Labeling the World: The 3P Framework for Critiquing and Reconstructing Our Categorization Processes

Scholars and students of comparative education routinely, and often reflexively, categorize places with labels that have complex and problematic histories, connotations and associations. Both comparative education classrooms and scholarship will benefit from reflecting on the dynamics of labeling places. We seek to provide a framework for analyzing the main issues and risks associated with labeling with a heuristic we call the 3P framework. It invites students and scholars to consider the ways in which power, perspective, and plurality are expressed through the terms we apply to places. Through this framework, we identify common pitfalls in labeling. We provide a table with open access resources that critically examine many of the most important and common geographic labels in our field. To illustrate how these issues are manifested in particular contexts, we provide two vignettes, on South Asia and Estonia. The vignettes show how issues of power, perspective and plurality are manifested through the labels used and applied in specific places where we conduct research. Finally, we examine how the labeling process is situated in specific contexts and how meaning is culturally rooted; in doing so, we explain how the exclusive use of English-language labels in this piece is necessarily incomplete. The piece concludes with recommendations for teaching with this framework and for producing comparative education scholarship that deploys labels with greater reflexivity and intentionality.