Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

In addition to the longstanding threat posed by narrow economism, faith in the possibility of peace and progress through democratic politics – central to the humanistic vision of the 1972 Faure report – today faces additional challenges. These challenges include the ascendancy of neurocentrism in the global policyscape. Whereas the effects of neoliberalism on education have been extensively critiqued, the implications of a newer, related ideological framework known as neuroliberalism remain under-theorised. Neuroliberalism combines neoliberal ideas concerning the role of markets in addressing social problems with beliefs about human nature ostensibly grounded in the behavioural, psychological and neurological sciences. This article critically examines a recent initiative of one of UNESCO’s Category 1 Institutes – the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) – that seeks to mainstream neuroscience and digital technology within global educational policy. Comparing the visions of the 1972 Faure, the 1996 Delors and the 2021 Futures of Education reports with MGIEP’s International Science and Evidence Based Education Assessment (ISEEA), the authors analyse continuity and change in UNESCO’s attempts to articulate a vision of “scientific humanism” which advocates the use of science for the betterment of humanity. They argue that ISEEA’s overall recommendations – as represented in its Summary for Decision Makers (SDM) – reinforce a reductive, depoliticised vision of education which threatens to exacerbate educational inequality while enhancing the profits and power of Big Tech. These recommendations exemplify a neuroliberal turn in global education policy discourse, marking a stark departure from the central focus on ethics and democratic politics characteristic of UNESCO’s landmark education reports. Reanimating, in cruder form, visions of a scientifically-organised utopia of the kind that attracted UNESCO’s inaugural Director-General, Julian Huxley, ISEEA’s recommendations actually point towards the sort of dystopian “brave new world” of which his brother, Aldous Huxley, warned.

DOI： https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-022-09982-6

Other Link： https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11159-022-09982-6

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This paper analyses rural migrant children's access to public schools in urban China, focusing on the implications of the recent introduction of points systems for apportioning school places. This approach, first piloted by Zhongshan city in Guangdong province from 2009, has steadily been extended nationwide. Here, we analyse the reasons for its spread and for divergence in its implementation in various urban districts. Notwithstanding rhetorical claims that points systems promote “fairness” or “equality” in the treatment of migrants, our analysis suggests that they maintain or even exacerbate the stratification of urban society, lending new legitimation to the hierarchical differentiation of entitlements. This is consistent with the aim of the 2014 “New national urbanization plan” to divert urban growth from megacities towards smaller cities. However, we argue that the use of points systems should also be seen in the context of an evolving bureaucratic-ideological project aimed at more rigorously monitoring and assessing China's entire population, invoking the logic of meritocracy for the purpose of control.

DOI： https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741021000990

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

DOI： DOI:10.4324/9781003137801-5

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Since Hong Kong's retrocession, the government has endeavoured to strengthen local citizens' identification with the People's Republic of China – a project that acquired new impetus with the 2010 decision to introduce ‘Moral and National Education’ (MNE) as a compulsory school subject. In the face of strong local opposition, this policy was withdrawn in 2012, and implementation of MNE made optional. This article seeks to elucidate the background to the MNE controversy of 2012 by locating the emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity in its historical context, and analysing successive official attempts (before and after the 1997 retrocession) to use schooling for purposes of political socialisation. We argue that the school curriculum has projected and reflected a dual sense of identity: a ‘Chineseness’ located mainly in ethno-cultural qualities, and a ‘Hongkongeseness’ rooted in civic attributes. While reinforced by schooling, local civic consciousness has been intimately related to a tradition of public activism strongly evident since the 1970s, and further strengthened post-1997.

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This article examines the coverage of Japan in Shanghai's senior high history textbooks since the early 1990s – a period when the city's status as China's“showpiece for the global era”has been widely touted. Uniquely among cities on the Chinese mainland, Shanghai has throughout this period enjoyed the right to publish and prescribe its own textbooks for use in local schools (a right extended to most other regions only since the early 2000s). The portrayal of Japan in local texts thus offers a window onto the way in which a self-avowedly “global” Chinese metropolis has balanced an outward-looking and internationalist vision with the requirement for history to serve patriotic education. It also sheds light on the meaning and extent of local curricular “autonomy” in contemporary China.

