Supporting higher education in unstable states: Can foreign contributions ever deliver?
- Gretchen Rossman, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Anthony Welch, University of Sydney
- CO-CHAIR: Rebecca Schendel, Center for International Higher Education, Boston College
- CO-CHAIR: Simon Marginson, University of Oxford
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This webinar is being co-hosted by CGHE and the Center for International Higher Education. It is not part of the ongoing ‘Racism and Coloniality in Global Higher Education’ special webinar series.
Social convulsions around the world bring into perspective longstanding efforts for higher education reform in emergency or post-conflict settings. These efforts are often funded by international development agencies in Global North and high-income countries, or by international organisations. Universities and academics frequently carry out or advise these development projects, inviting introspection about the ethics of engaging on such foreign initiatives. At a superficial level, the question is whether or not to engage, but in an increasingly global field of higher education, a more nuanced set of questions involves how to engage with higher education systems in unstable states.
While Afghanistan looms large in current conversations about the limits of higher education and development, the crisis in Myanmar, along with dramatic government transitions in multiple regions over the last several decades serve as reminders that these are recurrent issues. This webinar focuses on the role of universities, primarily in the Global North, in promoting higher education reforms in unstable states and the ethical choices that academics within these institutions may consider.
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Gretchen B. Rossman serves as Professor of International Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With an international reputation as a qualitative methodologist, she has expertise in education reform and capacity building at international, national, and local levels, qualitative research design and methods, mixed methods monitoring and evaluation, and inquiry in education. Over the past 25 years, she has co-authored nine books, two of which are editions of major qualitative research texts (Learning in the Field, 3rd ed., with Sharon F. Rallis, and Designing Qualitative Research, 5th ed., with Catherine Marshall). She has also authored or co-authored over 40 articles, book chapters, and technical reports focused on education reform internationally and domestically, as well as methodological issues in qualitative research synthesis, mixed methods evaluation, and ethical research practice.
Anthony Welch is Professor of Education, University of Sydney. His publications address education reforms, principally within Australia, and the Asia-Pacific, mainly on Higher Education. He has advised state, national and international agencies, governments, institutions and foundations in Australia, Europe, East, Central, and Southeast Asia and the USA. Project experience, largely in higher education, includes Myanmar, and Afghanistan. His work appears in numerous European and Asian languages, and he has been Visiting Professor in the USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Sweden, and Hong Kong (China).
Rebecca Schendel is the Managing Director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA). Her research considers the impact of higher education on human development in resource-poor contexts, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. Particular areas of focus include teaching and learning within universities, the role of faculty development initiatives and the links between curricular and pedagogical choices and student success.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and Lead Researcher with Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the contributions of higher education and higher education as a public good, the global science system and higher education and social inequality. At Oxford he team teaches in the MSc Education subject on ‘Global higher education’. His most recent book is Changing Higher Education for a Changing World (edited with Claire Callender and William Locke, Bloomsbury 2020). Forthcoming from Bloomsbury are Changing Higher Education in India (edited with Saumen Chattopadhyay and NV Varghese) and Changing Higher Education in East Asia (edited with Xin Xu).
