“Student success” in UK higher education remains a surprisingly vague concept, encompassing a range of priorities from retention and completion to employability and satisfaction. Over the past two decades, as UK higher education has undergone broad transformations, doctoral education has come to sit within a metric-driven environment, where notions of success are reduced to measurable outcomes aligned with regulatory and managerial agendas (Lowe, 2023). What tends to fall out of this view is how success is conceptualised and experienced by students themselves (Cook-Sather, 2018). This gap becomes particularly pronounced for Global South¹ scholars, who are often cast through deficit and homogenised lenses, flattening the diversity of their doctoral experiences. 

This blog post draws on a year-long UKRI-funded, multi-method project – PhD@Cam: What it Takes, Breaks, and Makes – that examines how international PhD students from the Global South (IGS) at the University of Cambridge experience and navigate doctoral “success” – what it means, how it is pursued, and what it costs – beyond narrow, outcome-driven definitions. Study details in Fig 1.

This project is led by three scholars from the Global South: Nidhi Singal, who has been at Cambridge since 1999 – charting a journey from MPhil student to full Professor; and two members of her research group, Nikita Jha and Surya Pratap Deka, who began their PhDs in 2021. All three studied at Cambridge on full scholarships, came from varied middle-class backgrounds in India, and continue to reflect on their own Global Southness and what it means to pursue and inhabit “success” within a historically white institution like Cambridge. In a field where the “international student” experience is largely studied from a Global North vantage point (Mittelmeier et al., 2023), this work begins from our positionality as Global South scholars, foregrounding lived experience as both method and object of inquiry.

The blog post opens with a vignette from a scholar’s life – Arlo’s² – grounding the analysis in his first-person account of everyday doctoral experience, before moving to some key findings and recommendations.

Arlo’s doctoral journey – A vignette

Arlo is the first in his family to attend university. A chance encounter with his current supervisor, then teaching a short course in his home country, set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought him to the University of Cambridge on a fully-funded PhD scholarship. For his family and community, going to “a place like Cambridge” (“everyone had heard of the Cambridge dictionaries”) marked a significant milestone.

Arlo’s transition to Cambridge was a mixed experience. While he found academic footing with a supportive supervisor, pressures beyond his research began to pull him from his “core PhD work”. Plans to relocate with his family had fallen through due to funding constraints. His PhD thus began with an unplanned separation – his wife and children remained back home.

To sustain two homes on his stipend meant juggling a tight fiscal arithmetic: rent in Cambridge, rent back home, school fees, medical bills etc. He recalls, at times, “going without lunch” and withdrawing from social life. The strain seeped into his sense of belonging and mental health. “Instead of worrying about PhD progress,” he found himself worrying about survival – “for myself and my children.”

Yet, Arlo chooses not to be defined by these constraints. In the second half of his PhD, he started an online mentorship initiative, drawing on his experience as a first-generation student to support others navigating access to elite universities and scholarships. What began as a small effort has grown into a social media platform with close to a 1000 subscribers, having supported more than 40 individuals to “win international scholarships.” The project has somewhat stabilised his finances and, just as importantly, renewed his sense of purpose. 

Looking back on his life, Arlo reflects, “It’s not breaking news that I’ve gone through a hard life.” What matters is how he has “navigated through it.” He is now writing a book documenting his life-journey, hoping, “it inspires another child from a humble background” to reach their potential. 

Today, alongside his academic outputs – publications, conference presentations, and newly acquired research skills – this possibility of giving back makes his sense of success feel complete, like “a story coming together.”

The triple labour of doctoral success

While Arlo’s account reflects a distinct doctoral journey shaped by particular life circumstances, it also reveals a broader pattern across our study: the extent of work that remains unseen in conventional accounts of doctoral life and success. We conceptualise this as the ‘triple labour’ of doctoral life – academic, bureaucratic, and emotional/relational labour (Fig. 2) – that sustains success for IGS scholars, yet remains largely unrecognised within institutional frameworks that privilege measurable outcomes over the conditions that sustain them.

The first amongst these is academic labour. Beyond the technical demands of research work, participants described the labour of learning to thrive in new professional cultures (“fast-paced”, “hands-off”) which often differed from those in their home contexts. Navigating this “steep learning curve” of positioning oneself within Cambridge’s academic culture, often without sustained mentorship, intensified self-doubt for some, as in Tesrae’s account of not feeling “good..or smart enough,” with implications for scholars’ mental, emotional, and academic lives.

The second is bureaucratic labour, encompassing the work of navigating opaque information systems, and institutional and geopolitical norms. Participants described grappling with institutional bureaucracies, where access to information, networks, and even timely scholarship payments was uneven and delayed, intensifying both practical and emotional strain. For Ritwik, this meant taking “extra bureaucratic steps” in planning his overseas internship – negotiating visa regulations and permits – adding months-long non-academic work simply to sustain his academic progress, unlike his Global North peers.

The third is relational or emotional labour. Participants described the work required to persist amid underrepresentation, microaggressions and racism, and for navigating cultural differences in predominantly white academic spaces. Tesrae recounts being singled out to show her ID at her college entrance, revealing how her belonging is policed along racial lines. For Nathaniel, even informal spaces of “small talk” became sites of exclusion, where shared cultural references among peers shaped conversations that often bled into academic discussions and potential collaborations, limiting his entry into both. 

Relational labour also involved contending with entrenched epistemic hierarchies and claiming academic legitimacy within them. As Sheena explains, her attempts to pursue global, comparative research triggered pushback – “who are you to do this research?” She noted that such scrutiny, whereby “literally no one else in my group was asked,” fell particularly on “women of colour scholars.” This reflects a differential expectation: Global South scholars are expected to research within their “own contexts,” relegated to “case study work,” while “white scholars” are not subject to the same scrutiny. These encounters point to a persistent “colonial lens,” through which Global South scholars must continually negotiate recognition as legitimate knowers in global academia.

The “triple labour” performed by participants is substantial and often gendered: female participants described heavier relational and emotional demands, while male participants framed their navigation pragmatically but reported more acute isolation and mental health strain. Across participants, this labour remained largely invisible within institutional frameworks. This invisibility has important implications. It obscures the unequal distribution of labour – disproportionately borne by IGS scholars – and allows similar outcomes to be read as comparable achievements, despite being produced under unequal conditions.

Beyond the deficit discourse

Even under significant structural constraints, participants described the PhD as a deeply transformative experience. They narrated their journeys through a dual lens of labour and resilience. Rather than approaching their Global South location through a deficit frame, participants recounted a repertoire of knowledge, skills, networks, and capacities, what Yosso (2005) terms ‘community cultural wealth’, that they mobilised alongside institutional infrastructures to navigate success. 

For instance, in the face of challenges, participants drew on emotional and social support from families back home (familial capital), as well as informal student-led networks (“women’s collectives”) within the University that shaped their sense of belonging (social capital). Others described skillful engagement with institutional cultures through strategies such as being “like water” – patient, attentive, and responsive to where change is possible (navigational capital) – while sustaining hope through agentive meaning-making (aspirational capital). These forms of cultural wealth, rooted in their lived experiences, are central to how doctoral success is sustained. Sara’s statement – “Does it matter that white Cambridge approves? I don’t think it does,” echoes a sentiment running through participant accounts: that success is redefined through scholars’ own practices of navigation, rather than resting solely on institutional validation or support. In these accounts, students succeed because of, not despite, their Global South backgrounds.

Finally, participants articulated a temporally evolving understanding of success itself. Over time, it broadened from a narrow focus on outputs, such as publications, to a wider orientation towards wellbeing, inner-growth, and societal contribution. This shift was captured through a range of metaphors: a journey of becoming, where the PhD was understood as a process of personal growth and ongoing learning (Steven); fulfilling a moral responsibility, reflecting a commitment to giving back to one’s field, community, and the world (Jamal, Nathaniel, Tesrae, Sara); and the coming together of a coherent story, where success was experienced as the alignment of research into a holistic thesis and career trajectory (Arlo, Mei).

Rethinking doctoral education and success

The recommendations emerging from this study call for moving beyond one-size-fits-all models of doctoral support towards more responsive frameworks that recognise the PhD as a relational process and position doctoral students as whole persons embedded in social, institutional, and personal contexts. First, universities must strengthen relational support structures by investing in supervision, college-based support, peer engagement, and accessible services. Second, institutional responses must move beyond individualised deficit framings to address structural barriers – funding insecurity, bureaucratic rigidity, and cultural gaps – through more flexible, responsive processes. Third, universities must engage with epistemic diversity by expanding the knowledge cultures they privilege and recognising IGS scholars like Arlo not as mere recipients of support or inclusion, but as agents in reshaping doctoral education and institutional research cultures.

By foregrounding the lived experiences and cultural wealth of IGS scholars, this study seeks to extend that conversation.

Note: The full report for the PhD@Cam project is available at . The PhD@Cam team aims to share findings from the Cambridge study with diverse audiences and academic spaces this year to co-develop a more comprehensive set of recommendations for UK higher education. We welcome your engagement, please get in touch at: ku.ca.macobfsctd-6486b2@142ns

¹As classified by NORRAG in the following list at

² This is a pseudonym; all participant names in this blog have been changed for confidentiality.

