Previous articleNext article FreePresidential AddressRecognizing Complexity in Our Changing Contexts: Centering What Matters in Comparative and International EducationKaren MonkmanKaren Monkman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIntroductionAs I write this address, we are in the third year of a global pandemic; an unprovoked assault on Ukraine is continuing unabated; climate change is impacting our lives and the ecosystems on which we depend; racial and gender violence continues; and a diminishing tolerance for difference is evident, whether related to sexuality and gender identities, religion and ethnicity, political orientation, among many others. The layering of these challenges has created a new reality for all of us, although some are impacted more than others. These conditions have affected our teaching, research, projects, how we engage with colleagues and mentor students—basically, all aspects of how we live and work. Even more so, communities with whom we work are impacted.Just as in the world, our field of comparative and international education (CIE) has also undergone changes, not only due to current global conditions, but due to the evolving ways of understanding how education is shaped by forces such as neoliberalism, poverty, social values, politics and environmental changes. Discursive framings of CIE embed particular agendas and ways of seeing the world, and they in turn shape how we think, understand, and act. More concretely, our field has seen an increase in the types and numbers of actors involved, including nonstate actors such as celebrities, billionaires, corporations, and others, each of whom has their own priorities and ways of engaging in education globally.Now more than ever, we need to understand with much more nuance these realities across diverse communities and within our changing field. We need to act in ways that are informed by a profound responsibility for the consequences, with, as I will suggest, a renewed focus on considering what really matters in and for the field.After reminding us of several ideas from previous presidential addresses, I will examine some key issues from CIES 2021—specifically, changing contexts and social responsibility—as an invitation to reexamine where we are, how we engage in our work and with each other. I invite you to consider a variety of questions to ponder, including:• What really matters? … to whom? … how? … why?• Whose interests are (and are not) being served?• To whom are we individually and collectively responsible? … for what? … how?• How are we implicated in creating or maintaining the social, political, and economic structures that impede education, or enable it, in ways that matter to people and communities we seek to serve?• How does our own work, the configuration of our professional relationships, and our discursive framing re-shape, reify, resist, or challenge structures of inequity and exclusion?• How does our work in education affect people’s lives, directly and indirectly, immediately and long-term?Our Shared HeritageTwenty years ago, Heidi Ross (2002) began her presidential address by situating her focus within the challenges she observed in how students and others grappled with making sense of education and society in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. In noting the need for critical dialogue, she called for a renewed relational orientation in our work—for reconsidering the “space between us” (416). In using “metaphors and imagery of relational theories to think with,” she argues, we can then (a) center a critical analysis of “conceptualizations of democracy, globalization, connection, and difference,” (b) “take seriously the issues of ‘identity work,’” and (c) “move toward social justice” (411).We have known for a long time that education serves some populations well and underserves others. In 2004, Kassie Freeman observed that “looking but not seeing has led to the underutilization of human potential” (443), particularly in Black communities. Freeman (2004) explaines the costs to those whose potential is underutilized: “Having their talents underutilized over the centuries has had a negative impact on the psychological being (self-esteem and confidence) because the costs of underutilizing their potential has gone to the heart and soul of black populations” (451–52). Not being seen is a form of violence that has profound negative implications. We might apply that point to our field more broadly, by saying: “looking but not seeing” (443) as we form or interpret policy, measure progress, teach others, or engage in collaborations can easily result in a diminished, and sometimes counterproductive outcomes that further challenge rather than help people and communities. Using “seeing as a metaphor [is useful for] capturing difference, the depth of understanding of that difference, and the plight of the human condition” (444).Ross and Freeman built on the work of Vandra Maseman (1990), who, 14 years earlier, had challenged us to use paradigms in our thinking and our work that are “holistic, context dependent, and integrative” (471), because these paradigms can promote a more integrated understanding of our place in the world, by conceptualizing knowledge not as fragmented, or some forms as less important than others, but as integrated wholes. She argues: “our conception of ways of knowing have limited and restricted the very definition of comparative education that we have taught students and used in our own research and, indeed, have promulgated to practitioners” (465). This has led “to willful ignoring or bypassing of large areas of teaching and learning that are not considered in the domain of valid knowledge” (465)—this, in turn constricts our awareness of possibility.N’Dri Assié-Lumumba (2016) also resonated with those ideas and challenged us to be more inclusive and holistic in choosing how we frame our own ways of seeing and