement and provisional consensus’ (ibid.:  6). This point is particularly important for the action of the comparativist in establishing relationships, whether between different realities or between people and institutions. The risks of dialogue are also the risks of comparison. Intellectual work demands choices and risks, it requires building bridges and, as Michel Serres (2006) writes, a work of art and architecture only truly becomes a bridge when someone crosses it. The comparative gesture requires a journey and a relationship:  a trip with instruments that allow us access to knowledge that would be impossible to acquire with the naked eye; a relationship built on shared ground with clear choices about what we want and don’t want to share – ‘you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own’ (Deleuze 1995: 125). The way the journey is made and the encounters are organized is decisive for the construction of a comparative perspective. The bridge that links both margins is the third perspective. Those who cross it are the comparativists.

Profanation: Making science public The first gesture is personal, estrangement. The second is relational, within the realities and people we work with, intercession. The third is public, it’s the ability to make our work public, profanation. It is a fundamental gesture of the comparativist, not only a posteriori, to diffuse the results, but also in the very process of construction and elaboration of comparative reflection. In this sense, the way Jacques Derrida presents the concept of dissemination is particularly interesting:  ‘Germination, dissemination. There is no first insemination. The semen is already swarming. The “primal” insemination is

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dissemination. A  trace, a graft whose traces have been lost’ (1981:  304). The dissemination is already in the beginning. Work and writing are built on a game of relations that are created within a scientific field, but also in their relations with the outside. Enclosing comparative work within ‘sacred spaces’ prevents it from renewing itself through dialogues and interactions that are absolutely decisive for the education of our time. This is why the concept of profanation, as proposed by Giorgio Agamben (2007), is both interesting and useful. It means to return to common use that which has been removed to other spheres. Agamben refers mostly to the religious sphere and therefore uses the metaphor of desecration. But his reasoning is equally valid for the academic sphere. Comparison needs to understand its public dimension. The ability to communicate results and build a basis for political decisions is important; in this respect, PISA’s work is notable for its ability to produce data that has profoundly influenced educational policies. But the point I would like to address with the concept of profanation is much deeper and more complex. It is a matter of recognizing the public dimension of intellectual work, especially in a field such as comparison. To put it another way, propagation and resonance are essential in our work, but being able to construct and project our reflection in a public space is just as important. The issue I  am raising is not limited to the matter of transferring knowledge to society but goes further, to draw attention to the modes of production of scientific knowledge. Paul Valéry said as much in a literary and precise manner, when he explained that his spirit is enriched with differences and only the ability to complete differences leads us to the lucidity of knowledge: And because your register is incomplete, because some orders of ideas, certain emotions and certain means are unknown or inaccessible to you, you have created a work that enriches me. I find in it surprises, marvellous inventions. The truth is that the mind thrives on differences; evasions quicken it, lacunae in light – whereas plenitude leaves it inert. (1970: 229–30)

Central debates on knowledge and science are no longer defined within disciplines or academic boundaries but in intertwining with the public. Today, in a sense, everyone feels like an author and a creator. Let us be careful. We must realize that we are facing forms of knowledge with varying levels of legitimacy. Confusing what should not be confused is a poor beginning; however, in a digital time that forces us to step out of traditional partitions, that does not mean that we should not establish bridges and dialogues. Here, too, the comparativist



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is expected to be able to put himself/herself in a third position and to value the public dimension of his/her knowledge. Being enclosed within an academic space allows dynamics to grow outside of it, making comparison a new form of governance (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003). Only the ability to articulate comparison in a public space opens up new perspectives and possibilities. It is in this sense that we must pay attention to Giorgio Agamben, namely, when he concludes that ‘the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation’ (2007: 92). This is the task of the next generation of comparativists.

