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This article contextualises Education in Pakistan, a White Paper (2007), an influential education policy paper in Pakistan. The focus is on the ways the White Paper constructs its own contexts as a complement to the policy solutions proffered. Here we recognise Seddon's point about the discursive work of policy in constructing context. We focus on the way the White Paper constructs its political/ideological context and its global/national context. The White Paper works with the trope of a binary construction of Islam - fundamentalist or moderate - which rearticulates Orientalist Western constructions. The analysis of the construction of the global/national contexts demonstrates the framing of the policy by the Millennium Development Goals, and the Washington and post-Washington consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the Freirean concept of politicity for critical policy studies in education. The first part lays the ground to expand the conceptualisation of teachers' politicity. I argue this entails an examination of the limits and possibilities within a juncture. To develop the argument, the second part focuses on a teacher strike that took place in Chile and draws on corpus-driven discourse analysis to explore news from a national teacher organisation and from an influential newspaper. Through the angle of politicity, I identify and discuss ideational projects during the strike with an emphasis on counterhegemonic resources for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the ongoing engagement of neoliberal ideology in Indonesian higher education institutions and in commodifying the global spread of English. With the growing number of faith-based higher education institutions in Indonesia, the neoliberal and English ideologies are contested and promulgated, creating ambivalent spaces. This complex entanglement of ideologies begs us to examine how they are appropriated by English teachers who are at the front line in translating the ideologies. In this respect, I argue that Bakhtin's construct of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Transalted by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press) has explanatory power that may help understand teachers' ideological formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many populist leaders and parties have succeeded in taking over the levers of state power, in spite of the fact that much of their political rhetoric in opposition expresses anti-state sentiments. This paper examines how populist leaders and parties in Asia have been able to use the institutions of the state, including education, to exercise and perpetuate their power. Focusing on the examples of India, the Philippines and Singapore, the paper shows how in each of these cases, populist politics consists in attempts to reconfigure the nature of the state and its relationship to civil society, often seeking to obliterate the distinction. A great deal of effort is put in to transform the institutions of the state, including education, making it possible for them to translate populist sentiments into governmental practice. This explains how, when in government, populists are often able to extend their appeal and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which administrators, academics and students living under conditions of authoritarianism come to imagine the university's political possibilities and horizons. To this aim, we first consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Boğaziçi University, where the parameters of political possibility are pre-figured both by the current ruling regime and the enduring histories of empire that pre-date it. Then, we turn to Aleppo countryside, where we compare Syrian opposition universities to newly established Turkish ones. In doing so, we attempt to trace the ideational lifeline of Syria's revolutionary imaginary as it persists in higher education under conditions of disillusionment and co-optation. When taken together, we argue, these two cases point not to the primacy of belief in creating or sustaining imaginaries, but rather to the constitutive role of violence, coercion and control in shaping notions of who and what the university is for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating critical mass has become a cornerstorne of science policy on both national and transnational levels. It suggests that once a certain size is reached, exponential growth or accelerated change will occur. In reconstructing theories, policies and practices associated with critical mass, the paper traces the image of critical mass as a size that performs in different dimensions. It takes the German Excellence Initiative, a state programme for the competitive distribution of research funds, as a policy intended to create critical mass. That the Excellence Initiative did not trigger exponential growth but organisational change points to qualitative effects of size. On the basis of case studies, it is reconstructed how Excellence-funded graduate schools and others perform size. They accumulate prestige, build-up research capacity, reproduce 'schools of thought' or provide for research personnel. In doing so, the schools are not a critical mass for exponential growth but normalise sizing practices in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study detailed in this paper examines the role of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) in the transnational policy-making landscape in relation to African fragile and conflict-affected states. Data collection was based on content analysis of a corpus of documents – Education Sector Plans (ESPs)/ Transitional Sector Plans – examining to what extent the main categories identified in the literature concerning global education policy and international development, emerge from the documents. We conclude that certain terms and constructs that emerge from global education discourses recur frequently in the ESPs. The article argues that there is a depoliticisation strategy in the development of the ESPs, making it possible to identify a façade of precision, a façade of rationality and a façade of