Comparative Education (CE) has long been entangled with the study of other countries and societies. Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) traced the foci of CE from ‘knowing the “other”’, ‘understanding the “other”’ to ‘constructing the “other”’, and ‘measuring the “other”’; Steiner-Khamsi (2006) recounted the influence of development and area studies on CE during the Cold War; Takayama (2015, p. 39) described the redefinition of CE in Japan as ‘area studies of education’. Although area-specialised research has had a significant impact on CE, the academic field of Area Studies (AS) is under-researched among comparativists, especially since the field has significantly declined in Europe and North America following the end of the Cold War.  

In contrast to what has been described as the ‘crisis’ of Area Studies in the West with surging critiques towards the field’s Western-centric past, there has been a rapid expansion of AS in Chinese universities. In 2022 and 2025 respectively, China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) designated Area Studies–known literally as ‘Country and Region Studies (CRS)’–as a first-level postgraduate discipline and an undergraduate major, allowing universities in China to set up departments and programmes with the title of CRS.

These policies promoting Area Studies have led to unprecedented attention on and enthusiasm for its sub-fields, including Southeast Asian Studies, African Studies, and Latin American Studies, that were previously marginalised compared to studies on major developed countries. The number of AS centres in higher education institutions (HEIs) registered at China’s MOE soared from 37 (MOE, 2012) to more than 400 in 2024. From 2022 to 2025, new AS departments mushroomed in a range of HEIs, from the College of African Area and Country Studies at Zhejiang Normal University to the Institute of Area Studies and International Communication at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Why has China upscaled the study of foreign countries and regions? How is this field defined in governmental policies? How have HEIs interpreted the development of Area Studies in the West? Based on reviews of MOE’s policy documents and journal articles discussing the construction of the AS/CRS discipline in China, I share below some of my initial analysis.

First, there is a shift in the conceptualisation of Area Studies in MOE policies from an aspect of the ‘internationalisation of higher education (IoHE)’ to an instrument to ‘tell China’s story well’. As early as 2011, Area Studies received official attention from China’s Vice Premier Liu Yandong at the National Education Work Conference who mentioned AS as a new measure to advance ‘Reform and Opening Up’. Following this conceptualisation, from 2014 to 2019, Area Studies was constantly listed in MOE’s annual work priorities under the section titled ‘education opening up’ along with other IoHE policies on, for example, in/out-bound student mobility and transnational higher education. However, this portrayal of Area Studies as an element of internationalisation has gradually turned towards a focus on building national power emphasising the promotion of the positive image of China. In 2025, Area Studies was included in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (Xinhua, 2025), which highlighted the field’s mission ‘to make international communication more effective’ under the goal of ‘extending the reach and appeal of Chinese civilization’. This shift moves the field of AS away from its association with the humanitarian elements of IoHE (discussed in Bamberger et al., 2019) towards the prioritisation of policy research and national agendas.

Second, existing ‘borders’ in China’s Area Studies are marginalising humanities and critical scholarship. ‘Borders’, as Schweisfurth (2025) describes, represent particular conceptions of education and pedagogy in an academic field, but create divisions in practice. Building on this concept, I identify some major ‘borders’ in China’s AS: the border between policy research and more theoretical inquiries, between humanities (e.g. History and Foreign Languages) and social sciences (e.g. International Politics), and between research on major powers (e.g. the United States) and smaller countries. In practice, those ‘borders’ were institutionalised by: the merging of ‘Area Studies’ into the ‘International Politics/Studies’ section of the National Social Science Fund of China from 2024; the framing of policy research around the creation of ‘think tank’ as one of the core functions of AS university departments; and as some of my research interviewees shared, the challenges of publishing research on small countries and non-policy topics on high impact journals. Xie (2021) noted the decline of published articles on social and cultural studies in  Southeast Asian Studies as a result of this ‘policy turn’.

Third, the rapid expansion of policy studies in China’s AS ‘silently borrowed’ (Waldow, 2009) from American practices in the 1960s-70s, whilst in parallel Western AS was selectively interpreted and criticised. In the guidelines released by China’s Academic Degree Committee (2024), the development of Area Studies in the United States was positively described as: ‘a large number of interdisciplinary scholars and research projects have played a special role in implementing national strategies and safeguarding national interests for the U.S.’. The guidelines then went on to criticise Western Area Studies as ‘constrained by Western value biases’, ‘judging countries and regions around the world based on Western experience’ and ‘portraying the Western path as universal’. While this interpretation mirrors the tenets of decolonial scholarship that criticise Western dominance in knowledge-making, it seems to have a narrow focus only on parts of the field’s history in European colonial empires and during the Cold War. This neglects AS’s recent decolonial and post-colonial scholarship, such as Escobar (Encountering Development), Mamdani (Citizen and Subject), and Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe). Nor does this portrayal of Western AS include the emerging ‘Comparative Area Studies’ (German Institute for Global and Area Studies, n.d.) that aspires to bridge generalising theories and local contexts.

Fourth, as MOE policies brand Area Studies as ‘Country and Region Studies’, there has been increasing popularity for framing the field through a Chinese epistemology (known literally as ‘China’s autonomous knowledge system’) which again mirrors decolonial scholarship that emphasises the importance of indigenous knowledge. ‘China’s autonomous knowledge system’, initiated by the state, interprets education through an agenda of ‘Philosophy and Social Sciences with Chinese characteristics’ that draws on the experience of Chinese modernisation, Chinese political ideologies, cultural traditions, and is ‘aimed at generating “Chinese knowledge” that transcends Western-centrism’ (Wang et al., 2026). Under this framing, scholarship in China’s AS that challenges Western epistemologies could be absorbed into a nation building agenda aiming to improve the country’s soft power.

In conclusion, this thought-piece summarises my initial findings on the recent large-scale development of Area Studies in Chinese universities. I traced in governmental policies the shifting conceptualisations of Area Studies from an aspect of internationalisation to supporting the task of nation-building. I identified the epistemic borders in the field that gave rise to the imbalanced development favouring policy research and think tanks. While references to Western Area Studies are selective, there is a distinct rise of a Chinese epistemology. Those features reveal how the study of ‘others’ unfolds as liberal internationalism is challenged globally.

Charlene Song is the recipient of the 糖心传媒 Student Fieldwork Grant 2025

Author: Charlene Song is a doctoral candidate at UCL’s Institute of Education. Her doctoral thesis investigates the development of Area Studies in Chinese universities with comparisons to British and American ones. She is grateful for the support from 糖心传媒 Student Fieldwork Grant. At IOE, Charlene also teaches seminars on Education and Globalisation.

References:

While Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers an influential language for linking education to freedom, opportunity, and choice (Sen, 1985, 2001), questions remain about how far it can account for military occupation as a living organising structure. Even where young people earn degrees and build skills, their conversion into stable futures is shaped by a political economic model that manages occupation and organises the terms of futurity. Learning emerges instead as a relational and political practice shaped by persistence and the struggle to remain intellectually and socially present, through which what hegemonic systems render invisible is reclaimed (Fasheh, 1990), sustaining self-worth and collective agency. Palestinians conceptualise this as sumud—steadfastness—yet, as Giacaman (2026) cautions, its appropriation within resilience discourse risks reducing a historically rooted, collective practice of endurance and resistance to settler coloniality into a depoliticised language of adaptation. 

The Arabic term Wa‘i exceeds individual awareness, gesturing toward a collective ethical form of consciousness that binds personal understanding to responsibility for others. This conception is reflected in longstanding Palestinian traditions of storytelling and theatre, where narrative functions as both expression and pedagogy. Adel Tartir, for instance, understood theatre as a way of living, loving, and caring for others—‘we live theatre, we breathe it,’ rooted in warmth, imagination, and everyday community life (Tartir, 2025). Across artistic interventions and oral histories that sustain testimony and collective memory (see Abd al-Hameed, 2026; Aqrabawi, 2024), storytelling functions as a form of insurgent, embodied learning. One of Tartir’s productions, Taghribat Saeed bin Fadlallah (1979) tells the story of a man who becomes a circus dog in search of work. The play is a metaphor for labour, dignity, and the struggle to remain human under dispossession. 

In the 1970s, Tartir travelled with what he called Sandouq al-Ajab, the ‘box of wonder’—a form of cultural technology through which storytelling sustained imagination, memory, and collective life. Such technologies do not reside in the ‘magic’ of Silicon Valley, but in the persistence of a people who refuse disappearance. In Gaza, digital witnessing—where people and families record their lives under systematic targeting of civilian life—transforms personal testimony into a form of public pedagogy (Hamdan, 2025). Through such acts, documenting and bearing witness become insurgent learning to preserve consciousness under fragmentation, ensuring experience remains visible, communicable, and politically meaningful.

