Changing Knowledge and Education : Communities, Mobilities and New Policies in Global Societies

On the move and being transformed. People and knowledge, just like ideas and institutions, travel around the world and change as they do. It is a classic problem in Comparative Education and we do have a contemporary interpretation of it. Currently, we have the generalised discourse of globalisation about ‘the cause’ of contemporary movements. We have new vocabularies for some of the social processes that may be involved: time-space compression, globalisation, new transnational identities, post-colonialities, and also all sorts of saturating and unproblematic catchwords. We also have some assertions about the educational prospects which must follow from such a cause and such processes – the forthcoming triumphs of e-learning, new forms of knowledge management, better and better skill-formation systems (and so on). This book presents the outcomes of the 21st Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), held in Granada, in Summer 2006, and brings together studies by twenty-five international leading scholars and new researchers from the scientific fields of education, sociology, economics, and anthropology who thoroughly explore our contemporary reading of what is global, the way we comparatively understand this world of new mobilities and old beliefs and stabilities, in which we witness new movements of persons and peoples, scientific ideas and religions, information and information systems, government and management models, as well as the commodification of available identities.

On the move and being transformed. People and knowledge, just like ideas and institutions, travel around the world and change as they do. It is a classic problem in Comparative Education and we do have a contemporary interpretation of it. Currently, we have the generalised discourse of globalisation about ‘the cause’ of contemporary movements. We have new vocabularies for some of the social processes that may be involved: time-space compression, globalisation, new transnational identities, post-colonialities, and also all sorts of saturating and unproblematic catchwords. We also have some assertions about the educational prospects which must follow from such a cause and such processes – the forthcoming triumphs of e-learning, new forms of knowledge management, better and better skill-formation systems (and so on). This book presents the outcomes of the 21st Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), held in Granada, in Summer 2006, and brings together studies by twenty-five international leading scholars and new researchers from the scientific fields of education, sociology, economics, and anthropology who thoroughly explore our contemporary reading of what is global, the way we comparatively understand this world of new mobilities and old beliefs and stabilities, in which we witness new movements of persons and peoples, scientific ideas and religions, information and information systems, government and management models, as well as the commodification of available identities.