universality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the epistemic politics at work in radically contrasting academic representations of African university futures. Euro-American policy entrepreneurs and research funders call for major investments in Africa's scientific research training capacity to strengthen the continent's integration into a global knowledge system. Meanwhile, African social scientists and humanities scholars critique the epistemological hegemony of 'Western' models of the academy, and call for the decolonisation of African universities. This paper sets out a three-step approach to dealing with the politicisation of 'academography' (Thorkelson 2016) in this decolonial moment. The first step is to acknowledge how epistemic power relations shape all analytical moves. The second is to recognise that 'generative antagonisms' (Burawoy 2004) are inherent to disciplinary knowledge production. The third is to develop an ethnographic sensitivity to everyday academic practice within these institutional worlds and epistemic cultures. Together these moves offer space for dialogue between different visions of African higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the rise of authoritarian populism in Brazil following the election in 2018 of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to the Presidency and reflect on the consequences of his far-right-wing politics for education. Our focus is broadly on three historical blocs (with five different presidents of the Republic) which make up the policy trajectory of Brazil over the period 1995–2019. We explore the complex cultural political economy surrounding more than a decade of left-wing government by Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016) of the Workers Party (PT). In what has been described as simultaneously a tragedy, a farce, and a soap opera, Bolsonaro's rise involves the impeachment of Dilma, accusations of corruption, the imprisonment of Lula and the resignation of multiple ministers of the government. The intersections of right-wing conservative discourse, evangelical proselytising and populist discourse in Brazil, coupled with resentment from those whose fortunes had been diminished because of declining economic competitiveness, contributed to the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. A final section focuses on the education policy in Brazil, the ways in which any progressive gains have been erased and what this means for Brazilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing China's 2006 and 2015 Africa policies, this article reveals how China's political discourse has become more confident, practical, and depoliticised. In particular, this paper shows how education is allocated, promised, and embedded in China's 'shared' agenda, which is centred on development co-operation and mutual learning. It then reflects on the extent to which China may move towards traditional donors. This paper concludes that, despite fragmented convergences in the discourse and an increased recognition of a Chinese model, China maintains its distinctive role and position in the post-2015 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from three levels of education policy-making in Canada, in this paper we identify variegated interactions of global circulations of sustainability discourses in education in relation to priorities and responses at subnational levels of government, including provinces and territorial ministries of education, local school divisions, and schools. Understanding 'scale' as mutable and practiced vs. fixed, we discuss instances of policy recoding or mutation when global UN priorities have been shifted to reflect language or priorities suited to education ministries and school divisions; as well as examples of policy immobility, where subnational education bodies did not engage with UN sustainability approaches. Cases of policy amplification are also highlighted, in which school division policy priorities appeared to increase the influence of provincial policy. In some cases, intentional efforts of 'rescaling' seemed to influence policy responses, such as through processes of school division amalgamation, or the growing attempts to relocalise policy in Canada's north. We draw on data from across six Canadian provinces and territories and 10 school divisions to better understand the mobilities of sustainability in education policy in relation to subnational policy practice, including via topological influences such as policy actors and certification programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses reflections upon the nature of recent educational policymaking in Singapore. Drawing upon the authors' individual and collective autoethnographic analyses of a series of reflective notes jotted down after discussions with educators from private and public schools in Singapore, the Academy of Singapore Teachers, and FutureSkills Singapore, we argue that what we learned from this Singaporean experience is considerably different from how the 'success' of the Singapore model is construed in much national and international policy about educational reform. While the research confirms various key paradoxes [after Ng, Pak Tee. 2017. Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes. New York: Routledge] that exist in relation to how schooling is construed within the Singapore context, there is also evidence of a form of pragmatism existing alongside a yearning/striving for perfection that is perhaps reflective of more active and directive practices and processes. Through identifying what we describe as 'pragmatic perfectionism' in the Singaporean context, we not only substantiate but also seek to extend existing understandings of educational policy learning/borrowing in comparative education literature, identifying the intensity of such processes as one of the 'real' lessons that national and international policymakers and researchers should and can learn from the Singaporean case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD's PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use of data to shift the exercise away from dissemination of one dominant worldview