Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education

This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on “Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education,” brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field’s founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These logics gained legitimacy through the Cold War geopolitical contexts in which the field was established and have shaped subsequent approaches including the much-debated world-culture approach to globalization in education. The article then reviews decolonial, postcolonial, and southern theory scholarship as an intellectual resource upon which CIE scholars and practitioners can draw to tackle these active colonial legacies. We situate the contribution of this special issue within this larger intellectual movement and call for a major collective rethinking of the way CIE knowledge is produced and circulated on a global scale.