关注社会、环境与认识正义: 国际与比较教育研究的优先议题

This article is based upon an invited Keynote Presentation for the Eighth Worldwide Forum for Comparative Education (WWFCE) held at Beijing Normal University (BNU) in October 2024. It addresses the core Social Transformation theme for the conference, along with two sub-themes relating to Ecological Justice and Theoretical Innovation and Paradigm Shifts. Three levels of contemporary challenge are first identified: challenging global times; challenging times for education; and challenging times for Comparative and International Research in Education. This is the context within which we are all looking to the future. At the global level international tensions have increased and social inequalities remain persistent and on the rise; in education the recent UNESCO Report (2021) highlights the need to ‘Reimagine our Future Together’ through a new social contract; and in the field of Comparative and International Education theoretical and epistemic challenges are prioritising the critical interrogation of the intellectual foundations of our field, the foregrounding of decolonisation debates, ecologies of knowledge, and implications emerging from climate change and environmental uncertainty. Here, I will draw upon my own research in a diversity of countries worldwide - research that has long challenged the uncritical international transfer of educational policy and practice - in ways that highlight emergent epistemological and methodological tensions and developments. In doing so, I will consider the potential of different ‘ways of knowing’, of diverse qualitative research methodologies, the contemporary decolonisation movement, the place of indigenous knowledges, insider – outsider positionings, the co-construction of knowledge, and innovative forms of international research partnerships. Taken together, the arguments presented here point to ways in which social, environmental, and epistemic justice lie at the heart of future directions and transformative futures for comparative and international research in education.