Keynotes

The BAICE 2026 Conference will feature three keynote sessions, including the Presidential Address by Professor Simon McGrath. We will be announcing our remaining keynote speakers over the coming weeks, so please check back here soon for updates and further details.

Presidential Address

Three Lost Words of International and Comparative Education: Work, Development and Skills

11:00am-12:30pm

Friday, 4 September 2026

Venue

Room 641 James McCune Smith Building

Speaker: Professor Simon McGrath, BAICE President 2025 – 2026

In this Presidential Address, inspired by the work of poet, Robert Macfarlane, I suggest that international and comparative education is in danger of losing important elements of its erstwhile language, rendering it less able to engage with key issues facing the field. I concern myself with three such words: work, development and skills, stressing their importance to the field, and outlining some of the insights that other areas of education and the social sciences could offer for the field of International and comparative education.

Simon McGrath holds the established chair in Education at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Associate Dean for Research Culture in the College of Social Sciences. He is a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, the latest part of more than three decade engagement with research in South Africa. He researches the complex relationships between education and development, and has a particular focus on tertiary education and skills development in Africa. In addition to his academic work, he has engaged extensively with policy and practice, including work for the South African government, for the Southern African Development Community and for a number of UN agencies.

Opening Keynote: Border Crossing in Comparative & International Education

10:00am – 11:30am

Thursday, 3 September 2026

Venue

Room 641 James McCune Smith Building

Speakers: Yusuf Sayed (Cambridge), Nozomi Sakata (Hiroshima) & Joanna Härmä (Independent researcher & animal welfare activist)

Moderator: Dennis Francis (Glasgow)

This opening panel brings together three speakers from diverse backgrounds and positionalities to reflect on what it means to work across borders: disciplinary, epistemic, institutional, practice and geographic.

Work in comparative and international education (CIE) is shaped by movements: between disciplines and epistemologies, among the academy and the worlds of practice, donors, international organisations and NGOs, and crossing countries, cultures, languages and contexts. This movement raises questions about how knowledge is produced and valued, how we negotiate different institutional cultures and expectations, and what is gained or lost when we cross from one world into another.　The panel explores these tensions from multiple angles: how academics and practitioners work across disciplines and epistemological traditions and how they bring them together, how they navigate relationships with donors and international organisations while maintaining scholarly integrity and rigour, and how they carry their research, values and identities across geographic, cultural and occupational boundaries.

The session will be moderated and structured to encourage open dialogue, and we hope it will set a reflective and inclusive tone for the conference ahead.

Yusuf Sayed (Cambridge)

Yusuf Sayed is Professor of Education specialising in global education policy and development focusing on equity inclusion and social justice. Yusuf has over 40 years ofexperience in international education as a scholar policy practitioner and education rights activist across diverse academic institutional and development contexts. His scholarship focuses on the implications for national and global education policy goals of efforts to achieve equity inclusion and empowerment in countries of the global South. His scholarship in global education policy studies aims to invigorate a social justice approach by bringing new evidence-informed knowledge of factors militating against the attainment of social and cognitive justice in and through education.

Nozomi Sakata (Hiroshima)

Nozomi Sakata is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE), Hiroshima University, Japan. Her research interests include educational policy diffusion and implementation with a focus on pedagogical reform in low- and middle-income countries. Her recent work also includes donor logic behind the Japanese educational aid practices as compared with other donors. Nozomi has wide experience of working in African contexts, her home country of Japan and of studying in the UK and the US, examining how educational ideas and reforms travel across borders, are reinterpreted locally, and shape teaching, learning and educational development. She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Cooperation in Education, Senior Associate Editor of Comparative Education Review, and Board Member at Large of the Comparative and International Education Society and the Japan Comparative Education Society.

Nozomi holds a PhD in Education and International Development from University College London in the UK, and an MA in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in the US.

Joanna Härmä

Independent researcher and activist

Joanna Härmä is a writer and researcher who has conducted extensive research on low-fee private schooling targeting lower income communities in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Mozambique. She completed her PhD at the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, looking at school choice for the rural poor in Uttar Pradesh, India. Her research career evolved while working on a range of donor and foundation-funded projects and she has also worked in other African and Asian countries on issues other than private schooling. While living and working in Nigeria, she designed and oversaw the only comprehensive census of private schools in Lagos, amongst other research into private schooling in the country, including Kwara State and the federal capital, Abuja. She has also worked on other types of projects in Liberia, Malawi and Bangladesh. She was a research officer at UNESCO, working on the EFA Global Monitoring Report from 2011-2015. Her first book, Low-fee Private Schooling and Poverty in Developing Countries, was published in 2021 and her second, How the New Education Establishment Betrayed the World’s Poorest Children: Broken Promises, Broken Schools was published in 2025. She has moved away from her former career and is now studying International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law at the University of Edinburgh and is a volunteer on the start-up NGO Pigs Protection, as well as crew for Sea Shepherd, the marine conservation organisation. She divides her time between India, where she and her husband founded a school for girls in a remote, rural community; Edinburgh; and wherever her Sea Shepherd work takes her.

