CESI Conference 2026

Concept Note

If aesthetics concerns modes of attention, sense-making, and judgments of form and content, ethics concerns self-formation, responsibility, and obligation to the social, and politics concerns relations of power through which collective life is organised, then all three are already internal to how education is practised, organised, and imagined. Yet much educational discourse continues to treat them either as external influences on education or as attributes to be cultivated in learners. The 16th Annual International Conference of the Comparative Education Society of India invites educationists to examine how the changing relation among ethics, aesthetics, and politics opens new ways of thinking, practising, and transforming education as a contested field.

This premise becomes especially important under contemporary conditions. Democratic education, both in its internal organisation and in its role in shaping democratic social life, depends upon judgments about what is worth knowing, doing, sensing, and becoming. Education is always involved in selecting, ordering, and legitimising forms of knowledge, conduct, and sensibility. It also participates in the formation of subjects whose relations with one another become part of the social and political life of the state. For these reasons, ethics, aesthetics, and politics are not external to education; they are constitutive of its practices, purposes, and forms, and education is one of the sites where their relation is stabilised, contested, and transformed.

What appears ordinary or natural within education often depends on settled ethical, aesthetic, and political arrangements, where ethics is reduced to extant morality, aesthetics to convention, and politics to consensus in service of the given order. It is often in moments of rupture that the force of these arrangements becomes most visible. For educationists today, the pandemic, EdTech, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and wars have been such ruptures. The pandemic exposed how deeply education remains tied to social reproduction, including unequal distribution of care, access, precarity, and institutional support. EdTech revealed the uneven organisation of time, space, infrastructure, and pedagogic interaction, while AI has reopened fundamental questions about knowledge, teaching, curriculum, authorship, and assessment, often without corresponding forms of democratic accountability. At the same time, the mediated visibility of wars and genocide has intensified questions about what kinds of moral and political subjects educational institutions sustain, normalise, or fail to contest. These developments show that education cannot be understood only as a stabilising institution that transmits existing norms; they also compel us to ask whether education might become a site for rethinking those norms under altered historical conditions.

Taking these concerns forward, the conference invites educationists to think along two related axes. The first concerns the present condition of education: how ethics, aesthetics, and politics shape educational life across pedagogy, curriculum, institutions, public culture, and policy; how educational forms are organised through judgments about what is worth knowing, valuing, sensing, and becoming; and how crises unsettle inherited norms of authority, responsibility, and form. The second concerns the possibilities that emerge from such ruptures: what openings they create for rethinking educational purpose, practice, and institutional life; what ethics might mean if it cannot be reduced to existing moral codes; what aesthetics might mean if it cannot be confined to cultural reproduction, taste, or refinement; and what politics might mean if it is understood not as service to power, but as a struggle over the terms of collective life.

This conference also matters specifically for comparative education. The relation among ethics, aesthetics, and politics cannot be understood within a single national or institutional frame. Comparative education enables us to examine how different societies organise judgments about knowledge, value, form, responsibility, and collective life through distinct educational histories, institutions, and political conditions. It allows us to ask not only how educational crises are differently experienced, but also how their meanings, mediations, and possibilities shift across contexts. In doing so, it reaffirms comparative education as a field uniquely placed to connect philosophical reflection, historical analysis, and institutional critique in the study of education in the contemporary world.

For educationists in the South Asian context, Tagore offers one such point of departure. His educational experiments, together with the formal and affective shifts visible in his later artistic work, allow us to ask how education responds to grief, loss, disillusionment, and the desire to imagine life otherwise. From this perspective, aesthetics is not merely a resource education deploys in the service of refinement or creativity, nor is ethics simply a set of codes to be followed by an already constituted individual. Rather, they name a deeper site through which education encounters its own limits, reflects on its contradictions, and reworks the relation between self-formation, collective life, and pedagogic form. The conference therefore invites educationists to examine how the changing relation among ethics, aesthetics, and politics can help rethink pedagogy, institutional practice, and the future of education in the present.

