Will Brehm 1:13
Joel Samoff, welcome to FreshEd.

Joel Samoff 1:16
Thank you, Will.

Will Brehm 1:18
I’d like to turn to your own biography, as an academic and researcher. I’ve heard from many listeners that they are interested in learning more about the guests’ own history and biography of being an academic and being a researcher, and perhaps giving it some tips to same young early- career scholars or students. So how did you end up researching education and aid and development primarily in Africa, from my understanding?

Joel Samoff 1:51
And the quick answer to the question about my intellectual trajectory is that is it’s much serendipity as planning. So, like many people, when I was in graduate school, I needed to decide, well, when I finished my undergraduate degree, I needed to decide what to do next. I was interested in Africa, I pursued that, as a graduate student, it was interesting, and I’ve been doing it ever since. And I think there come moments in our lives when we make a decision about how to take the next step. And if it works well for us, we keep on doing it. If it doesn’t work well, we find something else to do. And so, in that sense, the decision to get involved in studying Africa was to follow up on my own curiosity and interest. And that blossomed, and I’ve been working on Africa since early in graduate school.

Will Brehm 2:45
And what started your interest in Africa?

Joel Samoff 2:48
Well, that’s an even more ambiguous answer. That probably goes back to some much earlier moment in my life. Certainly, from at least elementary school age, I’ve been interested in the rest of the world, including Africa. And I did my own secondary schooling in the end of the 1950s, which was a time of decolonization in the world. And I think that increased the attention to what was happening in Africa. 1960 was a transition in the protests and organizing in South Africa, in particular set of protest, it turned bloody in Sharpeville in March of 1960. And I recall going to a rally in Philadelphia that was focused on Sharpeville in South Africa. So fairly early on, while I was still in school, I had an interest in African things. Kwame Nkrumah was a student and, in a university, Lincoln University in Philadelphia while I was there, and met him at some early moment, though I didn’t know the good then what the future look like. So, there’s an earlier interest. I think, the big answer to the question about where did the interest of Africa come from was that it was one among several interests. And at certain moments in my life, I had to decide what to do next, I pursued that interest. It worked. And I’ve been doing it ever since.

Will Brehm 4:14
Right, right. And now, did you move from university to graduate school to PhD to working in academia? Or did you kind of experiment outside of academia at certain points?

Joel Samoff 4:30
I, for practical reasons, went from university to graduate school to staying in academia. I actually wanted to work in the Peace Corps. I asked the Peace Corps for a posting in Africa. And they offered me one in Turkey. And there was no negotiation. So, I went to graduate school instead … So, there wouldn’t have been that sidestep. But no, I went directly to graduate school, and I continued to work on Africa. Now, the other part of your question was about getting involved in education and the focus on education. And the response, there is also a bit of a chance in my early research, the research that I did for my doctoral dissertation, in Tanzania, I was interested in local politics and development in an area in Tanzania. And I asked people in my interviews what they thought was the most important local issue. And for the purpose of my interviews, that question was intended to help me understand better what role members of city council, people worked in NGOs, people worked in district council, what role they played, so I needed to know what the issue was in order to have context for my questions about their role. But it turned out nearly everybody mentioned education as what they saw as the most important local issue. And it became clear to me that I needed to know more about education. And that has been the case ever since. So, my work has been on politics. That’s my background, political science. But very quickly, in the process, politics and education came together. And so, I’ve been working on the intersection of politics and education since my own doctoral dissertation.

Will Brehm 6:24
And in your career, have there been any major books or thinkers that have influenced you the most?

