Will Brehm  1:10
Steve Carney, welcome to FreshEd.

Steve Carney  1:21
Thanks, Will. Thanks for inviting me. It’s good to talk to you today.

Will Brehm  1:24
I don’t normally start conversations about structures of new books but your new co-written book, the structure seems so incredibly important to the idea that you are discussing in the book. So, how would you describe your book’s structure?

Steve Carney  1:43
Okay, thanks, Will. Yeah, I guess it is true that the structure is unusual. And it is important. And I guess the whole argument of the book can also be seen through the structure, the way we present our argument. In some ways, it’s a very familiar structure. We still have that traditional introduction, a heavy section on theory and method, then we present our data and have a discussion and reflection of that. So, in that sense, I think readers will find it familiar as a text to navigate through. But in other ways, it is quite unusual. And the essence of that is the decision we made to write the book in a fragmented style. So, even though those conventional sections can be identified throughout the book, and in fact, on every page, everything is presented in a fragmented way. And there’s reasons for that, that are theoretical reasons. But it means that when the reader enters the book, it’s not the sort of text where you need to start from the first page and work your way through to the completion. And we sort of did that because we thought that’s really how the world is organized. And that’s really how people experience the world. That they’re constantly in a moment. They’re present in a moment. And then it’s a cognitive process afterwards to try and connect those different moments into a meaningful story. Whereas the history of the text, at least in the Western tradition, is to have that very clear narrative. And that structure that takes the reader to a predetermined ending. And so, we took that risky decision of trying to mess with that structure as a way to encourage people to read and dwell and get stuck. To dip in and dip out and then to ponder. And then ultimately to find their own meaning in the text. So, in that sense, the structure was an invitation for the reader to sort of take control of the process of interpretation.

Will Brehm  3:28
It’s exactly how I read the book, I must say. I started from the beginning like a normal book but then I did sort of jump ahead, and it’s really easy to sort of read these different fragments. And I also found myself sort of reading from beginning to end, but jumping ahead at points, and then also going back and looking at other fragments that I sort of read earlier. And it’s unusual, definitely. It’s also a bit hard -it is. It started making me realize how comfortable I am with reading a book from start to finish. And when it’s not like that, it actually can become a bit frustrating. And I think you sort of recognize that and you even tell the reader like some readers are going to find this really hard.

Steve Carney  4:07
Yeah, and I think of course, if this was written to an audience in cultural studies, there may be more awareness and familiarity and acceptance of different sort of genres of interpretation and presentation. But as you know, for a range of reasons education operates within a particular episteme. And that also has implications for how we present our arguments. And it was that sort of thing we were trying to break away from out of a dissatisfaction with a lot of the reading in our field.

Will Brehm  4:34
So, it was an intentional decision to sort of critique the dominant way in which books and articles are written in specifically the field of comparative education?

Steve Carney  4:43
Specifically in comparative education, which maybe we can talk about at some point, but also in educational studies. Even though there’s a rich tradition of transgressive thought and transgressive writing, especially in research methodology, maybe to some extent in curriculum studies, in comparative education you don’t find much of that. And of course, there’s an overarching, often political, occasionally ideological point to comparative education writing that then requires a certain sort of establishment of an aim, a hypothesis, a starting point, which often has an embodied solution built into the question. So, even though we went through those debates, at least in comparative education around positivism, and the sort of scientific tradition of doing comparative work, we moved away from that through the 70s and then certainly into the 90s. There’s still that strong DNA, I would say, that there’s got to be a point to an academic text. The text has to take you somewhere. And that text has to have a normative value for society. And once you have those sorts of parameters, it’s really difficult, I think, to try and escape that and to write something that we think is more open-ended, more provocative, and more polemic.

Will Brehm  5:51
Why do you think comparative education does have this in its DNA? Why are we sort of stuck in that positivism, in a sense?

