Susan Robertson & Mario Novelli • FreshEd

Susan Robertson & Mario Novelli
2023 in Review

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #341 – 2023 in Review (Susan Robertson & Mario Novelli)

Overview

As we near the end of 2023, it’s time to take stock of the year. What were the big events in 2023 and how might they impact the field of CIE? What new ideas emerged? And where is our field headed in 2024? Continuing this FreshEd tradition, Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli join me for the last episode of the year.

Mario Novelli is professor in the political economy of education at the University of Sussex. Susan Robertson is a professor of the sociology of education at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. They co-edit the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Citation: Robertson, Susan, Novelli, Mario, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 341, podcast audio, December 25, 2023. https://freshedpodcast.com/2023inreview/

Transcript

Will Brehm 0:00
Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli, welcome to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 0:52
Thanks so much, Will. It’s wonderful to be back again on the edge of 2023, and just about to head into 2024.

Mario Novelli 0:59
It’s great to be with you again.

Will Brehm 1:01
So, let’s start this sort of reflection of 2023 by picking up a point that Bob Cowen mentioned in his last piece, I think, that he wrote before he passed away, and that was published in Comparative Education. He mentions briefly this topic of war, and how it was a silence or has been a silence in the field of comparative education. And of course, he passed away before the Gaza and Israel war broke out. But of course, he was sort of reflecting on the Ukraine war, when he was making these points. How do you see this connection between war and comparative education?

Mario Novelli 1:37
I guess there’s two ways that you could explore this in relation to the history of comparative and international education. I would say that the first one is war could be understood as an emission from the field precisely, I think, because the intellectual foundations of the field are located both in European imperialism and also American imperialism. So, you’ve got kind of two, in a sense, foundational impulses for the growth and emergence of the fields, where the purpose of the field was actually about supporting those processes of imperialism or US hegemony later on. And therefore, it’s not surprising that war was omitted from the analysis. In a sense, if we talk about US led comparative and international education, in a sense, it’s kind of foundational mantra would be rooted around comparative advantage of Western states based around human capital theory, for example. So, the reason Shultz would argue the West is advanced is because it has more human capital, it’s invested more in human capital. It wouldn’t argue that the reason the US is most advanced is that it’s invaded more countries than any other on the planet, or that its foundational strength is its military advantage in which it’s happily used, both itself and also through its proxies over the years. So, I guess there is that kind of sense that war is not part of the narrative of comparative education for those reasons. It’s a way of hiding some of the kind of foundational roots. So, there you think, you know, let’s contrast modernization theory to, for example, dependency theory, which would argue that actually, violence is at the heart of the evolution of capitalism. So, that’s part of it. And then the second dimension, I think, is that when war has been treated as a serious topic, which, particularly since the 90s, we’ve seen the emergence of the field of education in emergencies, then war is something out there, which we the benevolent West, enter into, and try to help to resolve and you know, so we have all this sets of toolkits and sets of ways of thinking about how to understand conflict in the Global South, how to intervene in conflict in the Global South, and, you know, whole literature’s on peacebuilding, and post-conflict reconstruction, delivering education in the midst of war, but a lot of that -and I’ve been part of that story for the last two decades- a lot of that research really kind of separates itself from the conflict as if the conflicts are out there, and education systems are out there, and we’re intervening in them, no? It’s a bit not dissimilar, I think, from the speech that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have talked about in the last couple of weeks where they lament the deaths of Palestinian children and women but are silent on the fact that they just agreed 8 billion in US dollars in weaponry. So, I think that that longer history is also about -we look at the humanitarian aid that the West sends, but we don’t look at the weapons that we produce and sell and deal with, no? So, it’s in a sense, both of those dimensions, I think, revealed the hypocrisy, not only of our governments and our leaders, but also our fields because we are also complicit in those processes of hiding reality, pushing it down, avoiding it. And I think that many of these things are coming to the surface now. People are no longer necessarily prepared to accept that narrative they’re starting to push, and I think that’s creating a lot of tensions.