Conclusion What is the comparativist for? The comparativist cannot construct his/her reflection on the basis of familiarization of the gaze but must be able to create distance, to find a place from which to see differences and realities that would otherwise go unnoticed. This is his/her first gesture, the gesture of estrangement, to defamiliarize the known. The comparativist cannot stand only on one bank of the river and produce thought from a centre. He/she is a builder of bridges, interactions, relationships. His/her place is the trip. This is his/her second gesture, the gesture of intercession, to transform reflection through relationship. The comparativist cannot be enclosed within academic spaces and must understand the importance of open science, not only in the presentation of results but also in the construction of the research process. This is his/her third gesture, the gesture of profanation, to make science public. What is the comparativist for? He/she can open up new insights based on these three gestures. He/she can bring us a unique way of seeing and thinking. In a time of big data, proliferation of surveys and information, and compulsive reporting, we need to value the return of the comparativist. Everything must be done on the basis of sound scientific research, certainly with the use of up-todate and accurate data, but this does not dispense with the distinctive, unique perspective of the comparativist. It is his/her signature that we should value in the near future, a signed Comparative Education. So, as David Labaree in his Sermon on Educational Research, I believe that academic writing can be and should be a medium for personal expression and artistic creation: ‘In our work we should be exploring the elegance of schooling

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as a cultural ideal and as a social construct, and we should be telling rich stories about school and society as a window on the human condition’ (2012: 82). I allow myself, in the following quote, to replace ‘researcher’ with ‘comparativist’: ‘Keep in mind that being an educational comparativist is being a writer, and in this role you are not just writing journal articles but you are contributing to literature in the fullest sense of the word. You want to ensure that this contribution leaves the world a little bit lovelier’ (ibid.). It is in this sense that throughout this text I wanted to draw attention to the position of the comparativist, which implies his/her ability to regain the pleasure of writing. At university, we are obliged to write, an academic productivism that is killing our relationship with writing and intellectual work. I often remember an interview by Paul Valéry, with the beautiful title ‘Pure Intellect’, where he recounts a conversation with André Gide: I remember a talk I once had while strolling with Gide in 1891 or thereabouts, soon after making his acquaintance. At one point, Gide said to me: ‘If I were prevented from writing, I believe that I would kill myself.’ This declaration, and Gide’s tone of voice, astounded me. I replied, with a laugh, but with equal conviction: ‘Well, for my part, I think that I would kill myself … if I were forced to write!’ (1970: 210)

We cannot be forced to write. We need writing that fills us with our signature, uniqueness, distinctiveness. Comparative education has lost this quality in the midst of so much data, tables and statistics, in the midst of so many reports, directories and inventories. This is the reason that led me to write this text: to defend the return of the comparativist, with his/her own personal, unique position, with his/her lucidity and creativity. Nothing replaces a good narrative. Nothing replaces the comparativist’s way of seeing and telling.

Note 1 This chapter emerges from the keynote address given at the CESE Conference in Nicosia (Cyprus), titled ‘Comparative Education: The Difference, the Public, and the Common’, which originated a first text, published in Comparative Education (Nóvoa 2018).

References Agamben, G. (2007), Profanations, New York: Zone Book.



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Appadurai, A. (2018), The Risks of Dialogue, São Paulo: Mecila Working Paper Series, no. 5. Barthes, R. (1977), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Boorstin, D. (1983), The Discoverers, New York: Random House. Boorstin, D. (1990), ‘The Amateur Spirit’, in C. Fadiman (ed.), Living Philosophies: The Reflections of some Eminent Men and Women of our Times, 23–9, New York: Doubleday. Bourdieu, P. (1988), Homo Academicus, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cowen R., and A. Kazamias, eds (2009), International Handbook of Comparative Education, New York: Springer. Cowen, R. (2014), ‘Comparative Education: Stones, Silences, and Siren Songs’, Comparative Education, 50(1): 3–14. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1981), Dissemination, London: Athlone Press. Greene, M. (1982), ‘Public Education and the Public Space’, Educational Researcher, 11(6): 4–9. Labaree, D. (2012), ‘A Sermon on Educational Research’, International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2(1): 74–83. Labaree, D. (2017), ‘Futures of the Field of Education’, in G. Whitty and J. Furlong (eds), Knowledge and the Study of Education: An International Exploration, 277–83, Oxford: Symposium. Maalouf, A. (1998), In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belonging, New York: Penguin books. Morin, E. (2010), ‘Éloge de la Métamorphose’, Le Monde, 9 January. Available online: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2010/01/09/eloge-de-lametamorphose-par-edgar-morin_1289625_3232.html (accessed 16 December 2019). Nóvoa, A. (2018), ‘Comparing Southern Europe: The Difference, the Public, and the Common’, Comparative Education, 54(4): 548–61. Nóvoa, A., and T. Yariv-Mashal (2003), ‘Comparative Research in Education: A mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?’, Comparative Education, 39(4): 423–38. O’Neil, C. (2016), Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, New York: Broadway. O’Neil, C. (2018), Algorithmes – La Bombe À Retardement, Paris: Les Arènes. Ozga, J., P. Dahler-Larsen, C. Segerholm and H. Simola, eds (2011), Fabricating Quality in Education: Data and Governance in Europe, New York: Routledge. Rosa, J. (1968), The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sadin, É. (2013), L’Humanité Augmentée: L’Administration Numérique du Monde, Montreuil: Éditions L’Échappée. Serres, M. (1997), The Troubadour of Knowledge, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Serres, M. (2006), L’Art des Ponts, Paris: Le Pommier. Serres, M. (2009), ‘Éditorial – Faute’, Libération, 19 November. Available online: https:// www.liberation.fr/societe/2009/11/19/faute_594497 (accessed 17 December 2019). Serres, M. (2019), Morales Espiègles, Paris: Le Pommier. Valéry, P. (1970), Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 14, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vergani, M. (2006), ‘Itérabilité’, in M. Antonioli (ed.), Abécédaire de Jacques Derrida, 109–10, Mons: Les éditions Sils Maria.