In the early stages of fieldwork, I invited graduates working in tech-related fields to draw maps of their journeys into professional life. Many began with diagrams that resembled linear pathways — education, graduation, employment, milestones, stability — reflecting the models that dominate development discourse. Our conversations unfolded through Mujāwara (neighbouring) (Sukarieh, 2019), a relational practice through which narratives were revisited and deepened over time. But as our conversations unfolded, these maps became more complicated. They revealed detours, interruptions, waiting, and decisions that redirected trajectories. One participant refused the exercise entirely and told me: “My map is disfigured. I cannot draw it.” In contexts marked by surveillance and political violence, this also requires political reflexivity (Abdelnour & Abu Moghli, 2021). I therefore work with an ethics of opacity, recognising that some experiences remain guarded or unspeakable. 

Graduates described investing significant effort in acquiring new skills and refining professional profiles, only to encounter prolonged periods of waiting and rejection. One recounted submitting hundreds of job applications before receiving a single interview, each application representing hours of unpaid preparation and self-directed learning. Behind these efforts lay a persistent awareness that qualifications alone could not overcome structural barriers shaped by military checkpoints, donor dependency, and ongoing occupation. Short-term projects offered temporary relief but rarely provided continuity or security. Delays in payment or funding interruptions were often interpreted by international investors as individual unreliability, obscuring the broader conditions that produced such disruptions. Over time, the repeated need to reskill and reapply generated professional fatigue and exhaustion, as graduates were continually required to demonstrate resilience in environments offering few guarantees. Education, hence, functioned less as a route toward stable employment and more as a means of sustaining purpose. 

The lives described by these graduates rarely resembled the orderly progression implied by dominant development models. I thus understand their trajectories as forms of constellational being, in which education, work, and personal life appear as interconnected experiences shaped by interruption and endurance. Educational and professional trajectories appeared fragmented by political events, economic instability, and moments of enforced stillness, though these fragments did not amount to disorder alone. Participants often spoke of their lives as composed of scattered but connected experiences, shaped by family support, community ties, cultural practice, and ethical commitments that sustained them through uncertainty. 

One graduate described how their confidence had been nurtured through folklore dance (Dabke) and familial encouragement, even as they carried the unspoken weight of military detention. Another developed an online game grounded in Palestinian history. This suggests education operates as a relational process, sustained through networks of care and shared meaning afore institutional continuity. Learning becomes a way of holding together disparate experiences without resolving them into a single story of progress. Endurance thus emerges not as passive survival, but as an active form of consciousness, and an effort to remain intellectually and ethically present when the very conditions of possibility are under sustained attack.

Comparative and international education has long been entangled with the shifting logics of world order, international relations, and global political economy, all of which shape how education is imagined, governed, and mobilised across different contexts (Jones, 2007; Klerides, 2023). What, then, does education signify in a world where the accumulation of skills is increasingly detached from the promise of opportunity and human dignity? International education frameworks often rest on assumptions of stability, continuity, and predictable progression, assumptions that echo broader neoliberal logics of efficiency, competition, and individual advancement. Such provisions, however, cannot be taken for granted in many parts of the world. When life and livelihood are targeted, learning assumes a different significance. It becomes a means of sustaining dignity and ethical orientation. Palestinian graduates’ narratives invite a rethinking of what counts as educational success, drawing attention to forms of knowledge that emerge through endurance and collective responsibility. These forms of learning may not align neatly with policy metrics or development indicators, but they carry profound social and political meaning. By attending to education as a lived, relational practice shaped by historical and material realities, scholars of international and comparative education can better account for how knowledge persists, adapts, and remains vital under forces that seek to erode it.

This blog post is based on We’am Hamdan’s award-winning submission for the 糖心传媒 Student Writing Award

References 

Abd al-Hameed, M. (2026, January 7). Mohammad Bakri: ‘We Resist with Art’ [Academic Journal]. Institute of Palestine Studies Blogs. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1658382

Abdelnour, S., & Abu Moghli, M. (2021). Researching violent contexts: A call for political reflexivity. Organization, 13505084211030646. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211030646

Aqrabawi, H. (2024). Triumph and Defeat in Popular Expression. Institute for Palestine Studies, Society and Culture, (137, Winter 2024). https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654980

Desai, C., Hammad, S., Abu Shaban, A., & Takriti, A. R. (2025). Scholasticide and resilience: The Gaza Genocide and the struggle for Palestinian higher education. Curriculum Inquiry, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2025.2558520

Fasheh, M. (1990). Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible. Harvard Educational Review, 60(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.60.1.1x8w11r570515154

Giacaman, R. (2026). Deconstructing Resilience and Reconstructing Palestinian Endurance and Resistance. International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, 27551938261423037. https://doi.org/10.1177/27551938261423037

Giroux, H. A. (2025). Scholasticide: Waging War on Education from Gaza to the West. Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 24(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3366/hlps.2025.0348

Habash, L. B., & Rabaia, I. S. I. (2025). From Iraq to Gaza: Educide as Colonial Strategy. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 15423166251395481. https://doi.org/10.1177/15423166251395481

Hamdan, W. (2025). Empty Chairs: Media, Movement, and Liberation. Child Studies, (7), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.21814/childstudies.6364

Jones, P. W. (2007). Education and world order. Comparative Education, 43(3), 325–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050060701556273

Klerides, E. (2023). Comparative education and international relations. Comparative Education, 59(3), 416–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2216045

Nabulsi, K. (2009). Land, sea, sky: All will kill you [News]. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/03/israel-palestinians-gaza-attacks

Sen, A. (1985). Commodities and capabilities. North-Holland.

Sen, A. (2001). Development As Freedom. Oxford University Press USA – OSO.

Sukarieh, M. (2019). Decolonizing education, a view from Palestine: An interview with Munir Fasheh. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28(2), 186–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2019.1601584

Tartir, A. (2025). Theatrical Giving Until the Last Breath. Institute for Palestine Studies, Reports and Testimonies, (144). https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1657867

We'am Hamdan

We’am Hamdan is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her research reconceptualises the capability approach in the context of settler colonialism to examine how education, technology, and labour intersect in Palestine, focusing on graduates’ trajectories into the high-tech sector and the structures of power that shape them. She holds an MSc in Comparative and International Education from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Language and Literature from Birzeit University.

Yet these differences are not simply variations in practice; they are shaped by power. In many contemporary educational contexts, particularly those influenced by Western pedagogical traditions, speaking up, sharing ideas confidently, and questioning perspectives are treated as primary indicators of student agency. In this framing, voice becomes visible, audible, and often immediate. 

However, this understanding is not culturally neutral. It privileges forms of participation associated with verbal confidence and, often, extraversion. As a result, other culturally grounded ways of engaging, such as listening attentively, reflecting before speaking, or waiting to be invited into discussion, can be overlooked or misinterpreted. When this happens, silence is no longer seen as a different expression of agency, but as its absence.

What Schools Mean by “Student Voice”

Across many education systems, student voice is commonly defined through visibility and verbal expression. Students are encouraged to speak often, share ideas confidently, and contribute actively to discussion. These practices are frequently framed as empowering and are closely linked to ideas of agency and participation. 

However, scholars have long argued that such understandings are shaped by dominant cultural norms. Poonoosamy (2018), for example, suggests that concepts such as international-mindedness may reflect “American or European mindedness” (p. 17). In practice, this means that behaviours aligned with Western educational values: expressing opinions openly, questioning authority, and speaking frequently are often recognized as markers of engagement and capability. 

This creates a narrow and culturally specific definition of participation. Students who are comfortable speaking quickly and assertively are more likely to be seen as confident and agentic. In contrast, students who engage through observation, reflection, or selective participation may be less visible within classroom interactions. 

Importantly, this is not a matter of ability or willingness. Rather, it reflects how different cultural traditions shape communication. In many contexts, thoughtful silence, careful listening, and measured responses are valued as signs of respect and intellectual engagement. When these forms of participation are not recognized, students’ engagement can be misunderstood. 

Culture, Silence, and Misinterpretation 

Imagine a classroom discussion where a young student confidently says, “Children shouldn’t question adults. It’s more respectful to stay quiet.” A few students quickly respond, eager to share their opinions. Others sit still, eyes focused, listening carefully but saying nothing. The teacher scans the room, noticing who has spoken and who has not, and begins to form assumptions about who is engaged. In this moment, silence risks being misread, even though it may reflect attentiveness, respect, or thoughtful processing. Such a moment reveals how deeply cultural expectations shape children’s understanding of participation. 

What may be interpreted in some contexts as disengagement can, in others, reflect attentiveness, discipline, and respect. Silence, in this sense, is not passive. It is often intentional and culturally meaningful. 

At the same time, in classrooms where verbal participation is prioritized, these forms of engagement can be misread. When educators rely primarily on who speaks, how often, and how confidently as indicators of understanding, quieter students may be perceived as less capable or less engaged. In practice, this can look like a student who listens attentively throughout a lesson but is overlooked during discussions or not called on because they have not volunteered to speak. Over time, patterns like these can shape how participation and ability are perceived. From my own positioning, I experience this tension directly. As a first-generation Canadian with Ghanaian heritage, I have been shaped by both Western and Ghanaian cultural expectations. In Western educational contexts, speaking up and sharing ideas are encouraged as signs of confidence. In Ghanaian cultural contexts, listening carefully, waiting to be invited to speak, and showing restraint are often understood as respectful and appropriate. 