Other Link： http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6317

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This article looks at how the major national (or pseudo-national) historical museums in China and Taiwan interpret and display very different “new rememberings” of Japan. The main focus is on the permanent exhibitions of the modern history wing of the National Museum of China (NMC; formerly the Museum of the Chinese Revolution), which finally reopened in 2011 after almost a decade of refurbishment, and of the National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH), which opened in the same year. It discusses how museum portrayals of Japan reflect divergent public discourses on national identity. Through examining the relationship between museums and the apparatus of the Chinese state (ROC and PRC), the first section locates the NMC and NMTH in their bureaucratic and political contexts. A typology of approaches to the construction of national identity is then offered, considering the implications of different conceptions of identity for portrayals of Japan and its relationship with China or Taiwan. The remainder of the article looks in turn at the NMC and NMTH, outlining the history of each before examining how Japan is represented in their permanent exhibitions. It concludes by considering what can be learnt from this about the evolving relationship between official historical discourse and the broader political context on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Other Link： http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6316

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Other Link： http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6306

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Museums in Taiwan—as elsewhere—have always been embroiled in politicised debates over collective identity, both reflecting and helping to shape the contours of identity discourse. During the four decades of the Martial Law era, the Kuomintang (KMT) regime used museums as vehicles for its campaigns to nurture patriotic citizens of a “Republic of China” encompassing the entire Chinese mainland. However, with the onset of democratisation from the late 1980s, museums increasingly reflected and reinforced a strengthening consensus over Taiwan’s historical and cultural distinctiveness, while also mirroring the considerable pluralism of popular identity consciousness. This trend was accentuated under the regime of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after 2000, but 2008 witnessed the return to power of a KMT determined to establish warmer ties with China. This paper examines the extent to which the new regime’s more accommodative approach to China has extended into the realm of museums, while considering whether developments within the sector, and within broader Taiwanese society, mean that museums are no longer quite the pliable tools of official cultural policy that they once were.

Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This article examines China’s senior high ‘Thought and Politics’ (sixiang zhengzhi) texts, analyzing how these seek to legitimize the regime’s developmental strategy. It is argued that their overriding emphasis on the strengthening of the state is premised upon the imperative of securing China’s position within global order conceived in Darwinian terms. While the school curriculum cannot be seen simply as an instrument with which the party-state shapes and moulds popular consciousness at will, it is assumed here that it does play a significant role in the political socialisation of young people. ‘Thought and Politics’ serves as a benchmark of ideological correctness within what remains a highly centralised system of curriculum development. The article begins by briefly analyzing the shifts and continuities in China’s developmental strategy, and of the roles assigned to education within that strategy. The importance traditionally attached to schooling’s moralizing function is noted, as is the relatively elitist character of the audience for the ‘Thought and Politics’ course – senior high school students. After considering how and why a discourse of state-centred patriotism has become central to the Communist Party’s efforts to legitimise its authority, the implications of the ‘Patriotic Education Campaign’ for the broader school curriculum are reviewed. The main discussion then focuses on the way in which the current texts for ‘Thought and Politics’ justify the national developmental strategy in terms derived from this patriotic discourse. Some potential implications of this combination of patriotic political socialisation with a highly labour-repressive developmental model, setting the case of China in comparative and historical context.

Publisher：Comparative Education  

Multilingualism is widely celebrated as a quality that education should promote for purposes of peacebuilding, inter-cultural understanding and the fostering of transferable skills. But the experience of much of postcolonial Asia illustrates how language can divide as well as unite. In the conflict-ridden multicultural society of Sri Lanka, language disputes have long contributed to social tension. Bilingual education, introduced at secondary level in 2002, was heralded as advancing both skills formation and conflict resolution. This study investigates its implications for identity construction, while illuminating how various stakeholders have understood and responded to related policies. The findings suggest that bilingual education has contributed to expanding disparities between rural and urban communities, while also creating new power dynamics at the classroom level, exacerbating distinctions of social class alongside those of ethnicity. This article thus challenges romantic visions of bilingual education as a democratising measure conducive to building sustainable peace in post-conflict societies.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2025.2460916

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Transactions of the Royal Historical Society  

In 2022, the Centre for Global South Asia (CGSA) at Royal Holloway University of London developed a small research project entitled 'Exhibit Asia'. The aim was to explore the use of exhibitions in nation-making in postcolonial South and East Asia in contrast to the scholarly preoccupation with investigating the region's history of museums and exhibitions primarily in a colonial context. Its academic outcomes were to be a conference and related publication; but we also wanted our research to be relevant to our students. The resulting intervention in the teaching and learning of history took the form of a curatorial fellowship for an international cohort of ten students from Taiwan, Japan, India, Pakistan and the UK, leading to a co-curated online exhibition. The first section of this article sets out the development, design and delivery of the fellowship and discusses the viability and relevance of such projects. The subsequent three sections are co-authored by several of the participating students. They outline their methods, reflections and learnings; share their insights on the role of exhibitions in perceptions of Asia in the UK today; and analyse responses to 'Tea and Tigers', the online exhibition that was the outcome of the fellowship.