Susan Robertson 5:39
Can I offer a slightly different vector as well, I think the comparative international education -so, international takes you off on a particular vector. But let’s say if we looked just at comparative education, which is a method, isn’t it? We’re comparing in order to make visible politics, for instance. And it’s been really interesting for me in some recent work I’ve been doing looking at the kinds of heuristics, let’s say Mark Bray’s cube, and so on. And nowhere on that cube, do we have a way of actually trying to understand social relations like class. And yet, why wouldn’t we be looking at the Global South -and I mean the Global South within, in other words- and the kind of violence for example, that we see. A couple of French writers Dardot and Laval talk about this as a low intensity class war that we’ve been living through, and in fact, we can characterize neoliberalism that way. And to some extent, I think, governing by numbers, and these more assemblage kinds of approaches, don’t enable us to actually look very closely at what’s going on inside our places, our spaces, our countries, our communities, cities, and so on. And so, I think there’s that other omission that comparative education really should address. And I imagine if we were talking to Bob now -in fact, Bob, basically, in one of the last pieces that I read, that he wrote before he died, and he was a wonderful intellectual, was actually asking for more sociological kinds of analyses there. That some of the best comparative work actually drew from a more confident social science tradition with disciplines kind of sitting at the base, and so on, so that we can compare what’s going on for different classes, for example, and what’s going on, if we look at the combined and uneven development that we see characterizes many places, now, UK, United States, Mexico, and so on. So, I think that’s what I’d also want to put on the table and kind of think with Bob about what will we see now, when we use comparative education in a much more expansive way methodologically?

Will Brehm 5:56
Both insights are quite interesting in my mind, and I think both of you are sort of highlighting, there’s a politics at play. And I think, Susan, you said that comparison can help reveal some of these politics. And Mario, you sort of said, that a lot of these politics are coming to the surface now, and sometimes in rather uncomfortable ways for a lot of people. And I think this comes particularly in university campuses, where there’s this big issue of free speech today. And we see countless examples of this around the world. More people are being policed in what they can or cannot say, or didn’t say something correctly. And I just would be keen to hear from you, you know, in 2023, how did you navigate some of these sorts of politics of free speech on your university campuses, and in sort of your intellectual lives that of course, go well beyond the specific universities where you work?

Mario Novelli 8:29
We live in times where the global economic system, even for those that it was designed to support, is no longer functioning. Neoliberalism as an economic model seems to me to not even be providing the basics for the middle classes that it relied on to build that kind of hegemonic project. So, we’re seeing mass movement of migrants in different parts of the world because in some places, it’s basically a question of life or death. I was in Miami two weeks ago, stuck for 24 hours because I missed a connection. And walking around Miami, I was shocked to see the amount of homelessness and poverty in what is one of the most powerful countries in the world. So, in a sense, you’ve got a crisis of a model. So, it’s unsurprising to me now that suddenly there is a huge crackdown on intellectual spaces, because when the West has lost its moral authority, and I think it’s lost its moral authority. Not now, not Palestine, Palestine is a new step. But I think since 9/11, the West has decided to tear down the rules of the international liberal order through mass violence, the killing of countless 1,000’s in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of black sites and abductions and massive violence. And now what we see in the conflict Palestine-Israel, in a sense, the defense of the indefensible requires actually not only arguments, it also requires repression. And I think that’s what we’re seeing, because essentially, I think those that are being repressed, as we speak, are trying to historicize conflicts that are taking place. They’re trying to tell, for example, in the Isreal-Palestine issue that you can’t look at this from October the seventh and say, that’s where these things begin. You need to take a longer purview. And that is incredibly comfortable for a country like my own that I’m sitting in, where we have to talk about the Balfour Declaration, we have to talk about the role of the British in that process. It’s incredibly difficult to talk about this in the United States where the whole system seems to be linked to the use of Israel as its kind of watchdog in the Middle East. And the fact that Israel has been the biggest recipient of US military aid since its creation reflects the fact that it is a useful tool for the United States in its overall global domination processes. So, I think in terms of the scale of that repression, it seems to me that the US campuses have become very quickly targeted precisely because they’re based much more on private capital. Private capital has much more of a quick way. A philanthropist threatens to withdraw its funding and then the next thing we know is that people start to lose their jobs, there are crackdowns on campuses. But one shouldn’t underestimate the chilling effect that this is happening also on UK campuses. It’s so difficult to talk about the issue of Palestine, so difficult to mobilize some students and staff, a real sense of anxiety amongst colleagues to say anything. And there is a deep irony in this because actually those that were pushing freedom of speech where the right for so many years, arguing that the campuses were full of woke students and academics and that they were closing down free speech, and we needed to open up those spaces for freedom of speech. Toby Young, Doug Stokes, and the other groups that are rallying for those arguments in the UK, totally silent over the last few weeks. The silence actually is deafening. And I think that that exactly shows to those liberals that fell into those arguments on our campuses, who have accepted the new regulations of the office for students to regulate freedom of speech, etc. We’re caught up now in a trap, which actually privileges right-wing discourses and silences left-wing discourses under the banner of freedom of speech.

