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Misunderstanding and harmful stereotyping have become commonplace amongst people in the United States and the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region since 2001, if not earlier. If universities are the locus of transformative education, work remains towards remedying these issues.One non-profit organisation, “Natafaham (pseudonym, Arabic for « we understand each other”), works to undo this negativity student by student. It brings participants from the MENA and Europe/North America into dialogue via Zoom each week. The inter-cultural dialogue availed to participants is empowering to actors, including the dialogue facilitator. This narrative is an autoethnographic exploration of my experience as an intercultural dialogue facilitator. Yet reviewing contemporaneous notes and reflections revealed structural aspects of this programme that empower voices from the MENA region, while facilitating learning amongst participants on both sides of the Atlantic. Such aspects include the format and the location of the programme, its focus on individuals rather than institutions or groups, its mixed top-down and bottom-up approach, and the opportunities it avails for ascension to positions of authority. This narrative analyses these aspects through several lenses and academic traditions, including those of global citizenship, critical internationalisation, (reciprocal) global service learning, and socio-cultural frameworks of second language acquisition. The chapter urges that these aspects are recognised as key catalysts of (more) equal relationships between youth in the MENA region and the United States, which merit widespread replication. It concludes by envisioning a still more equal relationship predicated upon more equitable language usage.

Retiring from work used to signify the end of paid employment and a transition to focus on life outside the workplace. From this perspective, the work-life interface may have no relevance for the retired. However, recent changes, particularly resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, suggest that conceptualizations of both retirement and the work-life interface are more fluid, ambiguous, and complex. In this chapter, we first set the scene, reviewing how and why the traditional concept of retirement has changed so dramatically. Drawing on empirical data from contemporary media, we then consider how the current experience of the older worker and retiree are being reframed in neoliberal terms, emphasizing individual responsibility to remain not just fit and healthy but also productive, through a wide range of activities. We then focus on the impact of COVID-19, highlighting how pre-pandemic structural inequalities have been exacerbated, resulting in a range of responses in both levels of retirement and work by older people. We conclude by suggesting that retirement and its work-life interface need to recognize lived experience as dynamic, messy, and varied and implicated in wider structural features of both the economy and society.

This introductory chapter traces some of the impact COVID-19 has had on education in different global contexts. It traces the history of the Universitas 21 Schools of Education Deans Group and its Forum for International Networking in Education and sets the context for the subsequent contributions in this book. It provides points of reflection for scholars and institutions as they traverse through the ongoing challenges of the pandemic.