Joel Samoff 6:33
I don’t have a good answer to the question. The question about major books, I think there’s, there are lots of books and thinkers that have influenced the work that I do. I am having a backup step. I take seriously the notion that scholarship ought to be critical. And that it ought to be asking hard questions about what is generally accepted as perceived wisdom or knowledge. And therefore, my general intellectual and academic orientation has always been to, for practical reasons, master whatever it is, I think I need to know in order to continue to function in the areas in which I’m working, but also to find authors and scholars who say other things and move in other directions. And for people who work on Africa … the very early on, there’s been a kind of a divergence in the writing about Africa, parallel tracks in the writing about Africa, some of which came out of the study and research on Europe and European history and empire and European influence and colonization. And a parallel track that is heavily oriented around decolonization, then nationalism, then anti-colonial activity. And to do a reasonable job, it seems necessary to understand both of those tracks. But my own personal preference is the second. And so, the authors that have been particularly instructive over the course of my work have been those heavily embedded in efforts to try to understand colonial rule with the motivation of ending it, efforts to understand postcolonial dependence with the motivation of ending it. So, among the economist, for example, Samir Amin has been a particularly clear-headed thinker, I think over what’s now many decades, he’s well into his 80s, I think, on that set of questions. And thinking about colonial rule from the perspective of political economy, my leaning, my inclination is less toward what did colonial rule accomplish in terms of what might be regarded as positive or progressive developments in the colonized world and more toward the kind of thinking that’s embedded in the clever title that Walter Rodney came up with “How Europe underdeveloped Africa,” that is, the ways in which the colonial process has not reduced … didn’t reduce poverty in Africa but entrenched it and entrenched it beyond the end of colonial rule. So, that’s a long-winded way of saying that my answer to your question is probably a set of perspectives rather than a particular author.

Will Brehm 9:46
Right! And what sort of advice would you have for PhD students or young scholars in the field of comparative and international education?

Joel Samoff 9:58
I will have three thoughts on that line, one is probably what will seem to many people to be very old fashion, and that is to pursue your passion. I think life would be really unpleasant if I had to spend my time doing things I didn’t find interesting, didn’t find engaging. So, the first bit of advice is to find issues, themes, places, people that are engaging, that are challenging, that are rewarding, and then make them work. Find people that are really productive and exciting to work with and to work with him.

Second thought is that it’s, of course, possible to ask the very practical or seemingly very practical questions, which fields and specialization seem to have better job prospects, which approaches and methods are more highly valued, which research sites seem to be regarded as most important, which projects are the funding agencies likely to support, and many academics do that. At this point of my career, what I can do though, is to look among my colleagues, and see who among my colleagues, that is people who’ve been at it for a while, cannot wait to retire. And who among my colleagues cannot imagine retiring. And as I think about that, I want to be in the second group, I want to be among the people who find that what I do is so challenging, so stimulating, so rewarding, that I want to stay immersed in it, rather than thinking about getting out and saying, I’ve been doing this for too long and I need to move on. So, it’s a very in a bit on that pursuing the passion. But it’s a notion of ‘for a career,’ and for the career that endures, it seems to me very important to try to find ways to do stuff that is rewarding. And I guess in the end, I’m a absolute optimist, that it’s possible to do that and still earn a living. Now, I know in … there are circumstances which is very difficult to see how to pull those two together. And my own experience tells me that I need to keep working at that. And so, I’ve had different roles in academia, and I do independent consulting. And in part, it’s aimed at that, how can I continue to find ways to do what is challenging, rewarding, and I think, significant, and earn a living. And it’s not been a straight-line path. So, in my own work, I was primarily an academic for a while, then I became a consultant and worked as a consultant for a while, now I do a bit of both. And so, I’ve stayed in academic, but I have some other things that I do as well. And I think that will vary among different people. But the underlying theme is still the same, find ways to make life rewarding rather than and then figure out how to earn a living at it, rather than go the other way around.

I also have that third sense that I talked about earlier. And that is that to be an effective scholar, I have to be somebody who asks really hard questions. And that means that I need to be willing to be unpopular, I need to be willing to challenge power structures, I need to be asking whether or not what’s taken as knowledge and wisdom are what they claim to be, even when it’s uncomfortable to be running against the grain. And that also means that to be a scholar who’s concerned with changing outcomes with participating in larger-scale and smaller-scale social transformation, means I need to work with people who are themselves the change agents. As a person from the United States working in Africa, most of my life, it’s not my job to bring change to Africa or to manage change in Africa, or to oversee change in Africa. My role is to assist people in Africa, who have taken the initiative to make things different. And I need to find ways to work with people who are involved in efforts to make things different. Working with the powerful seems promising, but most often, it seems to me is corrupting and distorting, and that requires a good deal, more reflection and self-examination than graduate programs generally require, or graduate programs generally encourage. So, no recipes.

Will Brehm 14:21
Well, Joel Samoff, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, it was really a pleasure to talk today.

Joel Samoff 14:27
Thank you for inviting me.

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