Susan Robertson 12:37
That’s the paradox, isn’t it? And I think I agree with you, Mario. This year, and particularly since the beginning of October, there has been a ramping up, but this has been here well over 20 years. We see Prevent -it was Prepare but becomes Prevent- come in in the early 2000’s. There are other elements too that, I think, are really difficult here, Will, and that includes, for example, there’s a kind of ramping up of the stakes of China versus the United States and so-called West, and that’s very uncomfortable for our Chinese colleagues, for example. Students who feel as if they’re not welcome, it’s kind of a level of racism. That includes Australia, actually. If you are a Chinese student, for instance, and you want to study in the biotech area, you’re going to be strongly looked at, and if not policed out of enrollments in those kinds of programs. So, we have the awful awful developments that have taken place over the last couple of months between the Israeli state and its military and what’s going on in Gaza. But you know, you run it out the other way, and have a look at the head-to-head competition between particularly the United States. But we shouldn’t reduce it to the US. The Netherlands, Germany, all of these countries have actually got a limit on the kinds of partnerships and so on that can now be set up. And existing partnerships finding it really difficult -Germany to China, for instance, will be an example.

Will Brehm 13:59
So, sticking with sort of political economy here, it seems like 2023, we also saw sort of the cost of living as a word that became sort of very well known. Everyone talks about cost of living. I think it even made the word of the year here in Australia. Of course, it’s about inflation, it’s about the price of goods, it’s about the price of fuel. And I just was wondering, in your opinion, how does comparative education sort of help us think about the cost-of-living crisis both within countries but also globally in your mind?

Mario Novelli 14:32
We’ve already talked about the fact that there is a failure in the global economic model to deliver the basic necessities across the world to different degrees, of course, no? And that’s why we have concepts like relative poverty, etc. to understand the differential nature of this crisis. We shouldn’t underestimate the gaps in terms of all the inequalities globally as well as within countries. But we should also link those things to conflict, because it’s not just the failure of the economic model, but then there is a military model or a military solution to certain conflicts that has exacerbated those tensions. So, we take the Russia-Ukraine conflict and that has led to massive military spending, a massive hike in energy crisis, which of course has affected and exacerbated already ongoing failures of the economic model. And of course, education enters into that in different ways. We seem always to have enough money for weapons, always. We always seem to be able to find those weapons and find the resources for those, but we don’t necessarily find those resources for public education. So, when budgets are threatened, then we have to look at where economies can be reduced and that often hits those public social sectors. So, I think that education slots in there, because once you’re in crisis mode, then you stop to plan for the future. And we’re precisely in a time where we have to look forward but massive technological changes, we need to invest in the future. And it’s precisely the time when we’re saying, Well, we haven’t got any money in public funds, and therefore, we need to retrench or support the private sector, etc. So, there is all that kind of dimensions of education. But you know, more generally, I think that this then also increases the unevenness through, for example, international development assistance. I mean, we’ve seen over the last few years, a massive slashing of international development assistance by the UK. And I’ve always said that we shouldn’t also just look at the volumes of money, but also ask the questions of where that money is going. And of course, the little money that is left in the UK has actually been all siphoned towards geopolitical interests. So, towards Ukraine, towards particular political support for certain regimes at the expense of targeting to those most in need. So, I think that there are a range of different ways that one could link comparative education, and reflect on those that don’t necessarily get framed in our field in those ways because we often narrow down on the educationism and forget those kinds of intersections.