towards the recognition of alternatives. To do this, we discuss the approach and findings from our recent papers, and then suggest future directions. Rather than mere accommodation, re-articulation underscores an approach to critique that is generative for theory and practice, one that extends of the horizon of possibility beyond culturally saturated notions of 'good' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue showcases the Gordian knot between organisations and globalisation in education and exposes the organisational infrastructure of globalisation in education. Overarching themes include education serving the globalisation of organisational models, globalisation as re-organising educational organisations, the organising of international bodies operating in education, and global-oriented organisations and organising in education. The paper concludes with a call for utilising organisational perspectives in the exploration of globalisation in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we focus on the transformations imposed on schools by individual parents, arguing that schools as modern organisations change not only through top-down pressures orchestrated by an array of international organisations, for-profit companies and media as shown in previous research, but also through the agency of mobile parents, who seek to import reforms from elsewhere, based on their previous schooling experiences abroad. We focus on a specific group of middle class parents, who are continuously mobile, moving between global cities for employment. This paper brings into the discussion the role of individual parental strategies as they seek to promote education policy-borrowing. By applying the theoretical lens of stakeholder identification and salience, using a multi case study research design, we suggest that parents express high levels of power, legitimacy and a sense of urgency, thus being able to successfully advocate for change. We argue that while exploring organisational reform occurring due to the globalisation of education, we must view parents as central actors in this new space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Facebook-coordinated high-school walkouts to compelling Internet-based protest art that has accompanied recent teacher strikes, grassroots education activism in the USA has gone digital. Despite the proliferation of research on the mediatisation of education policy, few studies have explored the ways in which activists for public education engage with Web 2.0 technologies. This paper makes a contribution to this under-researched area by exploring selected activist accounts including Parents Across America, United Opt Out National, and the PS 2013 campaign in New York City. I draw on critical, feminist, and cultural studies theories of education and social movement media to analyse activist media practices in a policy and political milieu dominated by corporate media and neoliberal governance structures. The analysis reveals that progressive education activists strategically deploy digital media to amplify voice, build collective identity, and disseminate alternative knowledge to enable direct action. A situated analysis also reveals significant differences in activist media practice which are shaped by particular political histories and geographies. The paper concludes with a discussion about future lines of inquiry into the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Canada’s first-ever strategy, international education (IE) is linked to immigration policy with international students (IS) recruited as ‘ideal’ immigrants. This paper engages in policy sociology and Ball's concepts of 'policy as text' and 'policy as discourse' (10). It follows three stages of critical policy discourse analysis. The first a simple tally of the most commonly used words/phrases in the Strategy; the second analyses it using Van Leeuwen’s framework and the third presents results from a study on the perception and experiences of IS, exposing the gap between policy rhetoric and practice. The paper concludes that critical discourse analysis is a powerful tool to uncover policy values/ideologies, identify legitimation strategies and reveal perpetuation of power relations/status quo within Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, an analysis of the spatial production of Chile as an international academic destination for doctoral students is put forward. This arises from the notion of internationalisation as a process of the rescaling of university marketplaces and international students as consumers of global scales of excellence. As such, it proposes the concept of an international academic hub to understand how a space oriented towards a 'global north' is produced and articulated with the guidelines of economic globalisation. Four case studies of interviews with foreign doctoral students in Chile are used to explore narratives of the international in discourses about academic trajectories within the country. The results indicate that Chile is configured as a compensatory destination and that its internationalisation policies indicate a directionality towards globally legitimised destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of international student mobilities (ISM) has increased substantially over the last two decades. Following trends in institutional and policy debates on the broader internationalisation of education, researchers have paid considerable attention to questions about why, where, how and under what circumstances people engage in educational migration. As the field of ISM has matured, however, it has also taken shape around distinct frameworks wherein little cross-fertilisation appears to be occurring and where a series of normative narratives have emerged. In this paper we evaluate the extant scholarship on ISM and argue that there are significant blind spots in current research and that there is a need for a greater focus on interdisciplinary conversations that can address the changing characteristics of educational migration internationally. In particular, we argue that researchers have remained preoccupied on researching international students at particular