Taking the example of educational biographies of alumni of an IB World School in the Lisbon region, the article aims to explore the potential of the concept of transnational educational spaces for biographical research. We focus on the biographical stage of transition to higher education as a crucial phase of students' biographies where we can…

This article presents an understanding of the context, nature and significance of Mary Gurney's educational career during the years 1863 to 1917. It is assisted in part by the conceptual lenses of feminist thinking and network theory. Despite neglect by past historians, Gurney's work was seen by contemporaries as equal in significance to that of…

Scholars and practitioners argue that information and communication technology (ICT) provides flexibility of time and place and softens boundaries between students' learning lives. The fluid movement between formal and informal learning contexts afforded by digital technology has prompted a re-definition of higher education learning environments…

When the newly appointed professor of medicine at the University of Rinteln, Johann Peter Lotichius (1598-1669), delivered an oration entitled "Oratio super fatalibus hoc tempore academiarum in Germania periculis" ("Oration on the pernicious dangers to the universities of contemporary Germany") at said university in February…

This paper addresses the challenge of developing a conceptual framing for the meaning of value with respect to higher education. The author argues that criteria derived from analyses of the life histories of longstanding graduates, which often take the form of counternarratives and proceed from that which matters to them, can inform an evaluative…

Women have long been under-represented in organization leader roles within higher education. Research has identified, mapped and examined the data, with recommendations for change. The research reported in this article adds to current knowledge, and raises methodological questions by focusing on senior female leaders in higher education in…

This paper is a brief summary of a large historic research project in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The project aimed to document and analyse the nature of mathematics education from tens of thousands of years ago to the present. Data sources varied from first contact and later records, archaeology, oral histories, language analyses, lived experiences,…

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and…

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded "knowledge economy optimism". Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive…

The paper investigates internationality as an academic virtue that is highly relevant for research biographies. The discursive trajectory of this virtue is assessed by comparing ascriptions of internationality in 216 academic obituaries from the US, UK and Germany, from physics, sociology and history, and from the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Our…

Five teachers of higher education (HE)-level courses working in the further education (FE) sector recalled critical moments which helped to form their self-concepts. The researchers used life history method to encourage the teachers to be open about their lives and how they formed their personal and professional selves. Three common themes were…

Feminist scholarship has considered how pedagogical identities and emotions are implicated in the gender politics of belonging and othering in higher education. This paper examines how gendered and embodied pedagogy is mobilised in Greek medical schools to construct notions of the ideal academic and assert women's position women in Academic…

This short account of R.J.W. (Dick) Selleck's career and research suggests how he reoriented study of the history of education in Australia. Using a historicist method, he examined educational theories and practices to elucidate the educational purposes they were intended to serve. Through major biographies of leading educationists and…

Peter Jarvis emphasised relationships in education: people in the West assumed we were born as individuals but we are relationally embedded from the outset and learn to become social beings. This paper is concerned with how we learn democratic sensibilities with a prime focus on "liberal" workers' education in the United Kingdom and the…

This article presents the results of a project entitled, "Analysis of University Barriers and Aids Identified by Students with Disabilities," carried out in a Spanish University. The study used the biographical-narrative methodology, which emphasises the importance of people talking about themselves without silencing their subjectivity.…