These ways of engaging are not contradictory; they coexist. Yet when one is privileged over the other, participation becomes unevenly recognized. 

Power: Whose Voice Counts? 

Participation in classrooms is not only about communication styles; it is also about power. 

When particular forms of expression are treated as the standard for engagement, students who already embody those forms are more likely to be recognized, affirmed, and given opportunities to lead. Their voices align with what the system understands as “good participation.” 

In contrast, students whose cultural backgrounds emphasize reflection, humility, or deference to authority may be less visible within classroom interactions. Their silence is rarely interpreted as thoughtful or intentional. Instead, it can be read as a lack of confidence or understanding. 

Over time, this dynamic shapes how students are perceived not only by teachers, but also by their peers. What appears to be confidence may reflect familiarity with dominant norms, while quieter forms of engagement remain undervalued. 

These patterns highlight how power operates subtly in classrooms. Here, power is not only about authority held by the teacher, but about the norms and expectations that shape which forms of participation are recognized and valued. It is not only about who speaks, but about whose ways of speaking are recognized as legitimate. 

The Consequences of Misrecognition

When students repeatedly experience their ways of participating as misunderstood, the impact can extend beyond individual classroom moments. 

A student who begins as quiet but attentive may gradually withdraw if their engagement is consistently overlooked. Over time, the message they receive is not simply that they should speak more, but that their current ways of participating are insufficient. 

This has implications for identity and belonging. Students may begin to question whether their perspectives matter or whether they fit within the learning environment. What begins as a difference in communication style can become a question of self-worth. 

Misreading silence can also shape learning trajectories. When thoughtful observation or careful listening are interpreted as lack of ability, students may be underestimated or excluded from opportunities to contribute meaningfully. For example, a student who consistently listens and understands the lesson may not be selected to share ideas during discussions or may be overlooked for leadership roles because they do not speak as often. 

For educators, these moments highlight an important responsibility. Teaching is not only about facilitating learning, but also about ensuring that students feel recognized, capable, and able to participate in ways that reflect who they are. 

Implications for Practice 

Moving from understanding these patterns to responding to them, if classrooms are to become more equitable, educators must move beyond narrow definitions of participation. 

Voice is not limited to verbal expression. Silence, when culturally informed and intentional, can represent a meaningful form of communication. Listening, observing, reflecting, and contributing in different ways are all forms of engagement. 

Rather than asking, “Why is this student not speaking?” educators might instead ask: 

What is this student communicating? 

How do they demonstrate understanding? 

What conditions make participation feel safe and possible? 

Creating more inclusive classrooms may involve designing multiple pathways for participation, through written reflection, small-group dialogue, one-to-one conversations, or other forms of contribution that recognize diverse communication styles. 

Ultimately, there is no single way to demonstrate agency. Participation is shaped by culture, identity, safety, and power. The responsibility of educators is not to require students to conform to one definition of voice, but to create learning environments expansive enough to recognize multiple ways of being present, thinking, and contributing.

This blog post is based on Gifty Kwaofio’s runner-up submission for the 糖心传媒 Student Writing Award

References 

Nyamekye, E., Zengulaaru, J., Addae, I., Mutawakil, A.-R., & Ntiakoh, G. B. (2025). Culture,   Critical Pedagogy, and Critical Thinking among ‘Children’ in Ghana: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Childhood Constructions in Ghanaian Proverbs. Journal of Asian and African Studies (Leiden), 60(5), 3257–3272.  

Poonoosamy, M. (2018). Third culture kids’ sense of international mindedness?: Case studies of students in two International Baccalaureate schools. Journal of Research in International Education, 17(3), 207–227.  

Image Credits

1. Classroom discussion stock photograph from Canva. 
2. “” by  is licensed under . 

Gifty Kwaofio

Gifty Kwaofio is a Learning Leader and international educator based in Accra, Ghana. She has over six years of teaching experience across Canada, Ghana, and the United Kingdom, working in culturally diverse learning environments. Gifty currently teaches within the IB Primary Years Programme and is particularly interested in how student voice and agency are understood and expressed across different cultural contexts. She is currently completing a Master of Education in Educational Leadership and Policy, with a focus on comparative, international, and development education. Her work explores how classroom practices can better reflect diverse ways of participating, learning, and making meaning.

This piece argues that inclusion in higher education is often conditional, requiring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students and staff to manage how they present themselves in order to be recognised and accepted. A key insight from my PhD research is how students and staff from these communities were not only navigating academic success, but also how their accent, background, identity, and behaviour were perceived and judged within the institution. There were parts of themselves that might cause friction, and which needed to remain hidden.

These practices were not improvised in higher education alone. They had been learned and refined through earlier stages of education, reflecting broader processes of stigma management and selective self-presentation (Goffman 1963). 

Higher education, however, brought this into sharper focus.

For many participants, statutory education had been difficult, but at least familiar. Higher education was neither. Often the first in their families to attend, they described the higher education environment as unfamiliar and frequently difficult to read. This reflects broader patterns of cultural mismatch (Stephens, Markus and Fryberg 2012) as well as those identified specifically in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller educational experiences (Morgan, McDonagh and Acton 2023). 

Accents shifted. Family histories were abridged or reworked. Certain questions were answered carefully; others were avoided. What looked like confidence was often caution.

On paper, these students were widening participation successes. They had made it to higher education against the odds. They were included. In practice, however, inclusion did not translate into belonging. Belonging was not a settled state (Reay 2018) or a right conferred by entry, but a fragile, ongoing achievement. It depended on how they were read by others—on when they spoke, what they disclosed, and what they held back – and had to be continually negotiated in everyday encounters.

Higher education institutions tend to describe inclusion through policy, participation targets, access schemes, and monitoring frameworks. These measures offer a picture of progress that is tidy, measurable, and reassuring. What is less visible is the work required to make that picture hold.

What emerges from this research is a form of inclusion that depends on what can be understood as performative citizenship: the ongoing labour through which marginalised students make themselves intelligible within institutions not designed with them in mind. (Isin and Nielsen 2008; Butler 2015). 

Read alongside the , this becomes a story about knowledge mobilisation from below, understood as the process through which research and evidence are translated into policy and practice (Ward 2017). It is also about the limits of inclusion built on adaptation rather than change. Seen this way, the key questions become: whose knowledge is assumed? Whose must be adjusted, translated, or withheld? And who is expected to do the work of making participation possible?

Widening participation policy often assumes that once access is secured, inclusion will follow. Participation is treated as a technical problem, addressed through outreach, funding, and reporting. Yet education systems are also systems of knowledge, privileging particular ways of speaking, behaving, and knowing, while rendering others unfamiliar or out of place. This reflects broader processes of epistemic injustice and the reproduction of legitimate knowledge (Fricker 2007; Bourdieu 1990).

Within Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the term “gadjo” is commonly used to describe non-Gypsy social worlds and norms. For many Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students, entering higher education therefore means entering gadjo knowledge systems not of their making. This is not simply a social transition, but an epistemic one.

Long histories of exclusion shape how Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are seen within educational spaces. Even where formal access is achieved, students encounter subtle signals that their presence is conditional – dependent on how closely their ways of speaking, behaving, and knowing approximate institutional expectations. Inclusion, in this sense, depends on whether one’s way of being is recognised as legitimate, reflecting broader dynamics of recognition and misrecognition (Fraser 1997).

Participants described learning how to present themselves in ways that aligned with institutional expectations. Decisions about disclosure were weighed carefully, particularly around identity. For some, concealment offered protection; for others, it carried a sense of loss. Either way, it required sustained emotional effort, reflecting broader accounts of the emotional labour involved in navigating higher education by those less familiar with institutional norms (Reay 2018).

In this framing, knowledge tends to move outward from institutions, shaping decision-making and informing intervention. Less attention is given to how knowledge is mobilised within institutions by those required to navigate them, particularly from marginalised positions. This article shifts the focus accordingly, examining how knowledge is mobilised from below through the everyday practices of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students as they learn to read, respond to, and work within higher education.

Alongside this, participants developed practical strategies for managing everyday life in higher education. Some avoided personal discussion altogether, or, at least, engaged selectively. Others over-prepared for seminars to pre-empt assumptions about ability or commitment. Several spoke about quietly supporting peers, sharing advice about which spaces felt safer, which staff were more trustworthy, and how to manage moments of exposure.

Such a range of practices amounts to a form of informal innovation. They are not designed by institutions, nor recognised as good practice, yet they enable participation where formal structures fall short. Knowledge circulates laterally, through lived experience and peer networks, rather than through official channels.

At times, individual students and staff became more visibly involved in change. Where institutions were already under pressure to demonstrate inclusion, some voices were briefly amplified. Experiences were listened to; perspectives were drawn upon. These moments were often fragile and uneven, but they show how individual action can gain traction when institutional conditions are receptive. They did not, however, remove the wider burden placed on students to manage their own inclusion.

From a sustainability perspective, this model of inclusion is precarious. When participation depends on continuous self-monitoring and adaptation by marginalised students themselves, it risks exhaustion and withdrawal. Emotional labour is expended without recognition or support. Responsibility for inclusion is displaced away from institutions and onto individuals.