points in time, have over emphasised the centrality of privilege and youth and been too focused on Westward mobility. In concluding, we set an agenda for future research on ISM that addresses three key challenges: analysing the connection between imagination and action; the relationship between life course, privilege and precarity; and accounting for the recent diversification and stratification of ISM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of papers have focused on UN policy formulation processes, but little is known about how particular issues come to policy-makers’ attention in the first place. This very early stage of policy formulation, called agenda setting, remains under-researched and more so in multilateral contexts. Applying Kingdon’s multiple streams model to the example of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), this study analyses the trajectory of the policy from being just an idea to the point of being placed on the UN agenda. This paper goes on to argue that there are three conditions that supported the successful trajectory of DESD: a funding-backed policy entrepreneur, policy oligopoly, and a highly predictable policy window. Its theoretical contribution is to fill the gap between current studies and theories by presenting an analysis of one policy in a multilateral context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the development of data infrastructure in Australian schooling with a specific focus on interoperability standards that help to make new markets for education data. The conceptual framework combines insights from studies of infrastructure, economic markets and digital data. The case of the Australian National Schools Interoperability Program is analysed, drawing on a corpus of web-based technical and promotional documents and supporting interviews. The paper shows that Australia has well-developed data infrastructure in schooling that is creating new relations between schools, school systems and commercial vendors within network markets for data-driven educational technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw attention to the impact of neoliberal globalisation in rearticulating conceptions of equity within the Ontario context. The Ontario education system has been hailed for its top performance on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a high-equity/high-quality education system and created ‘PISA envy’ in the international context. Our aim in this paper is to provide some critical analysis of the neoliberal rationality and to examine its manifestations for rearticulating conceptions of social justice. Drawing on equity education policies in Ontario and one in-depth interview with an equity practitioner in one of Ontario’s large and most diverse school boards, this paper illustrates how a redefinition of equity has been made possible through neoliberal systems of accountability and performativity involving measurement and facticity. As a result of these strategies, equity policy in education has been concerned with outcome measurement and boys’ underachievement, while racial and class inequalities have become invisible. While this paper is focused on Ontario equity policy, we believe that it serves much broader interest given the current context of global education policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically analyses key educational policy documents produced by the World Bank mainly from the mid-1980s to 2010 with regard to implementing major educational projects in Nepal. Using critical policy sociology as a methodological tool, the paper explores how a small Himalayan nation with per capita income of about US$730 (2014) plunged into neoliberal world order during the early 1980s. The paper argues that Bank’s educational policy recommendations are guided by some underlying assumptions of neoliberalism mainly marketisation, privatisation, and decentralisation. The paper concludes that neoliberal orientation in education has almost no potential in addressing Nepal’s development challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authority of the nation states and their capacity to govern their education policy has been reconfigured by the processes of globalisation. This paper examines recent education policy in Pakistan in order to reveal the nature of national authority in education policy-making in a challenging context. The central piece of analysis is the pre-policy text issued by the Ministry of Education, Pakistan — the White Paper. This analysis is further supported through interviews with senior policy actors and other significant policy texts. The paper identifies several tensions caused by the interaction of global and national education policy priorities and explores how the national government of Pakistan seeks to expand its SoA through ‘soft’ governance approaches despite the material and financial constraints within which it operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has emerged as a global policy in language education which has been 'borrowed' by nations across the world. This paper presents a critical analysis of Malaysia's borrowing of the CEFR as part of English language curriculum reform with particular reference to policy motivation and implementation processes as outlined in the English Language Education Roadmap for Malaysia (2015–2025). The analysis draws on Phillips and Ochs's (2003, "Processes of Policy Borrowing in Education: Some Explanatory and Analytical Devices." Comparative Education 39 (4): 451–461.) framework for examining educational policy borrowing to highlight challenges as well as prospects of the implementation of the global policy in higher education in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the OECD's PISA 2018 international framework for global competence. Given the growing national and international attention on educating for global competence, and absent of other measures, there is a need to scrutinise this framework. Our critical analysis is conceptually framed by academic literature related to (a) the OECD's influential role in facilitating neoliberal education policy trends, (b) disjuncture and debate surrounding global