knowing. Ubuntu, she argues, is an alternative way to frame not only our work but also how we see ourselves in the world. It is about a sense of shared humanity, a rich sense of community and collectivity, a recognition that we are all connected to each other and to the broader ecosystems within which we live. In this Ubuntu framing, we would think differently about knowledge, how we know, and power relations across time and location.Finally, beyond human-to-human experience, Iveta Silova (2021) called for more attention to environmental concerns and climate change, recognizing that we, as humans, are integral to a much larger environment and often act in ways that are destructive to our own life spaces.Across these addresses, past CIES presidents have called upon us not only to look, but also see, and to consider the space between us. We are also called upon to reconsider how we situate ourselves among others, and also in relationship to particular ways of knowing and the production of knowledge itself. These orientations are important for positioning humanity and meaningful social relationships at the center of our work—especially in today’s world with increasingly challenging conditions.CIES 2021: Social Responsibility within Changing ContextsThe theme of the CIES 2021 annual meeting, “Social Responsibility within Changing Contexts,” was an invitation to consider a variety of complexities related to changing contexts and our own individual and collective social responsibility.1 Like the presidential addresses noted above, these issues invite us to consider who we are, how we engage, what influences our understandings that inform how we engage, and how that engagement has consequences for others.Changing ContextsThere are many dimensions of context that are changing. After broadly contextualizing our changing world, I will focus on three dimensions: increasing precarity in today’s world, changing education/development discourses, and the expanded variety of actors in the field (i.e., the changing social/collaborative terrain).The world in which we find ourselves now is not the world that shaped the development of our work several decades ago, or even our work a few years ago. We are now experiencing rapid changes in basic life conditions which affect education, and, in turn, changes in education which affects life conditions. Most obvious in these current times is the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only forced changes in how CIES creates space for coming together in our annual meetings and how our professional relationships develop but has also radically altered how schooling is experienced globally, how nonformal and informal modes of learning occur (or not), how policy is created and understood, how research is conducted, and how we decide what is worth learning or knowing. Teachers worldwide were either forced to pivot to teach online, usually with little support or knowledge about how to do so—or for those where adequate or appropriate technology was not available, teachers were left without work as schools closed completely (UNICEF 2021; UNESCO Institute for Statistics, n.d.). Disparities in school closures and in access to technology have intensified already existing inequities (World Bank 2021). Beyond teaching, many researchers have moved to conducting interviews on virtual platforms, for example, which impacts the building of rapport and the development of nuanced understandings (both of which are critical for the collection of meaningful qualitative data). This shift also limits who is available as research participants (due in part to in/accessibility to technology). Others have stopped their research or shifted to other topics that are doable with pandemic restrictions, thereby changing the contours of knowledge production. In addition, many people struggle with social isolation due to lockdowns and social distancing.Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic are critical concerns about climate change, racial injustice and xenophobia, gender violence, increasing poverty, forced displacement, and the increased politicizing of migration along with a wide range of other social concerns. Globally, of the 26 million refugees—the highest number ever recorded—half are children, and 85 percent are being hosted in developing countries (Amnesty International, n.d.). Over 100 million people are forcibly displaced globally (Siegfried 2022), including 12.8 million people in Ukraine (Treisman 2022; UN-OHCHR 2022). International students of color have had a hard time crossing borders to escape the war in Ukraine, since neighboring countries do not welcome them as readily as White Ukrainians (Benavot 2022; Okeowo 2022). Conditions such as these are layered and intertwined, multiplying today’s challenges. Gender violence remains an endemic part of social strife, increasing in times of war and in conditions of domestic isolation as in a pandemic (Moaveni and Nagarajan 2022). In addition, world hunger is increasing, reflected in a doubling of severe food insecurity in the last 2 years (United Nations 2022).Fake news, belief in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and hate rhetoric add to the complexities we struggle with today. Global warming is still denied or downplayed by some (Dunlap and Jacques 2013). And, the global pandemic also has its deniers (Krugman 2021; Spring 2021), despite solid science about the virus and over 6 million lives lost worldwide (WHO 2022).Along with these recent contextual changes, we see other conditions continue to evolve, adding to individual and collective challenges. Neoliberal policies, for example, continue to constrain the work of teachers; narrow the curriculum; prioritize assessments over meaningful learning; and disadvantage some schools over others, growing the gaps in achievement (Lubienski and Brewer 2019).Woven throughout all of these dynamics and more, supporting