Steve Carney  5:59
That’s your term, I think, to say “stuck in positivism”. I’m not sure it’s that hard. There have been you know, there are different movements. Like all academic fields, I think there are contests about the soul of the discipline or the field. And we’ve had those in comparative education. The development turn in the 70s, and afterwards took things in another direction away from the pure scientific study of phenomena in a comparative way. Many of the great advances in educational studies have come to us through post-structuralism. And there’s a small space for that, I would say in comparative education. There’s another debate or I would say, a schism between what in the continental tradition we think of as academic comparative education as opposed to a more applied comparative education. I think, ultimately, education itself has these normative roots in the Anglo-American tradition has often been connected and come out of social science. So, for very good reasons, it’s already looking at the world in order to analyze processes, and in order to be able to intervene or to improve the quality of life. So, the social science origins of education have been really important to your contemporary comparative education. I think the overall emphasis in our book is that the comparative study of education will continue down one particular narrow pathway if it can’t find its way back to its humanistic roots. And in the continental tradition, pedagogy, pedagogic in Danish, comes out of the humanities. In many Anglo-Saxon contexts, educational studies is grounded in the social sciences. And I think a humanistic tradition expects more open-ended inquiry and respect for perspectives. I mean, we know that if you’re studying poetry, or the visual arts, or literature, it’s a little more doctrinaire to insist on one reading. So, there’s an openness in the humanities to perspectives. And I think that’s not so apparent in the field of educational studies because the perspective is, how can we move towards the good life? And how can education help us in that journey? And especially in in comparative education, which has always been tightly connected to the understanding of international relations between education systems and educational performance in countries. It already had a very practical starting point. And I don’t think we’ve ever really escaped that.

Will Brehm  8:17
And your book is trying to escape that. Trying to push in new directions, new formats, and structures sort of beyond and post- structures. So, it makes me wonder then, because like you said in the beginning, the book to some extent feels normal. Because there is a beginning, there is a theory section, and then there is this maybe empirical section that we might call it some sort of comparative case study that you end up doing of three different countries: Denmark, South Korea, and Zambia. So, how did you approach those sort of case studies or the comparative case study? And I know even in your book, you sort of challenged what do we even mean by a case? How did you approach that study within the traditions of comparative education but from the critiques that you were just talking about? Trying to come at it from a less sort of applied comparative education perspective, and perhaps a more humanistic, or not humanistic, more out of the humanities, I should say?

Steve Carney  9:15
Yes, yes. And I should have said that. More from the humanities rather than the humanistic tradition? Well, that’s a good question. And I think people who -and I haven’t written that many books. I think I’ve shifted to that book format over the last five years or so. But most of my career has been the shorter article, which is another type of genre. But I think writing a book in hindsight, exposed the obvious truth that it always ends in a completely different place from where it started. And I think when we first envisaged this project, there were two things working: one, it was after I had written a paper that I termed “policyscapes” where I deliberately brought together three country cases and three levels of education in those countries that had nothing in common that would never have been seen as comparable. And I did that as an experiment because I was trying to expose the contours of a global space through which all education systems and levels in education had to respond. So, I had that thinking that when I started talking with Ulla about this project, shouldn’t we continue that experiment and get away from the policy level and get into the practice of education. So, that was a reason to pick cases that seemed different. But of course, all cases have some relation to each other. And as we write in the book, this is a book that starts in Denmark. It’s written by, for the most part, Danish authors, at least people writing from a Danish context. So, any comparative work done by Danes with a Danish case is always going to be in a particular relation to the other cases. And we were inspired by a short book by Dominique Moïsi [inflection], called The Geopolitics of Emotions. We don’t use it in the book, but we liked his idea of trying to see the ways that the West/Europe was now looking upon Asia through the lens of fear, you know, Rising Asia. This is maybe 15-10 years ago. Africa, in particular, the Global South in general, was looking at Europe as this place of opportunity, one largely excluded for them. Whereas people in Europe were looking at the South, still through those sorts of eyes of benevolence. So, on the one hand, the European gaze to Asia was increasingly shaped by reticence and fear and foreboding about the rise of powers in the East. But some comfort and familiarity with this sense of superiority with the South. And he was trying to argue that the European mindset -and there’s many problems and thinking like that- was at this point of flux where we were quite confused about who we are as Europeans because we kept looking over our shoulder to our demise, but then looking over our other shoulder to where we saw ourselves as still being the masters of the global game. So, we thought we’ve got those three cases. But it is true that if you look at Danish education policy through the 90s and 2000s, it was really shaped by very abstract ideas of the rise of the Asian Tigers, and then our dependence on a trading and then some form of political relations with China. And in all those countries, Danes really didn’t have a good understanding of the social structures and the culture of those societies but had to learn, I guess, to step aside and become a junior partner. So, there’s that at the same time, as throughout the 90s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, all through the Scandinavian countries, international development assistance became a major priority. And so, you had this period where Denmark was investing -the term they used- enormous sums, especially in the social sectors and education sectors, in about six or seven key countries. So, you had on the one hand, Danes feeling inadequate and worried about the future. But then also, in some way, a dark legacy about our right to decide what the world should look like for those who can’t work it out for themselves. And that shaped a lot of educational thinking. And so, we wanted to find three cases that could continue that sort of experiment on method, but also think about the Danish subject in relation to these other geopolitical and subjectivizing elements. And so that’s why we picked all of that.

