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This chapter explores the potential of transnational history for researching global higher education policy. It begins with an overview of transnational history as a perspective, demonstrating how it is, in part, a response to processes of globalization that have also transformed contemporary higher education. Second, it reviews key features of transnational history as a perspective that can enhance global higher education policy research. The third part takes dimensions of contemporary global higher education and discusses how these can be approached through a transnational historical perspective drawing on the features outlined. The chapter concludes by highlighting how a transnational historical approach can enable new insights and research questions as well as some challenges presented by this perspective. The spatial focus of the chapter is predominantly European higher education, though the implications are more general.

The chapter demonstrates that one way to read recent developments in national curriculum in nations around the globe is as both expressions of and responses to globalization. Additionally, the chapter argues that curriculum making today is affected by ever-changing imbrications between local, national, regional and global relationships. Examples of this include the curriculum impacts actual and potential of the OECD's testing regime and aspirations in relation to curriculum and the EU's creation of a European education policy space. The more recent rise of new nationalisms and ethnonationalism is seen to have potential impact on national curriculum. Some consideration is also given to the content of the curriculum and the contemporary focus on both disciplinary knowledge and on what sorts of people schools should produce; both it is argued are responses to globalization. The ways the message systems (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation) sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the impact of the strengthened significance of international and large-scale assessments on the enactment of the curriculum are also documented. Some brief account is provided of the enhanced involvement of EdTech companies producing online curricula and the ways the pandemic has accelerated this development with the concerning potential for the privatization of the curriculum.

This article aims to set a roadmap for an ethical programme, which we call “qualitative migration research ethics” (QMRE). It is a scoping review that maps current ethical challenges that migration scholars often face and provide guidance, while acknowledging the fact that many researchers deal with ethical issues on a case-by-case basis.

By connecting three lines of debates – ethics in social sciences, in qualitative research and in migration studies – this article addresses the following core questions: What are the particular ethical dilemmas in qualitative migration research (QMR)? How do migration researchers deal with these ethical dilemmas? What is the role of universal ethical codes of conduct and case-by-case ethical considerations in dealing with particular situations?

This review demonstrates that special aspects of migration research context, e.g. participants' mobility, potential vulnerability and migration as a politicized issue as well as the flexible and exploratory nature of qualitative research require particular ethical awareness that cannot be sufficiently addressed by standardized guidelines.

It proposes that efforts to raise ethical awareness must go beyond researchers' ethical confessions or blind adherence to pre-fixed guidance. Researchers must have critical “ethical radar” before, during and after their fieldwork; not only while working on extreme and vulnerable cases but also while doing all kind of research regardless of the level of vulnerability. Last but not least, this article claims the need for including critical ethical consciousness substantially in higher education programmes at the very beginning of the research career.

Nation states’ neoliberal policies do not regard asylum seekers and undocumented migrants as deserving of a good life. Social work in welfare states is highly connected to the policies of nation states. There is a need to address theories in social work that have a transnational focus at the local level. Axel Honneth’s recognition theory enables an approach to forced migration from the direction of personal relations and personhood itself. The core idea is that if people cannot gain recognition, this causes harm to their self-realisation. The purpose of this paper is discuss how the recognition theory overcomes a national focus in social work.

This paper is theoretical. The relations of recognition are discussed in the context of transnational social work in welfare states with forced migrants.

The theory of recognition in social work practice with people who do not have a residence permit is best articulated by an understanding of rights concerning all the attributes of the person, i.e. as a needy being, autonomous and particular in a community.

Forced migrants’ backgrounds provide a specific backdrop for misrecognition, which may harm self-relations. The relations of recognition contribute to social work by providing the sensitivity required to evaluate the complexity of views and attitudes that affect the way we encounter service users. The relations of recognition (care, respect and esteem) give normative criteria for communication in order to take another person as a person, which, in turn, contributes to healthy self-relations of forced migrants.

