Editorial

Since 1972, the Comparative and International Education Journal/Éducation comparée et internationale (CIE/ÉCI) has welcomed Canadian comparative studies, particularly on Indigenous Peoples, as well as comparative research on various educational contexts and topics, accepting manuscripts in both French and English. As editor of the French portion, I would like to address in this editorial space the challenges associated with bilingual publications, and highlight some areas of research that the journal would be happy to support through the publication of articles in French. At the last conference, the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada/la Société canadienne d’éducation comparée et internationale (CIESC/SCÉCI) organized a panel for graduate students to present their work in the field of comparative and international education. We had hoped the panel would be bilingual, with some students presenting their work in French. Unfortunately, we did not receive any submissions. And we think this reflects the challenge we have been facing all along in making the journal a fully bilingual space, rather than a publishing space where two solitudes could cohabit, with Anglophone readers possibly only reading articles in English, and Francophone readers possibly only reading articles in French. Are Francophone authors more interested in publishing in a Quebec or French/European journal that will ensure them a wider Francophone readership? We’d love to hear from you, so please share your experience with us! Our vision for this journal is to see the emergence of a bilingual space that would enable readers to benefit from the views of both Francophone and Anglophone academia on common, collective, complementary issues: issues of equity/diversity/inclusion, decolonization, anti-racist education, and issues related to international mobility, to name but a few. The Anglophone and Francophone academic circles are porous, with researchers who, of course, navigate between both spaces. But these academic circles developed around different disciplinary boundaries, different academic cultures, with some concepts and leading authors moving around with different degrees between the two, or at different rates, with different resonances, and sometimes with the complex challenges of translating concepts from one language to another. I can refer here to the work of Dervin (2012), and in particular to the book Les impostures interculturelles (Intercultural Impostures), which already posed, more than 10 years ago, the difficulty of such a concept as intercultural, to travel from one country to another, from one context to another, from one author to another and of course from one language to another. This is also the observation that emerged from the international work “La circulation internationale des idées en didactique des langues,” where the authors, in particular Zarate and Liddicoat (2009), spoke of “veritable geological fault lines” or “chasms of meaning” (p. 192), when it comes to communicating between researchers of different nationalities and languages. In the context of my position, I have the opportunity to read the articles we publish in both French and English, and I think the journal could play a bridging role in this respect. There are a few areas of research in particular that I have identified where we would undoubtedly benefit from more emulation between the Anglophone and Francophone academic worlds. The first is the decolonization of education, education for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples and the Indigenization of education systems. There are more and more publications in this field, by both Indigenous and allied authors, but there are only a handful of authors publishing in French on the subject across Canada, from East to West. Of course, it is the rich literature from Anglophone Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Scandinavia that will best provide food for thought, and this literature is mainly in English. …