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In comparative education, words like 'culture' and 'foreign' are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of 'area expertise'. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period especially after 1950, theoretical work in comparative education did not retain the potentials of 'multiculturality' and 'interculturality' as crucial concerns. Thus, the strategic theme of this article is an analysis of what we lost and why and what is being overlooked in the dominant agenda of attention in comparative education such as majority-minority power relations in the politics of representation, transnational space for diasporas, competing worldviews, and epistemological hegemony. Overall, we need to assess what it is we are not-seeing. We also need to reflect on the ethics of comparative education, lest we become satisfied with being routinely relevant for practical policy and delivering 'robust and relevant research'. We should ask, relevant for whom and relevant to what?; and what might a closer relationship between comparative education and intercultural education imply for some 'futures' of 'comparative education'?

Many of the iconic figures in the history of comparative education were trans-national polyglot scholars. Several key thinkers and actors in the formative years of the institutionalisation of comparative education notably in London and New York were either émigré or migrant scholars (i.e. Kandel, Hans, Ulrich, Lauwerys, Bereday). There are many more transnationally- mobile academics doing comparative education these days and we do not yet have a clear "Gestalt" which permits us to grasp how and why they are engaged in comparative education. This article explores this general theme, not least in terms of the concept of 'the foreign'. The article wonders about and explores the theme of a 'diasporic comparative education', here taken to mean the kinds of re-thinking of comparative education undertaken by those who choose to undergo the existential and intellectual stresses of 'becoming foreign' while they embrace the professional identity of being 'comparative educationists'.

This article offers a reflexive analysis and discussion of the relationship between academic mobility and comparative knowledge creation. It argues that what constitutes "comparative knowledge" is not solely "Wissenschaften" but more often entwined with "Weltanschauungen", derived from lived experiences--as exemplified in the biographic narratives of some of the major intellects. It reviews the notions of the "gaze" and the concepts of the Other and Homeworld/Alienworld as epistemic positioning in doing comparative education. In the framework of phenomenological thinking, the paper discusses the intimate relationship between comparative knowledge and positional knowledge.

This article begins with the contemporary context of transnational academic mobility, and sketches a typology of mobile academics according to their self-identification. UK examples are offered as the main case study here. The article will then explore the relations of mobile academics and their embodied and encultured knowledge. It employs a concept of "transnational identity capital" to discuss the position of transnational mobile academic intellectuals as a "stranger" as inspired by Simmel's sociology of space. (Contains 6 notes.)

This article is an initial attempt to illustrate how patterns of academic mobility in the history of universities have been framed by the international politics of particular time periods. The article briefly looks at "the medieval period" and then at the emergent colonial and nationalist periods, including the ways that institutions as well as academics themselves were mobile. More contemporaneously the powerful political forces of both the interwar period and the Cold War period (which are well known) are sketched. The final part of the article shows in some detail how, in the contemporary period, the scale and speed of cross-border academic mobility has changed. There are new actors and new ideologies. What is clear from the article is that there is not merely a need to keep information about the flows of academics up to date for policy purposes. It is also clear that we are a long way from being able to theorise the problem, sociologically and comparatively. (Contains 1 table.)

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses theme of the periodical such as comparative education.