Gita Steiner-Khamsi recently reviewed the book Education, privatisation and social justice: Case studies from Africa, South Asia and South East Asia, in which I co-wrote a chapter with Iveta Silova. The full chapter can be read here. She liked the chapter, writing:

I would like to end this review with three examples of outstanding chapters that reflect on social justice.

The chapter “Ethical Dilemmas in the Education Marketplace,” written by William C. Brehm and Iveta Silova, investigates a particular form of shadow education in Cambodia: private tutoring in which teachers tutor their own students, referred to as “extra study,” “supplemental study,” or “study for hire.” The study is fascinating from a theoretical perspective because it digs into the deeper question of which structural deficiencies in the Cambodian educational system have accounted for the great attraction of “extra study.” Thus, the authors attempt to understand the conditions under which inequality and social injustice flourish.

Chanthol Sun, the Cambodian Minister for Commerce, was recently interviewed by Knowledge@Wharton and had an interesting take on Chinese vs. American investment in his country:

Let me put it this way. Let’s say, you have been starving, you’ve had nothing to eat for 30 days, or 30 years in the case of Cambodia, then comes this Chinese guy with a bowl of fried rice for you and says, “You are hungry; here is fried rice for you.” And then, you hear another guy who says, “Don’t eat. Why do you eat fried rice from the Chinese?” I would say to this guy, “You give me a Big Mac. If you give me an alternative – Big Mac versus fried rice – then I have a choice. But if you don’t provide me with the Big Mac when I’m starving and you tell me not to eat the rice, then I’m sorry, [I can’t do that].”

And that is why we go to China for funding. We want funding. That’s why we borrow from China, from Korea, from Japan, from ADB, from the World Bank. Money doesn’t have any color for us, as long as we can borrow and build our infrastructure and improve our country.

a Cambodian conference event was held on Feb. 2, 2015, to provide a forum for the announcement that the 500-page book [written by Xi] will be translated into the Khmer language in the near future.

A forum organized by the Chinese Embassy to promote the eventual translation of President Xi’s book? Was this public relations  or soft-power diplomacy? Perhaps both. But I wonder: is there another book that has had a forum held to promote a forthcoming translation into Khmer?

At a recent event at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC promoting the work of Sebastian Strangio, the need for Washington to understand contemporary Cambodia in greater depth become clear:

“Within the context of Washington, I think that there’s certainly room for improvement, as far as understanding Cambodia in terms of political, social and cultural dynamics at play in that country.” – Joseph Liow, senior fellow at Brookings.

Hopefully my dissertation will add to the conversation.

A new piece on ForeignAffairs.com by Evan Feigenbaum looks at the new Asian (financial) order and argues for Washington to recalibrate its approach:

Above all, Washington needs to intensify its own economic diplomacy in Asia. The U.S. goal should be not simply to tack an economic component onto its rebalance, or pivot, to Asia, but to encourage a liberal, open, market-based economic order in the region.

It’s a timely piece in my life as I was just awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Post-Doctoral research fellowship looking at ASEAN regionalism through education. The two year project (October 2015 – September 2017) will look at Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, the three poorest members of the ASEAN bloc but also the three largest recipients of Chinese foreign direct investment, to see how individuals inside secondary schools negotiate the competing interests in the region. From my proposal:

The research will be conducted out of the University of Tokyo in conjunction with Prof. Yuto Kitamura. I’m looking for country partners at the moment. Interested parties are encouraged to contact me here.

Iveta Silova and I co-wrote a paper in 2009 that has just been published online in a special issue of Globalisation, Education and Societies. The article is entitled “From myths to models: the (re)production of world culture in comparative education.” The first 50 downloads are free and can be accessed here. This is the abstract of the paper:

This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory’s telos of a ‘world culture’ neglects the notions of power and agency, and continues to use discourses of modernism and ‘scientific’ methodology to justify conformity as the reigning global ‘norm’. The world culture theory ultimately results in an unwitting legitimisation of neoliberal policies and its varied educational projects. Drawing on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of discourse analysis, we examine how the semantics and content of the world culture theory have evolved as it embraced an increasingly large and diverse community of scholars aligned with it. By highlighting some significant semantic shifts during the last four decades, we explore how the world culture theorists forged a relatively new (privileged) space in comparative education – a space that has increasingly turned deterministic and normative. Through a careful deconstruction of some of the basic assumptions of world culture theory, we call for reopening of an intellectual space for new ways of thinking about educational phenomena in the context of globalisation.

