Comparative and International Education Research Network

Who are we?

We are a vibrant group of academic staff and HDR students with diverse academic interest but what binds us together is to look at education from a global perspective. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives, including Marxism, postcolonial theory, Southern Theory, post-humanism, post-critical education research and feminist post-structuralism, we all try to make sense of the implications of globalizations (both from above and below) to education practice, policy and theory both within Australia and abroad.  

Goals

No doubt that research outputs are important in today's university environment. But we take some distance from such an output-driven approach to our research where we are expected to work towards 'projected outputs' usually set at the beginning of a year. We believe that outputs are not something we can 'project' before we even meet up and learn about each other. It makes more sense to us to view outputs as something that emerges through dialogue (and sometime through heated argument and disagreement!). Outputs should not dictate the process of our research and knowledge production. It should be the other way around; the quality of the process itself determines what we end up producing. Based on this principle, we see that the primary goal of CIERN is in capacity building. This makes sense to us, because we have a large number of early career academics. We meet every fortnightly to discuss articles and books of mutual interest or help each other with research ideas and writings.

Projects

Currently, we are working towards an edited book tentatively titled Doing Southern Theory in/for education. The book takes up Raewyn Connell's (2007) book Southern Theory and explores how education researchers can enact the idea of Southern Theory in and for education.  

If you have queries about this research network or would like to join, please contact the network leader, Dr. Keita Takayama (ktakayam@une.edu.au)