some elements and undermining others, is the global circulation of cultural values and ideas, including through social media (Anderson 2016). Our globalized world connects us all and enables real time communication, as long as one has access to particular technologies. Even so, the ideas that flow around the world are often controlled by those in positions of power (Brøgger et al. 2016; Menashy 2019) and accessed only by those with the required technology—we are not all engaged in the same conversations, so we do not all have access to the same knowledge and ideas.All of these conditions, and more, affect our work and our lives, and, more importantly, the lives of the people we are striving to support through our work. The experiences of these conditions and dynamics are not the same for everyone. For increasing numbers of people these layered and rapidly changing conditions make their lives precarious.2Precarious ConditionsThis layering of challenging conditions we now experience is increasingly referred to as precariousness or precarity.3 Although these terms have long been used to describe unstable conditions of employment, the terms are now also used to now describe conditions of life much more broadly. Judith Butler (2009) argues that precarity is a politically induced condition, in which, “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at a heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection” (25–26).Conditions of precarity include unpredictability, vulnerability, insecurity, instability, and the like.4 For many, “precarious situations and events are like rugged terrains: every step must be carefully preconceived and decisively taken and, even then, one can never be certain that s/he has firm ground under his or her feet” (della Porta et al. 2015, 2). Precarization has been described as “[penetrating] entire life-worlds of individuals and groups of people” (della Porta et al. 2015, 2, citing others).Those on the social margins are impacted most (Butler 2009; Perry et al. 2021). When intersections of multiple forces of instability, insecurity, vulnerability, and unpredictability are present, it is easy to see that precariousness is exacerbated. This demands that we not only “look” but also “see” the realities of life of those we presume to help through our work, so that our actions have a better chance to reduce precariousness and alter the structures that create these realities.These changing conditions—especially those that increase precarity—raise important questions about who has a right to learn and has access to learning, how to make learning available to those less able to adapt to today’s realities, what is worth learning, what is worth teaching, and even what education is for (Dovemark and Beach 2016). Grappling with these increasingly complex global challenges also raises questions such as: what kinds of policy would best support more equitably distributed education across disparate populations as we grapple with these increasingly complex global challenges. And finally, who is, can, and should be involved, and how, in these processes?The CIE professional terrain is also changed in these precarious times. Funding, jobs, mobility restrictions, organizational priorities, and other challenges have resulted in many losing jobs or having hours, salaries, or benefits cut. Limitations in travel due to the pandemic or lack of funding reduces opportunities to do fieldwork (whether related to projects or research) and to join colleagues at conferences.These precarious times demand that we reimagine how we come together in CIES, as has been evident in the most recent annual meetings. Even in virtual interactions, we notice different communication networks which likely fragment our communications within CIE. Who is talking with whom on what platforms? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Zoom, e-mail, text, or phone—not everyone is engaged in or has access to all of these, so conversations, the sharing of ideas, and ways of thinking and framing of issues discursively are likely occurring among particular groups and not others.Discourses: Ways of ThinkingWords and images matter, especially in policy. They change how we make sense of what we do and how we do it. They condition how we see the world, and what we decide is important. As Ross did 5 years before him, Victor Kobayashi (2007) highlighted the role of metaphors in his presidential address, and Ruth Hayhoe (2000) discussed metanarratives in hers. Similarly, discourses—the ideological underpinnings embedded in the ways we use words and images—shape how we and others think and understand (Ninnes 2004; Ball 2006; Allan 2012). The reason I raise this here is to call attention not just to the concrete language that we use but also to the need to unpack it, to more fully examine the discursive underpinnings of how we make sense of our worlds and how we live and work within them. Discursive shifts are another layer of changing contexts.In work on girls’ education, for example, policy discourses, such as in the sustainable development goals (SDGs), continue to prioritize counting bodies in seats (access, enrollments, gender parity, etc.) rather than messier (and more difficult to measure) research related to quality, content, empowerment, and other critical issues (Monkman and Hoffman 2013). To see our work differently, we must be willing to reexamine our underlying assumptions (discourses). Gayatri Spivak (2021), our Kneller lecturer at CIES 2021, argues that a “complete dismantling and rethinking … [of how we come to understand] is necessary.” She demonstrated this point by saying: “The real subalterns are the looters and shooters. Looting is equivalent to buying, when there are no other options.” Opening our minds to see how others think and how they are situated relative to life conditions is necessary to understanding other perspectives more fully. Framing issues