Chapter 5: A New Set of Questions: The Ethics of Taking Space Seriously in Macedonia

This chapter presents reflections on a teacher professional development project in the Republic of Macedonia as an opportunity to think through the ethics of international curriculum work in spatial terms. As scholars continue along what has been called “the spatial turn” (Soja, 2010), attention across a wide variety of disciplines from issues of space, place, and connections to much broader concerns (i.e., globalization, citizenship, social justice) offers a rich opportunity to raise questions of ethics. Soja (2010) states, “[F]rom the local and urban contexts to the regional, national, and global scales, a new spatial consciousness is entering into public debates on such key issues as human rights, social inclusion—exclusion, democracy, poverty, racism, economic growth, and environmental policy” (p. 15). In other words, the spatial matters in terms of social issues, and increasingly, as Soja notes in the epigraph, critical scholarship attends to spatial distribution and access. But what would it mean to consider ethics within a set of spatial relations? Reflection on a project intentionally working within an international education reform effort brings these social issues and their spatiality to the fore and provides the opportunity to highlight ethical tensions undergirding the work.