Susan Robertson 17:20
So, Mario, the 2024 conference in Miami, we’re having a dialogue session on tax justice, foregrounding that as one of the kinds of highlighted presidential sessions. And essentially, Wolfgang Streeck, put it very nicely in his book 2014 Buying Time, we move from a tax state to a debt state, and its families that are indebted, and essentially, that releases money that then gets shoved off, as Mario said, in the direction of weapons and other forms of violence. But you remain with a kind of violence, don’t you? Because essentially, what you’ve got is kind of the rise of much more kind of precarious, low paid jobs. In fact, actually, here in the UK, the number of people who are living on quite low levels of benefits, because actually, it doesn’t pay to actually work, it pays to be on a fairly kind of tiny kind of state support system than to be actually out in the workplace. Comparative education, I think, in that sense needs to challenge things like so-called graduate premium. A concept like that, for instance that’s hugely distorted by what doctors and dentists and let’s say, hedge fund managers and so on earn. When you actually strip those kinds of occupations out, what you see is that it probably even doesn’t pay to go to university anymore. And that’s an awful shame because essentially, if we’ve couched the way in which we think of education as an investment to get on in the future, and not an investment in knowledge, then we’ve got a very poor, you know, almost a kind of reduced understanding of the possibilities for education. So, the concepts even that we work with, in our everyday education worlds, actually, I think we need to really revisit those about thinking of the public nature of education, the nature of education being a global public good, and so on, and see if we can’t lean into some of those different understandings and get a different conversation on the table.

Will Brehm 19:17
One of the things that I find so interesting with the cost-of-living crisis -it’s sort of linked to what the two of you are saying- some of these sort of class divides within societies and the debt, for instance, that a lot of people are, of course, taking on particularly to go to university, of course, isn’t felt by everybody, right? There’s certain groups in society that aren’t going into debt because they have a huge amount of money in their bank account. And when you have a lot of money in your bank account and interest rates go up, all of a sudden, you are earning a lot more money, which sort of further exacerbates the inequality that pre-existed and I think we’re seeing this sort of constantly where there’s this widening gap, as Mario mentioned when he was walking around Miami the other week. And so, for me, it would be interesting to think about how then does that impact education? And one of the things that I recently learned with an interview with Barbara Preston is about how a lot of parents pay for school fees in Australia for their children to go to private schools. But what happens is they let the grandparents pay those fees. So, then the private school can get more public funding to support it and just distorts everything. And I feel like the cost-of-living crisis is just exacerbating some of these inequalities among social classes. So, I want to shift gears now to something slightly different than politics and economics -well, maybe probably a bit of both- but a slightly different focus of something that really jumped on the scene in 2023. Now, of course, probably existed before, but seemed to really almost come out of nowhere this year, and that’s Chat GPT, and artificial intelligence more broadly. Susan, how do you see the challenges that Chat GPT and AI more generally have or will have on education?