This matters for how we understand sustainable development through education. Social sustainability requires more than access and retention. It depends on institutions that are able to learn from those they include. When the labour of adaptation remains invisible, opportunities for institutional change are limited. Inclusion may appear to function, but it does so by absorbing strain rather than addressing its source.

Although this research is based in the UK, its implications extend more widely. Across education systems internationally, marginalised groups are encouraged to participate without institutions fully reckoning with how participation is lived. Students are welcomed conditionally, expected to adapt so that institutions can remain largely unchanged. There are alternative possibilities. Institutions such as Central European University in Austria, alongside Indigenous-led and decolonial initiatives in Canada (CCUNESCO 2024), for example, have made more sustained attempts to reshape curricula, governance, and epistemic norms (Smith 1999; Brunette-Debassige et al. 2022). These examples remain uneven and contested, but they suggest that inclusion need not rely so heavily on individual adaptation alone.

Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students are often treated as exceptional cases. In reality, their experiences illuminate a broader pattern in how education systems manage difference, showing how inclusion is sustained through informal labour rather than structural reform. For international and comparative education, this raises a pressing question: if sustainable development is to be supported through education, who is doing the work of making inclusion possible, and at what cost?

Taking knowledge mobilisation seriously means recognising the expertise embedded in students’ lived experience and shifting responsibility for inclusion back onto institutions themselves.

The students in this research were not failing higher education. They were making it work. The question is whether universities are willing to learn from that fact – and take on more of the work themselves.

This blog is based on Jethro Shirley-Smith’s runner-up submission for the 糖心传媒 Student Writing Award

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.Brunette-Debassige, C., Wakeham, P., Smithers Graeme, C., Haque, A., & Chitty, S. M. (2022). Mapping approaches to decolonizing and indigenizing the curriculum at Canadian universities: Critical reflections on current practices, challenges, and possibilities. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2022.13.3.14109

Jethro Shirley-Smith

Jethro Shirley-Smith is a PhD researcher in education exploring how Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students experience higher education. His work focuses on questions of belonging, recognition, and inclusion, examining how students navigate institutions that are not always designed with them in mind. Drawing on qualitative research, he looks at the everyday strategies students use to participate and succeed, and what these reveal about how inclusion actually works in practice. His research connects these experiences to wider debates on knowledge mobilisation, social justice, and the role of education in supporting sustainable and meaningful change. Before beginning his PhD, Jethro worked in primary education, where he developed a strong interest in equity and access. He remains committed to research that bridges academic insight and real-world impact, particularly in relation to underrepresented communities in education. In his spare time, he enjoys playing live music, going for walks, and spending time with his family.

Introduction

Being a teenager today opens you up to a social media feed filled with a chaotic blend of viral tree-planting challenges, AI-generated disasters, and sensationalist headlines about the climate crises. You know the planet is changing, you see the floods and feel the heatwaves in your own community. However, what you face online is a barrage of conflicting noises. 

“How do we know who to believe?” This question became the heartbeat of a recent study involving more than 7,000 secondary school students across 43 schools in India. We found that these students are thinking critically about climate change, recognising how its impact varies across social groups, but are also grappling with a secondary crisis: a lack of access to credible, evidence-based information about climate issues.

Between July 2024 and November 2025, these secondary school students in four Indian states logged on to complete an online climate change education module developed by Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Designed as a structured, sequential learning experience, the module aimed to build students’ understanding of global climate issues, their human causes, and their temporal consequences for ecosystems and communities. Because learners had to complete each section before moving to the next, the design reinforced incremental learning. Participation in the module was  voluntary  rather than completing it as part of a regimented science lesson. An independent mixed-methods evaluation, drawing on surveys and focus group discussions, revealed deeper insights into how young people process climate learning.

Local realities to global inequalities

Through the survey and focus group discussions that formed the study’s research methods, students demonstrated an increased understanding of human causes of climate change and its historical evolution. They articulated how rising emissions affect biodiversity, extreme weather patterns, and public health. Importantly, they connected global processes to local realities such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, and water scarcity. Rather than viewing climate change as an abstract scientific phenomenon, many described it as something woven into their everyday lived experiences.

A striking finding was students’ nuanced awareness of climate inequality. Many recognised that poor and marginalised populations are often the most vulnerable despite contributing least to global emissions. Consequentially, they highlighted the need for solutions tailored at different levels: local, state, national, and global. Students recognised that mitigation and adaptation require coordinated efforts, but also context-sensitive strategies. Moreover, students demonstrated a sense of agency and motivation to act even through micro initiatives such as reducing electricity use, limiting single-use plastics, planting trees, conserving water, and advocating within their communities.

Proliferation of misinformation 

However, students felt that their ability to act on climate uses was often constrained by a lack of access to credible information. While some students discussed accessing climate content through school subjects such as science or environmental management, and others actively followed reputable news sources, a majority cited social media – particularly YouTube and Instagram – as their primary source of climate information. Students mentioned well-known international and Indian public figures who advocate for environmental sustainability, noting how visible champions make climate issues relatable.

Students described the digital information ecosystem as both enabling and problematic. Viral initiatives such as mass tree-planting and ocean clean-up campaigns helped raise awareness about environmental issues. But they also pointed out that often the solution becomes more visible than the underlying problem: ‘when a solution is ordered to combat that problem or some plan is built to combat that problem, then that’s talked about… without that solution, we wouldn’t have known about the problem in the first place’ 

More concerning for many students was the growing prevalence of misinformation, including ‘fake news’, sensationalised headlines, and AI-generated content that blurs the line between credible and false information. Thus, the question, ‘How do we know who to believe?’ emerged as a central theme in their reflections. Moreover, students linked misinformation and sensationalism to climate anxiety. In contrast, access to accurate, evidence-based information -‘more statistical and analytical data,’ that have had ‘a lot of processing behind them’-appeared to reduce confusion and restore direction. As one student articulated: ‘Accurate awareness gives us confidence, motivation, and … direction to take practical steps.’ This difference between crisis-driven narratives and evidence-based explanations proved subtle but significant.  When climate change is framed solely as impending disaster in crisis-driven vocabulary, it can breed despair. When it is explained through evidence, with space for agency and action, it can foster engagement. This raises an important question: how can students access reliable, evidence-based information about climate change?

Importantly, students did not place responsibility for navigating misinformation solely on themselves. Instead, they described a distributed responsibility: young people must seek reliable evidence, parents and teachers must guide and contextualise, and institutions should provide trustworthy resources. Teachers were seen as particularly important mediators. In a world of algorithm-driven feeds, educators remain anchors of credibility. Several students emphasised the need to ‘rely on… our elders’ and informed mentors who can help interpret complex issues.

There was also a call for structural solutions. Many suggested that the government should establish a central, freely accessible repository of climate information, where students and the wider public could engage with verified data, research, and educational materials. Such a resource, they argued, would not only help combat misinformation but also democratise access to knowledge.

Conclusion: The way forward

A key finding from this project concerns how secondary school students access information to educate themselves about climate change and sustainability. As discerning learners, they are questioning sources of information and seeking evidence-based data from a variety of sources they consider reliable. As non-passive recipients of knowledge, they are processing climate learning through their own lived experiences (e.g. of individual responsibility) and contextual knowledge (e.g. of unequal climate impact). These findings corroborate research from other contexts and cohorts (Brandli et al., 2024; Walshe et al., 2024).

While international policy frameworks recognise the importance of contextualised learning (Singh & Shah, 2022), these findings provide for climate educators, policymakers, and parents: young people are asking to be equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to evaluate evidence, interrogate narratives, and act with informed conviction towards more sustainable and equitable futures. 

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of Cambridge University Press and Assessment (India) for facilitating learners’ participation in the survey and focus group discussions, and the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant for funding this research.

References

Brandli, L., Reginatto, G., Salvia, A., & C. Diniz, P. (2024). Student engagement on climate learning: What does the academic community say about it? International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 26, 406–426. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-06-2023-0219

Singh, S., & Shah, J. (2022). Case Studies on Adaptation and Climate Resilience in Schools and Educational Settings. Global Centre on Adaptation. https://gca.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Case-Studies-on-Adaptation-and-Climate-Resilience-in-Schools-and-Educational-Settings_web.pdf

Walshe, N., Perry, J., & Healy, G. (2024). Student perspectives on climate change and sustainability education in England: Experiences and expectations. UCL Open Environment. https://doi.org/10.14324/ucloepreprints.283.v1

Nidhi Singal is a Professor of Disability and Inclusive Education at the Faculty of Education, and Vice President of Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge. She also convenes the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). 

Camilla H. Chaudhary is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is co-founder of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network, member of the Executive Team, 糖心传媒, and Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education. 

Educational research is never neutral. It is shaped by who we are, where we stand, and how we are seen. My recent fieldwork in rural Sindh brought this reality into sharp focus. It was my first sustained period of research in a rural setting in Pakistan, and I entered the field acutely aware of my dual insider- outsider position. I am Pakistani, I speak Urdu (the national language) and even understand some basic Sindhi, the local language. I also understand the political and cultural structures (both historical and contemporary) that shape the country and province of Sindh. But I grew up in Karachi, which while the capital of Sindh, is a metropolitan megacity, and a social, economic and cultural melting pot in the country. I was educated in elite institutions (studying British curricula) shaped by colonial legacies, and later studied abroad. I am both from the context and distant from it. 

