My research examines tertiary education and research systems. Across three interconnected areas of work, I ask what these systems enable, whom they serve, and whose knowledge and contributions they recognise.
Underlying these areas is my longer-term intellectual agenda around the humanisation of higher education and research. I am interested in how education and research can place human beings and their flourishing at the centre, sustain human agency, and make space for different ways of knowing and being. This is leading me to explore a more fundamental question: what does it mean to learn to be human, and what roles can tertiary education play?
Below are summaries of my research across these three areas, drawing on both independent and collaborative work.
Tertiary education
My work in this area asks how the purposes, operation, and outcomes of tertiary education are shaped by wider social, economic, and institutional contexts, and how tertiary education can contribute to people’s lives and our collective futures.
This strand of work shows that policy ambitions do not always translate straightforwardly into educational and social outcomes. Higher education expansion does not by itself produce greater social mobility; internationalisation and new forms of provision depend on institutional capacity and practice; and policy reforms are mediated by relationships among governments, institutions, employers, professionals, learners, and labour markets.
I increasingly approach tertiary education as a connected and evolving ecosystem. I am exploring who participates in and benefits from this ecosystem, who remains marginalised within it, how connections across its different parts are built, sustained, or broken down, and how policy and institutional design can better support people and the multiple purposes of tertiary education.
My latest work in this area examines the changing purposes of higher education in an AI era, and the roles of lifelong learning in ageing societies.
Example work
- Changing Higher Education in East Asia
- How far has the state stepped back: changing governance of higher education in China
Example project
- System-Thinking Approaches to Tertiary Education Policymaking in England
Research on research
I have examined research cultures, assessment, professionals, and wider research and innovation ecosystems. A central concern is how research is organised, valued, governed, and experienced, and what these arrangements mean for researchers and for the kinds of knowledge and contribution that research systems recognise.
This strand of work shows that research evaluation systems shape what research is produced and valued, while researchers also exercise agency within these systems. Indicators, incentives, funding arrangements, and institutional policies influence researchers’ choices and research cultures, while researchers interpret, negotiate, resist, and sometimes reshape the structures within which they work.
My latest work in this area includes two collaborative projects: one examining diverse contributions to educational research, and the other focusing on research professionals working in UK higher education.
Example work
- Handbook of Meta-Research
- The impacts of incentives for international publications on research cultures in Chinese humanities and social sciences
Example project
- Diverse Contributions to Educational Research
Internationalisation and global higher education
My work in this area asks how, at the global scale, tertiary education and knowledge systems can accommodate plurality without reproducing hierarchy. I have examined this through independent and collaborative research on the movement of people, knowledge, ideas, and resources across borders, and the relationships among institutions, countries, regions, and knowledge traditions.
This strand of work shows that greater global connection can widen opportunities for mobility, collaboration, and knowledge circulation while also reproducing inequalities in language, publication, recognition, and geopolitical power. These inequalities shape whose knowledge travels, whose contributions are recognised, and whose ways of knowing become more visible within global higher education and research. It also challenges accounts of global higher education that reduce these relationships to a binary division between centres and peripheries, or between the West and the rest. Through these works, I foreground the agency of knowledge actors, epistemic diversity, and knowledge traditions that have historically received less recognition, and explore possibilities for more plural global relationships.
My latest work in this area examines how AI and open research are reshaping global social sciences research through what I term ‘triple extraction’ and the possibilities of ‘triple reclamation’.
Example work
- Reconceptualising international academic mobility in the global knowledge system
- Hegemony and inequality in global science: problems of the centre-periphery model
Example project
- Transnational Academic Mobility to Global South: An Exploratory Study of International Faculty in China
