Comparing from Here: The Gulf, International Assessments, and the Technological Promise

Abstract

This Gulf Comparative Education Society (GCES) Presidential Address takes “comparing from here” as an epistemic and methodological starting point for engaging with international large-scale assessments in the Gulf. Rather than rejecting comparison, it asks what comparison makes possible when the region is read from its own historical trajectories, social formations, and educational conditions. In doing so, the address moves away from two reductive readings. The first is exceptionalism, which positions the Gulf as if it were outside wider debates on global education policy. The second is genericism, which absorbs the region into international rankings as another comparable data point, detached from the migration histories, school stratification, linguistic arrangements, and socioeconomic inequalities that shape education systems. Drawing on policy mobility scholarship and Biesta’s critique of measurement culture, the address examines how international assessments, inspections, rankings, and performance indicators have become central to the ways education systems are described, compared, and governed. This is not only a technical process of measurement but also a political and epistemic process through which some realities become visible, while others are rendered marginal or invisible. The address extends this discussion to human capital narratives, particularly Brown et al.’s critique of the assumption that schooling necessarily guarantees earnings, with direct relevance to nationalization policies such as Emiratization, Saudization, and Kuwaitization. It also considers how generative AI circulates alongside assessment regimes, raising questions about educational purpose when student thinking can be partially outsourced. Taking this into consideration, the address outlines the GCES 2026–2027 agenda around four linked questions: (i) What does comparison do when it becomes a technology of governance rather than only a method of inquiry? (ii) What becomes visible and invisible when educational quality is organized through international assessments, inspections, rankings, and performance indicators? (iii) How are new technologies, including AI, reshaping the purposes and practices of education in systems already governed by measurable outputs? (iv) What forms of knowledge and educational purpose should schools and universities protect when human capital promises are unstable and when thinking can be outsourced?