The tension between belonging and distance accompanied me from the start. Driving to the fieldwork context, I took photographs from the car window both of the rural scenery – mustard fields and guava groves, mud-brick homes, and distant shots of people – and urbanised communities with levels of development that surprised me. While doing so, I started questioning myself. Was I ‘aestheticising’ rural ontologies by turning harsh lived realities into picturesque frames? Concurrently, to what extent was I an outsider that the urbanisation was so surprising to me? I realised that my gaze was shaped by urban privilege and possible learnt bias and, albeit unintentionally, I was entering the rural field with an ‘othering’ gaze.

This recognition came through a process of critical reflexivity, one that was neither singular, nor comfortable. Positionality, often viewed as necessary paragraphs to be inserted into methodology sections, is in fact a visceral, relational phenomenon that impacts how we enter and act in the field. It is a continuous, uncomfortable process of interrogating the assumptions that travel with us into the field. It informs what we say and how we interpret words, actions, and silences, how we respond to gestures (perhaps of hospitality) from participants, how we present ourselves to our participants.

In the field, I expected to encounter gender inequalities that are structurally and socially entrenched in Pakistan, and visible in everyday interactions. They shape social structures – such as access to education and employment – and socio-cultural practices that predominantly quieten women’s voices. I carried this knowledge consciously, but without? recognising how deeply it had sedimented into the lens I brought to the field: when I met women educators, I expected stories of gendered constraint. While inequalities were evident -particularly in the number of women and children involved in strenuous physical labour, and in the fact that most of the women educators reported to men- I also met agentic women who were self-actualising and strategically navigating the environment and systems they were operating in. I met women teachers who were vividly articulate about how they created impactful practice in highly resource-constrained environments, and female government officials who commanded authority in rooms filled with men. Perhaps the most outstanding example was our local research assistant – a woman- who was also our gatekeeper in the field, navigating all our field requirements from access to government officials, logistics of travel, and training note-takers.?

I recognise that these women may be anomalies to hierarchical patriarchy, most critically, because they were educated. Nonetheless they challenged dominant narratives that frame rural Pakistani women as passive subjects of patriarchy, flattening the complexities of lived experiences. While structural inequalities undeniably exist, foregrounding them unquestioningly obscures everyday acts of actualisation, resistance, and negotiation. My own surprise at encountering such manifestations of female agency in the rural field context was itself revealing by making me question the epistemic frameworks I had internalised.

As a researcher of comparative and international education, a native of a postcolonial society, I consider myself sensitive to and critical of the colonial genealogies that shape knowledge production. In particular, such shaping tends to highlight inequalities and injustices in the global south, without sufficiently engaging with the complexities of southern lived experiences. By doing so, it creates deficit discourses that serve to reify those very same inequities. However, I realised in this field experience that my own educational and lived experiences – shaped by those same influences – had created a deeply embedded bias that I had to let go off and view my context with fresh, situated lens. Critical reflexivity demands turning such an analytic gaze onto ourselves. In order to do this, I recorded my moments of realisation as data about my context and myself, and created an ongoing practice of reflection and self-questioning when I engaged with the data. I adopted consistent and ongoing practices that I internally labelled ‘catch your bias’.?

Through such practices, I realised that my understanding of gendered lived realities in that setting had also become overly deterministic. I was overlooking the nuanced, context-specific ways in which women can exercise power. This does not mean romanticising agency or denying constraint. Rather, it means holding both simultaneously: acknowledging structural gendered inequalities while recognising women’s capacity to act within, against, and beyond those structures. Such thinking challenges existing binaries in development discourses e.g., rural/urban, traditional/ modern, oppressed/empowered. 

The process of being critically reflexive then, is an ethical necessity requiring us to question how our social identity – in my case class, gender, education, and location- mediates what we see and fail to see. It can create moments of discomfort (indeed it likely always does) but also pathways for deeper understanding of ourselves and our context. It can come in fleeting moments – such as while taking pictures from the car, in pauses during data collection, and while reflecting on field notes – that demand recognition and reflection by the researcher. This process was a deeply moving one for me reinforcing that ultimately, awareness of positionality is about cultivating humility. It is about entering the field with openness to being unsettled and letting the field speak back to us.

Camilla Hadi Chaudhary

Camilla H. Chaudhary is a researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge whose work focuses on educational inclusion, education policy, school leadership, and climate justice education, particularly in low-income communities. Drawing on social justice theories and southern knowledge frameworks, her research foregrounds situated knowledges and more diverse ways of thinking about education. She is co-founder of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network, which explores context-driven approaches to educational research in South Asia, and is a member of the 糖心传媒, serving on its Executive Team. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education.

I was listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago. That makes me feel old already. Quite recently a young man saw the radio that I keep to hand, an old and very bulky set that is all AM, and has extra wave bands for long wave and short wave, and he asked me whether people still listen to radios. Well, yes, I do. But we are getting fewer.

Anyway, the programme is now a podcast, so I can do modern as well. The programme / podcast is called “The Great Influencer Experiment”, and it took three people, a potter, a historian and a performance artist, who decided to take their skills to the Internet, and become influencers. Somewhere around the second programme in a three programme series, the protagonists hit the influencer’s dilemma. (They all hit it, but they each hit it individually, which is why I have positioned the apostrophe to indicate that the dilemma has only one owner.) Each had embarked on their course as an influencer for their own personal satisfaction, to make their offering available to more people, and to present an authentic version of themselves. But then there are the numbers. Should they pursue the subscribers, the views and the likes.

That rang very true for me. I have been running my YouTube channel for four months now, and I feel my experience is reaching some kind of point, but I am not sure yet whether it is a crisis point, a turning point or some other kind of point. Something has changed. At first when I told people I was going to have a YouTube channel, or that I had just started, they were very encouraging. Now, if they remember, they ask me how it is going. At which, of course, I show my outrage; if they have to ask, they obviously have not subscribed. So that is the first lesson that YouTubing gives. You have to be absolutely ruthless about exploiting other people’s guilt.

But the second lesson is that, like the influencers in The Great Influencer Experiment, I started to notice the numbers. And the numbers tell me that the videos that get the most views are the simple how-to-do-it videos. And the videos that I think are important, that address the deeper questions, attract much less attention. So it seems that postgraduate students want simple recipes that explain how to manage different aspects of their research. Shall I, in John Steinbeck’s words, cut out the hoop-de-doodle, and get right down to the business, or am I going to stay true to myself. And true to myself, as I always explained to students in person, is to say, “This is complicated. That is why there are courses on it in a university. If it wasn’t complicated, it wouldn’t be in a university”.

On the other hand, as my bad angel tells me, there is no point in being an influencer if nobody is watching. In fact, you are probably not an influencer at all if nobody watches.

As a responsible YouTube channel proprietor (I am having trouble with verbs to go with YouTube) I have, naturally, checked out the competition, And there are plenty of people out there who want to give advice to postgraduate researchers. And plenty who say, “This ontology / epistemology / methodology / this-that-or-the-other-ology is very complicated. We can make it simple for you; it’s quantitative or qualitative, and if you cannot be arsed to make a decision (technical term from the Internet) why not say you are doing mixed methods?” And when I was a flesh and blood person, IRL, I hated it. Is the price of being an influencer that you can only disseminate ideas that are already influential.

As with all other aspects of comparative and international education, there are no simple answers. You will have to judge for yourself. Just search for “” on YouTube. No pressure.

David Turner

Professor David Andrew Turner is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South Wales, UK, and Professor at the Institute for International and Comparative Education (IICE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

He has extensive experience of teaching in schools and universities in the UK, including working as admissions tutor for several postgraduate programmes. He is the author of several books, including Quality in Higher Education (Sense Publishing, 2012) and Theory and Practice of Education (Continuum Books, 2007), as well as numerous scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals.

His research interests range across Comparative Education, Higher Education, Education Policy and Leadership and Management in Education.

Our “Podcasts as Pedagogy” project, which we co-led, brought together a group of researchers and students, including Fatih Aktas, Bahar Karaagacli, Kelsey Boivin, Phyllis Keyi Mensah, Injung Cho, and Tom Stonestreet. The project was funded by the British Association of Comparative and International Education, the University of Sydney Office of Global Engagement, and the University of Canberra’s Centre for Sustainable Communities. We conducted a scoping review of podcast literature, content analysis of FreshEd itself, and surveys of students, teachers, and the general public. Our approach revealed fascinating insights about podcasting as an educational medium.

What even is a Podcast?

The , published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, revealed a striking lack of definitional clarity in the field. Over 25 percent of academic papers about educational podcasts that we reviewed provided no definition at all of what they were studying. This may make sense given the evolving nature of podcasts. Can podcasts include video, as is popular today?  Are voice memos used as student feedback considered a podcast? And what about recorded interviews that are only accessible from within a Learning Management System? The boundaries of a “podcast” are hard to pin down. We attempted to define podcasts by mapping how they have been conceptualized across three main approaches: technological distribution, user experience, and audio medium. 

