Theme 6: Sustainability and reparative futures

Thursday 23 April, 11.45am – 1.15pm

Concepts in contexts : A pluriversal perspective on equity policies of access to higher education

Panellists:

• Penny Jane Burke, UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education and Global Innovation Chair of Equity, Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at University of Newcastle, Australia.
• Yann Lebeau, Professor of Higher Education Research in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia (UK).
• Jennifer Agbaire, Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the UK’s Open University.
• Abass Isiaka, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Practice, Policy and Scholarship (CHERPPS), University of East Anglia (UK).
• Nidhi S. Sabharwal, Associate Professor, Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education, National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), New Delhi.
• Vincent Carpentier, Professor of Higher Education and Society at the Institute of Education, University College London.
• Patricio Langa, Professor of Comparative Higher Education, Policy, and Innovation Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University (U.E.M.), Mozambique, and Associate Fellow, Department for Science Studies, Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn, Germany.

UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 sets a target to ensure equal access to affordable and quality tertiary education for all by 2030. Yet, despite rising global enrolment rates, persistent inequalities in participation and success in higher education (HE) continue to challenge this goal. The growing exclusion of aspiring youth from quality HE opportunities poses significant risks to the socio-economic and political stability of countries—evident in youth-led recent movements such as those in Nepal, Madagascar, and Morocco—and challenges the relevance of dominant fair access policies to the public good of HE.

This panel critically examines the global pervasiveness of structural inequalities in HE access. While efforts to decolonise university spaces and curricula have gained traction, prevailing policy and research ontologies often fail to address—or even obscure—the structural dimensions of inequity.

Through a series of examples and a plurality of perspectives, this panel will contextualise massification processes and accompanying pro-equity policies. It will highlight the effects of the historical and geographical translation of policy concepts, and critically examine the rationales that frame—and often misframe—equity and widening participation policy and practice. The panel will then propose new directions for research into the complex interactions between context-specific structural inequalities, marginalisation and exclusion, and often decontextualised equity policy assemblages.

Thursday 23 April, 2.15pm – 3.45pm

Cross-national perspectives on climate and sustainability in higher education

Panellists:

• Tristan McCowan
• Others to be confirmed

The last decade has seen a marked increase in both action and research on climate and sustainability in higher education institutions around the world. Publications on the topic have grown not only in long-standing areas of environmental education, but also in non- educational journals focusing on governance, policy, campus management and community impact. However, this large body of literature is dominated by isolated, technical accounts that pay little attention to context and the influence of local and national factors of a cultural, political and economic nature. This panel aims to provide a contextualised comparative view on the ways universities, their staff and students are engaging with these agendas. In particular, it addresses diverging conceptions of sustainability, differences in language used, and the ways they might draw on or link into local, religious or indigenous knowledge traditions.

There will be four presentations in the panel. First, Teodor Zidaru (St. Andrews) will present on “Extending knowledge ecologies in Tanzania and Kenya: lessons from university-brokered engagements between policymakers and communities”. Batool Zaidi (UCL) will then move the focus from researchers to students in “Student Voices of Lahore, Pakistan for Planetary Health in Higher Education”. Interaction with global agendas will be covered in Salim Al Maqbali & Khalaf Al’Abri’s (Sultan Qaboos University) “Evaluating Sustainability Performance in Gulf Universities: Comparative Insights from the QS 2025 Rankings”. Finally, Tristan McCowan (UCL) presents a three-country comparison in “Faculty of education engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals in Brazil, Canada and the UK”. The subsequent discussion will aim to generate insights from the cross-national comparison, involving further inputs from audience members.

Friday 24 April, 9am – 10.30am

Grassroots educational initiatives for sustainability and equity in higher education

Panellists:

• Olga Mun, Dphil at University of Oxford
• Amelia Farber, Research Fellow at Reuben College, University of Oxford
• Isobel Talks
• Julie Lin
• Zara Tripp
• Emmanuel Leon, junior project and community manager part of the Museum Ethnographers Groups and recently finished the Visual Material and Museum Anthropology MSc at the University of Oxford
• Rommy Anabalon Schaaf, University College London

In the UK, university knowledge economies operate within a high-tuition, high-aid model that poses significant challenges to equitable access for marginalised student groups. This panel examines how student-led partnerships function as effective catalysts for localised sustainability initiatives (Budowle et al., 2021; Gramatakos & Lavau, 2019; Murray, 2018; Reeves, 2019). Often emerging as informal micro-communities, these initiatives operate as Communities of Practice (Borges et al., 2017) that challenge existing power dynamics and promote equity through what has been termed inclusive sustainability (Lu et al., 2017).

