As a PhD student who has spent long months engrossed in literature and theoretical frameworks, stepping out ‘into the field’ feels like embarking on a journey of discovery. Having received the ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ Student Fieldwork Grant and recently concluded my fieldwork, I can confidently say that fieldwork is perhaps the most transformative part of the research process. It unfolds you. It pushes theory into the realm of the tangible. It brings abstraction to life. As you encounter fragments of knowledge with evidence scattered everywhere and engage in illuminating conversations with people, you begin piecing together ‘truths’.

It was during my MA at Loyola University Chicago that I remember reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World,which left a lasting impression on the intricacies of fieldwork, and more recently, I encountered her Friction. Her work, often surfacing in conversations with my friend and fellow researcher Aizuddin Anuar, has deeply shaped how I think about research. Tsing’s concept of friction resonates with me. The messiness, the generative encounters that occur when different worlds meet. And nowhere is that more present than in fieldwork.

That sense of friction became acutely real when I returned to Malaysia for fieldwork just weeks after losing my father in late February. I had to fly home suddenly to say goodbye. The grief had already been mounting. My niece had passed away just as I was beginning the PhD in 2023, my aunt the following year, and then, in the middle of 2024, my brother died suddenly. It was only right to return, and it was only possible with the support of the ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ Student Fieldwork Grant. After a brief visit home for my father’s funeral, I flew back to the UK for my upgrade viva in early March, and then finally made my way back to Malaysia again. This time with quiet sadness, but also with a heightened sensitivity. In many ways, grief made the fieldwork feel spiritual. It was not only a journey into schools and communities, but also an inward journey – one into myself, as a researcher.

As I travelled across Malaysia, from the urban centre engaging with elites in the Ministry of Education and nonprofit organisations, to rural teachers working with students on the ground, I often asked myself – how do we hold the fragments of the field, conversations, contradictions, observations, and weave them into something coherent, something meaningful? Over dinner one evening, my colleague RonĂŠ McFarlane, now in the writing-up stage, asked: “How do I make it all coherent?” That question lingered. It reminded me again of Tsing – that fieldwork and writing are not about extracting neat truths, but about making: negotiating meaning, finding patterns in friction, and fabricating coherence. Fabricating here is not in the sense of lying or faking, but in the sense of assembling. In fieldwork, as an education researcher, you are not passively absorbing data. We are fabricating knowledge: we interpret gestures, stitch together narratives, and co-construct meanings with others. The field is not a warehouse of facts; it’s a site of ongoing fabrication shaped by relationships, contexts, and histories.

So, for those who are preparing to go into the field: what if we did not treat fieldwork as a search for clarity, but as a process of composing? Of crafting stories and insights from the tensions and encounters that resist easy explanations? What if fieldwork were not just about finding data, but about becoming, through the very act of navigating its frictions?

This is the lens through which I approached my own fieldwork. Not just to gather information, but to understand how stories are told, how roles are shaped, and how futures are imagined. My research focuses on how global education agendas, particularly those tied to technology and efficiency, are shaping the professional identities of teachers in Malaysia. To explore this, I used a range of approaches rooted in dialogue, imagination, and reflection.

I conducted interviews with what we often call ‘elites’—policymakers, ministry officials, and other actors shaping the global agenda. These conversations helped surface the official narratives, logics, and ambitions underpinning Malaysia’s push towards adopting these global agendas in its local education system. But I also wanted to understand how these agendas are lived, interpreted, and negotiated in classrooms, so I turned to teachers.

Alongside traditional interviews with teachers, I designed and facilitated a series of futures-based workshops with two teacher communities. This method, inspired by Lauttamäki’s futures workshop model and adapted through speculative and critical design literature, became a space where teachers could play, reflect, and imagine. At the heart of this method was a custom-designed set of “futures cards”, which categorised scenarios as possible, plausible, probable, desirable, and undesirable.

These cards weren’t just props; in actuality, they were provocations. Teachers used them to build timelines, imagine dystopias and utopias, and reflect on the pathways that might lead to each. In one phase, they created a “Timeline of Disaster” and a “Timeline of Desire”, sketching key events that could shape those imagined futures. In another, they debated what kinds of futures they wanted, which ones were tolerable, and which must be avoided at all costs.

What emerged from these workshops was more than data. There was laughter, frustration, moments of silence. There were expressions of fatigue and resistance. Some teachers articulated, for the first time, a discomfort with how digital tools were being imposed upon them, not as helpful supports, but as mandates tied to performance and compliance. Many began to question the subtle forms of “nudging” they had previously accepted without pause. In other words, the workshop became a space not just for speaking, but for thinking differently.