Index Academia, university 15, 17, 22, 24–6, 36, 38, 40–1, 44–5, 47–8, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58–9, 65–9, 71, 73–94, 104, 106–7, 127, 135–6, 142, 145, 150, 155, 157–9, 161, 171–2, 176, 199, 212, 215, 219, 220, 241–5, 258–60 academic capitalism 67, 94 academic mobility, academic identity 20, 24, 48, 62–3, 67, 73, 83, 86–7, 92 adapted education, (notion of) adaptation 6, 16, 52, 243 affect(s), affect theory, technologies of affect, affective technologies 18–19, 23, 117, 158, 163–4, 168, 174–7, 195–6, 223–4, 228–31, 237–44 anxiety 1, 17, 35, 55, 63, 120, 238 argumentation theory, types of argument 102, 122, 168, 169, 207–9 assemblages (of meaning), identity/global citizenship as assemblage, knowledges assemblages, meaning constellations 7, 11, 16, 45, 111, 115, 230 Austria 17, 124, 133, 136, 145–6, 154 big data, data from international assessments and evaluations 12, 177, 246–7, 250–1, 257, 259 black minority 4, 14, 48, 65 borders, border-crossing 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 24–5, 63–4, 99–103, 106, 109, 115, 119, 120, 131–2, 136, 227 boredom 1, 18, 163–6, 170–7 Brazil 17, 144, 147–9, 152, 154, 157, 159–60 Brian Holmes 29, 31 capitalism (knowledge capitalism) 11, 18, 76, 92–3, 149, 184–5, 199–200, 220 change 10, 21, 34, 43, 44–5, 64, 66, 71, 74, 86, 107, 108, 117, 124, 140–1, 150, 156–7, 180, 203, 211–12, 250

citizenship 3, 15–17, 25, 32, 37, 43–5, 95–6, 99, 102, 107, 112–16, 155, 157, 206, 215–16, 226 colonialism, colonial times/societies/ projects, colonial identities/ subjectivities, colonial education, anticolonial, post-colonial, postcolonialism 6, 7, 16, 22–5, 27, 41, 43, 45, 55, 63, 89, 123, 157, 160, 173, 177, 204–10, 212–17, 220, 225 comparative education(s), comparative educational research/methodology/ approaches, comparative reflexivity/ gaze, comparativist(s), comparative educationist(s) 1–10, 12–14, 17–46, 50–3, 63, 67, 97, 110–16, 158, 163, 165, 171–7, 181–2, 186–7, 196, 199–200, 218, 222–3, 245–59 Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) 23, 31, 43–4, 163, 218, 258 Comparative historical approach (longue durée) 19, 218 comparison, historical/international comparisons 12–13, 20, 55, 141, 164, 173, 177, 187, 193, 196, 199, 245–7, 250–7 conflict(s) 1, 12, 19, 37, 45, 87, 93, 130, 194, 198, 223–4, 229, 235, 237, 241–4 Confucian capitalism/values/attributes, (notion of) Confucian-neoliberal 15, 60–2, 64 connectivity, (inter)relationality 13–14, 164, 174, 247 consumerism, consumer culture 18, 179–88, 192, 198–200 context(s), contextualization, (social) embeddedness 3, 16–18, 28, 33–4, 39–42, 45, 48, 55, 62, 95–8, 101, 103–4, 107, 109, 110–13, 123–5, 127, 130–1, 140, 145, 157, 170, 177, 181, 194, 200,

