COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING: NOTES ON DECOLONISING RESEARCH
Education policy, practice and research is particularly susceptible to ideological capture. Historically, education systems in settler-colonial societies have been used by colonial administrations to manage, assimilate and control indigenous populations, with devastating consequences for native communities. Recently, troubling associations between aspects of comparative and international education scholarship in the 1930s and Nazi ideologies were revealed in Comparative Education— a leading journal in the field. These uncomfortable histories have led to much intellectual soul-searching and a great deal of scholarly debate and reflection. Yet education policy and practice in settler-colonial space continues to be riven with power relations and this is not always reflected in contemporary comparative research. This raises many questions about our roles and responsibilities as comparative and international education researchers. Are we obliged to act as critics and conscience of our field? If so, what does that entail? To whom are we accountable? And, in Oceania, how can we act responsibly as indigenous, global, diasporic or white scholars as we enter the fraught and complicated territories of settler-colonial education?