This, I now realise, is the kind of fabrication I mentioned earlier – not in the sense of inventing something false, but in the creative, careful work of piecing together fragments of lived experience, institutional discourse, and speculative futures. It is a process of negotiating what it means to teach, care, and act with agency in a world increasingly shaped by technological imperatives. As I reflect on this fieldwork journey, marked by grief, friction, and moments of deep connection, I am reminded that research is not a path to certainty, but an ongoing negotiation with the world’s complexity. The field does not give us answers. Rather, it invites us to listen, to imagine, and to assemble meaning in ways that are necessarily incomplete.

In the words of Anna Tsing:

“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. To listen is to become vulnerable.” — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

It is in this spirit of vulnerability, of listening, making, and becoming that I continue to think with my fieldwork. Perhaps this is what it truly means to do research: to stay with the friction and let it change us.

References:

Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.

Pravindharan Balakrishnan

Pravindharan Balakrishnan is a PhD student in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. He is researching on the intersection of the increasingly complex architecture of global governance of education and the professional work of teachers. Previously, Pravin obtained a Master’s degree in education policy from the Loyola University Chicago under the prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Prior to that, Pravin worked as a secondary school teacher in Malaysia for close to a decade. This experience informed his interest in the flow of global education policies to the local level.

In her opening speech ‘The imperative of the future’ at the UKFIET 2023 Conference, two key arguments in relation to a just education stood out from Maria Balarin. First, less politically challenging topics have a greater chance to make it into policies and practice, and second, the depoliticisation of education policies undermines the potential for justice.  Balarin’s arguments are fundamental in interrogating the inequalities of the Global North-South relationship for a just education in present time. Drawing inspiration from Margaret Atwood’s Ustopia, which denotes the collective imagination of human species where tensions are acknowledged yet everyone has what they need to thrive, I make two arguments in relation to debates about just education – (1) the utopian visions promoted by international organisations (IOs) fail to engage underlying structural inequalities that impede equitable education and (2) Global South and grassroot movements can serve as a source of inspiration in the knowledge-making of a just education.

The utopian visions of the international organisations

In recent times, IOs, predominantly occupied with experts from the Global North, deploy utopias to shape the future of education through technologies of government (Tikly, 2004), such as foresights, anticipation, and scenario planning. Utopian visions are deeply problematic because they gloss over complex and complicated realities, and often times exaggerate the ease to achieve desirable futures. By assuming the role of ‘guardians’ of education (Robertson, 2022), such utopian visions do not engage with a just education in a meaningful way, rather they are used by IOs to legitimise the considerable influence they hold over education futures. Examples of future-making visions promoted by IOs are the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Reimagining our Futures Together and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030 and Digital Education Outlook. While UNESCO advocates a “new social contract” with justice at its core, the OECD promotes “soft” skills and technologies as panaceas to tackle an uncertain future (Robertson & Beech, 2023). Given the influence and reach of IOs and their visions through global agendas such as SDG4 (Quality Education), Global South countries are compelled to embrace educational agendas that are based on Western values and epistemologies, representing a form of new imperialism (Tikly, 2004). 

Against the background of Hannah Arendt’s warning that utopian visions can have depoliticising effects and totalitarian outcomes (Arendt, 1951), it is important to critically unpack these educational visions put forward by IOs. Based on an analysis of several OECD and UNESCO reports, Elfert (2023) highlighted the emergence of two policy strands – ‘sustainable futures’ and ‘technosolutionism’. Although both policy strands have different ontological underpinnings – sustainable futures are associated with the humanistic-emancipatory agenda such as lifelong learning, and technosolutionism which are related to the ‘economics of education’ movement and represents the unwavering belief that technology will save us all. Elfert (2023) carefully illustrates that educational visions stemming from both these policy strands have the potential to undermine democratic principles. For example, she argues that UNESCO’s notion of the social contract, outlined in Reimagining our Futures Together, diverts attention away from political action and creates potential for the abuse of higher collective ideals. Meanwhile, the OECD’s emphasis on enhancing the understanding of human learning through scientific evidence serves the commercial interests of educational technology (EdTech) companies. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, EdTech companies have successfully embedded themselves in public education by passing national laws (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). Companies such as Google For Education and Microsoft Education play an influential role in the digital education landscape offering technological solutions and leveraging their tools in the promise of enhanced education. Subsequently, such EdTech corporations not only have a say in global education policymaking, but also insert themselves in global and local networks that afford them legitimacy. Additionally, there is a growing influence of EdTech in education in the structure of global governance around the Sustainable Development Goals (Patil, 2024). The rise of global governance and the influence of EdTech corporations require us to think about a just education more contemplatively, particularly in the unequal North-South relationship. 

