Educational Research and Strategies of World-Forming - The Globe, the Unconscious, and the Child - Radford Address

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Jasmine

Explores how nationalism, parochialism, and racism shape understandings of place and voice, and how “New Times” rearranges sensibilities toward the spatial, glocal, and virtual. Argues that appeals to globalization force humanities and social sciences to rethink belonging, education’s purposes, and future projections, affecting policy, reform, leadership, doctoral programs, and classroom populations. Reconsiders Chambers’ problem of a rationality confronted with what exceeds its grasp, framing education as unfolding through world-forming strategies and their political implications across three sections.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages41

Reading Time1 h 43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

New Times and shifts in sensibilities

Globalization and reorientation in education

Fixity, place, and emerging concepts (world, globe, unconscious, child)

Paper scope and structure

RADFORD ADDRESS Educational Research and Strategies of World-Forming: The Globe, the Unconscious, and the Child Bernadette Baker University of Turku and University of Wisconsin Introduction The passion to eradicate alterity from the earth is also the passion for the home, the country, the dwelling, that authorizes this desire and rewards it. In its nationalism, parochialism and racism it constitutes a public and private neurosis. So, unwinding the rigid understanding of place that apparently permits me to speak, that guarantees my voice, my power, is not simply to disperse my locality within the wider coordinates of an ultimate planetary context. That would merely absolve me of responsibility in the name of an abstract and generic globalism, permitting my inheritance to continue uninterrupted in the vagaries of a new configuration. There is something altogether more precise and more urgent involved. For in the horror of the unhomely pulses the dread for the dispersal of Western humankind: the dread of a rationality confronted with what exceeds and slips its grasp. (Chambers, 2001, p. 196) We live in what has been called, for several decades now, New Times – an apparent shift in sensibilities from the chronological and linear, to the spatial, the scalar, and the glocal; a mutation in political debates from matters of truth to matters of concern; a leap from the textual to the virtual, from the auditory to the visual; contracted and reduced temporalities of communication that enable expansion of horizons, everything at once more easy and more difficult, from the sturdy foundations of certitude over who we are to irreconcilable planes of rhizomatic temperament and polycentricity – coordinates lost, disorientation ensues, a new moral compass is sought. That at least is the spin so frequently given to and as New Times. Such world-diagnosis requires its own coordinates, though: An appeal to a before and after, a here and a The Australian Educational Researcher, Volume 36, Number 3, December 2009 •1 BERNADETTE BAKER there, a this and a that which structure the observabilities often left unproblematized amid current logics of perception. Under the label globalization, the humanities and social sciences have been forced to revise their thinking to find new ways to speak about the changed circumstances around us and to reorient conceptually in an apparent“world without frontiers.” Appeals to the rhetoric of globalization are reflected in shiftsin our basic understanding of belonging, in the purposes attributed to education, and projections of the future. Significant shifts have already taken place in occidentalist notions of self and/or subjectivity and in the traditional framework of compulsory education, the nation-state. These shifts, in turn, affect educational policy, school reform and leadership, doctoral programs, and classroom populations. In contemporary educational research, such shifts are only marginally, but increasingly, being recognized (Anderson-Levitt, 2003; Burbules & Torres, 2000; Rizvi & Lingard, 2000; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000; Suárez-Oroczo & Qin-Hilliard, 2004) . Such shifts are often posited as indexical of a noise or chaos out of which a new rational ordering must be developed. Yet, ordering and inhabiting this montage of New Times’ sensibilities are very arbitrary and delimited discursive trajectories whose logic and confusion-generating potential are linked by a quest for fixity. The problem is not one of pointing to that over and over but rather of unwinding the rigid understanding of place that is embedded in their representational strategies. Integral to the quest for fixity that sought to link place, self, and progress since the late nineteenth century in anglophone scholarship and policies, and especially to the search for subjects-objects that do not leak but that remain malleable, have been the emergence of new conceptions of world and now of globe, of an unconscious, and of the c

FAQs

What does the paper challenge about “unwinding the rigid understanding of place”?

It argues that simply dispersing locality into an abstract global context would evade responsibility. Instead, it seeks a more precise and urgent unwinding of representational strategies that embed rigid place understandings.

How does the paper describe “New Times” and its impact on education debates?

It presents “New Times” as a shift from linear chronological logics to spatial and scalar ones, from textual to virtual and auditory to visual, producing disorientation that prompts a new moral compass. It connects this to changes in how truth becomes concern and to altered ways education is imagined.

What is the role of globalization in the humanities and social sciences according to the paper?

Under globalization, the humanities and social sciences are said to revise thinking to speak about changed circumstances and to reorient conceptually toward a “world without frontiers.” The paper links these shifts to changes in belonging, education’s purposes, and projections of the future.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Jasmine