Dennis Francis (Glasgow)

Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, I was a Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University and previously served as Dean of Education at the University of the Free State and Head of School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. I must add that before I started a career in higher education, I was a high school teacher myself and taught for several years in South African schools.

I hold a PhD in sociology in addition to a master’s degree in education for social justice. My master’s and doctoral research focused on identity, intersectionality, inequality and marginalisation as they pertain to youth and schooling.

Closing Keynote: Reflecting on Academic Freedom in Comparative & International Education

1:30pm – 3:00pm

Saturday, 5 September 2026

Venue
Room 641 James McCune Smith Building

Speakers: Liz Jackson (Hong Kong), Moira Faul (NORRAG)

Moderator: Leon Tikly (Bristol)

This panel brings together two speakers from diverse backgrounds and positionalities to explore what academic freedom means in the contexts where they work and how it is lived across different cultural, political, and institutional contexts.

Rather than treating academic freedom as a fixed or universal principle, the panel approaches it as a contested and context-dependent concept – one shaped by where we work, who we are, and the structures within which we work. Discussions will span what academic freedom means culturally and politically, how assumptions and misconceptions travel across borders, how it plays out in practice in our research and teaching, how academic societies navigate it given the pressures of diverse membership and legal obligations, and how it is experienced differently depending on a scholar’s positionality.

Framed as a closing conversation, the session invites reflection on the themes of the conference as well as the broader conditions that shape the academic work of CIE scholars today.

Liz Jackson (University of Hong Kong)

Liz Jackson is Karen Lo Eugene Chuang Professor in Diversity and Equity and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She is the immediate Past President of the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong and a Past President and Fellow of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. In addition, she is the Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Originally from the United States, Liz worked in the UK, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates before moving to Hong Kong. She has now been in Hong Kong for fifteen years. In the past she served as the Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre (University of Hong Kong) and the Head of the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong.

Liz’s research lies at the intersection of comparative and international education and philosophy of education. The persistent theme of her work is how people are shaped by diverse experiences, including gender, race, and ethnicity, as well as culture, nationality, and geography. Her authored books include Muslims and Islam in US Education: Reconsidering Multiculturalism, Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education, Contesting Education and Identity in Hong Kong, Beyond Virtue: The Politics of Educating Emotions, and Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice. She has a forthcoming book entitled Understanding Philosophy of Education and a multivolume handbook series (with Duck-Joo Kwak) on Philosophies of Education in Asia, both of which are dedicated to understanding philosophy of education from a global view.

Liz is the recipient of numerous research grants and research awards. She has nearly 300 scholarly publications, including 20 books, and has given over 200 research presentations, including keynotes in Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Singapore, the US, Korea, Poland, Germany, and the Philippines.

Moira Faul (NORRAG)

Moira is Senior Lecturer on the Interdisciplinary Master’s, and Executive Director of NORRAG, Global Education Centre and Network. She conducts research and teaches on global education governance and its effects on national education systems and learner opportunities. Moira’s research programme investigates global education governance, combining international political economy with decolonial and relational frameworks to examine how material and epistemic hierarchies shape education finance, technology and sustainable development. She has published widely on global education governance, including multi-stakeholder partnerships, the political economy of education finance and technology, complexity and decolonisation, and improving the use of data and evidence in policy.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Moira completed her PhD on global education partnerships at the University of Cambridge. She also holds an MSc with Distinction in international relations from the University of Southampton and a postgraduate teaching qualification from the University of Oxford.

Leon Tikly

Leon Tikly is Professor in Education and Director of the Perivoli Africa Research Centreat the University of Bristol. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences, and holds the UNESCO Chair in Transforming Knowledge and Research for Just and Sustainable Futures. Leon’s scholarship has focused on globalisation, education policy, and improving the quality of education for disadvantaged learners in Africa; race, ethnicity, and education; violence and scholasticide in education; education for sustainable futures. His research is grounded in critical realism and informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, reflecting a commitment to social, environmental, and epistemic justice.