In-between Culture and Category. Cross-cultural Comparison as a Methodological Approach in Inclusive Education Research

CONTEXT: There are few thematizations of inclusive education in international comparative research that do not refer directly or indirectly to culture: be it society as a cultural entity, questions of inclusion in schools being embedded in cultural, political and social conditions, or culture being the explicit framing of an overarching regional context. There is a long tradition of raising cultural questions in the discourse on inclusive education. It is surprising, then, that in the discourse and practice of comparative research on inclusive education, culture as a comparative entity has so far rarely been explicitly picked up on as a methodological issue. Moreover, questions of using and dealing with categories (e.g. dis/ability) against the background of cultural differences and commonalities have received little attention. METHODS: In this article, we take this as an opportunity to explore methodological challenges in cross-cultural comparison. By mapping different understandings of culture, we describe cross-cultural comparison as a methodological approach. This aims to elaborate on ambivalences in cross-cultural comparison in the field of inclusive education. To illustrate these, we present examples from an exploratory scoping review of how culture is articulated in inclusion-related journals, before offering considerations for methodological approaches in cross-cultural inclusion research. RESULTS: Based on an analytical grid, certain formations of how culture is articulated in relation to inclusive education could be identified: (a) culture as a national reference; (b) culture as a cultural-historical process and practice; (c) culture as a group; (d) culture as a system of production and representation. CONCLUSION: With regards to the presented formations, it is noticeable that national references remain an important and yet rather static entity of comparison, despite inclusion/exclusion being a complex and dynamic phenomenon. Furthermore, disabilities play a specific role within the discourse on inclusive education in cultural comparison. We furthermore conclude that in addition to the question of the object of comparison and its categorical setting, questions of positionality and translation should increasingly be raised.