Will Brehm  10:05
And sort of affective emotions, right? I mean fear, and, you know, there’s issues foreboding. I mean, arrogance, yeah.

Steve Carney  13:08
And so that shaped our thinking. In the end, we have a theoretical section, why we rejected affect theory. And of course, there is a contrary current in cultural studies, in particular that’s a little skeptical about affect theory -that’s another discussion. But we had that sort of geopolitical reach, that methodological ambition. And then we were taken away with a lot of Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of society. And so, I think the project in the end morphed from something that was a comparative education experiment to consider three countries, to one that started to think about the social psychological nature of subjectivity in those three societies, but also the connections across them like a global subjectivity. And then thinking about some of the very dark pronouncements people were making around Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of societies of simulation. You know, the loss of meaning. Because that was a really peculiar cocktail that Denmark was sort of thinking of itself being about to be dominated but able to dominate other countries. Young people were seeing themselves as global citizens but people who were guests in Asia, but masters in the South. And then this social theory saying, well, the subject is disappearing. Meaning is becoming submerged under a surfeit of meaning. You know, this absolute proliferation of science in consumer society, in media society means that young people in particular just can’t find a simple dominant narrative anymore. But somehow, they’re in education systems that have these big dominant narratives. And it was that sort of dissonance we really wanted to study. And that’s why the shift went on to looking at youth in school.

Will Brehm  14:39
And I would say that these quote, unquote, case studies are also written in that fragmented way. And in a sense, you experience the way in which youth might understand the world through these fragments. And there’s something there about global subjectivity in a sense that you’re dwelling in I feel like

Steve Carney  14:58
Yeah, and I think it would have been comfortable and open to criticism if two White Northern researchers just went to Zambia and studied that classic sort of theme of global policies and local struggles to make meaning, because we know that in the Western world, young people are really struggling to find a clear direction when they get these overheated signals that the world is at their feet, that education is the path to success. When they look over their shoulder and see structural unemployment, a rejection of consumerism, a lack of interest in corporate jobs and careers, we knew that there was something there that just doesn’t get picked up in educational studies, and certainly not in comparative studies.

Will Brehm  15:41
From this perspective, or perspectives, and from the work that you were doing, what then would be some of the big critiques of comparative education as a field? Like, if we could focus in a little bit more on that field in particular. Like having written this book, having thought deeply, theoretically, and methodologically, what comes out as some of the big critique of the field of comparative ed?

