913 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 W.T. Pink, G.W. Noblit (eds.), Second International Handbook of Urban Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40317-5_49 Chapter 49 Urban Education Across the Post-colonial, Post-Cold War South Pacific: Changes in the Trans-national Order of Theorising Michael Singh 49.1 Introduction There is more to urban education across the South Pacific than its geography might first admit. The homes of South Pacific Ocean peoples are immense; all made possible by their capabilities for long ocean voyages using the stars and currents to navigate. They themselves represent a vast constellation of hospitable and generous peoples spanning Polynesia and Melanesia. Moreover, the South Pacific has long been part of the urban education of Europeans and North Americans. For the purposes of this chapter urban education is defined as the production and circulation of knowledge for metropolitan populations via an interconnected set of intellectual projects that pro- ceed in unpredictable directions from various geographical points. The spatial distri- bution of the intellectual resources constituting urban education extends beyond the boundaries of Euro-American post/colonial spheres of influence. This definition opens up possibilities for activating and mobilising theoretic-linguistic knowledge produced through non-Western intellectual cultures. No doubt, this definition chal- lenges the ways in which the South Pacific Ocean peoples are unequally installed in the post-Cold War geo-political ordering of knowledge of urban education. Here the concept ‘theoretic-linguistic’ captures the idea that all theories are expressed in one language or another and, moreover, that the conceptual divergence expressed in diverse languages can bring forward possibilities for innovative theo- rising (Singh 2013). This is not a matter of construing an unbridgeable division between theoretic-linguistic knowledge in South Pacific languages and theories in English. Instead, it acknowledges that there are divergences in the devices, strate- gies and moves used to assemble knowledge in different places (Delsing 2001). Because conceptual categories are bound to the language in which they emerge, M. Singh (*) School of Education, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: m.j.singh@westernsydney.edu.au