Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there has been a myriad of attempts to understand education change in Southeast and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. While offering important explanations and interpretations about the changing contexts of educational institutions and communities, research on post-socialist education transformations has also revealed multiple theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas. This book seeks to creatively mobilize theory and method to address the dilemmas we encounter in conceptualizing and conducting research in post-socialist education settings.

Theoretically, much research has been conducted within the dominant Western conceptual paradigms, which often explain the complicated post-socialist reform trajectories in terms of a linear path from socialism to neoliberal capitalism (Fukuyama, 1992; Jowitt, 1992). Viewed through a singular Western lens, the complicated experiences of the post-socialist world have been invoked merely as a lagging temporality in the processes of global educational convergence. Consequently, the difference, diversity, and divergence of the post-socialist education space have been systematically erased in the expectation that the region will eventually become (just like) the West (Silova, 2010). Although more recent research has challenged the possibility of a singular (linear) path to post-socialist transformations and revealed the ways in which “Orientalization” has affected academic knowledge production about the region (see Perry, 2005, 2009; Silova, 2010, 2011, 2014; Griffith & Millei, 2013), concerted scholarly attention has not been given to generating theory and research methods that would allow for more complicated, authentic, and accurate analyses of the post-socialist world. The absence of such analyses in the area of postsocialist education transformations is particularly stark. This presents the first and perhaps most important theoretical dilemma that this book attempts to tackle: How