Steve Carney  16:07
Yeah. That’s also a good question. Some way I’m reluctant to be too critical because you know, I’m part of that field. And I’ve played a role in forming that field and consolidating a certain Northern gaze, and a certain scientific gaze. And some of my good colleagues in Europe and in North America have responded to the book with sort of subtle comments that it’s still very much Northern science. So, there are different types of objections to comparative education as there are to educational studies. I think the overriding one, which we write about in the book, is the critique that educational scholars make of instrumentalism, quantification and so forth, is often responded to by educational studies scholars with the same sort of scientific method. And I find that peculiar in countries like the United States, Britain, and Australia, you’ll find a really rich seam of scholarship critiquing neoliberalism. But many scholars are using the same realist or critical realist perspective on the world. They’re fighting fire with fire, but in an uneven battle. So, I think one thing is our field has -and now I’m talking about comparative education. But I think we’ve been too willing to try and win arguments through the logic of science when the logic of science is exactly the weapon that organizations like the World Bank and the OECD, and governments around the world use themselves. So, it’s just a matter of are our statistics, or our insights better than yours? You know, so I think there’s a limit to how far you can get in a battle, when much of our field is already writing itself up against policymakers. That’s sort of one sort of critique that it’s too science oriented.

Will Brehm  17:46
And what would be an alternative tool or weapon to continue the metaphor of a fight within the field. What would be an alternative?

Steve Carney  17:53
So, you know, I see myself as working within a post-foundational tradition. And from that, even though we didn’t work with the idea of Gilles Deleuze, his book What is Philosophy? is a good opening there because he talks about the aim of philosophy being more concerned with finding openings and new directions for thought, rather than using analysis to close down and find solutions and answers. So, in that sense, that means I’m very accepting of perspectives. So, I don’t think in my field of comparative education, I’m really reluctant to say this perspective is inadequate, or this one is better because for better or worse, I view the world as only understandable through perspectives. Having said that, what could be done differently, I would say a starting point, and we write about that in the book, is to have more humility. There are limits to what educational science can do. We know that when we look at a piece of art, or we listen to a piece of music, that aesthetic mood, or when we fall in love, or we experience joy, or pain, or sorrow, there are things that are just simply beyond transmission, right? And I would say that the center of the educational contract between teacher and pupil, and school and society is an unwritten and unwritable thing. And we don’t find that in education. The best of qualitative method is really about shedding light on every dark corner. And of course, as Kant said, as soon as you shed light on something, you cast a shadow, there are always things that then become obscured. And so, the question is, with all this light that we shed on education through scientific method, what Ian Stronach called our madness with method, what’s then put into the darkness? Because that is part of the contract of what we call “modernity’s other”. You know, the rise of reason has its other side. We’re seeing that now in political movements around the world, just to take one example. So, what’s “the other” in education?

Will Brehm  19:38
I think what I like so much about it is, it’s humility but it’s also doubt. It’s sort of doubting what we’re even capable of understanding. And that is often -at least in the field in comparative ed and international development or in the world I sort of run in- there’s a lot of confidence and the confidence is based on science and good method and being able to, like you said, shine a light on something and fully expose it and fully identify all the factors at play. And in a sense, there’s very little doubt. And it almost seems like you are saying, we need to doubt. We need to dwell in our uncertainty. And that is actually, it’s valuable, to use perhaps the wrong word.

Steve Carney  20:20
Yeah. I would say -well maybe valuable isn’t the right word. But I just think it’s necessary. And that humility, there’s a double edge to that. That humility is your way to awareness. And then in Nietzschean terms, a will to your own power. To be able to control or at least have the sense of control through letting go, that’s a subtle and a philosophical question. But I feel this has been written a lot about in post-World War Two French literary studies. But you know, the biggest thing holding back Western intellectual life is a fear of death. You need to let go in order to live. I know that sounds very glib, and quite banal but I found in writing this book without a predetermined end, with only trying to express the sorrow and the joy and the anguish and the anxiety and the alienation and so forth of young people, I started to find out more about my own journey because I’ve always felt that all academic work is always biographical. It’s also more than biographical but it’s also biographical. And so even picking these studies and using Jean Baudrillard and being experimental and then being polemic that says as much about Steve Carney, as it does about a legitimate field to study. But I felt as soon as we started to let go, and just let these young people talk, and often put them in dialogue with teachers and systems who also had their own logics but could often come across as quite brutal and uncaring. That just exacerbated the struggles that young people had. We ended up not taking sides. I think we went to another meta level thinking, well, that’s just what the struggle of life is. Life is that struggle, you only really understand afterwards. And it’s better sort of to live in those fragments, those fragmented experiences of your presence and everyday life and live from that rather than to try and piece it together and in the Western Christian sort of tradition, find the path to completion or to Utopia or to salvation, or -because no one ever found that.