Susan Robertson 21:00
Artificial intelligence and what it’s going to do to radically disrupt society’s been with us probably since the 1950’s, -much earlier of course, but in the so-called what they call the Babbage machine. If you could mechanize, for example, ways of calculating, and this was partly to do with trade movements, and things like that, then you’d be able to figure out the redistribution of production and so on. But you’re absolutely right, on the 30th of November last year 2022, Open Source launched what’s called Chat GPT. But essentially, it’s a large language processing model based on pattern recognition, and there essentially, if let’s say, we asked it to say -we could take FreshEd, and it probably sucked up a lot of your data in there Will all your different conversations that you’ve had over the years, and it would probably be able to give you an account of broadly, what are the topics that have been covered by FreshEd. I don’t know if you’ve done this yet. Now, you can see, for example, that if you were a student in university, hard pressed for time, and you wanted to get an essay done, you could say, you know, what’s the difference between something I did yesterday, humanitarianism and humanism, and it can spit out quite quickly what looks to be human formed kind of prose. But of course, it’s not. It’s recognizing patterns. And the algorithm, of course, that’s at the heart of this looks at essentially what typically, if you’re looking at very large amounts of language out there, including also more recently more visual material, how do these kinds of things tend to kind of come together as statements of something of a fact. So, it can tell you that humanitarianism broadly has a concern with human beings, but it is much more focused in on perhaps doing something about that distribution of aid, etc. Whereas humanism as opposed to humanitarianism is a particular philosophy. So, it can kind of get that right. But it can also get things badly wrong, because it’s both sucking up huge amounts include fake, and it’s often described as a kind of a confident, preppy student. Confident because it puts it out it. The way it starts off the statement, and concludes and so on, is almost a beautifully formed undergraduate essay in a pretty well healed university, I would say. But essentially, this has also now got universities, particularly in schools kind of spinning. What does this mean for the kind of pedagogy that they have and forms of assessment? What does this actually mean for even people’s jobs? If we’re thinking about the promise that it can be a tutor, it can mark work, and so on. So, China, for example, launched its own version, but they’re being much more modest about and managing actually who can even sign up and get a subscription there. But there’s a war that’s now brewing between the United States and China -I’m describing this as AI nationalisms, which to some extent gets in the way because artificial intelligence is many different things. It’s not simply large language processing models, which is what Chat GPT is. One other thing that I would say here, I mean, it comes out of the largely unregulated tech sector in the United States. Tech is much more closely regulated but probably deeply is problematic in China. And now we’ve got these AI wars but particularly Chat GPT kind of wars kind of taking place. Some bit of a Claude, which is a kind of an offshoot of the Chat GPT Open Access version is kind of self-styled, it’s got an ethical constitution, but at the same time, it’s a profit-seeking corporation. So, there’s efforts to try and distinguish yourself out there. But what this does mean, I think, is we can see many papers coming up in the conference in Miami for comparative and international education thinking about these issues. In China, every student actually has to study artificial intelligence and try and make sense of it. We do need a critical literacy around these kinds of issues in a bid to both understand its underpinning political economy, the diversity. The thing about hype is that it hides things. And the question is what’s being hidden? Where are the biases? And where are the misrecognitions? Where are the falsehoods and so on? So, interesting, I use it at times as an interlocutor, but at the same time, they come health warnings. And please don’t think that Elon Musk who kind of says well, none of us are going to have to work anymore. Now, unless we fix the economic system, and have a mechanism for redistribution, you know, essentially, this heightens precarity, it doesn’t make it all go away.

Will Brehm 25:36
I have this dystopian dream about AI in my work at university where, if students are just using AI to create these essays, and there’s ways of getting AI to mark those essays, that then frees me up to work with students in different ways, right? So, we can get out of this, like managerial, neoliberal university through AI. I don’t know, I keep thinking about it, and how to bring it to life. Am I crazy, Mario?

Mario Novelli 26:02
That sounds like a fantastic idea.

Susan Robertson 26:04
Aristotle said, I love work, I really love it. He said, I could sit here and watch it all day. But essentially, unless you fix the ways in which people can figure out how to live social reproduction bottom line, then, and this means redistribution. I mean, we did see experiments. And it’d be interesting to know what happened to those. The living wage in Kenya, Finland, and others. And again, I’m not sure what the overall sense of that was but for Musk, this is a genie being lit out of the bottle. But we need other kinds of really insightful ways of thinking about how we can live well together. And that actually means forms of redistribution, that excessive wealth that’s been built up by, let’s say, a very small number in Silicon Valley, for example, it’s astonishing. I mean, it’s eye watering. If you think of that kind of money that just gets wasted week on week on week, rockets going up to see how far you can get up. What if you put that money into Miami, and people on the streets? I mean, it’s such an indictment of where we are as human beings.

Mario Novelli 27:06
Yeah, no. I think you framed it nicely, Susan, when you say that the relationship between the kind of technological advances and the economic social model that needs to be established alongside that in order to benefit from it. And if you have one without the other, that can create a great deal of fear. And of course, historically, we’ve always been told that the future is workless, that we’re all going to sit around finding complicated ways to enjoy our leisure time but that never quite comes. We just keep having the intensification of labor precisely for those reasons. But clearly, there are massive implications in terms of changing nature of labor relations within the education system, which, as you’ve written so much about -both of you- around the kind of global education industry. Clearly, that’s going to affect it massively. I was just looking at new language learning possibilities of Chat GPT, where you can have a kind of online interlocutor who will talk to you in any language that you choose. And so, you can imagine a whole industry of language teaching. The British Council shaking in its boots there, because its model is so based around the spread of English.