Elfert’s (2023) work on IOs’ utopian visions push us to think about how justice in education can be achieved without being grounded in an analysis of structural inequalities? The intensification of ‘scientific evidence’ in education was meant to advance human knowledge to make sense of the uncertainties in a volatile world. If utopia itself is ambiguous, and IOs are shaping visions of how they want the world to be through imperial technologies of government, where would this leave marginalised communities in the Global South? Therefore, Elfert’s (2023) argues that these global educational discourses do not bring us closer to the supposed utopia, rather they contribute to the widening inequalities between the North and South. Owing to this, new sources of inspiration, such as reparations (Sriprakash, 2023) are needed to imagine a just education for the future. 

Seeking inspirations from grassroot movements

In a recently published book, titled Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-making in the Global South, Mario Novelli, Birgul Kutan, Patrick Kane, Adnan Celik, Tejendra Pherali, and Saranel Benjamin highlight grassroot examples of justice in education from the Global South, namely in Turkey, Colombia, Nepal, and South Africa (Novelli et al., 2023). Their collaborative research sheds light on how the South can produce vital knowledge as they struggle for a better world. If anything, the social movements’ struggle for a just education for their communities were achieved by confronting the structural inequalities. These grassroot movements, referred to as ‘laboratories as learning’ offer rich and innovative insights into advocacy work for and by marginalised groups and provide evidence of the role of the Global South in the knowledge-making process, particularly in the context of equitable education. Another example is Rebecca Tarlau’s (2019) research on the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, focusing on how the social movement of rural workers struggled for agrarian reform. Tarlau highlighted that the social movement was able to push for co-governance of rural public schools to encourage youths to remain in the countryside. With the rising influence of EdTech corporations, it is also pertinent to look at examples of Ustopias from a technological perspective. In her latest book Viral Justice, Ruha Benjamin (2022) highlights how technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination through automated decision making. As a counter example, in Barcelona, a digital platform for citizen participation called Decidim collectively create policies that respond to citizens’ needs, without the influence of technology companies. In Atlanta, people utilised their imagination and mobilised digital tools against the construction of a police facility that would lead to destruction of one of Atlanta’s largest forests. Although Barcelona and Atlanta are localities of the Global South, the mobilisation of these young communities from marginalised backgrounds shows that technological power can be harnessed for a better and just society. 

The struggles of these self-mobilised and politically-motivated social movements and digital initiatives represent Ustopias in action, powerful counter-visions to the depoliticised global utopias promoted by IOs, that can serve as inspirations to realise an education that is more just and meaningful for communities around the world.      

References

“2023 Conference Opening Plenary.” YouTube, uploaded by Sarah Jeffery, 2 October 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1XImyErWg

Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral justice: How we grow the world we want. Princeton University Press.

Elfert, M. (2023). Humanism and democracy in comparative education. Comparative Education, 118.

Novelli, M., Benjamin, S., Çelik, A., Kane, P., Kutan, B., & Pherali, T. (2021). Laboratories of learning: Education, learning and knowledge-making in social movements: Insights from Colombia, Nepal, South Africa and Turkey. Pluto Books.

Patil, L. (2024, January 25). Education Global Governance and Technology Corporations: Inherent Conflicts and Potential Safeguards for a New Social Contract. NORRAG.

Robertson, S. L. (2022). Guardians of the future: International organisations, anticipatory governance and education. Global Society, 36(2), 188-205.

Robertson, S. L., & Beech, J. (2023). ‘Promises promises’: international organisations, promissory legitimacy and the re-negotiation of education futures. Comparative Education, 1-18.

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782-795.

Tarlau, R. (2019). Occupying schools, occupying land: How the landless workers movement transformed Brazilian education. Global and Comparative Ethnography.

Tikly, L. (2004). Education and the new imperialism. Comparative Education, 40(2), 173-198.

Williamson, B., & Hogan, A. (2020). Commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19. Education International. 

Pravindharan Balakrishnan

Pravindharan Balakrishnan is a PhD student in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. He is researching on the intersection of the increasingly complex architecture of global governance of education and the professional work of teachers. Previously, Pravin obtained a Master’s degree in education policy from the Loyola University Chicago under the prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Prior to that, Pravin worked as a secondary school teacher in Malaysia for close to a decade. This experience informed his interest in the flow of global education policies to the local level.