The internationalisation of educational ideas, together with attendant mobilities and migrations, have brought new opportunities, as well as new challenges for high quality international and comparative research.  In a complex world of shifting identities and competing economies, there is pressure on policymakers and educational managers to compare educational outcomes, internationally, in order to seek solutions that have produced satisfactory results elsewhere.  This has placed a renewed emphasis on the value of international and comparative research, often in the form of large data sets, such as PISA and TIMMS. At the same time, researchers who come from a Sadlerian tradition, who see the origins and influence of education as more cultural, societal and situated, have argued for the need to re-assess the theoretical, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of such work in order to rise to these new challenges and support contextual and cultural sensitivity. 

Challenges have been made to both the unit of analysis and the uncritical transfer of ideas and policy from one context to another.  However, there has been less focus on notions of ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’ and how these might impact on the research process in a post-modern and post-colonial world where older concepts of ‘national identity’ and simple constructions of the ‘other’ have begun to lose their relevance.

Historically, insider-outsider perspectives have been theorised across many academic disciplines:  in anthropology from the perspective of the observer studying different cultures; in sociology with regard to social groupings and class, the dynamics of power relationships and social mobility; in psychology with regard to group behaviour and interaction;  in linguistics and intercultural studies in the context of second language acquisition and cultural integration  as well as in philosophy in terms of the individual, the self, phenomenology and reflexivity. All these perspectives have left their mark on research methodologies and methods, particularly in the field of international comparative education.

This paper seeks to develop new knowledge in this area and addresses a growing recognition that the bipolar constructs of insider-outsiderism fail to acknowledge a more complex understanding of difference. Social constructivist epistemologies, for example, regard identity as multiple, shifting and constantly in the process of formation, which argues against such simple dualisms. Researchers themselves have multiple identities which can play out differently in different situations.  Moreover, they have past histories and what Gadamer (2012) refers to as ‘prejudices’creating an ‘historically-effected conciousness’.  He argues that it is through our historically-effected consciousness that we understand and interpret the world. A more recent body of literature from cultural and activity theorists argues that, in the process of intercultural communication and boundary crossing, there is a third perspective which is constructed when the insider and outsider meet. This liminal space of inbetweeness can be an area of hostility but also great creativity, mutual understanding and new wisdom.

Our work challenges earlier definitions of the outsider as detached and objective, and the insider as culturally embedded and subjective in order to seek a more inclusive, collaborative and nuanced approach to the search for knowledge.

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