Susan Robertson 28:15
Mario, when it goes wrong. So, I’ll give you an example. It’s not an education example but you could see -and there is an education example, when they ran the algorithm to do with allocation of student marks just toward the end of COVID. But the other example here is what’s called the post office scandal. And it’s an algorithm that was incorrect. And it begins to actually identify and accuse post office masters and mistresses of infidelity to do with money and about 700 lost their jobs. Now, this was the problem of the algorithm. And only 90 people have ever had the charges dropped. A further what 600 or so people have still got charges against them. Some have died, some have had periods of time in prison, others, their families have been completely destroyed, their livelihoods loss. Now that’s an algorithm that was wrong. And the post office refused to accept when it begins to see a pattern here that in fact, actually somehow, they got a technological kind of problem that they were facing. This was constantly then and continues to be presented as a people problem. And I think that stains is a really interesting example of when things go wrong. So, it’s now we’ve got a marking kind of system here, because it is a view that there are products out there that teachers are even using right now. But what if it gets it wrong? I mean, the stakes and the costs in education is your future or not the way education worlds now operate that would be significant.

Mario Novelli 29:41
And I think the other dimension is this, which I think you alluded to but maybe needs to be fleshed out is the repository of knowledge upon which Chat GPT draws upon reflects global inequalities in knowledge production, knowledge making and will reproduce those. So, I think there was a short Tik Tok video around somebody’s asking Chat GPT if Israelis, and then later Palestinians deserve the right to their own nation and to be free. And on the question of Israel was all people have a right to be free. And when it came to Palestinians, it said, this is a complicated question that requires a lot of -you know, so it reflects the way that these issues have been framed, historically. And then we think about the hegemony of the English language, the hegemony of certain ways of thinking and framing, the lack of an ecology of knowledge in our global knowledge making world which all tend to produce kind of a narrowing down rather than a kind of opening up, which I think needs to be challenged. And again, that’s the importance of pushing for a more plural, global governance regime because we’ve been so dominated by one particular Western hegemonic kind of leadership, particularly since the end of the Cold War, that all of these innovations kind of filter themselves through that. And, you know, if we want to kind of have a diversity of thought, we need a diversity of governance, we need more voices, we need more general assemblies and less Security Council’s, I think.

Susan Robertson 31:25
Just on that, just a very quick way of finishing that, Ada Lovelace who writes, The first algorithm for computers basically said, the algorithm only does what we ask it to do, and it doesn’t do anything more, or anything less. It doesn’t run off and do all these other things that we’re not aware of. So, this is a human invention, and we have to understand the consequences. So, the hype and so on needs to be pierced, it seems to me. We need to kind of explode that and have wide ranging conversations that are much more nuanced.

Will Brehm 31:55
I totally agree. And I just read this Nature article about these mathematicians who solve a pure mathematics problem that has gone unsolved for decades, or centuries, or forever, I should say, of the comp set problem and it was solved through artificial intelligence. They created these models that trained each other, and basically, they solved the problem. I mean, so it’s sort of like everything you said, all of the sort of, you know, don’t believe the hype, or look beyond the hype and all the inequalities that happen, that it’s human systems, all the biases, you know, all of that is true. And this other side is true that we are able to do something that has never been done by humans before. And I think that creates even more sort of complexity around this issue.

Susan Robertson 32:39
Absolutely, and partly because it’s based on algebra. An algebra which is an Arabic-Hindu. It’s not an abacus, it’s algebra. And algebra actually has the capacity to work with very large numbers, but in a very parsimonious kind of way, because of the way in which algebra itself actually works. Now, then you add computing power to that, and you’ve got something startling. But we shouldn’t also think that this is neutral and the cost, the sheer computing costs, I mean, our energy, let’s just call it energy costs to do this are astonishing. So, you know, we euphemistically say, well, it’s all up in the cloud. But of course, it’s not up in the cloud. These are physical infrastructures that sit in places like Greenland, to cool down their computing and so on. These are voracious. And the minute we begin to think that this is kind of like a horizon that’s going to go on forever, with no limits, we’re just walking into another climate kind of issue.

