Towards a new articulation of comparative education: Cross-culturalising research imaginations

Abstract

The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journal Hikakukyoikukenkyu (Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-language literature. Drawing on a review of the Japanese-language literature and semi-structured interviews with 25 JCES members, this paper identifies a particular intellectual tradition within JCES, often referred to as the area-studies approach to comparative education. This approach, often practised by JCES researchers specialising in developing countries in Asia, has long constituted the mainstay of comparative education scholarship in Japan. This paper traces the formation of this intellectual tradition, and focuses on its complex relationship with the dominant paradigm of 'paradigmatic' English-language comparative education scholarship. The paper shows how 'other' comparative education societies- such as the JCES- can be looked to as a resource with which to 'provincialise' the way comparative education research is conceptualised in English-language academia, and to cross-culturalise the field of comparative education.