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209, 211, 215, 218, 221, 224, 229–30, 242, 248 contingency 126, 141 contingent faculty 15, 25, 68, 72–80, 82–94 cosmopolitanism, anti-cosmopolitanism 1, 15, 99–100, 113 Council of Europe 7, 12 crisis, crises 1–2, 13–20, 37, 87, 116–17, 125–6, 132, 135–7, 139, 143, 172, 220, 223 cultural essentialism 18, 182, 192, 194, 197–9 cultural identity 5–6, 22–4, 43, 66, 182, 196, 197 culturalization 184–5, 194–5, 197–9 curriculum (school) 8, 24–5, 31, 43, 101, 115, 148, 152, 157, 221, 224, 228, 231, 233 Cyprus 19, 218, 223–8, 230, 232–5, 237, 241–4, 258 de-centering (of subject), deconstruction (of culture) 2, 8, 100, 164 de-nationalize, de-nationalizing 8, 121 de-colonization, of universities and knowledge 6, 19, 216–17 democracy (liberal and illiberal, pluralist democracy) 33, 78, 82, 89, 91, 96, 99, 101, 106, 108–9, 117, 121, 126, 128, 131–4, 137–8, 160–1, 187–8, 206, 213, 219, 242, 251, 259 Denmark 17, 23, 124, 150, 175 difference 10, 13–14, 21, 23, 25, 39, 103, 151, 173, 176–7, 183, 187, 194, 196, 246–7, 252, 254, 258–9 disconnections, disjunctions, discrepancies 10, 11, 18, 110, 166 Discourse Analysis, Discourse-Historical Approach 24, 43, 134, 137, 200, 237 discrimination 13, 23, 48, 50, 54–5, 57–8, 62, 64–5, 136, 149, 158, 160, 210 discursive strategies/ identities 122, 136 diversity, pluralism 9, 13–15, 21, 25, 47–9, 52–4, 59–60, 62, 65, 67–9, 76, 79, 121, 127, 129, 132, 134, 148, 149, 173, 187, 196, 248 East Asian (identities, academics, values) 15, 47–64, 67 educational media 17, 139–41, 153, 160

educational reform 42 educational system 28–30, 34, 44, 224, 231 educational transfer, borrowing, exports and imports, mobilities 3, 16, 22, 26–7, 29, 33–4, 39, 41–2, 45, 47–8, 62–3, 67, 84, 91, 99, 110, 116, 120, 166, 170, 177, 215, 242 Emanuel Macron 17, 121, 129 emotion(s) 18, 117, 168, 177, 223–4, 228– 31, 233–7, 240–4, 256 entanglements 19, 97, 174, 229–31, 238, 240 equality 14–15, 47–8, 52–4, 56, 59–60, 62, 65–6, 69, 82, 89, 92–3, 134, 158, 206, 218, 220, 222 essentialism 5, 8–9, 18, 31, 181–2, 187, 192, 194–9 estrangement 20, 245, 252–3, 255, 257 ethnicity, ethnic minorities, ethnic identities 5, 8, 13–14, 48, 49, 52–5, 58, 60, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 124, 205, 210, 242, 244 Europe, Europe of hope, Europe at crossroads 7, 12, 17, 24–5, 31, 34, 43–5, 68, 71, 93, 95, 97, 104, 115, 117–21, 124, 126–30, 132–7, 148, 158–9, 160, 163, 176, 203, 242, 259 European identity, Homo Europaeus 12, 17, 132, 159, 160 European Union (EU) 17, 25, 34, 65, 107, 116–18, 120–2, 125–30, 133–4, 137, 160, 222, 227, 234 excellence (ideology, subject position) 15, 48, 60, 72, 157, 220, 242 exclusion 1, 10, 13, 55, 122, 125, 174, 210, 213, 215, 217, 223, 230, 237 flows, movements, mobilities (transnational) 1, 9, 17, 23, 27, 34, 42, 109, 141, 148–9, 153, 177, 198, 204, 216–17, 247 France 3, 17, 31–2, 43, 45, 72, 124, 133, 150, 161  gender (inequality, equity, discrimination, gender-based exclusion), school related gender-based violence (SRGBV) 1, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 19, 32–3, 49, 53, 59, 62, 65, 79, 85, 91, 93–4, 122, 147–9, 153, 157–8,

