Temporality as a Lens for Comparative and International Education

This chapter offers a synthesis of temporality-focused scholarship in comparative and international education (CIE), examining how temporality has been conceptualized and mobilized as an analytic lens. While CIE has traditionally foregrounded a spatial and cultural comparison, a growing body of scholarship now interrogates how educational life is structured through time. This work challenges linear models of progress, universalized clock-time, and development-focused temporal hierarchies embedded in global education agendas. Through a narrative review of studies published primarily between 2015 and 2025, this chapter synthesizes three intersecting analytic dimensions: (1) time tracks, which capture nonlinear educational trajectories shaped by waiting, acceleration, and disruption; (2) timescales, which situate educational processes across interacting macro-, meso-, and micro-level temporal regimes; and (3) temporal ontologies, which interrogate whose notions of time are legitimized and whose are marginalized, particularly through decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological perspectives. The review shows temporality functions as a structuring force and ontological condition in educational inequality, governance, mobility, and lived experience. It also identifies unresolved questions that limit the transformative potential of the temporal turn in CIE. This chapter concludes by calling for future scholarship that advances temporal justice, adopts longitudinal and ecological timescales, and critically reexamines the temporal assumptions embedded in educational policy and practice.