The panel explores tensions between sustainability goals, institutional governance, and financial barriers faced by students, particularly considering how restrictions on financial aid shape the composition of the student body and, in turn, influence sustainability-oriented research outputs and opportunities for collective learning. It also examines inconsistencies in institutional sustainability narratives, with particular attention to equity challenges faced by marginalised higher education stakeholders and the resulting limitations in research outputs, including a lack of intersectional perspectives and research grounded in the Global Majority.

Through empirical cases—including a student-led climate change reading group, a Sentipensar (feel-thinking) framework enacted through creative and decolonial reading practices, and a grassroots language initiative developed with precarious migrant university workers—the panel demonstrates both the possibilities and limits of grassroots sustainability efforts. While these initiatives foster collective learning, solidarity, and critical engagement beyond technocratic or institutionally sanctioned approaches, the case of the language programme shows how grassroots initiatives, when absorbed into university moral and reputational economies without structural accountability, expose the limits of equity and sustainability in British higher education.

Finally, the panel advocates a reparative approach to sustainability that promotes inclusive sustainability and facilitates intersectionality within and beyond higher education. By foregrounding student-led and grassroots initiatives as drivers of change, the panel challenges institution-led sustainability agendas that remain constrained by existing practices (Compagnuccia & Spigarelli, 2020). The initiative, collaboration, and peer support embedded within these groups offer grounded practices that contribute to a broader and more equitable understanding of sustainability, education, and institutional accountability.

Friday 24 April, 11am – 12.30pm

Transforming the global education agenda: Beyond sustainability, toward plural futures

Panellists:

•  Olga Mun, University of Oxford
• Moira V. Faul
• Oakleigh Welply
• Benjamin Scherrer
• Nigel O. M. Brissett
• Tristan McCowan, UCL

As the 2030 deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, this panel asks whether “sustainable development” should continue to anchor global education and higher education agendas. The term’s enduring appeal lies in its promise of a win-win balance between human progress and ecological protection. Yet its conceptual vagueness and complicity with colonial, capitalist, and technocratic paradigms invite critical interrogation. What does it mean to sustain a system that has generated deep inequalities and planetary precarity? And what might come after sustainable development as a guiding vision for education?

This panel gathers four scholars who offer distinct yet complementary critiques and alternatives. Moira V. Faul and Oakleigh Welply explore how coloniality continues to shape global education institutions, calling for epistemic transformations that challenge Western paradigms and reorient universities toward plural, interconnected futures. Olga Mun’s Rewilding Comparative and International Higher Education proposes a reparative framework that integrates indigenous and ecological philosophies to reimagine higher education beyond modernity’s developmental myths. Nigel O. M. Brissett argues that “sustainable development” perpetuates injustice and ecological harm, advocating instead for “education for social transformation and just futures.” Benjamin Scherrer’s Finding Ceremony Beyond the Ruins of Sustainable Development reads the remnants of failed sustainability projects as spaces of possibility, envisioning new genres of the human grounded in relationality and ceremony.

Together, these interventions move beyond critique to reimagine the role of education in shaping post-2030 planetary futures. The panel invites dialogue on reframing higher education’s moral, epistemic, and ecological responsibilities in an age that demands repair rather than sustainability.

Friday 24 April, 1.30pm – 3pm (Online)

Rethinking equity and the public good through service-learning and community engagement (SLCE)

Panellists:

• Claire McCann, University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
• Nigel Machiha, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)
• Dr Shilohna Phillanders, independent consultant (recent PhD graduate) (Trinidad and Tobago)
• Dr Matías Flores, independent (recent PhD graduate) (Chile)
• Joao Elton, Catholic University of Pernambuco (UNICAP) (Brazil)
• Diana Coello, Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador)

While debates around higher education access and equity often focus on models of tuition and aid, these approaches may neglect deeper considerations such as the relationship with community and societal relevance, institutional culture, and  experiences of higher education. To be truly equitable, contemporary universities need also remain relevant to the needs and desires of their surrounding communities, especially those historically excluded from these institutions of higher learning. University functions of service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) have become vital avenues for connecting academic learning with societal needs. Yet across the globe, SLCE faces challenges: limited funding, uneven institutional support, questions of reciprocity between partners, and tensions between short-term projects and long-term community development.

This roundtable convenes graduate students and early-career researchers from across the globe to explore how SLCE is imagined, practiced, and sustained across diverse higher education systems. We ask: What does it mean for universities to fulfil their ‘public good’ mission in contexts marked by escalating costs, widening inequalities, and calls for decolonisation and social justice? And what role can SLCE play in protecting the public good dimensions of higher education amidst constrained state finances?

View full conference programme for Days 1 and 2.