competence, and (c) how influence is garnered through measurement technologies. We conclude by encouraging the OECD to be transparent in the reporting of results and educational stakeholders to be cautious interpreters of forthcoming results and rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research stresses the increasing relevance of international organisations (IOs) for national education policymaking. Yet, IOs' curriculum recommendations have remained largely out of scope, although they provide a forceful example of 'soft' governance. Based on a content analysis of 83 documents from 42 inter/-nongovernmental, global and regional organisations involved in international education networks between 1990 and 2015, this paper identifies an expansive field of IOs directing growing attention to such curricular issues as student needs, educational goals and content, as well as issues of teaching and learning. In line with much cross-national curriculum research, analysis provides evidence for the trend towards a global curriculum model stressing empowerment, individual agency and psychosocial development. The article argues that the strong focus on human capabilities and human capital in IOs' curriculum policies reflects wider cultural transformations in contemporary world society. The article concludes by arguing for an expanded analytical scope of IOs' educational work and a reconsideration of causal explanations in curriculum theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines increasing privatisation of education in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Conceptually, the paper is informed by theories of privatisation and social justice; and methodologically, it uses policy analysis to examine documents and financial records obtained from government departments. The paper critically analyses education policy that has enabled the emergence of private sources of revenue (tuition fees and for-profit revenue) and the establishment of school and programme choice. Analysis of levels of international student tuition generated by school districts in the province reveals differential capacity to produce such revenue. The authors argue that this differential capacity is leading to the development of a fourth tier within a pre-existing three-tier K-12 education system in British Columbia. The article concludes with a discussion of implications related to social justice in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The restructuring of European higher education (EHE) since the 1980s is a widely studied subject. However, this paper argues that previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the role of transnational policy-making groups in this complex and multilevel process. This argument is supported by focusing on how the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has participated in this restructuring since the mid-1980s. This paper's focus is especially in two ERT documents that were published in the 1980s. The main finding is that the current restructuring of EHE reflects interests of the ERT that represents the emerging transnational capitalist class (TCC) at European level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interventions in the field of early childhood education policy, drawn from global policy flows, are reconfiguring the work of early childhood educators in Australia. One such intervention is the requirement to designate an ‘educational leader’ (EL) in each service for young children and their families. This policy intervention has its origins in England's Early Years Professional Status initiative. This paper compares the pedagogical leader imagined in regulatory reforms with the educational labour described in interviews with childcare educators in Queensland and Victoria, Australia. The paper argues these educators are being called upon to navigate the tension between ‘imagined’ and ‘actual’ policy effects and that this is a key part of the work of educational leadership. Such leadership includes re-constituting ‘teachers’ in early childhood services as ‘learners’ who are ‘led’ by ‘ELs’, requiring major shifts in professional knowledge and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on the case of Russia's post-Soviet education reform, the paper explores the interaction between borrowed reformatory solutions and culture codes in the process of neoliberal educational modernisation. Through the examination of the concept of 'commercial service' the article shows how bottom-up societal resistance is maintained and normalised in the real-life language of the reform debate among policymakers, teachers, parents and the general public. Building on policy-asdiscourse studies, the analysis unpacks specific conceptual frames behind societal interpretation of educational commercialisation. The article finds that the public debate is stalled by an extreme polarisation and a seeming intractability of such conceptual categories as 'money', 'commerce', 'moral upbringing', and 'the soul.' It further argues that instead of mediating borrowed and domestic social meanings, the official reform narrative serves to strengthen the polarisation of opinions, while leaving under-conceptualised a number of important links between market values of competitive individualism, material profit and entrepreneurship and domestic values of egalitarianism, collegiality, moral education and non-materialist values. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of the state in transmitting borrowed policy ideas to the public and the interplay between grassroots resistance and national education policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on building the Canadian province’s economy through the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) sector. In service of this endeavour, the government launched theSkills for Jobs Blueprint, which attempts to more clearly align BC’s education system with resource extraction industries. In this paper, I argue that at the heart of this policy is the idea of education for, through, and as extraction. Conceptually, ‘extraction education’ focuses onsupply(what we can take out of the earth, institutions, and individuals) rather thandemand(what is needed to put into the educational system to meet needs of the land, institutions, communities, and individuals), and is problematic on environmental, economic, employment, equity, and educational fronts. In theorising ‘extraction education’ I extend Freire’s ideas on ‘banking education’ and briefly explore dialogic, problem-posing counters to it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural exchange is privileged in many higher education programs across the globe. The Australian government’s New Colombo Plan refers to a ‘Third Wave’ of globalisation which foregrounds global interrelatedness through developing student capabilities to live, work and contribute to global communities and aims to make the global an ‘everyday’ experience for students. Mobility programs are promoted as the main strategy for fostering global perspectives, contradicting the idea of the global as an everyday experience. This paper unpacks constructs of global citizenship that underpin Australia’s recent international and global engagement policies, and implications for the ‘global’ wave in ‘local’ parochial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the role of media in shaping adult literacy discourse and policy in Canada. The authors show how journalists, newspapers and other media personalities have directly and indirectly influenced (1) government and public perception of adult literacy and (2) the creation of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). Overall, the paper points to the crucial role of the media in the transnationalisation of government agendas and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the relationship between global, regional and local influences on adult literacy policy and practice in the UK through a discourse analysis of policy-related texts. The analysis is framed by theoretical perspectives from literacy studies and socio-material theory. The paper identifies a number of specific features in the UK literacy policy environment that have mediated the influence of transnational agencies such as UNESCO, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Union. It argues for the importance of understanding adult literacy policy as part of a wider constellation of discourses and governance practices and shows how textual representations of literacy and literacy learners are powerful constituents of the policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine the Times Higher Education's (THE) World University Rankings as a corporate media product. A number of empirical studies have critiqued the methodology of the THE, yet individuals, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and governments continue to use them for decision-making. This paper analyses the influence of rankings through the concepts of mediatization and visualisation. To this end, this paper will examine how media defines excellence in HEIs through rankings, and how HEIs use rankings to define themselves within a competitive educational marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon a project on British transnational education (TNE) programmes offered in Hong Kong, this paper interrogates the capacity development impact of TNE on the students, the Hong Kong Government and the programme providers. It addresses the questions: ‘What capacity is being developed in TNE operations?’ and ‘For whom?’ Our findings reveal multiple capacities at play. As TNE has been traded between British and Hong Kong universities and facilitated by the Hong Kong Government'slaissez-fairedoctrine, as a commodity in the neoliberal trade-in-education regime, students' interests are often sidelined. This paper calls for a critical reflection on this TNE model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that global university rankings can be understood as a mechanism upholding Taiwan's interests in light of cross-national analysis of university ranking and recent discussion on regionalisation of higher education in Asia. To draw an analytical framework, it begins by delineating a conceptualisation of university ranking, in which ranking exercises are seen as a form of institutions in the globalised field of education politics and policy. In anticipation of the emergence of the Greater China higher education region, the paper suggests that global university ranking can be used as a zoning technology to form an imaginary line of cultural and academic sovereignty, and to affect university strategies and government policies. This analysis not only explains how global university rankings can be used to uphold interests of Taiwan's higher education, but also sheds light on the way to constitute subjectivity in the process of regionalisation of worldwide higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Market forces are being introduced in public spheres such as higher education and public health, which hitherto were closed to such forces. Ironically, it is the state that is responsible for this process of marketisation. Some see this state action as leading to a growing influence of the state in public policy while others see an attenuation of its role. Critiquing this market–state incompatibility thesis from a geo-spatial perspective on globalisation, this paper calls for an articulation of state–market relations that emphasises their interpenetration. Using Botswana as a case study, the paper argues that although on-going tertiary education reforms in the country are characterised by the state's promotion of market forces this does not mean that the state is retreating, leaving the sub-sector to the vagaries of the market. Contrarily, the state is employing marketisation to reform the sub-sector so that it is responsive to labour and skills demands of an economy aspiring to be knowledge-based. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to analyse current developments in education through exploring shifts in the politics of education over time. Rather than looking at education policy in terms of political provenance (left or right) or ideological underpinnings (the state or the market, the public or the private), the paper compares education policies in terms of the domains of social injustice which they address. Based on Nancy Fraser's theorisation of different kinds of social justice, the paper uses examples from England to show how the politics of education have sequentially attempted to address injustices in economic, cultural and political domains. This has resulted in a changing orientation from a politics of redistribution to a politics of recognition and, in recent years, to a politics of representation. This approach reveals the complexity of educational inequalities and the fragility and incomplete nature of strategies to address them. It also provides a fruitful framework for the comparative analysis of the politics of education which can link the detail with the bigger picture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is set within the context of university change in the Republic of Ireland. Irish third-level institutions are increasingly situated, whilst situating themselves, in the global advance of the so-called ‘entrepreneurial’ university model. This model promotes knowledge as utilitarian and performative that, in turn, informs new organising principles that pervade mission statements, policy choices and inter-related cultural practices. Such a change force benefits from significant moral, financial and politico-ideological support at national, European and global levels. Symbolic and real links between education and the economy lie at the heart of this paradigm. Most visibly, rationalisation and innovation measures, rooted within the education–economy relation, powerfully pervade the daily life of the world's universities. These and other related cultural practices are presently legitimated by recessionary conditions and are progressively harmonised by the advance of multi-layered disciplinary technologies. Foucauldian insights into these illuminate how corporate culture is regulated within university and how teachers’ identities and work practices are shaped by, and simultaneously shape, new cultural practices. This paper concerns itself with providing a critical conceptual lens through which to explicate the power effects of corporate culture. Furthermore, this paper addresses possible resolutions to challenges and possibilities that ensue. In particular, Foucault's concept of problematisation is evoked as a direct challenge to a ‘normative allegiance’ to the cultural reshaping of the university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The oil-rich northern districts of Iraq were long considered a reflection of the country with a diversity of ethnic and religious groups: Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, Assyrians, and Yezidi, living together and portraying Iraq's demographic make-up. Yet the territory has suffered from heightening ethno-political influence and sectarianism throughout its recent history. The ethnic basis to territorial claims has amplified the discourse over linguistic presence, cultural representation and minority rights across the region and elevated debates over territorial representation to the height of ethnic survival issues. This paper will explore the changing face of education in the region over the last 12 years, highlighting the way in which education policy has reflected, and reacted to, national fragility and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the South African knowledge enterprise and citizenship in terms of the ontologies it authorises. It is especially interested in how education comes to be used in particular settings to privilege particular ways of being. In relation to this it asks what notions of the subject and his or her relation to the social and the natural world inhabit the organisation of the school and its curriculum and how these notions have settled on the learning landscape. These questions are critical in understanding the emergent conceptions of citizenship and national identity in the country, especially in light of its complex attempts to work with its multiple pasts and its determination to enter the global world on its own terms as opposed to those of the dominant economies of the world. They are crucial as South Africans make a commitment to both Africanism and globalisation. The paper begins with a brief discussion on the promise of modern education and its commitment to democracy and democratic citizenship. It argues, however, that this commitment to inclusiveness is undone as education systems around the world emerge and are developed on the premise of a universalism informed by the experience and example of Europe and its presumptive cultural legacy. How this process works in the South African context constitutes the substance of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines annual changes in the participation of developing countries in three kinds of learning assessment activity over the past three decades. It specifically highlights, and provides initial explanations for, the worldwide spread of national and regional assessments since the mid-1990s. The paper argues that national learning assessments - namely, non-standardised, context-sensitive and non-comparable learning assessments - have become a preferred tool of educational policy makers in developing countries. The increasing demand by educational stakeholders for accountability and the relative advantages of national assessments are likely to amplify this trend in the future. Patterns of country participation will further depend on the policies of international agencies, NGOs and regional associations that support and advise countries on learning assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that higher education has a long history of globalising, though the form of these processes has been different. Two are identified; first, a normative order based on common frameworks; second, the expansion of formal exchanges of inputs and outputs from higher education. Different countries, however, are positioned differently in this. Through an analysis of France's higher education sector, the paper argues that unlike most English speaking and South Asian countries in the recent past, France seems much less interested in increasing its share of the international