Throughout Latin America, policy-makers are struggling to reconcile two conflicting political pressures: (i) the push to become more globally competitive on the basis of international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and (ii) the simultaneous need to address long-standing, entrenched inequities in both educational quality and access throughout much of the region. This chapter documents how policy-making elites throughout Latin America are trying to address these two goals by incorporating “evidence-based” policy solutions that can be empirically defended as promoting equity. However, scholars throughout Latin America argue that instead of promoting equity, an increasing focus on accountability in educational policy at the national level throughout the region has resulted instead in a shift in priorities from the governance of educational systems to evaluation of those systems, with the state functioning primarily as an Evaluative State. This argument is developed through secondary analysis of the Hispanophone and Lusophone academic education literatures of Latin America, whose robust and rigorous studies of these trends at both national and regional levels remain little explored within the Anglophone academic tradition.

This chapter presents a very broad synopsis of the intensification of education governance. It opens by narrating the multifaceted nature of governance and in what way it has developed as the axiom for professed policy problems that national educational systems are experiencing. The chapter chronicles the amplification of education governance and it explicates the metamorphosis and myriad typographies that “governance” has taken in responding to perceived endogenous and exogenous policy problems. It explains how managerialism and neo-corporate reforms sought to destabilize the activities of education governance and the results. In making this argument, it suggests that new public management policy prescriptions in education were part of the earliest form of disruptive innovation in education. It advances that educational managerialism, in hollowing out national educational systems, has generated the perfect breeding ground for the rise of newer modus operandi (or modes, styles, and arrangements) that governs and regulates education systems through the use of different techniques and mechanisms. The second half of the chapter discusses five different modus operandi that are inchoate in the post-managerialist era and highlights that in education, we have progressed beyond the movement from government to governance across national education systems and these systems are now employing additional modes of governance (vertical and horizontal) across different scales. The chapter concludes by drawing on the concept of a “Wicked Problem” (an unsolvable or difficult problematic, that is, fluid, paradoxical, and unfinished) to insinuate that education governance is an example of a wicked problem that has been and continues to be shaped by the ideological contours of endogenous and exogenous policy influences.

If moments of historical rupture create spaces for social change, what emerges to fill those gaps? This article approaches this question by exploring the creation of the “domestic” in 17th century Europe and Asia following the decline of the Spanish Habsburgs in the West and the Ming Dynasty in the East. Two events will serve as lenses through which that process will be explored. The first case centers on arguments for the legitimacy of the 1603 Dutch seizure of a Portuguese carrack in what would serve as the basis for Hugo Grotius’s defense of the free seas. The second debate focuses on the appropriate mourning ritual following the 1659 death of King Hyojong, the 17th ruler in Korea’s Choson dynasty. I argue that, in the process of responding to the crises they faced in their environments, social elites in both cases defined and articulated a conception of themselves as sovereign societies, creating a political space and corporate identity distinct from the extant institutional apparatus of the state and cultural framework of the nation.

This essay seeks to extend the original gambit of this forum, of thinking possible modes of postcolonial sociology, unto a more relational terrain. It takes as its point of departure the vexed status of history in sociology and the hermeneutic suspicion of comparison in postcolonial theory. Any potential rapprochement between postcolonial theory and sociology must engage with the deeply incongruent status of history and comparison across these fields. I attempt to bridge this divide historically by revisiting an anti-imperial internationalist sociology forged in interwar colonial India. I seek thereby to show what Pierre Bourdieu called a “particular case of the possible” and to participate in ongoing efforts to “provincialize” sociology.

This article is intended to stimulate theoretical reflection in international comparative studies in library and information science (comparative LIS).

The need for theory is emphasized and shortcomings in comparative LIS in respect of theory are identified. On the basis of literature from other comparative disciplines, a framework for examining issues of metatheory, methodology and methods is constructed. Against this background the role of theory and metatheory in the literature of comparative LIS is evaluated. General observations are illustrated using examples selected from comparative studies in LIS.

Much of the literature of comparative LIS is atheoretical and based on assumptions that reflect naive empiricism. Most comparativists in LIS fail to link their work to that of colleagues, so that no body of theory is built up. Insufficient use is made of theory from other social science disciplines. There is a little evidence of awareness of metatheoretical assumptions in the sociological, teleological, ontological, epistemological and ethical dimensions.

While general observations are presented about the literature of comparative LIS, this is not a bibliometric study. Issues of methodology and method are not dealt with.

Recommendations are made for improving teaching and research in comparative LIS. Concepts presented here are of value to the wider LIS community, particularly in internationally oriented research and practice.

Since the 1980s there has been very little conceptual and methodological reflection on comparative LIS. This article alerts the LIS profession to new thinking in other comparative disciplines.