Comparative and International Higher Education Policy Specialist; Focus on Central Asia
I've recently returned from Washington DC, USA, where this year's Comparative & International Education Society (CIES) conference took place. A huge gathering of over 3,000 education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, the conference opened many valuable spaces for learning, (re)connecting, and sharing research and ideas. Members of the GPE KIX research team with then Kyrgyz Minister …
Continue reading Educating for inclusion beyond the pandemic – Learning from Central Asia
Following the recent publication of our open access article on faculty experiences of higher education internationalization in post-conflict Iraq and Tajikistan, my co-author Dr Hayfa Jafar and I were invited by the team at Thesis podcast to discuss our findings in audio form. Dropping today, our episode can be found at https://anchor.fm/thesis-podcast along with links …
Continue reading Podcast: Internationalization in post-conflict societies – Iraq and Tajikistan
Tajikistan is missing 25,000 new students in 2022/23. Where are they?
The very lovely cover of the new book It's been a very long time in the making but the new book Building research capacity at universities: Insights from post-Soviet countries is now out! The book offers a comprehensive analysis of developments in higher education systems across the former Soviet space with a focus on research …
Continue reading Building research capacity at universities in the former Soviet space (new book)
Curious to know more about trends in higher education internationalization in Central Asia? What might lie ahead for academic mobility in the pandemic/post-pandemic era? How the pandemic has driven innovation in digitalization of academic mobility? Then you will likely want to tune in to my public lecture Digital future? Virtual academic mobility and the prospects …
Here's a link to a very interesting recent story from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty by the excellent Bermet Talant. In this piece, Talant interviews a university student in Tajikistan and an instructor at a private university in Uzbekistan about the higher education landscape as seen from their perspectives. You can read the key takeaways or …
Continue reading The challenges of higher education in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
The internationalization of higher education has been on a fairly linear upward trajectory (at least until 2019 - data for the pandemic period isn't fully available and it's too soon to see whether travel and other disruptions will have a long-term effect). That means more students going abroad for all or part of their programmes, …
My new article, Surviving a Crisis: Transformation, Adaptation, and Resistance in Higher Education, is now out. The article is open access and the online first version is available to download at https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/hegp/issue/69503/1054946. This is the first article to be published from my PhD research and it also builds on the webinar I gave at the …
I've spent many a happy hour enjoying the challenge of finding a vaguely suitable cat meme to go with many of my blog posts Somehow, the tenth anniversary of this blog has rolled around. From my very first post published on 30 September 2011, I've published 345 posts, averaging around three posts a month. In …
Here's a very nice (Russian language) summary of a recent (English language) seminar given by Professor Sarfaroz Niyozov of the University of Toronto, Canada on knowledge production in Tajikistan. Niyozov draws on global discourses of decolonization, recolonization and indigenization as they might pertain to the contemporary Central Asian context. You can also watch the seminar …
Emma Sabzalieva 