Will Brehm 33:33
Yeah. Neil Selwyn gave a great talk at the AARE conference in Melbourne this year. And when he talked about AI, he said, it’s socially unsustainable and environmentally unsustainable. I totally agree with him. And he sort of says he would love to just put the genie back in the bottle and not have to deal with it. Let’s turn to -I guess we’re probably not going to be able to get through every topic that we had planned for today. But I really would love to give listeners some sort of reading recommendations. What have you been reading in 2023? What would be a recommendation that you could give the audience of a book that really hit home to you, and you think you’ll be using into the future going forward?

Mario Novelli 34:13
Two books that I’ve read this year that kind of slip into my vocabulary a bit and framing. One was Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism that I really enjoy, and I think helps us to kind of understand precisely this kind of crisis that we were talking about which builds on all of the critiques of neoliberalism that we had for several decades and that we’ve all tried to contribute to in education, but also frames it in quite interesting ways to show its irrationality. So, this kind of cannibal capitalism idea, I think was useful. And then the second book that I’ve really enjoyed, and I think helps to frame some contemporary issues is Olufemi Taiwo’s, Against Decolonization, which, in a sense, coming from a kind of African critique of the decolonization discourse to show the ways that if decolonization is used as this kind of totalizing discourse, it often kind of undermines African agency, African histories. I’ll give some simple examples; if you believe that everything that has emerged out of your society is a result of colonialism, it in a sense, denies you a pre-history, but it also denies kind of your own agency. So, I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Olufemi Taiwo believes in that, but I think it’s been a useful antidote to a kind of new hegemonic language, which like many theories and many frames doesn’t tell the whole story. And we need to open that up. Just as kind of, for example, dependency theory with its emphasis on the role of US imperialism and Western imperialism often kind of hid the nefarious role of endogenous capitalist classes within the societies and that you needed to open up that. So, I think that Olufemi’s work, and others is opening up a kind of new way to diversify and complexify the discourses of decolonization, and to also link them up, and open them up because you get a sense sometimes that people think that decolonization kind of emerges out of post-colonial theory and that there is no previous decolonial struggle and decolonial thinkers that actually did the real struggle of rejecting Western nations out of their occupied countries. So, those two books have been important.

Will Brehm 36:55
Susan, what about you?

Susan Robertson 36:56
Yeah. I read Nancy Fraser’s book and was very excited by Cannibal Capitalism. It’s a manifesto and so here’s what I’ve been trying to do in my own work. And I’ve been trying to understand using a kind of a Marxist kind of language the making of markets and how to begin to think about that. And if you read Nancy, essentially, the world of education is still in the hidden abode. You know, Marx talked about the hidden about being the private home space. And Nancy places it there. Now in the world I live in, it’s definitely not there. It’s driven by knowledge economy discourses, but it generates significant revenues and things like that. And so, the book that I’m going to say really does give us a much more sophisticated language to try and understand the things that I’m trying to understand around the capitalizing of education and drawing into the economy as a form of imperialism to think with Rosa Luxemburg is Søren Mau’s? book called Mute Compulsion. And it’s an amazing book. It was his PhD, beautifully written actually, very clear, and there are issues and so on. But what Mau was trying to do on this is to add another more of a kind of complicated lexicon. Mute compulsion, essentially, is once you can get markets kind of working, for example, then they kind of took over, but they are a form of domination. And he kind of compares it -on the one hand, we tend to think of ideology, or we tend to think of violence. But what’s quite exciting about this book, actually, is also that what they’re trying to do actually, is to look at social reproduction. So, it draws on new social reproduction theory, but it also is telling us that Marx didn’t get it right at that time. He’s thinking about industrial Britain and the 19th century. So, what we need to do is not to stick with a Marxist language, as if a fundamentalist would, but to bring Marx into the world of today, and to try and understand our worlds that we’re both living in and do the kind of development work on some of the Marxist kind of categories and concepts that actually fit us out better for the kind of -let’s go back to the beginning of where Mario started, a kind of a system as Nancy Fraser is kind of describing it to us that in fact is rapacious, you know, it devours things -nature, human beings, to some extent, it’s not that different from the kind of argument that also Saskia Sassen was putting around expulsion. That would be one of my favorite books here. We’ve had a reading group on it, and it’s well worth reading for what we’ll get from it.