differently can open up new possibilities.As with any context, discourses shape how we understand our own field. We are a diverse field, drawing from many disciplines, with various ideological leanings, but we also tend to talk mostly with those who do similar work and with whom we agree. With the expanding numbers and variety of actors in the field this does not serve us well. How well do we understand others’ perspectives, particularly those of our new nonstate actor colleagues? Practitioner-researchers in our field who straddle the lines between state and nonstate actors in their everyday work may be in a unique position to help interpret these perspectives, especially when there appears to be disagreement. Discourses often emanate from where and how we are situated, from our histories and experiences. Reexamining our own ways of thinking, and the underling ideological influences, can yield valuable insights to inform future actions.A Proliferation of Actors and Complex RelationshipsThe expansion in the variety of actors in our field is evident. How they are involved in development work changes the structural arrangements among actors, that is, relationships and discoursive assumptions that inform priorities and practices (Verger et al. 2016; Menashy 2019).Nonstate actors and policy prioritiesThe proliferation of nonstate actors—corporations, foundations, private businesses, celebrities, billionaires, and so on—are eager to help educate the world. The long history of involvement of corporate philanthropy (e.g., a century of involvement by the Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Gates Foundations; see Kilby 2021) has expanded to encompass many more entities’ involvement.Corporate philanthropy and foundations use corporate profits for education work, contribute in-kind donations, and mobilize their employees as volunteers. They talk about their intentions to benefit local communities, but research reveals that benefits cohere primarily to corporations and only sometimes to the communities they are intending to help. Kathryn Moeller’s (2018) research, for example, examines how and why transnational corporations invest in poor girls and women of color as instruments of poverty alleviation, showing that this investment benefits the corporate interests, positioning them “as new frontiers of capital accumulation” (196), to open up new markets in the Global South, but without changing the structures of inequality that would benefit girls or women in local communities (or any other marginalized population). Moeller’s interlocutors consistently called for “increased transparency and accountability for corporations in their relationships with Third World girls and women as laborers in their factories, agricultural fields, and retail stores as well as purported beneficiaries of their philanthropic and socially responsible endeavors” (208). Moeller asks, “in these complicated transnational relationships, to whom and for what are these corporations responsible?” (208). Their motivations are, in Francine Menashy’s (2019) words, “part of a larger business objective, often as part of their corporate social responsibility program” (32). What “social responsibility” looks like in this environment varies, but it is unlikely to conflict with their business interests.Across new state actors we see a wide variety of approaches to funding programs, from some (particularly private foundations) whose goals are to “push money out the door”5 to others that are integrally involved in designing their own programs to fund. Like most entities, private foundations have their own priorities, and many lack a robust knowledge of the field. In one program I was involved with, a private foundation funding the program minimized their control (few strings attached to the funding), as they wanted the local communities to create priorities to drive their processes that met their localized needs—they knew the local communities and the experienced NGOs had the knowledge and expertise, and they understood the value of bottom-up initiatives. In contrast, in another program, the private foundation that funded the evaluation did not seem to understand a bottom-up approach to social change—the foundation wanted to make sure the program was evaluated on the basis of whether the participants chose to mobilize around one specific topic as determined by the foundation, even though the Freirean-inspired curriculum was designed to enable communities to decide for themselves what issues they want to. The foundation’s measure of success did not emanate from the program’s curriculum, processes, or logic.Celebrity involvement usually takes the form of advocacy. For example, celebrities offer their names and images—their “brand”—to organizations or initiatives as a way to magnify public awareness of particular development efforts. Many international NGOs have celebrity advocates. Oprah Winfrey (Oprah Winfrey Foundation 2022), Angelina Jolie, John Legend, Shakira, Pink, and Dolly Parton (Caso 2020) are a few celebrities active in the development world. While many efforts by celebrities are impressive, for some, education (or development) appears to be secondary to their personal gain. For example, Peter Kelly and Jane Kenway (2014) studied the internationally known chef Jamie Oliver and his culinary program with underserved youth. They found that, after the culinary training, the promised jobs were not forthcoming, leaving their lives unchanged, yet Oliver’s public image as a celebrity was enhanced—he was known for helping underserved youth in Australia. Others have achieved celebrity status through their work in education. Greg Mortensen (2007, 2010), for example, became known through his best-selling books about starting schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the public critique of his education work centered on fabrications and financial irregularities (Krakauer 2011).6 