Commentary: Cultivating a defiant global research imagination in international education

Abstract

Developing a 'defiant research imagination' (Kenway and Fahey, 2006) is necessary in all educational research. Do the papers in this special issue, individually and collectively, exhibit a 'defiant research imagination'? To what extent and how?I believe that a 'defiant research imagination' is necessary because of the untenable present conditions of knowledge production with their reductionist notions of the knowledge economy and national innovation (Kenway, Bullen & Fahey with Robb, 2006). The globalizing neo liberal university adopts the following primary and interrelated research imperatives: a techno-scientific orientation to knowledge, an emphasis on 'knowledge networks' for the explicit purpose of 'knowledge transfer' and on the commercialization and commodification of knowledge.The corresponding implied researchers are the techno-scientist, the instrumental and strategic knowledge networker transfering apply-able knowledge to 'end users' and the knowledge entrepreneur who is skilled at branding and can readily turn knowledge into profit. We call this figure the 'technopreneur' (Kenway, Bullen, & Robb, 2004). It is intended that the deepest allegiances of technopreneurial researchers are to 'their' university. They are expected to be ruthlessly competitive in advancing its, often defensive and sometimes paranoid, agendas within neo liberal governments' policy and benchmark settings be they those of the nation state or international agencies such as the OECD (the two are usually agreeably 'harmonized'). This is regarded as the highest calling of any researcher or research group and attracts the greatest accolades. The field of international education is as subject to these imperatives as other fields and certainly attracts its fair share of technopreneurs.In this context what possibilities exist for defiant research theories, practices and identities and how might such alternatives be conceptualized? In our opening chapter to Globalising the Research Imagination, Johannah Fahey and I (Eds, 2008) offer some pedagogical principals designed to assist PhD supervisors/advisors to support PhD students to develop a defiant research imagination. This argument is, of course, directed as much to supervisors themselves as to research students. Such an imagination is unavoidably global.The pedagogical principles involved in cultivating a defiant global research imagination include seeking and provoking 'uncomfortable thought', examining 'unexamined habits of looking', trying 'to see from elsewhere' and 'striving for complexity'. These arise from our interviews with some of the English-speaking world's finest scholars on globalization who come from the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography and education. We complement their thinking with ideas on the imagination drawn from Greek-French thinker Cornelius Castoriadis, philosopher, economist, social critic and psychoanalyst (1984a, 1987, 1994a). In translating his ideas about the imagination into our discussion of the notion of a defiant global research imagination we develop an argument for a research imagination that is rich with critical, creative and ethical, individual and collective possibilities and responsibilities. Overall we contend that such an imagination should seek to unsettle the global hegemonic research imagination, noted above, and in relation to this would also attend to what we call 'global geographies of power/knowledge' (Kenway and Fahey, 2008).Attending to such geographies involves taking seriously the implications for knowledge and education of colonialism, imperialism and their 'post', 'neo' and recent manifestations; overall, to the geopolitics of the circumstances being researched and the geopolitics of knowledge itself. This means not only addressing past and present colonialism and imperialism as they are manifest in the particular situation under research scrutiny but also attending to how we think about the particular situation. …