Will Brehm 39:34
Excellent. The only two I’ll add is -I would add to the reading list that we are creating for FreshEd listeners is Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian, and his focus on zones I think is really helpful for comparative educationalists to get out of that nation state sort of thinking and I think it can be quite useful for all of us sort of going forward into 2024. And then the other one is a name of a philosopher/cultural theorist that I’ve recently come across this year, but a lot of his work was written in German, and has only recently been translated. And so, I’ve been going through his books. His name is Byung-Chul Han, and he basically updates a lot of Foucauldian thought sort of around biopolitics to what he’s now calling psychopolitics. And he has this fantastic book that became a huge hit in Korea called Burnout Society, and I think there’s a lot of overlaps with education generally, comparative education, specifically I would love to see scholars take up and push forward into 2024. So, I guess that sort of brings us to the last question of the year, which is; what are we looking forward for in 2024. Susan, I know the conference that you have been organizing, and Mario has been helping. The conference, of course, is in 2024 but give me a sense of what 2024 looks like to you and what you are looking forward to.

Susan Robertson 40:46
So, yeah. There’s a big undertaking, actually, the Comparative and International Education Society will be in Miami in March. It’s theme is called the power of protest. And I must say, I’m just absolutely blown over by the engagement with the theme. And of course, it’s going to trigger difficult conversations but, in a way, I’m glad that in fact, we don’t have an anodyne theme. That in fact, actually, if that society is to do its work, it’s got to be able to learn to come together to have those difficult conversations, to learn to listen, to do the kind of dialogical work that Freire a kind of calls us to do. So, I’m hoping that the conference will be -there’ll be artistic performances going on over the course, Michael Burawoy will be speaking. He’s been deeply involved in some work at Berkeley around education and protests, and so on. So, from 2023, I want to welcome everyone to Miami and do what Mario said, walk around the streets and get a sense. Don’t stay in a hotel. Get a sense of actually, what a kind of topography begins to feel like when life’s chances are not equally shared at all by any stretch of the imagination.

Will Brehm 41:58
And Mario, what are you looking forward to in 2024?

Mario Novelli 42:00
Yeah, well definitely looking forward to that conference. I think I agree that the world is so full of tension and complexity and conflict at the moment that we really need to find spaces where those discussions can take place. And we need to push back against censorship and hegemonic control of certain debates and certain ideas. So, I think that it’s great that CIES is going ahead. Complex, I think -Miami and the politics of that city are deeply troubling, and I think we’re in a time, a period of history, that’s also deeply troubling. So, it’s full of tensions but I think that we have to continue to talk, continue to dialogue, continue to fight for the importance of ideas, the importance of aspirations, and we have a responsibility not only to our colleagues, but also to new generations of scholars to be critical, to raise issues, to be brave in these periods. Now, I think more than ever, we need to do that. So, that’s definitely one event that’s going to be important. What else am I looking forward to? In terms of the journal, we have a number of new special issues coming through. We’ve just had Aziz Choudry’s special issue out, which I think is really important. We have another one on education in emergencies and the ethics around that. I think with the issue of Palestine, that is a really poignant special issue that reflects on some of these dynamics and the way that we as comparative education specialists get entangled in other people’s imperial plans or sometimes construct our own. And so, I think those are areas. And then we also have another special issue coming through around teachers and teacher’s trade unions and labor. So, looking forward to those.

Susan Robertson 43:52
And can I add also one on Paulo Freire, the global educator because that was recognition of 100 years of his date of birth, actually. I mean, I’m absolutely buoyed by the way in which our young scholars, despite the challenges that they’re facing, engage and continue to raise important issues. And our job is to support any of those kinds of activities. So, yeah, 2024 it’ll be different but let’s hope that it’s something to look forward to as well.

Will Brehm 44:20
Well, Susan Robertson, Mario Novelli, thank you so much for joining the last episode of 2023. I wish you a happy new year, a brave new year, and I look forward to seeing both of you in Miami.

Susan Robertson 44:32
Thank you so much, Will.

Mario Novelli 44:33
It’s a great pleasure to be with you. Take care.

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Resources

Related Author Publications/Projects

The imperial entanglements of ‘education in emergencies’

Historicising the geopolitics of education and the SDGs

Politics, power, and partnerships

Social movement struggles, learning and knowledge-making

Mentioned Resources

Comparative education: And now? – By Robert Cowen

Human capital: Policy issues and research opportunities – T.W. Schultz