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This paper reflects on the role of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) by analysing and presenting a critique of its report '20 Years of INEE: Achievements and Challenges in Education in Emergencies'. Despite the strides achieved in highlighting the importance of education in humanitarian crises, we identify four critical points related to the ontology and epistemology of Education in Emergencies with a specific focus on refugee education: First, the oxymoron between short-term humanitarianism and future-oriented education, second, the purpose of education; third, the role of knowledge production within INEE as a primary agenda-setter; and fourth, how the INEE as firmly embedded in the humanitarian system reproduces unequal power dynamics. In conclusion and by using a decoloniality continuum (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli [2021]. "Researching Violent Contexts: A Call for Political Reflexivity." Organization. doi:) ranging from complicity to liberation, we offer different possibilities for INEE to address the four critical points and the potential for decolonising the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper engages in 'paradigmatic talk' about public outcomes of higher education (HE). We were drawn to this paradigmatic discussion because of its inherent 'cultural' dimensions and the opportunity for us to be self-reflexive about the ontological values underlying 'cultures' that shape the articulation, representation, and enactment of HE's public outcomes. While we agree with Marginson and Yang (forthcoming) that comparisons of public outcomes of HE across cultures are not neutral, we argue that such comparisons are rooted in and driven by ontological values and commitments. We offer an analysis of how our understandings of 'public' and 'outcomes' may shift when ontological commitments and values consider representations of culture, public, affect, and temporality. [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 article suggests that it is in the vicissitudes of the OECD's internal developments that we can better understand how the OECD developed into a global policy actor and reference in education. From an ontological perspective, the article focuses on the three characteristics dimensions of IGOs – actor, arena, instrument – and examines how these are constitutive of the OECD, as reflected in the OECD's work in education. The idea of 'dimension' allows the inquiry to move forward from the idea of 'roles' or 'functions' that the organisation, voluntarily or otherwise, chooses to play in a given situation, to develop more textured interpretations, in which the organisation's intergovernmental and organisational facets, besides its acknowledged political facet, are also taken into account. The historical analysis focuses on the early 1970s. It demonstrates the overlapping and interplay between the three dimensions, as well as their constitutive effects on the OECD's work. It is the 'lively' pluridimensionality of the OECD that has enabled the educational activities to prove their way within the organisation. The OECD's pluridimensionality reveals that the organisation does not operate in a vacuum, and that it is neither a monolithic nor an insulated organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]