We also tried to define the term “educational” podcast. We did so by focusing on three pathways by which podcasts become “educational”: educator assignment, individual learning choice, and creator labeling. This allowed us to develop a taxonomy that captures evolving practices of podcast use in teaching and learning from substitutional lecture recordings to creative student-produced content. This was foundational work for our project and revealed insights about podcasting as an educational medium. It highlighted critical research gaps around representation, access, and the intersection of academic inquiry with audio storytelling, which we explored further.

FreshEd as a Mirror and Lens on the Field

Once we had our definitional and conceptual foundations set, we wanted to understand how podcasts impact academic fields. It’ll come as no surprise to readers that we focused on FreshEd and the field of comparative and international education. spanning seven years, which was published in Compare, revealed fascinating patterns about the comparative and international education field itself. While it mirrored familiar patterns in the field—that is, the prevalence of higher education research, the dominance of English-speaking institutions, the geographic concentration in Anglo-European contexts—it also offered something different. Unlike traditional journal articles that typically focus on single countries due to space and expertise constraints, most FreshEd episodes naturally referenced multiple contexts, opening new possibilities for comparative thinking.

Perhaps most significantly, our analysis revealed how podcasts such as FreshEd may be reshaping the “epistemic living space” of academic fields. The informal chat show format allows for connections across contexts that might be difficult to achieve in peer-reviewed articles, while the public accessibility of podcasts helps democratize knowledge that would otherwise remain behind academic paywalls.

Voices from the Field

The final, ongoing aspect of our research aims to understand how podcasts are used by teachers and students in higher education. Our survey research, which is not yet published, revealed nuanced perspectives from both students and educators about podcasts in learning. Students appreciated podcasts for their accessibility and diverse perspectives, often using them as tools for conceptual clarity and as welcome breaks from text-heavy coursework. However, they also noted challenges including difficulty with note-taking, limited referencing options, and questions about content depth, especially when compared to traditional academic sources.

Teachers showed enthusiasm for podcasts as creative assessment alternatives and tools for bringing expert voices into their classrooms, particularly valuing their potential to circumvent plagiarism concerns in the Generative AI era. Yet they also highlighted significant implementation barriers: crowded curricula, technical challenges, and the ongoing tension between innovation and institutional expectations.

Overall, the conversation about podcasts as pedagogy is just beginning, and we’re excited to continue exploring how this medium can transform teaching and learning in the years ahead.

Will Brehm is an Associate Professor in comparative and international education at the University of Canberra, where he is also the deputy director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Education. He hosts the FreshEd podcast, and for several years co-led a research project called “Podcasts as Pedagogy” with Matthew A.M. Thomas, who at the time was Head of the Department of Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Glasgow.

Imagine being asked to revolutionise a global higher education system of close to 800 institutions steeped in centuries of tradition. This is precisely what Pope Francis set out to do in 2018 with Veritatis Gaudium, an Apostolic Constitution that has been called ‘one of the largest educational reform attempts worldwide.’ My doctoral research examined how these ecclesiastical institutions are responding to this call for transformation, and what their responses can teach us about managing change in traditional educational settings.

A bold vision for modernisation

Ecclesiastical higher education institutions (EHEIs) are quite different from the Catholic universities many of us know. These are institutions offering degrees validated by the Holy See itself, traditionally focused on preparing students for roles within the Church apparatus, though they’re open to anyone interested in theology, philosophy, or canon law. They exist in various forms: as faculties within Catholic universities, as stand-alone institutions, or even as departments within public universities. In France alone, there are 16 faculties spread across eight institutions.

The 2018 reform represented a dramatic paradigm shift. These predominantly teaching-focused institutions were suddenly expected to strengthen their research capabilities, collaborate across disciplines and even with other religions, and become more outward-looking contributors to broader societal challenges. For institutions built on tradition and theological mission, this was no small ask. It formed part of Pope Francis’s wider modernisation agenda, one that has also encompassed environmental protection and greater inclusion of marginalised groups.

Where quality assurance meets organisational change

What caught my attention, working myself at the time for a quality assurance organisation in higher education, was the central role given to quality evaluations in implementing this reform. AVEPRO, the Holy See’s Quality Assurance Agency, was charged with promoting and evaluating quality at all EHEIs. Analysing AVEPRO’s policy revealed a fascinating dual mandate: consolidating current educational and missionary activities while simultaneously encouraging radical innovation and change.

This tension between ‘stability and change’ or ‘efficiency and innovation’ is what organisational theorists call ambidexterity: an organization’s ability to both exploit existing capabilities and explore new possibilities. It struck me as the perfect theoretical lens for understanding how these traditional institutions might navigate such sweeping reforms.

Measuring ambidexterity in a sacred context

My research employs a qualitative multi-method design to answer three key questions: To what extent have EHEIs developed as ambidextrous organisations? Do institutions show different patterns of incremental versus radical change? And what managerial actions support this ambidexterity?

The first stage involves a survey sent to all French EHEIs (leaders, quality managers, staff, and faculty members) and used as a sampling tool for the case-study stage. The survey results and the accompanying documentary analysis allowed me to categorise institutions along a taxonomy: from non-innovative organisations through those emphasising either exploitation or exploration, to genuinely ambidextrous institutions operating at varying maturity levels.

The second stage uses in-depth interviews at selected institutions to examine the managerial practices that enable—or inhibit—ambidexterity. Drawing on organizational literature, I focus on four categories of managerial actions: communication, role-modeling, task fulfillment, and relation-focused activities. Documentary analysis of evaluation reports and strategic plans complements these methods.

Why this research matters

Beyond filling a significant gap in our understanding of ecclesiastical higher education, this research contributes to broader scholarly conversations about policy implementation and organisational change. While neo-institutionalism might predict isomorphic responses, i.e. institutions mimicking each other to gain legitimacy, my preliminary analysis of audit reports suggested considerable variation in how French EHEIs are implementing the reform. This variation is theoretically intriguing. It suggests that organisational culture, leadership actions, and contextual factors matter enormously, even when institutions face identical external pressures and evaluation criteria.

Lessons for policy and practice

There’s a certain irony in studying change within institutions devoted to eternal truths. Yet this very tension makes the research particularly valuable. How do organisations balance their core mission and identity with pressures to innovate? What leadership approaches help institutions navigate the choppy waters between preservation and transformation?

For comparative and international higher education scholars, this under-researched sector offers rich terrain for understanding policy implementation, organisational dynamics, and the globalisation of quality assurance. For quality assurance practitioners working across diverse institutional landscapes, these insights are particularly relevant. My own experience at AACSB International, working with business schools globally, showed me the challenges of applying universal standards while respecting institutional diversity. The ecclesiastical context amplifies these challenges, adding theological mission and centuries of tradition to an already complex mix. And for practitioners facing their own institutional reforms, these ecclesiastical institutions’ experiences may offer unexpected lessons, proving that even organizations devoted to the eternal must find ways to adapt to changing times.

Finding fascination in the unexpected

When I first encountered this reform, I was immediately hooked. The parallels with my professional work were striking, but so were the distinctive features of this unique higher education system. What began as curiosity during the taught phase of my DBA evolved into two publications and ultimately a doctoral thesis. The funding support of 糖心传媒 was a big part of these achievements by facilitating the fieldwork, including at the Vatican itself, which proved immensely important to grasp the context in which these institutions evolved.

If you haven’t yet watched The Young Pope, I highly recommend it. Not just for Jude Law’s compelling portrayal of a reformist pontiff, but for its exploration of how change happens (or doesn’t) within deeply traditional institutions. It’s a reminder that even the most established organisations must grapple with evolution, adaptation, and the ever-present tension between continuity and change.

Marine Condette

Marine Condette is Executive Officer of the European Academy of Management (EURAM). She was formerly Senior Accreditation Manager, EMEA at AACSB International, and completed a part-time DBA in Higher Education Management at the University of Bath, UK. Her research interests include quality assurance, change management, and internationalisation in higher education. Contact: ku.ca.htabobfsctd-6d4f35@6092cm

Theresa Frey, Abass Isiaka, and Yann Lebeau School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic was about to severely disrupt international mobility when UNESCO launched in November 2019 a plan to redefine that mobility as a global project. The Global Convention for the Recognition of Qualifications in Higher Education (hereafter GC) adopted at the 40th General Assembly was indeed “the first UN legally binding standard-setting instrument for global higher education” but is it the game changer its promoters announced towards a global transparent and non-discriminatory recognition of qualifications? The GC’s history dates back to the 1970s, when UNESCO first proposed the idea of a global framework to regulate academic mobility and unify recognition systems worldwide. Eventually, six regional conventions were adopted instead to regulate recognition at regional levels, covering the areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (1974), the Arab and European States bordering the Mediterranean (1976), the Arab States (1978), Europe (1979), Africa (1981), and Asia and the Pacific (1983).

