Becoming Comparative and International Educationalists in Oceania

Abstract

The authors write as three education practitioner-researchers with different disciplinary and professional backgrounds and locations, and who met through their involvement in comparative and international education (CIE). The authors’ connections with each other, and with CIE, have grown through their engagement with their regional society, Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES). This engagement has spanned the transition of the society from the Australia and New Zealand CIES (ANZCIES) to a more regionally representative identity. In this discussion paper, the authors set out to trace intersections of personal, shared, and collective “becomings” as CIE practitioner-researchers, through vignettes over the arc of these past seven years since their first meetings. The authors connect their observations and reflections about annual conference locations and themes visited during this period of accelerated decolonization of OCIES, through topics salient in contemporary CIE and wider debates: identification, identities, and positioning, including ethnic, gendered, and racial dimensions and discriminations, as markers of identification. The authors engage with concepts of decolonization, foreign-ness, and insider/outsider/neither formulations. Discussion reflects on their coming to know each other, CIE, theirselves, and their praxis. Among and around these spatial and temporal locations, the authors situate observations and reflections that have variously influenced, marked, and spanned their early career relationships and sharing, with reference to global and regional CIE works. These reflections accompany their own published, and fresh, perspectives in this sense-making and sharing of their discussions, ongoing, with CIE readers as a wider audience (Fonua, 2021; McCormick, 2017; Shah et al., 2017; Spratt & Coxon, 2020).

Citation

Fonua, S.M., McCormick, A. and Spratt, R. (2022), "Becoming Comparative and International Educationalists in Oceania", Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 42A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-36792022000042A006