Will Brehm  22:19
It makes me think of Heidegger’s comment about how we all should spend more time in graveyards to dwell on that death and on what life is.

Steve Carney  22:27
That was a big thing in French literary scholarship to really work with the concept of death. Of course, that was central to Hegel, and to Kant as well, that death was the great theme death. Baudrillard has also said, death is now no longer an object of analysis because we’ve defeated death, you know, and that’s just added tenfold to our woes, right? Because now we are. We killed God and we’re immortal. And death has been pushed further and further and further away from our consciousness to lingering presence. And so, I just think you can work with that -without having a great treatise on what is death, we have some pages on that- you can work with that idea that freedom comes through letting go. And then don’t take sides when a young person tells you they’ve been brutalized, or they’re going to get a scholarship to a great university, or their parents have thrown them out, or they don’t know what to do with their life. I think your obligation as a human being, and secondly, as a researcher is to listen to that and just to respect it without trying to put it into a framework of improvement or of redemption, or of understanding, just to dwell on it.

Will Brehm  23:25
I think that’s -the dwelling- is a really good point. Something that we should do more.

Steve Carney  23:31
Yeah, but you’re also right in saying that in some way, the book is quite heavy, and, in some way, I regret that. I think we made it in this radical, fragmented, open-ended dwelling sort of genre, but I was always worried that it would be more swiftly rejected for being un-academic if we didn’t show the reader and our community that we also knew how to do that heavy lifting with theory and method. Of course, any one book that tries to catch social theory from Kant to Baudrillard is going to fall short. But we really tried to show that there’s a seam in Western scholarship that was always open to these questions of doubt, and unknowability, the otherness. That was always there. You don’t have to go to spirituality or to religion or to Indigenous knowledge systems, it was central to Western thought, but that’s been suppressed and marginalized in many fields. And it’s just not even known in comparative education. You know, when we look at our comparative work these days, you don’t even find many people going back as far as Habermas or Adorno let alone to some of these huge debates about is there something rather than nothing? Who am I? What’s the nature of the world? They were the only discussions in town 200 years ago, right? And now it’s all about how can we increase a grade retention here and reading achievement here? And these are important questions, but they’re not the big questions.

Will Brehm  24:48
Yeah. Yeah. They seem quite narrow. You have a chapter in this book, that is basically fragments of reviewer feedback that you’ve received over the years that often is quite negative and challenging some of the work that -we don’t actually know what work it was that was being reviewed, we just are getting the reviewer feedback. And it made me wonder why put that in there? Is that sort of a recognition that you might receive similar feedback on this book? Perhaps you already have from some colleagues. But I found that a very peculiar addition to the book to sort of read some of these critiques, or to recognize that perhaps the perspective that you’re putting forward is also challenged by others?

