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Global Research Insights: Voices from across the Globe

The Centre for International Education is delighted to announce the launch of its publication Global Research Insights: Voices from across the Globe. The edited collection brings together a number of essays that offer important research insights into pressing concerns about education and development across a wide range of national contexts.

Importantly, the collection brings new voices into global conversations about the inadequacies of education policy and practice, in ways that mainstream development research does not do.

These essays were initially developed as dissertation research studies from the cohorts of the MA in International Education and Development programme led by faculty from the Centre for International Education. Each essay in the collection has been informed by theoretical explorations that draw on the intersecting fields of coloniality, gender, power, inequality, conflict, displacement and critical pedagogy, among other themes relevant to education and development.

The carefully crafted contributions reflect diverse perspectives and contexts, underscoring the value of small-scale research that is often overlooked in mainstream discourse. While these studies may not draw on large population samples, they offer rich, mostly qualitative insights that illuminate lived experiences, challenge prevailing assumptions, and provide foundations upon which future scholarship can build.

Volume I

 Global Research Insights 2026 [PDF 802.23KB]

Suggested citation:

Udosen, N. and Dunne, M. (2025) Global Research Insights: Voices from across the Globe. Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, UK. Available at https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-for-international-education/documents/global-research-insights-(2).pdf. 

Volume II

 

Suggested citations:

For full volume:
Isesele, J. and Wadhwa, G. (2026) Global Research Insights II: Voices from across the Globe. Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, UK. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20764361.

For individual chapters:

Author name (2026) Chapter title. In J. Isesele and G. Wadhwa (eds) Global Research Insights II: Voices from across the Global. Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, UK. Chapter: as numbered below (in Essays). Available from: links below (in Essays).

• Foreword

  Building on a strong foundation laid by the first volume, this edition of Global Research Insights continues the commitment to bringing new voices from across the globe into conversations on international education and development.

  This publication is shaped by a recognition that many of the challenges in education and development are often understood through limited and sometimes distant frameworks, which do not fully capture the realities of specific contexts. This volume brings together research that engages directly with these challenges from within the settings in which they are experienced, offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in dominant academic and policy discussions. In doing so, it seeks not only to broaden how educational realities are examined but also reaffirms our shared commitment to knowledge production that is grounded, contextualised, locally situated, and critically engaged.

  The 18 contributions included in this volume have been developed from distinction-level work of the 2024/2025 MA in International Education and Development cohort led by faculty from the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex. The essays engage with a range of interconnected concerns which span interrogations of coloniality, gender, race and difference; conflict, migration and displacement; critical higher education and pedagogies; and planetary justice. While the essays are situated in diverse contexts, there is a strong presence of theoretical and methodological explorations emerging from the Global South. Each essay is connected by a sustained substantive engagement with the intersections of knowledge, power, and society. These concerns are worked through in specific settings, informed and enriched by the methodological approaches and distinct positionalities of the researchers themselves.

  What distinguishes this collection is not scale, but proximity. The contributions are closely engaged with the contexts they examine, allowing for forms of insight that are often overlooked in broader analyses. Rather than seeking generalisation, as in the dominant development discourses, they attend to lived experiences and specific conditions through which educational realities are shaped and governed. This attention to context does more than add nuance. It exposes gaps in how education is often represented in policy and research and brings into view perspectives that might otherwise remain obscured. In this way, the contributions offer not only insight, but a different way of approaching knowledge production.

  Taken together, this collection offers fresh perspectives, voices and insights on pressing global concerns in education and development which call for local action. By foregrounding these voices, we open up a space that encourages more attentive ways of understanding diverse educational contexts. We invite our readers, whether scholars, practitioners or policymakers, to engage with the substantive concerns raised in this publication and deepen their understanding of the issues that continue to shape education and development.

  We thank all our contributors for sharing their research in this publication and acknowledge the contributions made by Dr Namse Udosen, Prof Máiréad Dunne, Prof Barbara Crossouard and Dr Silvio Fanzon in supporting us with this volume. We hope you enjoy reading it!

  Janet Isesele and Gunjan Wadhwa

• Essays

  1. "It’s not the kids; it is everything else that makes it the hardest job in the school”: exploring the realities of an internal alternative provision unit and the barriers to its improvement in the UK

  Author: Samuel Woolhead

  2. Reframing Empowerment for Children’s Education: An Autoethnographic Reflection with Single Mothers in a Tanzanian Informal Settlement

  Author: Migyeong Ji

  3. Opportunities for relational teacher agency in Baghdadi for-profit international schools

  Author: Boris Kilgarriff

  4. Higher education, social media, gender and workplace futures: An exploration of low-income youth perspectives in Medellín, Colombia

  Author: Maria Camila Camacho Diaz

  5. The Nexus of Education, Work, and Migration in Nepal: Perspectives of Young Higher Education Graduates Working Overseas

  Author: Sae Yoneda

  6. Citizenship Preparation Courses in Upstate New York: How Teachers Reflect American Identity and Navigate Various Needs

  Author: Yasmin Mazen Nayrouz

  7. Promoting community resilience through education: Strengthening the connection between education and community in rural areas in Mozambique

  Author: Kaho Murakami

  8. Duality of Teacher Agency: Insights from School-Community Collaboration in Ghana

  Author: Hiroki Tohyama

  9. Access, Inclusion and Relevance: A study of the experiences of Young Women with Disabilities in Technical Vocational Education and Training in Uganda

  Author: Lynda Eunice Nakaibale 

  10. Constructing the Girl Subject: Problematising Rights Discourse in South Korea’s Development Policy and Practice

  Author: Jung Ju Lee

  11. Teachers on the Front Line: Exploring teachers’ resistance in protracted conflict areas in Myanmar

  Author: Shwe Htay Khant

  12. Defining and Promoting School Health in Global and National School Health Policies: A Critical Discourse Analysis of WHO and Tanzania’s National Guidelines

  Author: Mayu Kataoka

  13. Teaching By the Book: Exploring Teacher Identities in the Era of Scripted Curriculum in U.S. Elementary Schools

  Author: McKenzie Leigh Biliter

  14. Deconstructing colonial legacies through the medium of instruction in Rwandan secondary education: A teacher’s perspective

  Author: Stella Kangabe Rwabigwi

  15. From Past to Present: What Were Pre-colonial African Gender and Sexuality Practices, and How Can They Be Included in Curricula?

  Author: Amanda Nyanhongo

  16. Beyond the Binary: Japanese Administrators’ Views on Segregated versus Inclusive Education

  Author: Hikari Furukawa

  17. Students with a migration background in the Milanese schooling system: the role of homework as a tool for potential inclusion in multicultural classrooms

  Author: Chiara Colombo

  18. Gender at the intersection of higher education and displacement: A qualitative study of young refugee women in Uganda

  Author: Rabecca Chelangat