Chapter 1: From Serendipity to Concrete Ideas: Professional Associations and Conferences in Comparative and International Education as Incubators of Academic Work

In this essay, the authors explore how professional associations and the scholarly meetings or conferences they organize, such as the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), act as incubators of scholarly inquiry in Comparative and International Education (CIE), but also serve as venues for the further dissemination of the comparative approach in education to inform scholarship and practice. Via an exemplification of our history of collaboration, our commentary particularly emphasizes how conference sites, based on thematic calls, bring together academics in serendipitous ways, to forge new understandings of transformational concepts in their fields and disciplines, and contribute to new forms of educational practice that draw on such novel thematic examinations.