This article is an expansion of an earlier investigation that the authors undertook in the wake of the democratization process in South Africa while universities were struggling to redefine their aims, roles, and identities toward the end of the twentieth century. The authors' research commenced in 1994 as a genealogy, tracing individuals on an institution-by-institution basis and collecting information on courses taught in comparative education and related fields at South African universities. The conceptual framework of this paper is built around the concepts of embeddedness and representations of knowledge within institutional, national, and international contexts. A major point of departure is the notion of discourses as complex fields of speech and action in social arenas, which both act and are acted upon--discourses therefore form and reform academic fields of study to become products of processes of re-embedding. For this article, the authors chose comparative education as a discursive arena for seeking to make sense of how South African academic discourses, the character formation of disciplines, and their institutionalized forms took shape as a result of practices and ideas transposed from North America and Europe during the last half of the twentieth century. In their analysis of re-embedding processes, the authors drew strongly on the work of Wagner and Wittrock for identifying three kinds of reembedding: epistemic alliances that characterize the development of the social sciences in the Western university tradition, discourse coalitions among the educational subsystem and other social systems, and the mediation of the development of individual intellectuals and divergences of academic traditions through institutional discourses. In seeking to explicate the re-embedding processes that have developed, they contend that comparative education, as part of the social sciences arena, became embedded in academic and public discourses in South Africa through the development of different comparative education traditions as a result of different "epistemic alliances." These alliances were infused with and formed as a result of traditions assimilated from continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world (including North American traditions).(Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 1 note.)