Imagining Comparative Education: Past,Present, Future

The study is organised around three questions, i.e. (1) how have comparative educators, and relate scholars, used their creative imaginations to construct new knowledge and understanding about ways of representing changing educational phenomena and relations? (2) what genres and forms of representation have been appropriated or elaborated and how have these code choices influenced ways of seeing and thinking? and (3) can this self-reflexive history of imagination in practice be patterned as an intertextual field of difference, as a comparative cultural map that may help to open new vistas into the past and the future? In this, my desire is to move beyond the sterile polarities of modernist rule-making and poststructuralist nihilism in knowledge work. Here I should instead like to privilege a hermeneutic of imagination with its power of disclosure, which I believe marks our basic ethical ability to imagine oneself as another. Two figures and two tables help to visualise my argument and summarise findings.