Universities around the world are increasingly digitalising all of their operations, with the current COVID-19 pandemic speeding up otherwise steady developments. This article focuses on the political economy of higher education (HE) digitalisation and suggests a new research programme. I foreground three principal arguments, which are…

This study examines the emergence and evolution of madrasa as a specific organizational form of higher learning from a comparative-historical perspective. The article begins by discussing how the madrasa emerged and which factors contributed to its rise and spread among the Islamicate political regimes during the Middle Ages and afterwards. Then,…

Literature suggests that state--market relations in Asian transnational education appear as a hybrid of economic socialism and economic liberalism as well as of supra-territoriality and sovereignty. Such a notion of hybrid focuses on how Asian states manage the struggles over the meaning and value of higher education, thereby addressing various…

In the United States, some states allow undocumented immigrants to benefit from in-state resident tuition policy at public colleges and universities, a benefit aimed at improving accessibility to higher education. Yet, undocumented immigrants face bureaucratic procedures and requirements that may discourage them from applying and delay or hamper…

During the 2021, 2022, and 2023 state legislative sessions more than one hundred and fifty bills were introduced seeking to actively undermine academic freedom and university autonomy. This includes nearly one hundred academic gag orders affecting higher education, such as those restricting the teaching of "critical race theory" (CRT)…

As community-based global learning (CBGL) programs become more common on college/university campuses and utilize the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to guide programmatic outcomes, open-access evaluation instruments that both benchmark and effectively measure programmatic enhancements over time are needed. The 147-item Community Engagement and…

As Iraq and Tajikistan recover from the impact of conflict and international isolation, spaces are being created for higher education to internationalize by opening up and (re)connecting with the international academic community. Drawing on 25 field-based interviews, this article examines how academics in these two countries interpret these…

The aim of this paper is to examine key change vectors shaping the undergraduate curriculum in the third decade of the twenty-first century. The paper begins by outlining selected definitions, foundational theories and conceptual frameworks underpinning this analysis of the undergraduate curriculum and its influences. Three key external forces…

Throughout the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, the UK higher education went through significant changes. We identify three epochs, through which the institutional logic and purpose of university were redefined: an elite reconfiguration before the 1950s; a democratic reconfiguration from the 1960s on; and an…

There is currently a clarion call to address social injustice in South African higher education (HE) in order to achieve greater equity in access. Within this context, current social injustices pertain to financial exclusion as well as epistemic marginalisation and are embodied in the predominance of expensive textbooks which are authored in the…

Private higher education has become an integral part of higher education systems worldwide, including in Vietnam. However, the details explaining the private higher education sector emergence in Vietnam has hardly been addressed in the current literature. Most scholars that have mentioned this emergence in passing believed that Vietnamese private…

Global science expansion and the 'skills premium' in labor markets have been extensively discussed in the literature on the global knowledge economy, yet the focus on, broadly-speaking, knowledge-related personnel as a key factor is surprisingly absent. This article draws on UIS and OECD data on research and development (R&D) personnel for the…

Since 2011 the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University has been actively supporting an ethos of belonging throughout their learning and teaching. In 2017 'belonging' became a formal university priority, embedded in the institution's strategy and dispersed across Colleges and Schools through a range of activities and interventions.…

This contribution to the special issue is an historical account of Paulo Freire's pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field trip in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the head of the first…

As borders and political systems change, members of some nations become minorities, resulting in multifaceted changes to those communities. This paper draws on Otherness and intersectionality in problematizing the interplay of gender, ethnicity, and language within Serbian academia for ethnic minority female students. I examine the narratives of…