ABSTRACT
In the last decade or so, ‘comparative education’ has changed. This is partly because the world has changed, and the political processes of that world and the words we use have become irritants and stimulants: information societies, post-colonial, neo-liberal, postmodern, globalised, post-socialist, knowledge economies, and so on. This has generated a flurry of new theorisation, not least because a new generation of scholars with their own fresh perspectives has reinterpreted the world that comparative education sees (Alexiadou 2007; Beech 2011; Carney 2010; Klerides 2012; Larsen 2011; Manzon 2011; Ninnes and Mehta 2004; Rappleye 2012; Silova 2009; Sobe 2009; Takayama 2011). The bonus which the fresh voices have given us – along with powerful creativities from Roger Dale, Erwin Epstein, Martin Lawn, António Nóvoa, Jenny Ozga, Susan Robertson, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and from my colleagues on the Board of this journal and from within the Comparative Education Society in Europe – is that it is even clearer that there are many more ‘comparative educations’ than I had anticipated when I first used that expression (Cowen 1990). All I was attempting to do, then, was to edge towards some simple distinctions between forms of comparative education and to develop some sense of what might be seen as the institutional infrastructures and superstructures of ‘comparative education’.