Index 179, 183, 188, 209–10, 219, 220–2, 235, 242–3 George Bereday 32 German Schools Abroad 16, 95, 97–8, 100, 108, 114 Germany 17–18, 29, 34, 37, 43, 45, 95, 98, 114, 129, 131–2, 145, 148, 151, 153–4, 190, 196 global acceleration and deceleration 18, 166–70, 173–4 global citizenship (GC), Global Citizenship Education (GCE), Global identity 7, 12, 15–17, 25, 37–8, 44, 95–116, 157 globalization 18, 23, 25, 35–6, 38, 41, 44–7, 94, 104, 114, 123, 127, 129, 158, 165–6, 170, 172, 175, 220, 247 global society, global culture, global structures 25, 97, 100, 181, 186–7, 241 governance (global) 11–16, 18, 22, 25, 37, 38, 41–2, 44, 74, 76–7, 79–80, 82–3, 86–8, 165, 177, 212, 215, 221, 246, 250, 257, 259 governmentality 61, 67 Greece 18, 124, 125, 191, 196, 224–5 heuristic inquiry/methodology 50, 52, 66 higher education 15, 18, 44, 47, 50, 53, 56–7, 61–3, 65–9, 71–3, 76–8, 83, 85, 87–94, 106, 155, 170–2, 176, 208, 214, 216, 218, 220, 221 Holland 18 Homo Academicus 253 human rights 12, 14, 106, 108, 115, 127, 134, 158, 160, 186, 210, 228, 244 Hungary 122, 124, 130, 132, 156, 160 hyper culture 18, 179, 182, 192, 194–5, 197–9 identification(s), position(s) of identification 8–10, 12–18, 147, 192, 204–5, 207, 209–11, 215–16, 235–6, 239 identitarianism 247 identity (formation, narratives, politics, positions) 1, 6, 17, 20, 24, 43, 47–8, 50, 52, 61–3, 124, 179–80, 182, 187, 196, 223 identity (types of: educated, positional, ethnic minority, black identity, mobile, embodied, hybrid) 1–10, 12–21, 27–8,

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30–4, 37–8, 40, 48–9, 54, 56, 58, 62, 65, 86, 89 identity (history of the concept in comparative education) 2–8, 31–3 identity (of the comparativist) 20–1, 257 identity (theoretical perspectives) 2, 8–11, 13, 21–4, 50, 52, 62, 66, 111, 180, 181, 204, 207, 214, 228–9, 230, 240 Imperium 15, 27, 38–40 inclusion 15, 29, 47–8, 69, 152–3, 168, 170, 211, 216, 223, 233, 237 India 17, 34, 41, 152, 158, 160, 172, 176, 204, 219, 221 indigenization (of policies and practices) 16 injustice(s) 104, 106, 150, 206, 220 intercession 20, 245, 252, 254–5, 257 interconnections, flows, mobilities 1, 9, 13–14, 17, 23, 27, 34, 42, 109, 141, 148, 149, 153, 164, 174, 177, 198, 204, 216, 217, 247 international system, interstates system, world system, world politics, world society 3, 7, 10, 11, 25, 97, 100, 107, 114, 181, 186–7, 241 international and domestic politics 14, 33–4, 37–9, 241 international identity 7, 15, 37 international organizations 7, 11, 176, 217 international student/education assessment programmes/surveys, international benchmarking instruments 12, 177, 246–8, 250–1, 257, 259 internationalization 15, 36, 42, 47, 48, 56, 59–61, 67, 92, 177 intersectionality 2, 10, 14–15, 18, 20, 33–4, 37–9, 53, 59, 209 intersecting politics 14, 33–4, 37–9, 241 Isaac Kandel 29, 30 John Dewy 19 Joseph Lauwerys 31, 163 knowledge society/economy 39, 71, 76, 93, 171, 172 labour unions 78, 84 League of Nations 7, 23, 37, 106