Several development organizations have now created units whose sole purpose is to interface with celebrities. Much more research is needed on the benefits to the communities that are supposed to be served versus the benefits to the organizations or to the celebrities. Brockington (2014) argues that “the complexities of development mean that celebrities advocating for apparently good causes, can be promoting bad ones, or failing to tackle the real problems underlying these causes” (xxiv).Celebrities, corporate entities, and foundations have good intentions, and some do good work. Some, however, have goals that seem uninformed or simplistic—they do not often have the background to know the history of education globally or in specific locations or to understand complex social issues as they intersect with education. To the public, it sounds impressive that these entities are educating the world, but often, if they had been better informed, more could have been done and the challenges they run into could have been predicted and avoided. One corporate-related entity (which also receives public funding) announced about a decade ago that they had initiated work on girls’ education globally and before anyone else, apparently unaware that many of us have been working in this arena for decades. Many of these new actors are very well positioned to frame the education issues in public discourse, shaping the ways in which large audiences understand our field—or not (Menashy 2019; Gideon and Unterhalter 2021). This also impacts the ways that relationships are formed and engaged in globally.Changing relationshipsSince the 1990s, actors in our field have became more involved in coordinated, collaborative efforts.7 Cross-sectoral alliances grew, and the language of partnerships replaced single-agency initiatives and ad hoc collaborations. While formal partnerships may have reduced duplication of effort to some degree, they are not without problems, including the imbalance in power among the partners. More recently, partnerships have included private sector actors and other nonstate actors (such as those discussed above), sometimes as the recipients of public funding and sometimes as key decision makers (Robertson et al. 2012; Gideon and Unterhalter 2021). Important questions remain about whose agendas are heard more loudly in partnerships and what the implications are of the particular power relations within collaborative efforts.Menashy (2019) describes recent changes: “the international aid landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, with greater numbers of increasingly diverse actors involved, as well as more convoluted mechanisms through which aid is distributed” (44). She suggests conceptualizing these changes in the proliferation of new actors and relationships as networks, not partnerships, because the concept of partnership where multiple actors come to the table as equals and work toward a common goal is too simplistic in today’s world. A partnership lens does not encompass the convoluted mechanisms, messy relationships, or uncoordinated efforts in the field.The nature of these relationships can result in disparate influences in policy making. With a seat at the policy-making table, the power of nonstate actors is becoming evident (Gideon and Unterhalter 2021; Kilby 2021). Menashy (2019) sees both corporations and their related foundations as increasingly joining education partnerships (32) and having a much larger voice in policy making. In “the Global South, foundations are gaining prominence and are now members of several education-related partnerships” (Menashy 2019, 32). As part of a partnership, they become able to shape policy.8Similarly, although not about nonstate actors in particular, Oren Pizmony-Levy and colleagues’ research has clearly shown that some actors—most notably teacher unions but also many organizations in the Global South—are outside the policy conversations (Brøgger et al. 2016). Their research maps the networks through which policy discourses are shared, revealing dominance by the Global North and major development organizations.9 Many sessions at recent CIES conferences have also addressed power inequities in North-South partnerships and have examined the power relations of those sitting at the policy table. Sitting outside or on the periphery of these policy networks means not having a voice in shaping policy. Recognizing the patterns of influence and the discursive underpinnings are both integral to understanding what social responsibility means to different actors and what is prioritized.Social ResponsibilityThe “social responsibility” focus in the 2021 CIES conference theme invited us to unpack how we understand social responsibility. Across sessions at CIES 2021 we heard a variety of conceptualizations of social responsibility.The corporate world uses the term “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), although this narrow conceptualization was not the intention of the CIES 2021 theme. CSR suggests that companies should have a responsibility beyond their profit-making goals, yet it is also understood as “align[ing] a company’s social and environmental activities with its business purpose and values” (Rangan et al. 2015, para. 1), suggesting that CSR may be secondary to financial goals. CSR can prioritize customers, employees, or the world at large and have elements related to ethical, economic, environmental, or philanthropic responsibility. In CIE, the concept of social responsibility invites us to consider what a broader understanding of social responsibility might mean in the work done by the increasing variety of actors working in education globally, including ourselves. To many of us in CIES, it would mean taking a much more detailed look at the consequences—intended and unintended—of our agendas, priorities, actions, and so on, to unders
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