DOI： 10.1017/S0080440125000040

Scopus

Publisher：Comparative Education  

The early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a dogmatic strand of decolonial scholarship, often relying on racialised identity discourse and ad hominem critique, that rejects the ‘Western’ foundations of comparative education as irredeemably colonial. The rise of dogmatic decolonialism constitutes the latest and most far-reaching of several inflection points within the history of the field. This article begins by reviewing the development of comparative education as a scholarly tradition, considering its foundational epistemological orientations and challenges to them. This allows us to analyse the challenge posed by decolonialism from a historical perspective. We show that, far from injecting fresh historical nuance and complexity into comparative scholarship, dogmatic decolonialism is entrenching itself as an intolerant new orthodoxy. The threat this poses to rigorous, open and balanced scholarly debate underlines the need for an urgent renewal of comparative education as a robust and relevant field of scholarly enquiry.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2024.2429297

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Educational Philosophy and Theory  

DOI： 10.1080/00131857.2023.2239446

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Compare  

This paper analyses the development of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute on Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), examining its record from global, national and institutional perspectives. The global perspective encompasses challenges to UNESCO’s attempts to articulate a distinctive, humanistic vision in competition with other multilateral bodies. The national perspective relates to India, which hosts MGIEP, provides the bulk of its funding and exerts significant influence over its governance. Consideration is also given to the relationship between MGIEP’s work and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas. Finally, the institutional perspective relates both to the author’s own experience with MGIEP, and to information gained through interviews with others involved with the institute. It is argued that MGIEP’s story illuminates challenges to attempts, within India and internationally, to sustain a humanistic vision of education in the face of powerful countervailing interests.

DOI： 10.1080/03057925.2022.2108374

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Compare  

This article analyses contradictions in the Thai engagement with UNESCO discourse by examining how concepts relating to Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship Education have been interpreted in key national policies. Thai education policy discourse signals convergence with certain aspects of the international sustainability agenda while selectively excluding key elements in the name of Thai ‘tradition’. Crucially, the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy (SEP) is portrayed as a distinctively ‘Thai’ approach to modernisation, endorsing hierarchy and inequality. Divergent understandings of key concepts extend to contested notions of democracy, human rights, secularism, and moral education. Analysing these tensions in historical context, we trace the politics of education to Thailand’s semi-colonial past, before focusing on contemporary SEP discourse. In conclusion, we situate this case in a wider comparative frame, showing how Thai claims to uniqueness are, in fact, anything but unique.

DOI： 10.1080/03057925.2024.2310129

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Compare  

DOI： 10.1080/03057925.2024.2371259

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Comparative Education  

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China’s use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national ‘branding’ in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI. We analyse the Chinese state’s engagement with UNESCO’s education work in the context of shifts in budgetary and political influence within the organisation, and of a growing ‘securitisation’ of education within China itself. We show how Chinese engagement with UNESCO’s educational agenda reflects both domestic political considerations and the ‘major country diplomacy’ of Xi Jinping, as manifested in the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and intensifying strategic competition with the USA. We conclude by discussing the implications of rising Chinese influence within the organisation for UNESCO’s capacity for articulating a coherent and consistently humanistic vision for education.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2024.2335125

Web of Science

Scopus

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2024.2314909

Web of Science

Publisher：East Asian Journal of Popular Culture  

This editorial is an overview of this edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (EAJPC). In celebration of our tenth anniversary, it features a guest-edit by Yuiko Asaba and Amane Kasai on ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents’. Six articles share a focus on the trans-oceanic circulation of popular music to and from Japan during the 1920s to the 1960s. Themes include Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, interpretations of Chinese popular song in wartime Japan, trans-Pacific circulations of Japanese popular songs in Cold War South Korea and among American military personnel in East Asia. One general paper complements this issue with an analysis on the linguistic nuances of the lyrics of Japan’s top-selling female idol groups. The book reviews section features commentary on recently published works that relate to themes discussed in the research articles.

