CHEER is committed to examining and reviewing the systems, structures, cultures, experiences and consequences of inequities within higher education. We are part of critically informed social change, bringing together new interdisciplinary understandings of the creation, exchange and transfer of knowledge, and its social justice purpose, distribution and impact on society, higher education policy, practices and processes.

• We specialise in applying critical, creative and feminist epistemologies as a means of investigating and interrupting social, educational and cognitive injustices.
• We aim to identify newly emergent, as well as persistent forms of exclusion in the context of turbulent local, national, international conditions.
• We aspire to bring intellectual work, high‐impact research findings and new insights to diverse audiences.
• We work with students, policymakers, national and international organisations, NGOs, and campaigners, as well as cognate social scientists and scholars globally building a shared vision of imagining alternative futures.

Our current research considers equity in higher education in relation to four interrelated themes:

1. Internationalisation (inclusion, spatial, social and affective dimensions and dynamics of mobility, exclusion of particular communities/ social groups)
2. Leadership (gender, exclusion, affective economies)
3. The Neo‐Liberal Global Academy (equity consequences of marketization, privatization, financialisation, audit)
4. Inclusion - of groups who have been traditional excluded from higher education e.g. the Roma in Europe, low socio-economic students globally.

Through its links with national and international research centres, CHEER seeks to promote research collaboration, seminars, consultancy and academic partnerships.