Articulating one's positionality as a researcher is crucial to social research. This is particularly important in comparative and international education research where context, culture and notions of power underpin much of the work. However, researcher positionality has multiple meanings, making it challenging for emerging researchers to navigate…

This article explores the state of higher education studies today, suggesting that in many ways it can be considered a vibrant field. In the UK, this is evidenced by the relatively large number of REF2021 submissions that had a higher education focus, and the emphasis higher education institutions are increasingly placing on conducting their own…

The global forces shaping international education requires us to explore how transnational pre-service teachers navigate new and unfamiliar education contexts. Within studies of transnational pre-service teacher education, the voice of the Chinese diaspora remains largely on the periphery. This article aims to redress this paucity by applying…

Private entities offering US-based colleges and universities access to international student recruitment networks have expanded in recent years as institutions seek to bolster their international prestige and their enrollment revenue. Many resulting third-party partnerships also provide curricular "pathway programs" and co-curricular…

This article addresses the ways in which education systems responded to the aftermath of World War I with respect to education for nationalism and internationalism. It does so by drawing on theories of internationalism and through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Prescott, an American scholar who toured European schools in the middle of the…

Transnational academic mobility is often characterized in relation to terms such as "brain drain", "brain gain", or "brain circulation"--terms that isolate researchers' minds from their bodies, while saying nothing about their political identities as foreign nationals. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of a…

An invitation to be a visiting academic at a Malaysian university provided me with rich opportunities to talk with international students and academics and to explore their experiences of learning and teaching in that context. The university had developed an internationalisation strategy and was positioning itself as an "education hub"…

To ratify possibilities for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising there is a need to forgo the exclusionary preoccupation with English and Western critical theories. The debates informing the international circulation of Bourdieu's (1977, 1993, 1999, 2004) ideas provide methodological lessons for moving from critical sociology…

In this article, we set out from the challenge that globalising synchronisation--usually exemplified by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and World Bank initiatives--presents for education to argue that the time-space compression effected by globalisation must educationally be dealt with with caution, critical vigilance and a…

This paper presents data generated during a semester-long programme to support international students from countries in Melanesia and Asia embarking on masters research in education in a New Zealand university. All were scholarship recipients. The researcher-and facilitator-of the programme, was interested in documenting and understanding the…

The technical complexities and sheer size of international large-scale assessment (LSA) databases often cause hesitation on the part of the applied researcher interested in analyzing them. Further, inappropriate choice or application of statistical methods is a common problem in applied research using these databases. This article serves as a…

This work is based on the experience of the authors' involvement in the development of a Masters of Vocational Pedagogy program in Uganda and Southern Sudan between 2007 and 2011. This is also grounded in work with Vocational Education and Culture (VET) over many years. The terms VET and Culture are interdependent; both terms are highly contested…

Since 1995 I have been engaged in consultancies and since 2001 in research dealing with the language of instruction policies in Africa. To what extent are the policies being implemented? What is the role of research and consultancy when it comes to language policy? What happens when researchers or consultants come up with recommendations which do…

This paper describes an EU-funded project under the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme, with a particular emphasis on the Oxford-based part. Involving six European universities, the overarching investigation was concerned with the tensions between standardization and tradition in education. In Oxford the focus was on aspects of…

This paper problematizes the discourse of internationalizing the curriculum using a critical framework of difference. The author draws on her transnational experiences as an international postgraduate researcher in an Australian university, an educator in Malaysia and her present experiences as an academic in an Australian university. The notions…