3 - (Post) Modern times: Transcultural exchange and the circumstances of postgraduate social science research

Summary

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).

This chapter is a reflection on the pedagogic circumstances in which postgraduate research students, especially from China, find themselves when studying in Australia. These students coming from China to Australia are, in a manner of speaking, living through a maelstrom of change, where the dead weight of the past weighs heavily on the present. These students have almost certainly experienced an education system where the Marxism-Leninism educational tradition sits uneasily with the market modernization model of China, where continual change dominates Chinese students’ lives and shapes their identities. On arrival in Australia, these students enter into an Australian academic milieu where poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking has challenged the master-narrative of Marxism, resulting in a series of competing mini-narratives. Moreover, in the Chinese social sciences a somewhat positivist model predominates, which has great strength in empirical research but is largely unchallenged by reflective thinking on the methodology underpinning this research approach. In contrast, in the Anglo-Celtic world, the after-effects of the postmodern and post-structural debates have made ‘scientific’ inquiry open to constant challenge and methodological multiplicity. As such, Chinese students studying in the Australian academy have to confront a quite distinct pedagogical world from the one they have experienced in China. Likewise, the pedagogic challenge for any Australian supervisor is not to denigrate Chinese models of scientific learning.