Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher education in Central Asia blog

Educating for inclusion beyond the pandemic – Learning from Central Asia

I’ve recently returned from Washington DC, USA, where this year’s Comparative & International Education Society (CIES) conference took place. A huge gathering of over 3,000 education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, the conference opened many valuable spaces for learning, (re)connecting, and sharing research and ideas. As well as presenting UNESCO IESALC projects on virtual student mobility Read more

March 6, 2023
Podcast: Internationalization in post-conflict societies – Iraq and Tajikistan

Following the recent publication of our open access article on faculty experiences of higher education internationalization in post-conflict Iraq and Tajikistan, my co-author Dr Hayfa Jafar and I were invited by the team at Thesis podcast to discuss our findings in audio form. Dropping today, our episode can be found at https://anchor.fm/thesis-podcast along with links Read more

March 2, 2023
Where have Tajikistan’s students gone?

Tajikistan is missing 25,000 new students in 2022/23. Where are they? Read more

December 16, 2022
Building research capacity at universities in the former Soviet space (new book)

It’s been a very long time in the making but the new book Building research capacity at universities: Insights from post-Soviet countries is now out! The book offers a comprehensive analysis of developments in higher education systems across the former Soviet space with a focus on research capacity. I’m pleased to have a chapter in Read more

October 13, 2022
Digital future of academic mobility and higher education in Central Asia – public lecture, 4 October

Curious to know more about trends in higher education internationalization in Central Asia? What might lie ahead for academic mobility in the pandemic/post-pandemic era? How the pandemic has driven innovation in digitalization of academic mobility? Then you will likely want to tune in to my public lecture Digital future? Virtual academic mobility and the prospects Read more

October 3, 2022
The challenges of higher education in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Here’s a link to a very interesting recent story from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty by the excellent Bermet Talant. In this piece, Talant interviews a university student in Tajikistan and an instructor at a private university in Uzbekistan about the higher education landscape as seen from their perspectives. You can read the key takeaways or Read more

September 1, 2022