By considering the position of education as a pharmakon, highlighting its potential positive and negative effects on societies by its technical unfolding, the article proposes to explore the political and pedagogical role that public and collective performances can have within the public sphere as political devices for promoting and enacting…

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are expanding access to high school education, which is a perpetuation of the previous focus on basic education. This study applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using data from seven countries from 2010 to 2020 to examine the potential conditions of fee-free policies at the high school level. Five…

Scholars have documented a tendency of (semi-)authoritarian regimes to undermine university autonomy, mainly through organizational (de jure) changes. This paper presents a case study of a publicly triggered plagiarism investigation by the University of Belgrade into the doctoral thesis of the Serbian Minister of Finance, one of the key members of…

The US-led invasion in 2003 created opportunities for Iraq to establish American-style universities. Drawing on policy borrowing and educational transfer theory and using interviews as the primary method of data collection, this study examines how the American-style universities are rationalized and appropriated by various actors at national,…

The decades from the 1960s to the 1980s were prolific in the emergence of a significant and diverse movement of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Latin America. In the case of Chile, grassroots educational organisations navigated various political contexts. Initially, they played an active part in the process of social mobilisation and the…

This study examined vertical segregation in Mongolian public universities, making the formation of the glass ceiling visible. Due to its socialist foundation, the Mongolian university sector has long been masculinized, wherein the two systems of socialism and democracy exist simultaneously, and this coexistence is "clumsy" rather than…

In light of socio-political dynamics at play in contemporary Thailand, higher education (HE) is becoming an important site for citizenship learning. This article interrogates priorities and practices of civic/citizenship education in Thai universities. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with leadership in five public universities…

Educational democratic (ED) values and their manifestation in school are related to the school context and the socio-political-cultural setting. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine participants, including two principals, four teachers, and three students in two secondary schools in Da Nang city, Central Vietnam. The participants indicated…

The United Nations (UN) and Council of Europe (CoE) have engaged in the development of a human rights education (HRE) curriculum in Turkey. The study programme for an elective high school course, "Democracy and Human Rights," was first developed as part of the UN Decade for HRE initiative in 1999. The programme was later renewed as part…

Teachers matter. They make a difference in the life of the individual and the society at large. Hence, their education and training has always been at the centre of any government's education policy. This paper focuses on teacher education in Albania. The narrative describes and analyzes the main milestones in teacher education during the four…

Taking the hasty implementation of 'German support classes' in Austria in 2018 as a starting point, I will lay out recent political developments in Austria similarly marked by speed, i.e. I will focus on language "integration policies" in more detail, which form a central concern for studies on bilingualism and bilingual education with…

The modern history of Nepal started after the Kingdom of Nepal was formed during the 1760s through a series of military battles, which is now known as a national unification campaign, led by Prithvi Narayan Shah. The history of mass education, however, started during the 1950s when a political uprising overthrew autocratic Rana regime that had…

The purpose of this study is to create a model of tertiary vocational education in Kenya. Despite considerable progress in Kenya over the last 20 years, current education models, low attendance, and low academic proficiency levels preclude many vulnerable learners from becoming employable. Utilizing semi structured interviews of eight Kenyan…

Media freedom and independence are the pillars of a given democratic society. Since the media makes up the bridge between the political authority and the public opinion, its independence is crucial for the survival of democracy. However, the history of the media has always been paved with obstacles of different kinds. This paper examines the…

This paper examines contemporary challenges for education and democracy in Brazil. In the past decade, conservative forces headed by the Escola sem Partido (ESP) movement have led a scaremongering campaign against teachers and public education, with Paulo Freire's critical educational philosophies as their main enemy. This study investigates the…