Problematizing Comparison in a Post-Exploration Age: Big Data, Educational Knowledge, and the Art of Criss-Crossing

Abstract

This article discusses the problem of comparison within comparative and international education research. It pushes back against the algorithmic and computational creep in education, arguing that if Big Data analytics replace theory, reflexivity, and critique, we are left with sterilized and atrophied comparative education research. Following a review of several business-as-usual modalities of comparison and a consideration of the colonial and power-knowledge effects that educational comparisons have had both historically and at present, the article proposes a “criss-crossing” comparative education. The term “criss-crossing” references the traveling back and forth along intersecting lines. This approach puts relationality at the center, sees research as an active process of criss-crossing, and aims to surface the entangled complexity of sometime disparate educational actors, devices, discourses, and practices. Criss-crossing comparison recognizes that we construct knowledge from and through relationships, and it additionally recognizes that the production of comparison is itself a way of relating to other people.

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