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Index

left-wing populism, left-wing populist parties 125, 137 local appropriation and translation (of global norms, policies, practices) 23, 37, 110, 113, 140, 154 memory and history 156, 228, 241, 243 metamorphosis (of school, society, education) 249, 250 Mexico 18, 23, 92, 192 migration, migrant identities and communities, emigration, immigration 4, 13, 55, 58, 63–4, 65, 68, 99, 113, 116–18, 120, 122, 126–7, 129, 131–3, 135, 138, 142, 150, 177 multi-site research, cross-country analysis 96, 142 multiculturalism 115–16, 121, 132, 142 multilateralism, multilateral bodies 7, 11, 16, 176, 217, 203 narratives (of identity) 17, 57, 60, 62, 64, 124, 126, 129, 131, 140, 152–3, 166, 224, 227, 229, 240–1 nation(s), national identities, nationalism(s), national culture(s) 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 11, 12–16, 20, 23–4, 26, 30, 33, 36–7, 39, 42, 49, 53, 57–8, 67, 96–7, 105–6, 111, 115–16, 121–2, 124, 127–33, 137–8, 142, 150, 156–7, 177, 180–3, 186–7, 194–7, 200, 205, 210, 215, 223, 225–6, 230, 235–6, 239, 241–3 national character (concept in comparative education) 4–5, 31, 182 neo-liberalism 15, 35, 64, 67, 71–2, 76–8, 81, 86, 91, 93, 123, 139, 141, 144, 154, 159, 212, 219 Nicholas Hans 30 Niklas Luhmann 134, 183 Norway 17, 144, 145, 158, 161 OECD 12, 37, 53, 96–7, 110, 116, 245, 249 Olive Schreiner 19, 204, 221 Other(s), othering, strangers, foreigners, outsiders 9–10, 22, 51, 119–20, 122–4, 131, 136, 142, 152, 158, 173, 176, 195, 223, 227, 230, 236–9, 254 Oxley and Morris’ typology 96–7, 99–100

peace, peace movement 11, 12, 38, 204–5, 214, 216, 221, 226, 236, 241 pedagogy, pedagogical practices 150–1, 197–8, 212, 221, 230, 236, 249 permanent faculty 15, 73–4, 80, 82–4, 87 perpetrators 126, 223, 229, 236 PISA 29, 36–7, 41, 43–4, 109, 174, 246, 248, 250 playmobil figures 18, 179–99 pluralization, proliferation, multiplicity (of identities) 9, 11, 13–15, 20–1, 25, 47–9, 52, 53–4, 59–60, 62, 65, 67–9, 76, 79, 121, 127, 129, 132, 134, 148–9, 166, 173–4, 187, 196, 223, 245, 248, 253, 257 political far-right, far-right movements and populism 17, 35, 121, 134–9, 141– 5, 154–61, 188, 195 political parties, politicians 17, 29, 35, 89, 117, 121–2, 126–7, 131, 139, 141, 143, 146–7, 151–2 politics of fear, fear 17, 22, 69, 117–18, 120–7, 129–30, 132, 135, 137, 221, 238 politics of hope, hope 17, 19, 22, 111, 117–18, 121, 125–6, 129–30, 134–5, 172, 217, 221, 233, 237 politics of memory 156, 228, 241 populism, far-right populist movements, right-wing populism 17, 35, 121, 134–9, 141–5, 154–61, 188, 195 positionality, perspectivity, multiperspectivity 7, 17, 19–21, 140, 151 power 3, 6–9, 12–13, 15, 17, 21–3, 32–3, 38, 40, 44, 50, 57, 61, 64–6, 68, 76–7, 80, 82, 88, 95, 99, 103–4, 106, 117, 145, 152, 168, 173–4, 210–11, 213, 216, 235–6, 238–44 precariat, precarity 72, 94 private education and schools, privatization of education 98, 149, 204, 207–9, 214–15, 217, 219, 222, 249 profanation 20, 245, 252, 255–7 professional identities 15 professoriate, professorial identities 71, 73, 77–9, 81, 83–4, 86, 89, 91, 93 public education 15, 88, 248, 250, 259 public good, common good 19, 36, 80, 91, 94, 203–9, 211–21