Steve Carney  25:30
That’s an interesting question. I mean, the book is about 300 pages. And I guess it’s really split in these two hubs of these heavy theory and method fragments, and then a very long three country case sort of presentation in fragments. And in the middle there, there are these three or four pages where there’s not much introduction, but there are quotes from reviewers, from statements that people have in some cases screamed out at me in conferences saying, “How dare you take such a disconnected ambivalent view? Because young people are in need, and, yes, post-modernism is interesting but there are real issues. So, can we please get back to the proper discussion” -that sort of thing. I put that in there, really, because of my interest in literature and interest in particularly Shakespearean literature, that often you will find a jester in the middle of a play where the tone has to shift. So, I think part of it was stylistic. That after these 150 hard pages of fragments of theory, from Kant to Baudrillard and so forth. And then all this stuff about method about what had been written on ethnography from anthropology right up to the literary turn in anthropology, and so forth. Then I wanted to have a break. And I thought, and part of that was to preempt people who were already thinking, “this book isn’t very clever”, because I was already putting into their mouth exactly the sorts of critiques, I knew must come from that positivistic social science research tradition. So, it was sort of preempting those but also in the Shakespearean sense, recognizing that the only response to all of this, to almost everything, is laughter, which also has a long philosophical heritage. And to be able to laugh, not just a good joke, but be able to laugh at purported seriousness of any sort of academic texts that purports to talk about the world and to help us understand. That was also an exercise in humility. But I guess there was also a sense in which it was cathartic because I also wanted to write down some of the things that people had said, which from their perspective made very good sense, but were not the sort of thing I would want to entertain in a critique of this book because it has other premises.

Will Brehm  27:32
I like this idea of the jester in the middle sort of adding comedy. I laughed when I read that section. It was funny because of having gone through 150 pages of quite heavy theory and theory not presented in the way I’m used to. So, that actually worked quite well, I must say. So, in one of the fragments, you have this notion of taking a fatal approach, in sort of writing and in research. And the idea that you sort of presented as it’s trying to undermine a system of meaning and sort of push systems of meaning to the breaking point. The question, I guess, to end our conversation is: do you think you’ve achieved that fatal approach? Like, did you push something to the breaking point with this book?

Steve Carney  28:19
I would like to think so. I think we start the book with a quote from Andy Warhol saying, the aim of my work is to leave people wanting less, you know, which is his very many sort of deliberately sarcastic, but sort of self-reflective points. So, I think part of this book -it is a 300-page request that people don’t take themselves so seriously. That when they do educational science, in inverted commas, realize that you’re pretending to be scientific because you can only be scientific about a very small domain of human experience. So, I think there’s that. I think towards the end, we opened up to a direction that we would both like to follow in the future. And that was to looking at other ontologies. And so, I’ve been very interested in what some of our colleagues are doing in Japan, trying to look at different ways to understand meaning and meaninglessness, and the aim of education. So, in that sense, I think the book ends up moving towards a program for the future. The very last fragment is in the conclusion and that captures a lot of what we’ve talked about today, because it was one of the main characters Joseph in Zambia, a boy we got to know quite well. And he goes down to the river with his friends after school to play football, and his football gets kicked away. This is a fragment we, in fact, made up. It was a magical realist fragment. But he kicks his football away, and then he picks it up and he has an encounter with a bird, and he has this interaction with this bird that is mystical in some way. The two creatures are talking but they can’t share words to explain their shared experience. And then he sort of snaps out of that, I guess what Nietzsche would call the real world, the world that we can’t understand. He snaps out of that and goes back to his friends -back into this world of appearances where we have to just make do with our limitations of language and understanding. So, I think in that sense, it’s maybe too subtle for an education audience. This was a literary attempt to try and make people see that there is a -metaphysics may not be the right word, but there’s something beyond appearances that we can’t catch. That’s the essence of what it means to be a human and what it means to engage with other people. And we’ll never catch that with words. We know that from Derrida that words have these limitations and how we can think and so forth, but we will never understand fully what it means to be human by trying to reduce that to the genre of science. And education has that same problem built into it. So, the question is, how do you go on when we can only ever be inadequate? And that, to me is a wonderful starting point to realize that we can be inadequate. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be innovative and experiment. It doesn’t mean we should represent the rights of people who are dispossessed and being dominated -definitely not. But there has to be a humility to what we can achieve as researchers and what science and knowledge can achieve.

Will Brehm  31:07
Well, Steve Carney, thank you so much for joining FreshEd again. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Steve Carney  31:12
Yea. Thank you very much, Will.

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