Emma Harden-Wolfson

Hello and welcome back to the blog! It’s been a busy few months – whoever said that academics get the summer off has clearly never encountered the 24/7ized nature of today’s higher education… I’ve been teaching, researching, conferencing, preparing for my second year at McGill, and more during the northern summer (‘holiday’) period!

Central Asia-wise, I wrapped up my contributions to a major international comparative research project examining the impact of the pandemic on access to quality distance education (read more here and here) and work on a very interesting book chapter looking at data on gender and education in Central Asia (spoiler alert: there’s not a lot). The book is due out later this year or next year. As part of a fabulous McGill-CAPS Unlock (Kazakhstan) collaboration, we completed a report for UNESCO on climate change education in Central Asia and the team is working now on dissemination.

My latest article, which is on structural reforms and the creation of new universities in the early post-Soviet period (available open access) was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Best Paper Award category by the newly renamed Europe & Central Asia Special Interest Group at the Comparative & International Education Society conference. Thanks team!

And, as a Kazakh government-funded Visiting Scholar, I was able to spend time at Korkyt Ata Kyzylorda University creating and conducting exciting workshops with students about global issues together with Dr Dana Abdrasheva, the university’s Vice Rector for Academic Affairs. The university was a wonderful host and I’m very grateful to them for creating the opportunity for this joint project, which we will keep developing.

So that’s me. How have you been?

In the world of higher education in Central Asia, there’s been quite a bit of chatter in the news around two big buzzwords: regionalization and internationalization. In terms of regionalization, question marks over the 2021 Turkestan Declaration, which promised the creation of a Central Asian Higher Education Area, have been hanging around for some time. Will the CAHEA ever be more than an agreement on paper?

The lingering smell of neocolonialism is imprinted on an April 2024 Russian language publication from the Centre for Eurasian Research at Tomsk State University, which is not hopeful about the CAHEA’s prospects or about higher education in the region in general. Yet, I’ve spoken with colleagues in Kazakhstan who think things are on the move – and if leadership is going to come from anywhere, I think it will be Astana. For example, the National Centre for Higher Education Development in Kazakhstan (previously the Bologna Process office) focussed on the CAHEA during a Rectors’ Conference in late 2023 with some interesting papers about what a shared higher education space separate to the European one might look like. Keep watching this one.

When it comes to internationalization, there’s only place to look in the region right now and it’s Uzbekistan. I’ve posted before about the country’s dramatic growth in student enrolment, which has now reached over one million students. Uzbekistan is scrambling to keep up by creating new universities (one’s so new it’s called, for now at least, New Uzbekistan University, reminding me of the early days of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University) and growing numbers of students continue to head abroad to study for a variety of reasons.

But the most interesting thing that’s happened in this realm lately is the opening of Uzbekistan’s first ever overseas branch campus. It’s not too far away: just over the border in Kazakhstan. But that in itself is significant both because it reflects a new direction for inter-regional export of higher education, and because it’s a direct interaction between the two countries that are leading the Central Asian way in reforming higher education. Definitely keep watching this one too. I will be.