“Empires overseas” and “empires at home”: postcolonial and transnational perspectives on social change in the history of education

Education, internationalism and empire at the 1928 and 1930 Pan-Pacific Women's Conferences

“…This lays emphasis on 'intercrossings and intersections' to accommodate challenges within comparative and transnational histories (Werner and Zimmermann 2006, p. 32). The plurality and complexity of 'connected histories' resonate with the circuits of discussion and webbed conceptions of imperial space characteristic of new imperial histories and geographies of colonialism (Lester 2001, Lambert and Lester 2006, Goodman et al 2009), which facilitates examination of resonances of empire within cultural internationalism. In exploring women's activism in shaping academic and professional knowledge, I adopt a performative view of gender (Butler 1989) and draw on Moi's (1999) nuancing of Bourdieu's theoretical tools and her contention that gender is implicated in all social fields, is a relevant factor in all social analysis, is always socially variable and carries different amounts of symbolic capital in different contexts.…”

Postcolonial perspective in the history of education: research problems and trends in an international context

“…The headway of the widely researched field of post-colonialism, which bears the stamp of significant persons (Abraham, 2007;Loomba, 2007), can be closely linked to the liberation of colonized states from colonization, but today post-colonial theory is not limited to countries with a colonial history (Tárnok, 2004). The concept itself has at least two meanings as, on the one hand, it directly refers to the time period after gaining independence, while on the other, it also signifies the defined, critical form of theory creation and interpretation (Goodman et al, 2009). It is an approach which does not consider "Europe" (meaning Western Europe), the "West" as a point of reference in its analysis, but rather argues for the contingency and flexibility of reference-points.…”

“…The next important event was the "Education and Ethnicity" conference, vii also organized by ISCHE in 1999 in Sidney where the following topics were foregroundedpointing further than the word "ethnicity" which was used in the conference title itself: the central role of language, the relationship between imperial education and gender, and transnationalism. It was within the topic of transnationalism that the notion was conceived that cultural and pedagogical effects did not only work in one direction (Goodman et al, 2009;Novoa, 2009). Parallel to this, the reinterpretation of the relationship between local and global levels, which transcended the boundaries of nation-states, came into focus in historiography.…”

“…Studies examining the history of the empire and education were published in the care of both ISCHE as well as the History of Education Society UK, which highlighted the fact that the political and sociological changes around the world are in a close and interrelated relationship and they can be linked to each other in various ways. The post-colonial studies open a new field of research on the one hand, and on the other, in addition to reinterpreting old data, they supply new historical data as well (Goodman et al, 2009, Novoa, 2009. The next milestone in the field was the international symposium held by the History of Education Society UK in Hamburg in 2007. viii Within ISCHE, research that reinterpreted and thematised the relationship between the empire and education also continued in the first decade of the 21 st century.…”

Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19th‐Century British Empire. Part I: Church‐State Relations and Indigenous Actions and Reactions

“…Although work on education on mission stations has received attention from many different areas of scholarship, scholars of the history of education have been at the forefront of examining missionary education, often in transnational and postcolonial perspectives. 7 The history of education has traditionally been seen to be on the borders of two academic disciplines, 8 with post-colonial theories providing a bridge between the areas of colonial history and education. 9 Within both missionary and colonial studies, post-colonial theory has also shaped much of the scholarship over the last couple of decades.…”