Comparative Education Studies: Vision Statement

Comparative Education Studies is a response and an attempt to understand education in the 21st century, especially in terms of the complex challenges the countries of the global south have been undergoing. For us, the questions of education are interconnected to the larger historical, social, and political structures. In addition to these important intersections, the discipline of education also seriously engages with practice. The journal intends to be an independent forum that encourages rigorous, high-quality, original research with the intention of understanding and informing the wide spectrum of educational processes and practices that are at the fulcrum of change. Education as a field of enquiry demands an orientation towards the world, which includes not only changing the world but also caring for the world, the way it is. This kind of education can never be fully grasped without overcoming indifference; thus, any effort to preserve this spirit of education will spill outside the fixed categories and can only flourish in the plurality of ideas, theories, and methods.

Education as a discipline is of interest to different stakeholders including teachers, students, parents, policy makers and civic organisations. To be a platform for discussion and dialogue around diverse ideas, theories, methods and practices, CES encourages contributions that not only examine and understand the contemporary but also imagine alternative possibilities and futures. Questions and concerns of education refuse assumed typecasting and canonization in the categories of theory-practice, structure-agency, school-milieu; thus, to think of education means to think along various oppositions simultaneously which usually cuts across disciplinary boundaries. The journal is located along the constitutive link that reconciles and bridges these categories. It aims to further the knowledge that deepens our understanding of issues central to education in South Asia and internationally. While questioning the totalizing nature of decontextualized theory and methodology, the journal invites papers that attempt to intensify one’s experiences with field-based practices, thereby, developing concrete and specific linkages between theory and practice leading to theory-building.