The cultural mechanisms producing hybrid education in Cambodia: towards a dialectical critical cultural political economy of education

Abstract

A Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) is based on a critical realist philosophy of science. As such, CCPEE must have a stratified ontology whereby experiences are determined by mechanisms that exist independently of social events they generate. Mechanisms (the “real”) cause social phenomena and events (the “actual”), which may (or may not) be experienced by a person (the “empirical”). From these assumptions, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) is effectively turned on its head: There is, therefore I (may be able to) think; ontology precedes epistemology. How then might the idea of the cultural exist not only in the dimension of the empirical, but also in the actual and real? By examining a moment in the politics of education—that is, the privatization of public education—within the context of Cambodia, this presentation examines a stratified ontology in the cultural, focusing on the mechanisms, structures, and tendencies that produce the social phenomenon of hybrid-education (Brehm et al., 2012). By looking at the tensions and contradictions within the observable and unobservable cultural dimensions in the schooling experience, the presentation ends by arguing for a dialectical CCPEE based on Bhaskar’s concept of absence, whereby the real, actual, and empirical must be understood in relation to those entities that are “never anywhere,” “sometimes somewhere else” and/or “spatio-temporally distant.”