DOI： 10.1386/EAPC_00120_2

Scopus

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2024.2326759

Web of Science

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2023.2213139

Web of Science

Publisher：Comparative Education  

This article provides an overview of the politics of education as they affect regions and communities on the periphery of the People’s Republic of China. Drawing on the articles in this special issue of Comparative Education, it analyses tensions related to the attempted imposition of Bejing’s homogenising and totalising vision of Chineseness across Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and amongst the mainland’s migrant underclass. Also considered here are the politics of comparative educational scholarship, as they relate to a widespread failure to engage critically with the diversity and complexity of Chinese societies. Attributable largely to the West’s own ‘culture wars’, this failure betrays much-touted ethical commitments to social justice and anti-‘hegemonic’ resistance. It is thus a central purpose of this essay–and special issue–to urge educational scholars to interrogate the politics of oppression and injustice in China and elsewhere ‘beyond the Western horizon’.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2023.2299907

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Comparative Education  

While ‘national education’ has regularly been invoked by post-1997 Hong Kong administrations, its pursuit has acquired new force and urgency since the introduction in 2020 of a National Security Law. Investigating the role of schooling in this reinvigorated project of thought reform, this article asks how far recent initiatives have merely amplified official identity discourse or marked a qualitative change. It does so primarily by analysing the official curriculum and textbooks for Citizenship and Social Development (CSD), introduced in 2022 to replace Liberal Studies, a subject widely blamed by nationalists for fomenting sedition. Following a comparative overview of the new and old curricula, there is a discussion of changes to the textbook treatment of: the historical framing of identity; the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model; culture’s significance for Hong Kong’s place in China; and civil, legal and constitutional rights and duties. The analysis concludes with reflections on what these changes imply both for China’s efforts to re-educate its unruly Hong Kong subjects, and for scholarly efforts to understand and explain such processes.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2023.2212351

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Comparative Education  

The problems China’s rural-born migrants face in accessing urban public services, including education, are widely known. This article analyses how official discourse attributes migrant children’s vulnerability to their ‘problematic family background’ while exhorting them to show ‘gratitude’ to a benevolent state. Combining documentary analysis and insights from fieldwork, we examine how ‘gratitude education’ seeks to inculcate notions of a moral hierarchy in which migrants are subordinate or inferior. We further investigate parental beliefs and practices with respect to gratitude, and family participation in related educational activities. The findings indicate that such activities constitute just one aspect of a broader strategy that extends to initiatives focused on governance and philanthropy. Programmes of gratitude education are one tactic for concealing the deficiencies in government action on rural migrants’ behalf. By associating entitlement to public goods with individual or familial propriety, they aim to legitimate the institutional barriers that ensure migrants’ enduring marginalisation.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2023.2296191

Web of Science

Scopus

DOI： 10.1086/727298

Web of Science

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This paper analyses the development of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute on Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), examining its record from global, national and institutional perspectives. The global perspective encompasses challenges to UNESCO’s attempts to articulate a distinctive, humanistic vision in competition with other multilateral bodies. The national perspective relates to India, which hosts MGIEP, provides the bulk of its funding and exerts significant influence over its governance. Consideration is also given to the relationship between MGIEP’s work and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas. Finally, the institutional perspective relates both to the author’s own experience with MGIEP, and to information gained through interviews with others involved with the institute. It is argued that MGIEP’s story illuminates challenges to attempts, within India and internationally, to sustain a humanistic vision of education in the face of powerful countervailing interests.

DOI： https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2022.2108374

Other Link： https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F03057925.2022.2108374

DOI： 10.1017/S0305741023001637

Web of Science

Publisher：Holocaust Studies  

This article examines the portrayal of the Nazi Holocaust in Chinese public culture, focusing on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM). It argues that contemporary Western preoccupations with coloniality/decoloniality are unhelpful in understanding the Communist Party's efforts to project influence abroad, and reinforce legitimacy at home. The SJRM shows how these efforts extend to fierce competition with Japan for UNESCO recognition of war-related heritage, as each country trumpets its role in saving Jews from the Holocaust. Official interest in the Holocaust as heritage remains overwhelmingly instrumental, focused on enhancing the international reputation of Shanghai and China.

