Education and Belonging
1st December - 3rd December 2011
University of Sydney, Womens College
Educational settings – in all forms – provide important contexts for social
change.
How different countries educate their citizens reveals wide-ranging priorities of states and
societies.
This comparative education conference attempts to explore a range of ideas and experiences
about education and belonging:
whether within the walls of formal institutions like schools and universities, or through
the life ways of community, family and the environment.
The notion of belonging repeatedly, and often subtly, emerges as a common theme when people
recall their experiences and memories of education.
Contributors to this conference will explore the varying intensities and temporalities of
belonging.
At the outset we stated that educational settings provide important contexts for social
change.
Different countries and communities " educate " their citizens or members in
different ways.
...theory without empirical research is empty, empirical research
without theory is blind.
Pierre Bourdieu in Jenkins, R. (1992).
Providing a theoretical framework for a comparative study on belonging raises a series of
dichotomies. How can notions of belonging be situated in a changing global context? Theories
of globalisation continue to focus on diminishing borders between countries thus challenging
the future of the nation state and indeed of comparative education as a separate field of
study. Cosmopolitanism is one theory of globalization with a world view that refers to a
... vision of global democracy and world citizenship; for others it
points to the possibilities
for shaping new transnational frameworks for making links between social movements. Yet
others invoke cosmopolitanism to advocate non-communitarian, post-identity politics of
overlapping interest and heterogeneous or hybrid publics in order to challenge conventional
notions of belonging identity and citizenship. (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002:
1)
Held (2002) argues that globalists are at their strongest when focused on these institutional
and process changes in the domains of economics, politics and the environment, but are at
their most vulnerable when considering the movements of people, their attachments and their
cultural and moral identities.
Participants in this conference are invited to present on themes related to comparative and
international education and should take the opportunity to incorporate notions of belonging
within their research agendas.
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