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This discussion essay explores the theory–practice nexus in comparative and international education (CIE) from the author’s role as a third space professional and a budding academic-practitioner (Wilson, 1994) providing academic support to offshore international students at a New Zealand university. It engages with two debates related to the research–practice conundrum in CIE: The first debate relates to the boundaries between CIE and raise questions about the identities of theorists and practitioners in CIE. The author argues that regardless of their identities, implicit theories about why things happened and how things will change in the future are often held by practitioners and theorists alike. The second debate relates to the knowledge hierarchy in CIE and raise questions about who decides the value and utility of the kinds of knowledge produced. Drawing on the politics of knowledge production, the author highlights that it may be the implicit theories held by the theorists or practitioners that ultimately determine the knowledge they saw as useful and valuable.

This chapter addresses current trends regarding how the meta-theory of critical realism (CR) frames comparative and international education research and practice. It introduces the key tenets of CR and explores how these ideas have been and can be applied in educational research. It demonstrates how CR provides a valuable alternative to the positivist, interpretivist and constructivist paradigms, and leverages elements of all three to provide new approaches to develop knowledge that is free from the dualisms embedded in their ontological assumptions. I argue that by offering a dialectical understanding of structure and agency, as well as the material and ideational dimension of social reality, CR provides an ontological framework that does not do conceptual violence to the reality we seek to research. This ontological basis is particularly valuable to the social justice agenda of educational research in general because it allows researchers to work beneath the surface of empirical research to disclose the field of possibilities for social action.

This chapter employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine three key policy documents related to international education in New Zealand: The International Student Wellbeing Strategy (ISW), The New Zealand’s International Education Strategy 2018–2020 (IES), and The New Zealand’s Strategic Recovery Plan (SRP) for the International Education Sector. It asks, “How are discourses of international student wellbeing deployed in New Zealand’s international education policy documents?” The findings suggest that the actual targets of wellbeing in New Zealand international education policies were less the international students than New Zealand itself. I argue that discourses of international student wellbeing are instrumentalized in policy discourses to position New Zealand as a progressive and inclusive society and feed the competitive market dynamics driving the global international education market.