Collective action has always been the heartbeat of social justice movements. However, existing systems pressure people to focus on hyper-competition and eradicate the ability to collectively resist systemic oppression. Unfortunately, education scholars rarely critically and theoretically analyze how they can and do collectively refuse neoliberal…

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as…

Neoliberal tenets have colored the past half-century of education reform, marked by top-down accountability, market competition, and regimented learning aims. Federal drift and post-pandemic recovery, along with economic uncertainty, will blur policy priorities going forward. Less noticed, local networks of pro-equity activists have come to…

Intense competition and educational privatization have fostered demands for student personalization, leading to shadow education becoming entrenched in the Asian education sector. Its social influence is expanding and far-reaching, which has attracted many scholars to study this issue. Scholars have been arguing about the adverse effects of shadow…

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical…

Pluralistic societies are generally characterised by weak national cohesiveness, increasing the risk of political tension and violent conflict; for communities from diverse religious or ethnic backgrounds, peaceful coexistence alone is insufficient to build the social cohesion needed for sustainable development and lasting peace. As an effective…

Two appealing principles of educational distribution--equality and sufficiency--are comparatively assessed. The initial point of comparison is the distribution of civic educational goods. One reason to favor equality in educational distribution rather than sufficiency is the elimination of undeserved positional advantage in access to labor…

This article discusses the depoliticization of the language of social justice, multiculturalism, and multicultural education in this moment of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, and in each section includes both national and international examples of depolicizaton to point out the pervasiveness of depolicization throughout the world.…

This article explores language policy in Southeast Asia, focussing on two recent state and other institutional reform efforts and directions: one towards English, and the other towards the mother tongues. However, what needs to be highlighted is the bifurcated nature of language policy reforms in the region. That is, these two policy directions…

Lifelong learning has become a catchword in almost all countries because of its growing influence on education policies in the globalised world. In the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), the promotion of lifelong learning has been a strategy to speed up economic growth and become competitive.…

This paper critiques international trends towards certain school practices aimed at promoting equity and social justice by closing gaps in specific learning outcomes among students. It argues that even though some of these practices (e.g. individualised student support, data-driven leadership) improve learning outcomes for certain groups…

University mergers have become a common strategy for increasing global competitiveness. In this chapter, the authors analyze the implementation of mergers in Finnish universities from the perspective of social justice as conceived within Finland and other Nordic countries.

In this chapter, the issue editors set the stage for the chapters that follow by delineating recent developments in higher education and common strategies for creating globally competitive higher education institutions. The editors consider social justice concerns that arise with global competition and contend that contextualized priorities can…

This paper draws on interview data gathered from a broader study concerned with examining issues of social justice, cultural diversity and schooling. The focus is on five students in Years 5 and 6 who attend a primary school located on the edge of a class-privileged area in outer London. The children are all high achievers who are very invested in…

The last three decades have witnessed significant changes in the social and economic context of young people's lives. There is increasing evidence that for young people growing up in the UK, this is fuelling a disparity between those with resources and those without. What this means in terms of social justice, however, is difficult to discern. In…