DOI： 10.1080/17504902.2022.2116543

Web of Science

Scopus

DOI： 10.1017/S147959142200033X

Web of Science

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

No abstract

Other Link： 10.1080/14623528.2021.1968142

Language：English   Publisher：Japanese Educational Research Association  

DOI： 10.7571/esjkyoiku.17.139

CiNii Research

Language：English   Publisher：International Review of Education  

In addition to the longstanding threat posed by narrow economism, faith in the possibility of peace and progress through democratic politics – central to the humanistic vision of the 1972 Faure report – today faces additional challenges. These challenges include the ascendancy of neurocentrism in the global policyscape. Whereas the effects of neoliberalism on education have been extensively critiqued, the implications of a newer, related ideological framework known as neuroliberalism remain under-theorised. Neuroliberalism combines neoliberal ideas concerning the role of markets in addressing social problems with beliefs about human nature ostensibly grounded in the behavioural, psychological and neurological sciences. This article critically examines a recent initiative of one of UNESCO’s Category 1 Institutes – the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) – that seeks to mainstream neuroscience and digital technology within global educational policy. Comparing the visions of the 1972 Faure, the 1996 Delors and the 2021 Futures of Education reports with MGIEP’s International Science and Evidence Based Education Assessment (ISEEA), the authors analyse continuity and change in UNESCO’s attempts to articulate a vision of “scientific humanism” which advocates the use of science for the betterment of humanity. They argue that ISEEA’s overall recommendations – as represented in its Summary for Decision Makers (SDM) – reinforce a reductive, depoliticised vision of education which threatens to exacerbate educational inequality while enhancing the profits and power of Big Tech. These recommendations exemplify a neuroliberal turn in global education policy discourse, marking a stark departure from the central focus on ethics and democratic politics characteristic of UNESCO’s landmark education reports. Reanimating, in cruder form, visions of a scientifically-organised utopia of the kind that attracted UNESCO’s inaugural Director-General, Julian Huxley, ISEEA’s recommendations actually point towards the sort of dystopian “brave new world” of which his brother, Aldous Huxley, warned.

DOI： 10.1007/s11159-022-09982-6

Web of Science

Scopus

PubMed

DOI： 10.1177/0920203X221105559e

Web of Science

Publisher：Journal of Genocide Research  

DOI： 10.1080/14623528.2021.1968142

Web of Science

Scopus

Language：English   Publisher：Taylor and Francis Group  

Whilst Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 has influenced education in various ways, major reforms perceived as promoting mainland control have been resisted. For two decades, Hong Kong’s educational autonomy under the ‘one country, two systems’ formula was thus largely maintained. This changed radically with the response to the protests of 2019–2020, culminating in the introduction of a National Security Law. This has drastically constrained Hong Kong’s civil society, enhanced central government control of education and accelerated efforts to reeducate Hongkongers as loyal PRC citizens. We trace how this transformation has been enacted and justified, and reflect on its consequences. We analyse the current situation through the lenses of ‘internal colonialism’ and securitisation, which have characterised governance of China’s restive periphery under Xi Jinping. We argue that analytical perspectives in Comparative Education, relating to postcolonialism/decolonisation and globalisation, obstruct or distort understanding of Hong Kong’s present predicament.

DOI： 10.1080/03050068.2022.2046878

Web of Science

Scopus

CiNii Research

Publisher：China Quarterly  

This paper analyses rural migrant children's access to public schools in urban China, focusing on the implications of the recent introduction of points systems for apportioning school places. This approach, first piloted by Zhongshan city in Guangdong province from 2009, has steadily been extended nationwide. Here, we analyse the reasons for its spread and for divergence in its implementation in various urban districts. Notwithstanding rhetorical claims that points systems promote fairness or equality in the treatment of migrants, our analysis suggests that they maintain or even exacerbate the stratification of urban society, lending new legitimation to the hierarchical differentiation of entitlements. This is consistent with the aim of the 2014 New national urbanization plan to divert urban growth from megacities towards smaller cities. However, we argue that the use of points systems should also be seen in the context of an evolving bureaucratic-ideological project aimed at more rigorously monitoring and assessing China's entire population, invoking the logic of meritocracy for the purpose of control.

