➡ Date: Thursday 8th May 2025
➡ Time: 14.00pm – 15.30pm (UK time)
➡ Where: Online
We invite you to the next event from the International and Comparative Education Research Interest Group (ICE RIG), entitled ‘Beyond Binaries: Cosmopolitan Nationalism in US Global Education Initiatives’.
The RIG Co-Convenors will be joined by guest speaker, Professor Laura Engel, who will discuss the following:
Weak State Recall: Reflecting on the Global Turn in US Schooling
Spurred in the 1980s and 1990s were a plethora of arguments related to the decline, and even outright death, of the nation-state in favour of the interconnected and interdependent globalized world. The ‘weak state’ arguments grew in popularity across the social sciences, often pinning the national against the global in a binary framework.
In comparative and international educational research, scholars have often referred to the ‘global turn in schooling’ and while education is one of the core institutions serving the purposes of the nation-state, most of the research related to global education initiatives either positioned nationalism as antagonistic to the shared global humanity embraced by cosmopolitanism, or overlooked it entirely. Recent research has attempted to develop a discursive framework for the intersections of global and national orientations, referred to as cosmopolitan nationalism (Maxwell et al., 2020; Yemini et al.,2023; Wright et al., 2024).
Drawing on a cosmopolitan nationalism framework, this session will focus on the development of different global education initiatives in the US educational context over the last decade, exploring the blend of national and global orientations found within these local, sub-national, and federal education initiatives.
We hope you can join us.
Please note, this event is free to BELMAS members and £5 for non-members. If you pay the non-member fee to attend and then become a BELMAS Member within a month of the event taking place, please let us know and we will refund the £5 fee.
Registration will close at midnight (UK) on Tuesday 6th May 2025.
Professor Laura Engel
Laura Engel is a Professor of International Education and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC (US), where she serves as Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair of International Education for Development and Director of the Global Education Lab.
In 2023-2024, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Costa Rica. As a Policy Sociologist, her interests focus on multilateralism and the global education policies in federal systems. Her current projects include (1) a comparative study of education for sustainable development policies in global cities; (2) a 10-year longitudinal study of a K-12 global mobility program in the capital city of Washington, DC.
Joining instructions will be sent out before the event, so please keep an eye on your inbox for these. We look forward to seeing you at the event!
We record our events for sharing purposes on the BELMAS website and YouTube page. Please tick this box in your registration to acknowledge you are happy for us to record.
The International and Comparative Education Research Interest Group (ICE RIG) hosted an event on Thursday 8th May 2025, entitled ‘Beyond Binaries: Cosmopolitan Nationalism in US Global Education Initiatives’.
The RIG’s Co-Convenors were joined by guest speaker, Professor Laura Engel, who shared insight and reflections on the Global Turn in US Schooling.
If you missed this event or would like a recap, you can now watch it in full below.
Our huge thanks to the ICE RIG Co-Convenors for arranging this event, to our fantastic speaker, Laura Engel, for her thought-provoking presentation, and to everyone who joined us. We look forward to seeing you again at the next one.
