Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) - Volume 22 - Issue 1 - Special Issue 2020 - Labeling the World - The 3P Framework for Critiquing and Reconstructing Our Categorization Processes

Oct 15, 2026

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Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) Volume 22, Issue 1 presents “Labeling the World,” which examines how comparative education scholars and students routinely assign place-based labels that carry complex histories, connotations, and risks. The article develops the 3P framework—power, perspective, and plurality—to analyze labeling dynamics, identify common pitfalls, and interpret labels in specific research contexts through vignettes on South Asia and Estonia. It concludes with teaching and research recommendations.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Labeling the World: The 3P Framework for Critiquing and Reconstructing Our Categorization Processes

3P framework and its purpose

Pitfalls in labeling and open access resources

Vignettes: South Asia and Estonia

Labels, power, perspective, and plurality

Teaching and scholarship recommendations

Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) Volume 22, Issue 1, Special Issue 2020 Labeling the World: The 3P Framework for Critiquing and Reconstructing Our Categorization Processes Kara D. Brown University of South Carolina Payal P. Shah University of South Carolina E. Doyle Stevick University of South Carolina Scholars and students of comparative education routinely, and often reflexively, categorize places with labels that have complex and problematic histories, connotations and associations. Both comparative education classrooms and scholarship will benefit from reflecting on the dynamics of labeling places. We seek to provide a framework for analyzing the main issues and risks associated with labeling with a heuristic we call the 3P framework. It invites students and scholars to consider the ways in which power, perspective, and plurality are expressed through the terms we apply to places. Through this framework, we identify common pitfalls in labeling. We provide a table with open access resources that critically examine many of the most important and common geographic labels in our field. To illustrate how these issues are manifested in particular contexts, we provide two vignettes, on South Asia and Estonia. The vignettes show how issues of power, perspective and plurality are manifested through the labels used and applied in specific places where we conduct research. Finally, we examine how the labeling process is situated in specific contexts and how meaning is culturally rooted; in doing so, we explain how the exclusive use of English-language labels in this piece is necessarily incomplete. The piece concludes with recommendations for teaching with this framework and for producing comparative education scholarship that deploys labels with greater reflexivity and intentionality. Keywords: Labels, categories, states, regions. How do we label the world? By adulthood, we have absorbed a set of terms and categories for places, colloquial understandings that we carry into our roles as students and scholars of comparative education. While becoming socialized into shared professional discourses may partially reconstruct the meaning of these labels, the process by which we assign terms to places has not received much explicit attention. As former students and current researchers and professors in the field, we recognize that these terms play a fundamental role both in structuring our comparisons and in defining the contexts for our work: in other words, this is how we attribute meaning by creating associations with specific other places. Given the centrality of labels and © 2020, Current Issues in Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Current Issues in Comparative Education 22(1), 104-120. Brown, Shah & Stevick labeling in our field, it is important and illuminating to examine their use and history with care and depth. This article focuses on how we label the world — in writing, understanding, researching, and reading comparative work in education. The complexity of these taxonomies and the impact of their use are often left unremarked, yet have important theoretical and practical implications as well as significant promise for teaching comparative education as a subject. We begin with the dynamics of power, perspective, and plurality in the imposition and diffusion of labels. Any label may shed light and cast shadows, and labels that persist are frequently dated while their shadows can perpetuate distortions. To illustrate these issues, we offer two resources: first, a table of common terms and popular resources (with links) that invite us--students and scholars alike--into a deeper consideration of their complexity and problematic aspects, and second, two vignettes from our research sites--South Asia and Estonia--that reveal the depth and situated nature of labels and how they are imposed, appropriated or contested. We advocate more intentiona

FAQs

What is the 3P framework introduced in the article?

The 3P framework is a heuristic for analyzing the main issues and risks associated with labeling places, organized around power, perspective, and plurality.

How does the article suggest labeling affects comparative education work?

It argues that labeling is not neutral; labels structure comparisons and define research contexts by attributing meaning through associations with other places.

What roles do the South Asia and Estonia vignettes play?

They illustrate how power, perspective, and plurality are expressed through labels used in specific research sites, showing how labels are imposed, appropriated, or contested.

Oct 15, 2026

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