DOI： 10.1017/S0305741021000990

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：International Journal of Taiwan Studies  

Mass formal education is a feature of modern societies all too often taken for granted or overlooked in mainstream sociological analysis. In this respect, the field of Taiwan studies is no exception. This introductory essay sets the three papers of this topical section in historical and comparative perspective, particularly in relation to East Asia. The papers show how education policy in contemporary Taiwan has evolved in a context of vibrant democracy, economic transition, demographic squeeze, and, looming over all, the threat from the Chinese mainland. Our focus falls especially on higher education and language instruction, and their involvement in debates over economic prosperity, security, identity, and Taiwan’s place in the world. A central theme of this introductory essay is the way in which educational debate in Taiwan is conditioned by awareness of insecurity—at individual, familial and societal levels. The intensely competitive, human capital-oriented approach to education that predominates there is bound up in complex ways with the insecurities of life on this island.

DOI： 10.1163/24688800-20211302

Web of Science

Scopus

DOI： 10.4324/9781003137801-5

Web of Science

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.

Other Link： https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Frost-Vickers.html

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO’s universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.

Other Link： https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Vickers.html

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Since 1991, scholars from all over Asia have sought to reconstruct the history of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” – that is, to recover the facts relating to this system of sexual slavery – by analysing documentary records and interviewing survivors. As a result, an international consensus has emerged concerning the status of this system as a wartime atrocity involving large-scale violation of human rights, for which Japan ought to apologize. However, within Japan many persist in denying responsibility for the invasion [of China and associated atrocities]. Therefore, no effort should be spared to pass on the memory of this history to future generations, through discussing this atrocity of sexual slavery in school textbooks, applying for a [UNESCO] Memory of the World inscription, producing documentary films, or building museums, memorials and so forth. Other Asian countries thus continue their intense disputes with Japan over the nature and scale of the comfort women system, and the appropriate terminology for describing it

Other Link： https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Su.html

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki’s film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty - and importance - of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past.

Other Link： https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Dezaki.html

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

DOI： https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2017.1341107

Other Link： http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02188791.2017.1341107

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Contrary to the prevailing narrative of East Asian immunity to the recent surge of anti-establishment, populist politics across the West, Vickers argues that features of populist nationalism are already ingrained in the established order across much of East Asia. Examining China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, he finds that many of the forces now challenging the status quo in Europe and the United States are part of the East Asian political mainstream.

DOI： doi:10.1353/gia.2017.0021

Other Link： https://muse.jhu.edu/article/675153/pdf

Language：English   Book type：General book, introductory book for general audience

Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan's fraught relations with its regional neighbours.

Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

This book offers a fresh and comparative approach to analyzing the uses of education and the effects of its politicization on Asian societies in the era of globalisation. Education has been used as a political tool throughout the ages and across the whole world to define national identity and underpin the political rationale of regimes. In the contemporary world Asian societies manifest this phenomenon in a variety of ways, ranging from tensions over religious versus secular definitions of national identity in India and Pakistan, to various blends of ethno-culturally primordialist and 'multicultural' nationalism in China, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. In Asia, modern education systems have their origins in processes of state formation aimed either at bolstering 'self-strengthening' resistance to the encroachments of Western and/or Asian imperialism, or at furthering projects of post-colonial nation-building. State elites have sought to popularise powerful visions of nationhood, to equip these visions with a historical 'back-story', and to endow them with the maximum sentimental charge. This book explores these developments in various national contexts, emphasising that education is seen by nations across Asia, as elsewhere, as far more than simply a tool for economic development, and that issues of national identity and the tolerance - or lack of it - of ethnic, cultural or religious diversity can be at least as important as issues of literacy and access. Interdisciplinary and unique in its analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars of political science, research in education and Asian Studies.

Repository Public URL： http://hdl.handle.net/2324/1001481311

Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

This original collection offers the first significant comparative study of the politics of history curricula across East Asia. Vickers and Jones examine the relationship of history education to changing official visions of the past in a context of political transformation, giving special consideration to the rise of communism, decolonization, and the Cold War divisions of China and Korea. Chapters by a range of international scholars deal with history education in Japan, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the two Koreas. They focus on the content of official syllabi and textbooks, and on the influences shaping government policy regarding the teaching of history. Highlighting the tension between the traditional nation-building priorities of history education and the emerging cross-regional concern with the promotion of 'skills', this important book shows how the school subject of History has been a major site for the construction and contestation of definitions of national and regional identity.

