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Comparativists have been struggling with understanding the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) for over 60 years. Analyses of CIE knowledge production meet at least three limiting factors: questions of what should be constituent themes of the field (or “nodes” to structure analysis); how to code individual manuscripts as belonging to one comparative field and not another (e.g. should a manuscript be coded according to its geographic focus, its methodology, educational focus, or all three?); and then finally, how to deal with knowledge production that is not published through recognized Journals or publication outlets. I use 100 submissions to the Comparative Education Review (CER) in 2015 as a way to deal with the latter constraint, suggesting that such analysis may reflect new trends in the field. Further, to deal with other constraints, I have coded each manuscript according to its methodology, geographic focus, theme, type of manuscript (e.g. single case or comparative), and author characteristics (location of author). In reviewing the submissions, I find that the field as seen from the perspective of the CER submissions is dominated by single case studies (58%), and that quantitative studies (41%) are becoming increasingly more prominent. The studies mostly are focused on higher education (32%) and secondary education (21%). Authors in majority (61%) are based in the area studied. As regards themes, there seem to be no unity or grand narratives in the field. Despite interesting new trends as related to location of authors, CIE appears dominated by fairly traditional and conservative discourses as related to themes and epistemologies.

The implications and impacts of the educational intelligent economy from the vantage point of digital frontierism is explored using a decolonial framework, with a specific focus on Big Data and data sharing in Comparative and International Education (CIE). Recent debates are reviewed about CIE’s past histories and its current directions to tease out their implications for data sharing. The authors demonstrate how data sharing continues to reinforce imperialism through control, dissemination, and application of data, and how electronic and digital colonialism preserve current intellectual and structural hegemonies. Then, we give an example of how donors and funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, engage in neoliberal scientism and control of data, and how it affects the future of social sciences, including CIE. Our inquiry is at the intersections of economic intelligence and educational intelligence in a rapidly evolving technocentric, data-dominated, and networked economy. The authors demonstrate how educational intelligence in the global economy may exacerbate the asymmetric access to data between the global North and the South, as educational data are increasingly becoming global commodities to be traded between various public and private actors. Finally, the authors argue that decolonial participatory research designs that aim at positive, sustained transformations, as opposed to the stagnancy of Big Data and data mining, should be used to address the problems inherent to the Educational Intelligent Economy.

In the United States and other Anglophone countries in the Global North, there exists a rich and lengthy literature on how white teachers and teachers-in-training can and should begin to recognize, question and challenge their own privilege. Indeed, entire literatures have been developed around problematizing whiteness, and teacher education programs regularly incorporate this literature into preservice courses as an expected part of teacher training. However, despite similar proportions of white educators and researchers-in-training in comparative and international education, a similarly thorough discussion and unpacking of privilege is relatively lacking. Comparative and international education graduate programs rarely (if ever) incorporate multicultural education courses similar to those that have become staples in North American teacher education, and the literature interrogating whiteness in comparative education is still nascent. However, in 2015 several significant steps forward were taken into this dearly needed conversation, opening potential lines of continued inquiry. This essay outlines and begins to explore several of these directions for the future of the field: namely, critical self-studies of comparative educators, ethnographic research of racial dynamics in international education development organizations, and critical discourse analysis of prominent documents in international education and their recognition (or lack of such) of the role of race in sustaining global educational inequities.