This article critically examines reciprocity in international volunteering. It first highlights tensions and unintended consequences that can emerge when pursuing reciprocal relationships between host-country partners and international volunteers or volunteer-sending organizations. It then reconsiders how to determine equal or fair distribution of benefits between stakeholders when some benefits are material and some are intangible. It then presents a typology of different modalities of reciprocity practiced or aspired to by contemporary international volunteer organizations. The article aims to provoke more nuanced consideration of when, if or under what conditions different forms of reciprocity may be possible or even desirable.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Comparative and International Education Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Education Review.Comparative and international studies of education that focus on policy borrowing and transfer must be expanded to account for aspects of what Terence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers call "global norm-making." Such an approach examines how global policies are refracted within divergent but interrelated sociopolitical and economic contexts, how researchers influence each other and the people and places they study, and how context matters but not in ways that devolve infinite possibility to all cases. Drawing on a review of gender-mainstreaming literature and field research in northern Pakistan, this article shows how various actors' arguments about girls' schooling are made in relation to intertwined but contrasting frameworks for understanding the necessity and value of education. Such an approach neither endorses nor condemns world culture theory but instead draws as empirically warranted on various approaches to the comparative study of education to demonstrate how global networks reflect and enable particular manifestations of indeterminacy and human ingenuity. IntroductionThis article contributes new theoretical and methodological insights concerned with understanding how education researchers come to privilege some ideas and propositions over others, and how these normative choices dialectically shape and are shaped by the work of other researchers as well as the people and places they study. Such a contribution offers to disrupt the norm-making cycle by showing how education is used in multiple ways to refract and reflect social change. It also offers to deepen our understanding of how the educational ideas, values, practices, and norms that we study move and transform across space and time through networks of knowledge and influence in which our work is included but not determining. These networks link the decisions of researchers and policy makers to the decisions and lived experiences of actors who are often not involved in the formulation of research or policy. By exploring the ideas and relationships comprising such linkages, the article has two aims: first, to increase awareness of the hege-OPPENHEIM AND STAMBACH monic and normative aspects of trends in educational research and policy, and second, to highlight the agentive role of the individuals and communities who engage with these trends and translate them into contextualized meaning and practice through ongoing processes of contestation and interpretation.Our analysis focuses upon the dialectical and indeterminate qualities of the pro...