The Research Field of Adult Education and Learning: Widening the Field

Abstract

We began this book by launching a series of questions on what the adult education and learning research field looks like, how it has emerged historically and how it is transformed through contemporary policy and research practice. The chapters have, in different ways, contributed to answering these questions by case studies, as well as by looking at the transnational power relations across countries. In the debate on comparative adult education research finalising this book, Field, Künzel and Schemmann posed the rather provocative question of whether the chapter of international comparative adult education has now come to a close (see Chap. 10). We would argue that such research is still alive and possible to carry out, but that the conditions under which research is conducted also need to be taken into serious consideration. In the various contributions to this book, several chapters show how a comparative perspective on the field of research can contribute to our understanding of how knowledge about adult education and learning is produced. They also demonstrate how this knowledge is stratified across regional and national borders, as well as between individual scholars positioned in relation to one another.