Comparative Education in Asia: Reflections on an Intellectual Field

Abstract

Comparative education in Asia is a century old. University courses and books in the field existed in Japan and China since the 1920s. Institutional growth has since been uneven and discontinuous. Yet, the field remains young, dynamic, and continues to develop in response to changing times and needs.This chapter gives an overview and update of these institutional developments. It analyzes comparative education as an intellectual field in the Bourdieuian sense. The discourse verses on how to define the academic field of comparative education by analyzing the dynamic interactions among academics whose capitals have created diverse impacts on the field. Earlier work on this theme took the professional societies of comparative education and university programs in Asia as the units for analysis (Bray & Manzon, 2014; Manzon, 2017). This paper extends that work to another level. It focuses on an interdisciplinary research center: the Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) at the University of Hong Kong. CERC is a major Asian-based scholarly community that has hugely contributed to reshaping academic knowledge production and scholarly networking in the field globally. The discussion is mainly conceptual and philosophical. The paper offers a sociological commentary on the role of a research center in the institutional and intellectual construction of comparative education and highlights its contributions to the field. It is hoped that this knowledge can help inspire the next generations of Asian scholars to articulate their voices in contributing to the sustainable present and futures of education and society.KeywordsComparative education- institutionalizationIntellectual fieldAsiaComparative Education Research Centre (CERC)