Series Editor Preface

Summary

This book is the first in the ‘shorts’ format within the Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education series. This is an important book, a book that is challenging for the field of comparative and international education (CIE) and one that opens up new ways of thinking differently about policy analysis, policy mobilities and education policy transfer.

The authors, Steven Lewis and Rebecca Pratt, propose that bringing work on policy mobilities and assemblage theory together can creatively foreground ‘the contingent nature of policy as emerging through, and as, complex multidimensional encounters of people, places and things’. This, they go on to argue, has ‘important implications for how we might do and research policy, as well as consequences for the notional source of power and how it operates within policy spaces and/or actors’.

There is currently no sustained treatment in published work that explicitly combines policy mobilities and assemblage theory while exploring possible new ways forward for CIE. This is, therefore, original, complex and multifaceted work that we hope comparativists and readers across the social sciences will find helpful in taking them deeper in to the related literatures and the innovative approach developed throughout the volume.

The ‘shorts’ format fits these aims well for the ways in which it enables complex issues and arguments to be presented in relatively concise and accessible ways. Indeed, all involved in the production of this volume hope that this publication will stimulate further work, developments, challenges and creativity, along these and related lines within and beyond CIE and policy constituencies.

A second key strength of the book relates to the authors’ efforts to demonstrate the potential of their ideas through practical application and a ‘worked example’ – based upon their own ongoing research on Pacific Regional Education Policy. Given our collective shared history of research in CIE within the Pacific region, or what pioneering Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa (1993) called ‘our sea of islands’ or ‘large ocean states’, this connects closely to my own work in CIE (Crossley 2019) and adds an important and timely contribution to the contemporary decolonization debate and literature.