WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Globalization, education and the challenge of uncertainty
Stephen Carney, Roskilde University
Framing Uncertainty
• Modernity intensifying & spreading(Giddens, Beck, Friedman)
• Modernity diversifying(Appadurai, Castells)
• Modernity unraveling(Wallerstein, Hardt & Negri)
• Modernity as abjection(Bauman, Ferguson)
Some Central Concerns• The changing role/ nature of the state
- State spatiality and reach (as potential)- Rescaling (neoliberalism as decline)
• The prospects for political action
- Globalization connecting the ‘multitude’ - Consumer society alienating the ‘mass’
• ‘Culture’, place, locality
- Imagination and ‘ideoscape’- Cosmopolitanism and anti-membership
Three Experiments
• ‘Policyscape’ (Denmark, Nepal, China)
• ‘Eduscape’ (Denmark, South Korea, Zambia)
• Youth and schooling (Nepal)
Exploring flows across spaces:
Exploring flows within a single site:
Responses to ‘Policyscape’
- ‘breaks from the legacy of methodological nationalism’ (Gita Steiner-Khamsi)
- ‘theoreticial innovation’ (Robert Cowen)
- ‘spatial fetishism!’ (Susan Robertson)
A Different Type of CritiqueQuestion:
- Are we dealing with uncertainty, denying or embracing it?
Sub-question:
- What counts as data in the ‘global cultural economy’?
‘Asia in Miniature’Towards ‘an analytic of noise’:
‘…a mode of analysis that would take seriously both the fact that signifying actors might have social reasons not to establish a bond of communication but to rupture it, and the way that stylistic messages take on a social significance whether they are ‘understood’ or not through a social process of construal of the partially unintelligible’.
(James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity 1999)
Questions• Where do we do comparative education research under conditions of profound global interconnectivity?
• What counts as data in the emerging global cultural economy?
• What type of progressive project is possible in such research?
Unframing ‘Modern’ Policy ResearchSubjectivity as ‘becoming’
- In assemblages- As movement
‘Non-state philosophy’ - Minor literature (Deleuzes)- Beyond power and production (Baudrillard)
Social/ epistemological - ‘State’ and ‘subject’ as investments- Morality and ethics (Nietzsche)
Post-Modern Origins of Globalization
(Lizardo & Strand, 2009)
French(The social)
German(The political)
British(The economic) The US
(The cultural/ aesthetic)
‘Domesticating’ French theorizing• Post-classical theory viewed as ‘impractical’:
- too little focus on economy, state or change • ‘Global condition’ defined by US/ British interests:
- class (Marx)- state (Weber)- social solidarity (Durkheim)- ‘North’ now seen in ‘South’
• French ‘post’ theorizing lingers as (practical/ politically-aware) globalization research
The Global Cultural Economy
• ‘Scapes’(ethno, media, techno, finance and ideo)
• ‘Global Flows’ (complex, rapid, overflowing and disjunctive)
• Interconnectivity of phenomena (end of centre/ periphery distinction)
(‘Modernity at Large’, Arjun Appadurai 1996)
Educational ‘Policyscape’
Neo & advanced liberalism (Mitchell Dean)
• Visions and values
• Management and organisation
• Learning processes
Different Countries, Systems, Levels
Policy Agents Technologies
DK Uni Law Boards Contracts
Nepal Community Parents SMCs schools
China Curriculum Students Pedagogy
Interconnectivities• State spatiality (read: ‘state’)
- Strong state/ weak state- Reaching in/ reaching out
• Negotiation and enactment (read: ‘action’)
- New and old voices heard- Productive and repressive power
• ‘Locality’ (read: ‘culture’)
- As nationalism and protest- As tradition and change
However…….
Other Responses
• Vertical case study (Fran Vavrus)
• Multi-site ethnography(George Marcus)
• Anthropology of policy(Susan Wright)