The conference invites contributions from educationists on, but not limited to, the following sub-themes:

Ethics, aesthetics, and politics as constitutive of education
How are ethics, aesthetics, and politics internal to the forms, practices, and purposes of education, rather than added later as values, competencies, or outcomes?

The politics of educational form
How do educational institutions organise judgments about what is worth knowing, valuing, sensing, and becoming, and how do form and content reinforce or disrupt one another?

Rupture and the contemporary condition
How have the pandemic, digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence, war, dispossession, ecological crisis, and policy change unsettled inherited assumptions about education and exposed its contradictions?

Pedagogy, authority, and collective life
How are authority, responsibility, discipline, and public judgment organised within pedagogy, curriculum, and institutional life in the present?

Education, democracy, and political subjectivity
What kinds of moral and political subjects do educational institutions sustain, normalise, or fail to contest, and what does this mean for democratic life?

Technology, platformisation, and accountability
How do EdTech and Artificial Intelligence reshape pedagogy, authorship, assessment, labour, and democratic accountability in education?
Education and social difference
How do caste, class, gender, region, language, disability, religion, and other social divisions shape the ethical and aesthetic ordering of educational life?

Margins, exclusion, and the critique of the norm
What do marginal locations, minoritised experiences, and excluded communities reveal about the ethical and political structure of education itself? What does peace education look like if it is an ethico-aesthetic, political project?

Institutional life, policy, and governance
How do policy, planning, administration, and institutional cultures encode judgments about legitimacy, value, and desirable educational futures?

Teachers, teacher education, and pedagogic responsibility
What kinds of teacher education and pedagogic practice are needed if educationists are to respond critically, rather than merely adapt, to contemporary ruptures?

Comparative perspectives on education in the contemporary world
How do different societies and educational systems organise the relation among ethics, aesthetics, and politics, and what comparative insights emerge from these differences?

Reimagining educational purpose and practice
What pedagogic, stylistic, and institutional interventions become possible when education is approached as a site for rethinking inherited norms under altered historical conditions?

We also welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological, historical, philosophical, comparative, and practice-based contributions from educationists, social scientists, and scholars across related disciplines.

Venue

Department of Sociology
Aligarh Muslim University
Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh

Important Dates

Event	Date
Last Date for Submission of the Abstract	10 July 2026
Decision on the Abstract	25 August 2026

Organising Secretary

Dr. Shazia Farooq Fazli
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social Sciences
AMU, Aligarh

Convener

Prof. Mohammad Akram
Professor & Chairman
Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social Sciences
AMU, Aligarh

CESI 2026 – Registration Fee Structure

Please find below the registration fee details for CESI 2026.

Category	Participant & CESI Life Member (₹)	Participant & CESI Annual Member (₹)	Participant & CESI Non-Member (₹)	Only Attending (₹)
Professionals	Early Registration: ₹4,500 Late Registration: ₹5,000 Spot Registration: ₹5,500	Early Registration: ₹5,000 Late Registration: ₹5,500 Spot Registration: ₹6,000	Early Registration: ₹6,500 Late Registration: ₹7,000 Spot Registration: ₹7,500	₹3,000
Students / Scholars / Grassroot Organizations / Schoolteachers	Early Registration: ₹3,000 Late Registration: ₹3,500 Spot Registration: ₹4,000	Early Registration: ₹3,200 Late Registration: ₹3,700 Spot Registration: ₹4,200	Early Registration: ₹4,000 Late Registration: ₹4,500 Spot Registration: ₹5,000	₹2,000
Students / Scholars from Host University (AMU)	Early / Late / Spot Registration: ₹2,000			₹1,000

Note: Registration fees are applicable as per the category and registration period selected.

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Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics: Education for the Contemporary World

16th Annual International Conference of the Comparative Education Society of India (CESI)