These “first generation” regional conventions were subsequently revised to reflect a changing global landscape of study mobility and are known in their new format as the Lisbon Convention (developed with the Council of Europe in 1997), the Tokyo Convention (2011), the Addis Ababa Convention (2014), the Buenos Aires Convention (2019), and the Arab States Convention adopted in Paris in 2022. Regional conventions were designed to address the implications of trends such as the massification of higher education, the diversification of educational offerings, shifts in learning paradigms, the acceleration of internationalisation and emerging transnationalisation of higher education, as well as the steady rise of transborder professional mobility (UNESCO-IELSAC, 2023).

The GC, therefore, appears to complement instruments already championing the fair recognition of foreign higher education qualifications by universalising their principles and extending them to non-traditional learning modes (e.g. Transnational Education). The GC also offers UNESCO an opportunity to align its Higher Education (hereafter HE) agenda with growing calls for a decolonial and more sustainable internationalisation. And finally, the GC is being promoted as a standard-setting instrument that recognises new challenges, such as the forced internationalisation of HE induced by population displacements and the integration of qualified refugees into the labour markets of host countries.

A closer attention to the timing of the adoption of the GC questions the image of linearity and complementarity of the two types of conventions promoted by UNESCO. One might wonder why UNESCO deemed it appropriate to develop and adopt a global convention when some of the “second generation” regional conventions had yet to be adopted and ratified. In fact, with the exception of the Lisbon Convention of 1997, framing recognition across the European Higher Education Area and North America, revised regional conventions were still in their infancy and facing mistrust, if not resistance, from member states. The question then is: why did UNESCO push ahead with a global recognition agenda instead of investing in the consolidation of regional instruments largely identical in wording? 

To address this question, we returned to how the GC came to be, and to why dominant players (in Europe in particular) in the international HE field joined forces to support the introduction of yet another layer of regulation to a world already tailored to their own economic and symbolic profit. 

International student mobility in a world of polycrisis

Over the past three decades, international student mobility has experienced significant changes and shifts under the deregulation, diversification, and massification of higher education, but also as a result of rising environmental, political, and economic crises challenging the neoliberal economy and ideology of mobility.

In this context, the unilateral flow and attached celebratory narrative of mobility is challenged by scholars and trends alike, in the Global South in particular. New dynamics, particularly the regionalisation of mobility, begin to mitigate the ecological toll of over 7 million globally mobile students and advance the prospect of more sustainable and equitable regional higher education cooperation. Regional initiatives, particularly in South America, also seek to disrupt long-standing South–North dependencies and reimagine mobility beyond the gravitational pull of elite Northern institutions.

In today’s polycrisis context, dotted by protracted wars, climate emergencies, authoritarianism, neo-nationalism and growing displacement, rethinking ISM is not only timely but necessary. As the boundaries between higher education mobility and migration become increasingly porous, the need to develop sustainable frameworks for understanding and supporting mobility becomes ever more urgent. But is a Global Convention the answer?

Meanings and Expectations

The GC adopted in 2019 has so far been ratified by 38 countries. At the heart of this rather slow ratification process is the interpretive work of various actors, including national ministries, universities, international organisations, and stakeholder organisations, each with contrasting interests in the convention and its proposed scope. The expression of these differences is seen in UNESCO’s self-presentation as a “laboratory of ideas”, a global public sphere drawing on tools like the GC, conceived as inclusive discursive spaces shaped by both expert knowledge and member state consensus.

UNESCO highlighted three of the GC’s ten objectives in advancing its agenda for inclusive internationalisation, namely establishing a fair, transparent, and equitable global framework for qualification recognition, promoting a “culture of quality assurance” within HE systems, and ensuring “recognition for all,” including refugees and displaced persons (UNESCO, 2019). Interestingly, this implicit critique of global HE market dynamics and alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) faces incredulity and reluctance from among the Global South countries it is aiming to primarily benefit. This is because the inclusivity gloss of the agenda tends to mask the tangible implications of the norm-setting instrument for national policies. While some Member States support and promote (through their early ratification) the Convention as a tool to expand graduates’ access to international labour markets, reduce brain drain, and integrate displaced populations, others simply do not see its immediate interest, are wary of models from the Global North (such as the European Lisbon Convention or ENQA) seeping through a highly permeable UNESCO, see in the GC a facilitator of transnational education initiatives from the Global North, or are reluctant to further open their HE and labour market opportunities. 

This was evident in our interviews with officials from Türkiye, Jordan, and Zambia and with regional UNESCO officials. For example, Turkish officials stated that ratifying the Lisbon Recognition Convention (LRC) and the Tokyo Convention had already integrated their country into a global higher education framework aligned with its internationalisation goals. Ratifying the GC was therefore not a policy priority. For Jordan, the decision was more complex. Yet to ratify a regional convention perceived as equating its qualifications with those neighbouring  countries it does not recognise academically, the country sees the GC as a more valuable route to the global visibility and legitimacy of its qualifications and is  further engaged in its ratification (Interviews, 2024). Meanwhile, in some regional UNESCO offices, officials warned that discounting regional conventions in favour of a single global framework could reinforce existing centre-periphery dynamics.

Complex intertwined influential factors involving voluntary financial contributions, strategic appointments and active diplomatic promotion from dominant State Parties and non-state actors such as regional agencies and organisations (e.g. the EU) complicates the actual agency of member States despite their prerogative over higher education. This is something important for UNESCO to consider. While offering long-sought possibilities for inter-regional collaboration and mobility (particularly within the Global South) and providing an alternative to fragmented and unequal pathways of post-mobility integration into labour markets, the GC also risks reproducing global hierarchies by allowing influences across its policy cycle from formulation to implementation.

In a rapidly changing world of ISM where international league tables and private supra-national accreditation agencies increasingly act as proxies for quality and recognition of programmes and institutions, the GC is as much a political and symbolic instrument as it is a policy tool. Its global appeal lies in its promise of inclusive and sustainable regulation of internationalisation, but its adoption and implementation remain deeply rooted in geopolitical, institutional, and historical inequalities. Understanding the GC, therefore, requires not only attention to its stated aims (or what UNESCO and its state parties seek to achieve with it) but also to the complex interplay of meaning, expectation, and power that underpins its emergence as a global education norm.

References

UNESCO. (2019). Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education.

UNESCO. (n.d.). What is the Global Convention on higher education? | UNESCO. Retrieved February 9, 2025, from

Author Bios

Theresa Frey

Theresa Frey is a PhD student at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia and an adjunct faculty member at State University of New York (SUNY), Westchester Community College. Theresa has been a higher education professional since 2008. Theresa’s research has focused on international education, refugee education, and justice-centred education practices through art and creative approaches for refugee and migrant children. In addition, Theresa’s PhD research focuses on decolonising and futures practices of youth education activists in New York City, United States, through ethnography and participatory action research.

Abass Isiaka

Abass B. Isiaka (PhD) is a Senior Research Associate in Widening Participation at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Practice, Policy and Scholarship (CHERPPS) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. As an SRA at CHERPPS, he works on a range of evaluation and research projects informing the University’s inclusive policy and widening access and participation for underrepresented and/or disadvantaged groups such as those with specific learning differences (SpLDs), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Yann Lebeau

Yann Lebeau is Professor of Higher Education Research, and Head of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia. He joined the School in 2007 after holding teaching and research positions in France (Brest, Bordeaux), in Nigeria (Ibadan) and at the UK’s Open University. His research interests are in the sociology of higher education communities and where higher education, policy and social change intersect. He has done extensive empirical research on the University/society nexus and on questions of international policy transfers, internationalisation, academic mobility, in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and in Europe. Yann is a member of several education and development research networks. He has been involved for over 20 years in the design and delivery of research training and research capacity building programmes worldwide, notably with the Open Society Foundations and with the Council for the Development of Social Sciences in Africa (CODESRIA).

Workshop 1: Debating reparations in CIE

In this workshop, participants discussed the following two papers, exploring the politics and possibilities of reparation in CIE:

• Walker, S., Tikly, L., Strong, K., Wallace, D., & Soudien, C. (2023). The case for educational reparations: addressing racial injustices in sustainable development goal 4. , 103.

• Sylla, N.S., Fischer, A.M., Kaltenbrunner, A. and Sathi, S. (2024), Global Reparations within Capitalism: Aspirations and Tensions in Contemporary Movements for Reparatory Justice. . vol.55(4)  

Workshop 2: A case for embedding structural analyses of race and racism in comparative and international education

In this workshop, authors of recently-published paper on structural racism in CIE presented the key ideas of their work, focusing on theories of: Racialisation, Racial States, and Racial Capitalism. Participants reflected on how these theories connected to their own research.

You can read the paper here:

Singh, Y., Drago?, S., Oddy, J., Sriprakash, A., & Walker, S. (2025). A case for embedding structural analyses of race and racism in comparative and international education. , 1–19.

Workshop 3: New research on racial justice in CIE

In this workshop we heard about new research on racial justice and education. Presentations weaved together analyses of both the structural conditions and the lived experiences of racism in different contexts, with papers on: the educational implications of internal colonisation in Thailand; the lived experiences of school exclusion in England; the development of a global critical race theory to account for anti-Muslim racism across contexts;  the development of critical caste curriculum theory in India; and a study of whiteness and ableism through the experiences of South Asian teachers in England.

Keep your eyes out for an upcoming Compare Forum on this work!