Politics of Education in Asia

This series focuses on the politics of education in Asia, inquiring into the processes of education reforms in the region in ways that foreground issues of equity, access and power relations. The series especially welcomes contributions that document the complex and contradictory interactions among various education agents and agencies in Asia – ministries of education, state boards and agencies, schools, teachers and teacher unions, university departments of education, local interest groups, the media, international standards agencies and global educational reform discourses. In thus illuminating the multiple sites of conflict and contestation both between and within the state and these agents, such a collection highlights the ways in which struggles over education in the region continue to reflect struggles over visions of social order, the unequal distribution of knowledge and opportunities, and entrenched relations of power and social control.

Among the questions the book series pursues include:

 What do emerging understandings of civil society in Asia tell us about the ability of states to hold on to a singular conception of legitimate knowledge?

 What are the discursive spaces created by democratic movements and what is their potential for counter-hegemonic educational work?

 What happens to "non-official", popular and/or traditional knowledges and cultures, how are these positioned (if at all) and what sites of resistance do they create?

 What are the fields of power within which counter-hegemonic groups are working, what ideals and ideologies are they coalescing around and how does the state provide – or concede – spaces for some of these groups?

 In a region marked by the brutal histories of colonialism, how are new waves of education reforms emanating from the West and supra-national organizations such as the OECD negotiated and appropriated?

 Given the rising levels of education of its citizens and the democratization of new media, what tensions and challenges do states encounter in continuing to use the curriculum as a form of social control?

These research questions are framed by a larger interest in the politics of education in the region and will draw upon interdisciplinary analyses of history, cultural studies, political science, economics, gender studies, sociology, globalization studies, philosophy and epistemology.