market of HE teaching services than in developing a competitive R-D university-industry sector. This implies the de-construction of the inherited system, and a reallocation of resources toward a new top-tier of public establishments strongly linked with private economic interests. For that purpose a radical reform of the HE sector was needed. To implement such a reform, one that is strongly opposed by a large part of the academic community, the government has relied on the external resources of international norms and rules of governance. In this field, France appears both as a norm-maker and a norm-taker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changing form and scope of higher education in the UK with a specific focus on contemporary 'globalising' developments within the sector and beyond. Situated within an analysis of transformations under way in the wider global and regional economy, and drawing on Jessop's strategic relational approach (SRA), I examine the way higher education in the UK has been restructured through the mobilisation of three key logics (corporatisation, competititiveness, commercialisation) to play a central role in the realisation of a globally-competitive education services sector and imagined 'knowledge-based economy'. The main argument of this paper is that from the early 1980s onward, successive rounds of neo-liberal political projects - shaped by these logics - were mobilised to rework the basis of capital accumulation. A central outcome was to structurally predispose UK HEIs, over time, toward new regionalising and globalising horizons of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scenario of Latin America in the higher education area, especially in Chile and Mexico, appears to be significantly affected by some European influences. We can see this by examining the implementation of two 'hegemonic tools': the Bologna Process and the Tuning Project. This paper argues that if we analyse the European influences as a normative power (NPE) on the construction of a common space in higher education in Chile and Mexico, the hegemonic process may, perhaps, prove to be focused on an 'alternative imperialism', based on Eurocentric discourse, which could also be called a 'post-colonialist' strategy. This article will seek to show that European influences, exercised by the EU operating as a normative power, are only the 'tip of the iceberg' of the hegemonic process. The paper is divided into five parts: following the introduction, a general overview of the Bologna Process opens the discussion of questions of American or European hegemony. After that, I analyse NPE and the 'ontological quality' of the EU as a hegemonic power. The empirical cases of European influences, on Chilean and Mexican HE, are analysed in detail in order to show the most significant impacts on their public and university policies. Finally, I offer a view of the Bologna Process as a 'European hegemonic instrument' of NPE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the translation of global educational norms of quality assurance in two countries with very different regulatory regimes in higher education: Chile and South Africa. The translation process is conceptualised here as a contested socio-political process of appropriation and creation of meaning. Drawing upon the strategic-relational concept of selectivity, the paper argues that quality assurance policies have become a hegemonic tool for re-organising higher education because a variety of - partly contradictory - meanings and interests can be attached to them: quality assurance is linked to rationales such as democratic transformation, re-establishing public governance, strengthening market governance, contributing to national competitiveness, internationalisation of higher education or positioning universities in the (global) education market. Looking at the translation of quality assurance policies with the concept of selectivity enables us to see how structure, agency, discourses and scales operate strategically-selectively in creating compromises between different interests in higher education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both policy and research contexts, internationalisation in African higher education is welcomed for its potential to strengthen local capacity and cautioned against for its potential to extend long-standing asymmetries of power in international partnerships. This paper examines two sets of developments which seek to re-orient internationalisation to allow for greater local control, local focus and local benefit. The one relates to a more formalised policy, planning and research approach to internationalisation and the other pertains to an intra-regional form of internationalisation under the influence of the Bologna process. The paper explores prospects for internationalisation on the continent to yield more equal North-South partnerships and to support the revitalisation agenda and its development priorities in higher education. It suggests that continuing lack of local capacity, continuing structural inequalities in partnerships, and insufficient interrogation of dominant concepts and models of internationalisation may still pose problems in moving towards an alternative internationalisation politics in African higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relation between power and politics under the conditions of economic globalisation and transnational policy-making in education. The paper argues that power lies not only with the producers of the dominant educational discourse nor simply with the very discourse which is circulated and reproduced in national legislations, local policies and pedagogic practices; it lies with the increasingly global endorsement of a specific perception of what education should be about: to maintain or increase 'economic competitiveness', 'growth', 'development' and ultimately 'progress'. Progress remains the central signification of societies today, as the paper argues, and, therefore, the main source of power, namely of widespread consent around a largely common set of education policies promoted across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]