Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a…

Drawing on the recent critiques of the global knowledge economy of social science research, this article explores possible ways in which the Japanese education research communities can reposition themselves in the wider international education research community. The premises of this discussion are that there exists a global structure of academic…

Neo-institutionalist theory of global "isomorphism", or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that…

This article examines a case of what Olssen et al. (2004) call "managerial oppression" set in a faculty of international studies of a Japanese university. Japanese universities have, in recent times, been facing the financial pressures of a falling birthrate and dwindling enrolments. To remain solvent, some universities have had to…

Japan is known to be a country that manicures its socio-cultural borders. In this article I will examine discourses regarding openness, closedness and cultural diversity in relation to policies and practices that draw heavily on mythologies of English language as an inroad to greater openness and diversity. To do this I will examine two English…

This article challenges the common-sense observation that Japanese and American education have been moving in "opposite directions" in recent times. Drawing on postcolonial discourse studies and cultural studies, the article extracts from this observation an Orientalist binary epistemology that continues to set discursive limits on the…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…