Repository Public URL： http://hdl.handle.net/2324/1001482679

Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

In most societies, the school subject of History reflects and reinforces a sense of collective identity. However, in Hong Kong this has emphatically not been the case. Official and popular ambivalence towards 'the nation' in the shape of the People's Republic of China, and the sensitivity of Hong Kong's own political and cultural status, have meant that the question of local identity has until recently been largely sidestepped in school curricula and textbooks. In this study, Edward Vickers sets out to reexamine some of the myths concerning colonialism and schooling under the British, while showing how in postcolonial Hong Kong these myths have been deployed to legitimize a programme of nationalistic reeducation. In the Afterword to this 2005 edition, he emphasizes that it is Hong Kong's fundamentally undemocratic political context that has thwarted and continues to thwart efforts to make history education a vehicle for fostering a liberal, democratic sense of regional and national citizenship.

Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on the notion of heritage, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as “heritage” in a number of societies. The authors analyze how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on their political agenda. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of difficult heritage can involve the construction of new borders between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. The studies presented here suggest new directions for comparative research into “difficult heritage” across Asia and beyond, applying an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that spans history, heritage studies, memory studies, urban studies, architecture, and international relations.

Other Link： https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo185844036.html

Language：English  

CiNii Books

Language：English  

CiNii Books

Language：English  

CiNii Books

Responsible for pages：In Patrick Finney (ed.) 'Remembering the Second World War', pp. 46-67   Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

In recent years, a number of scholars have analysed Chinese memories of the AJW with a particular focus on implications for relations with the West (e.g. Wang 2012; Gries 2004) or with Japan (e.g. Rose 1998; Reilly 2012; He 2013). Most such studies effectively equate ‘China’ with the PRC. Here, I focus instead on the memory divides within and especially between the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I argue that the centrality of memory of ‘national humiliation’ in general, and the AJW in particular, to notions of patriotic identity on the mainland exacerbates the mutual alienation between Chinese ‘patriots’ and Hongkongese and Taiwanese for whom other memories and identities have come to assume more immediate significance.

Other Link： https://www.academia.edu/33983061/Remembering_and_forgetting_war_and_occupation_in_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China_Hong_Kong_and_Taiwan_pre-publication_draft_

Responsible for pages：In Annika Frieberg and C. K. Martin Chung (eds), 'Reconciling with the Past: Resources and Obstacles in a Global Perspective'   Language：English   Book type：Scholarly book

The continuing divisiveness of relations with mainland China has been underlined in recent years by Hong Kong’s 2012 protest over a ‘Moral and National Education’ initiative (Morris and Vickers 2015), and the ‘Umbrella’ and ‘Sunflower’ movements of 2014 (in Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively). In both societies, schooling has been a key battleground for struggles between different visions of local identity, and of its relationship to political, ethnic or cultural Chineseness. But attitudes to the mainland and mainlanders are shaped at least as much by experience outside the classroom as by discourse within it. This essay traces the evolution of identity consciousness in Taiwan and Hong Kong, analyzing its relationship both to official education policy and to developments beyond the school gates. It shows that, in these societies shifts in the curricular representation of identity have often reflected preceding changes in popular consciousness, rather than producing them. A key insight – that should be obvious to political leaders, but clearly is not – is that top-down efforts to mould identity, when they go against the grain of lived experience, tend further to alienate estranged communities, rather than reconciling them.

Other Link： https://www.academia.edu/33311075/Altered_states_of_consciousness_Identity_politics_and_prospects_for_Taiwan-Hong_Kong-mainland_reconciliation

Event date： 2012.7

Country：Japan  

Japan through East Asian Eyes - an introduction to the Leverhulme Network on Japan and East Asian Identities

Language：English   Presentation type：Oral presentation (general)  

Venue：University of Bath   Country：United Kingdom  

Language：English   Presentation type：Oral presentation (general)  

Venue：University of Essex   Country：United Kingdom  

Language：English  

Venue：Harvard Center Shanghai   Country：China  

Assessing the impact of schooling on civic consciousness is always extremely difficult, especially nowadays, given the range of other influences to which young people are exposed. But whatever its actual impact, the school curriculum remains central to official efforts to shape popular consciousness, and to public arguments over identity and values. Culture and history are invariably key themes in such debates. This paper therefore highlights some of the problems arising from an over-reliance on culture in attempts either to explain, or to shape, civic consciousness. In doing so, it focuses not just on the Chinese mainland, but also on the case of Hong Kong – where the practice of active citizenship has recently been making global headlines.