A piece I co-wrote has recently been published online. The article is in the Journal of Education Policy and entitled “The emergence of Cambodian civil society within global educational governance: a morphogenetic approach to agency and structure.” Here’s the abstract to the piece:

This paper uses Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in Cambodia of the Civil Society Education Fund – sponsored by the Global Campaign for Education – we first identify the relevant sociocultural, political-economic, and governance structures within which the politics of education is embedded in Cambodia. Then, we detail the relational processes through which Cambodian civil society has been able to join and, in so doing, modify the structures of education governance. The value of the morphogenetic approach is its treatment of time – that is, the way that it temporarily separates structure and agency in order to make possible an analysis of the dynamics of global education governance. While this approach is not new, we suggest that a morphogenetic approach can help in understanding the ways actors come together to create the processes and co-constitute the spaces through which existing educational structures and policies are made and remade across time.

[An update on President Peter Mathieson’s statement to student protesters.]

It looks like Mathieson had a change of heart.  Here’s his latest email to students:

To : All Students and Staff

Subject : A personal appeal from Peter Mathieson, President & Vice-Chancellor, issued at 1.45am on Sunday 5th October, 2014, to students and staff through social media:

I appeal to all HKU students and staff to leave all protest areas immediately. Please stay calm and leave in an orderly manner without delay. I am making this appeal from my heart because I genuinely believe that if you stay, there is a risk to your safety. Please leave now: you owe it to your loved ones to put your safety above all other considerations.

Peter Mathieson
President and Vice-Chancellor

I wonder what sort of institutional pressure went on behind the scenes to force such a reversal. Agency, it seems, has lost the day to the structures of power.

[update: 8:20 pm] It looks like the whole HKU institution is behind the “get the students off the streets” plan. Here’s an email from the Dean of the College of Education, Steve Andrews:

Dear Students,

You will have seen the message sent by the Vice-Chancellor. I would urge you to take note of that message and stay away from the protest sites. At this point, your personal safety must be your number one priority.

Please take care

Steve Andrews

The discourse of “safety”—or its implied absence— is a bit frightening, especially when it comes from those in power.

Instead of beginning school on October 1, students in Cambodia will begin a month later on November 1. The delay did not come from rain like years past, but rather came from the Prime Minister himself. After 75 percent of students failed the grade 12 examination, Hun Sen said students could re-take the examination at the end of October. To help those students prepare, the Ministry of Education has turned to tutoring. Many teachers are being paid to tutor grade 12 students in preparation for the re-examination. The 11 students who received A grades on the examination have also been recruited to tutor. This comes from the Christian Science Monitor:

Because of the reforms, those who flunked will get another shot at passing in a retest in October. The government is enlisting A students like Vibolroth in the fight.

She’s being paid $5 an hour to tutor students five times a week, two hours a day. One thing her new job has given her is perspective. She knows how hard it is to be a teacher. In her classes, the students are “very worried.” What they may not know is that the feeling is mutual.

Speaking in her new role as teacher, she says that, “I worry that I didn’t cover all the lessons and the exam [covers] that part I didn’t talk about.

Elizabeth Economy from the Council on Foreign Relations has a new op-ed about Hong Kong where she cites the University of Hong Kong’s support for the student protesters. She lists what she thinks are Beijing’s options, other than meeting all of the demands of the protesters:

Given these reasonably straight-forward demands, Beijing has a number of options. It can: enforce a harsh crackdown in Hong Kong in the hopes that brutally suppressing the protestors will stave off further reform demonstrations; confine the protests to a small area of Hong Kong and hope that they run their course: eventually the students will return to school and the occupy central protestors will return to work; remove Chief Executive C.Y. Leung, who has been a weak and unpopular leader from the outset as a stop-gap; or establish a committee including representatives of various Hong Kong political actors to consider the next stage of suffrage, post-2017.

It looks like the plan is for CY Leung to wait it out: Reuters reports an anonoumous source close to the Chief Executive saying,

“Unless there’s some chaotic situation, we won’t send in riot police … We hope this doesn’t happen,” the source said. “We have to deal with it peacefully, even if it lasts weeks or months.”