Index race, racism 68, 244 re-contextualization, re-contextualized (practices, ideas, norms, concepts) 16, 140 reading (re-reading) the global 38, 45, 113 reframing, repositioning (of identities) 207 refugees, refugee crisis 17, 105, 117, 119–20, 123, 126, 132–3, 136, 203, 228, 233–4, 242, 244 representations (of identity) 51, 152, 228, 235, 237 resilience 19, 60, 61–7 rhetoric 13, 15, 24, 50, 114, 121–2, 124, 127, 130–2, 135–6, 143, 152, 168, 172, 174, 233 sexuality, sexual discrimination 5, 8, 9, 13, 160, 210 situatedness, situated practices, identity as situated construct 9, 21, 97, 109, 111 slowing global order 163, 165–6, 176 Sol Plaatje 19, 205, 209, 222 South Africa 14, 32, 204, 206, 212, 219, 220–1 space, spatiality, time-spaces, uneven space-times 10, 12, 21–2, 24–5, 28, 30, 34, 36, 41–5, 58, 96–9, 107, 110, 114, 127, 134, 163–6, 168–9, 173–7, 211, 230, 241, 243–4, 249, 250, 254, 256–7, 259 speculative speeches (genre) 17, 121, 126–7, 133 state (the), forms of state 12, 28, 30, 34, 36–8, 43, 49, 64, 71, 76, 85, 88, 146–7, 208, 211–12, 216 Stuart Hall 4, 8–10, 21–5, 51–2, 66 subject positions, subjectivities 6–7, 9, 12, 14–21, 24, 238 textbooks (school) 7, 139, 147, 152–3, 227, 232 time(s), temporality, space-times, uneven space-times 1–2, 5–7, 10, 16, 19, 21–2, 24–5, 28, 30, 34–6, 39, 41–5, 95–7, 109,

265

115, 130, 139–40, 154, 163–6, 168–9, 173–7, 184, 218, 229, 231, 239, 244, 256–7, 259 transformation, shape-shifting, ‘as they move, they morph’ 16, 23, 39, 42, 45, 73, 76–7, 95, 110, 113, 115, 212, 249, 250 translation (of policies, norms, ideas, practices) 110, 140, 154 transnational comparative strategy/ approach/perspective 111, 139 uncertainty 1, 17–18, 20–1, 117–18, 120, 125, 127, 130, 219 UNESCO 7, 12, 26, 37, 43, 96–7, 112, 116, 187, 189, 203, 205, 209–11, 215, 222 unit ideas 14, 23, 28, 30, 32–4, 36–40, 42 United Kingdom, UK 15, 22, 47–50, 52–61, 63, 65–9, 72, 89, 94–5, 118, 124, 203, 212 United States, USA 3, 15, 17, 31–2, 43, 55–6, 58, 63, 65, 72–4, 80, 82–3, 85, 89–90, 92–4, 96, 106, 118, 120, 122, 124, 137, 141, 148, 149, 154, 158–9, 166, 203, 212, 221–2 Vernon Mallinson 31 victimization 6, 19, 50, 60, 126, 129, 143, 146, 148, 223–4, 227, 229, 230–1, 235–40 Victor Orbán 17, 121, 129, 136 villainification 19, 223–4, 227, 229–31, 235–40 Westphalian and Post-Westphalian order 3, 11–12 women’s rights, women’s movement 158, 204, 217 World Bank 12, 37, 208, 209, 215, 222, 245 world culture, world society, universal human community 7, 22, 23, 25, 34, 41, 97, 100, 110, 113, 181, 186–7, 199, 241 worldwide diffusion and dissemination (of policies and practices) 110 Zygmunt Bauman 119, 173

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