Publisher：East Asian Journal of Popular Culture  

DOI： 10.1386/eapc_00059_2

Scopus

Language：English   Publishing type：Article, review, commentary, editorial, etc. (scientific journal)  

This NORRAG Highlights was prepared in response to the blog post by Iveta Silova, Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye: “Facing the Climate Change Catastrophe: Education as Solution or Cause?” In this post, Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at the Department of Education, Kyushu University, argues that it is both mistaken and counter-productive to portray the problematic role of modern mass schooling in climate change as a consequence of specifically ‘Western’ ethical failings. Citing a recent report on Asian schooling that he co-authored for UNESCO, he rejects attempts to dichotomize the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ in assigning blame for our climate crisis. Instead, he urges the importance of recognizing our shared responsibility for this as a factor of our common human frailty.

Other Link： https://www.norrag.org/education-and-climate-change-is-blaming-western-modernity-the-answer-by-edward-vickers/

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

This is a critical review essay on the Lim and Apple edited volume, accompanied by a response from the editors.

DOI： https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.16.2.12

Other Link： https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/ioep/clre/2018/00000016/00000002/art00012?crawler=true&mimetype=application/pdf

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

DOI： https://doi.org/10.1086/692538

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

DOI： doi:10.1353/mni.2017.0020

Language：English   Publishing type：Article, review, commentary, editorial, etc. (scientific journal)  

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

Language：English   Publishing type：Book review, literature introduction, etc.  

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：40

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：4

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：3

Type：Academic society, research group, etc. 

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：20

Type：Peer review 

Number of peer-reviewed articles in foreign language journals：6

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：4

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：6

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：300

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：30

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：250

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：30

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：90

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Type：Competition, symposium, etc. 

Number of participants：20

Prof. Edward Vickers was interviewed on the program 'Taiwan Lecture Hall' (民視台灣學堂) on September 10, 2018. The interview was conducted by Dr. Yin C. Chuang of National Taiwan Normal University. Dr. Chuang and Prof. Vickers discussed history education and the politics of national identity in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China.

Factory Model Schools (letter to the Editor)

Interviewed for and quoted in article entitled, 'Westminster and Kings accused of Helping Chinese teach propaganda', by Rosemary Bennett

Interviewed for and quoted in article entitled 'Students in East China and Vietnam top rich world peers', by Simon Roughneen

Lessons in Education from Post-Mao China

Warn Students about Expensive Diploma Mills (letter to the Editor)

At What Price Success? Lessons in education from Post-Mao China

Interviewed for and quoted in article entitled 'Chinese universities scramble to open centers to study Xi Jinping Thought', by Simon Denyer

Japan's Pyrrhic Victory over 'Comfort Women' Commemoration

Lecture entitled 'Educating China after Mao' in RN's 'Big Ideas' series (broadcast September 27, 2017)

Japan Scores Tragic Own Goal with UNESCO Stance

Japan Scores Tragic Own Goal (reprint of article originally published in 'The Diplomat')

「世界的趨勢としての人文社会科学危機」　という記事を執筆した。

Article with Jeremy Rappleye entitled, 'Can Japanese Universities really become Super Global?'

Article with Jeremy Rappleye entitled 'Nationalism vs. Internationalism'

Article with Jeremy Rappleye entitled, 'Asia is Japan's Internationalisation Blindspot'

The Abe Statement and the Politics of War Memory in Japan

外国人教員から見た日本の大学の奇妙なグローバル化　(Japan's Peculiar University Internationalization: the view of foreign professors)

Britain's Approach to Japan and East Asia (article co-authored with Tim Summers)

'China and the Future of Democracy in Hong Kong'

China and the Future of Democracy in Hong Kong (letter to the Editor)

Interviewed by Simon Denyer (Beijing Bureau Chief of The Washington Post) on the politics of education in contemporary Hong Kong. Cited in article: 'Hong Kong Protests Spur Renewed Debate Over Patriotic Education', Washington Post, November 21, 2014.

'Bully Tactics by Accounting Firms' (Commentary on Hong Kong politics)

Bully Tactics by Accounting Firms (letter to the Editor)

'At Cross Purposes on Hong Kong's Autonomy' (a criticism of the British government's policy towards Hong Kong in the context of the 'Occupy Central' campaign)

China-Taiwan History: No Textbook Answers

This article discusses my reflections on the current state of Sino-Japanese relations, drawing on my experience of living, working and researching in mainland China, Hong Kong and Japan over a 20-year period. It is a contribution to a special issue of the Japanese magazine 'Foreign Affairs' commemorating the 40th anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese diplomatic ties.