Emma Harden-Wolfson

I received the very good news this week that my PhD thesis was selected as the winner of the 2021 Comparative & International Education Society Eurasia Special Interest Group Dissertation Award!

My thesis is titled ‘Responding to major institutional change: The fall of the Soviet Union and higher education in Central Asia’. Click here for a 350 word summary.

The Eurasia Special Interest Group Dissertation Award aims to honor the best dissertation or thesis written by scholars working and studying in the Eurasia region. The evaluation criteria include originality of research, appropriate use of scholarly literature, and quality of writing.

The Eurasia Special Interest Group (SIG) brings together educational researchers and practitioners working on or in Eurasia and is part of the Comparative & International Education Society (CIES). CIES is the largest and oldest of 47 comparative and international education societies around the world and has over 3,000 individual members.

I have been a member of CIES since starting my doctoral work and consider the Eurasia SIG one of my academic families. The annual conference has always been a fantastic way to learn about others’ work, to meet up with global ‘relatives’, and to make new connections. Because it’s such a large conference, there are plenty of opportunities for the serendipity moment of stumbling onto new (for me) research/knowledge areas. Within that bigger network, I have greatly benefited from being a member of the smaller Eurasia SIG and really enjoy getting to know other people who share my passion for higher education and for the Eurasia/Central Asia region.

Very many thanks to the awards committee for this excellent recognition!

(It also serves as a great prompt that I should get on with trying to publish from the thesis…)