An invitation to negative comparative education

Please note, the time and venue of this event has been changed. 

Professor Takayama’s journey involved transnational moves from Japan, Canada, US, Australia and back to Japan. He uses his story of relocations as an entry point for theorising what he means by ‘negative’ comparative education. 

It is a story of learning, with much struggle, to let go of the familiar language and frame of seeing the world and confronting the limits of previous knowing and opening oneself up for new ways of knowing and being. 

The story brings the notion of ‘comparison’ in comparative research that not only aims to understand others on their own terms but to let the otherness of others disrupt how we research. 

Professor Takayama argues that negative comparative education offers a methodological stance that enables us to undertake research in a manner that challenges the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge and contributes to the pluriverse world.

Drawing on Andrea English and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, he uses the term ‘negativity’ in the philosophical sense. It refers to affective experiences of discomfort, perplexity, confusion and suffering as an important catalysis for generative learning and unlearning. 

Links

• Department of Education, Practice and Society 

Image

• 'House of Flags' by Karen Roe via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)