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On the one hand, studies of African international students in China document their instrumental role in "telling China's story and spreading China's voice" while, on the other hand, this research indicates how their lived experiences are shaped by racialisation and exclusionary practices in social life. However, there remains surprisingly little scholarship exploring ways of reducing inter-group stereotypes and racial divides so as to further Sino-African diplomatic relations over the long term. Drawing primarily upon an in-depth interview with Alex - a 23-year-old Burundian international student in China, this paper employs Freire's central concepts of dialogic practices and critical consciousness to examine how he established dialogues with villagers in rural areas in an effort to alter relations between two ethnic groups. The case study of Alex and his daily racial encounters highlights how African students are agentic in disrupting racial discourses. We further argue that dialogue, as a method to read the world in a Freirean sense, can contribute to increased tolerance and understanding.

This paper investigates the epistemic politics at work in radically contrasting academic representations of African university futures. Euro-American policy entrepreneurs and research funders call for major investments in Africa's scientific research training capacity to strengthen the continent's integration into a global knowledge system. Meanwhile, African social scientists and humanities scholars critique the epistemological hegemony of 'Western' models of the academy, and call for the decolonisation of African universities. This paper sets out a three-step approach to dealing with the politicisation of 'academography' (Thorkelson 2016) in this decolonial moment. The first step is to acknowledge how epistemic power relations shape all analytical moves. The second is to recognise that 'generative antagonisms' (Burawoy 2004) are inherent to disciplinary knowledge production. The third is to develop an ethnographic sensitivity to everyday academic practice within these institutional worlds and epistemic cultures. Together these moves offer space for dialogue between different visions of African higher education.

Comparing China's 2006 and 2015 Africa policies, this article reveals how China's political discourse has become more confident, practical, and depoliticised. In particular, this paper shows how education is allocated, promised, and embedded in China's 'shared' agenda, which is centred on development co-operation and mutual learning. It then reflects on the extent to which China may move towards traditional donors. This paper concludes that, despite fragmented convergences in the discourse and an increased recognition of a Chinese model, China maintains its distinctive role and position in the post-2015 era.PuP

Sociocultural issues are major contributing factors in mass acceptance and effective use of technology. These issues are often perceived to contradict the benefits the technology brings about. E-learning use in higher education in Africa, as a technology, faces some sociocultural barriers that contradict its promise and benefits. This paper identifies five social cultural paradoxes, namely globalisation, cultural identity, westernisation, authenticity and foreign ideologies, with the aim of creating awareness of, and eliciting the interventions required to improve the acceptance and use of e-learning. The paper presents the differing and contradictory views of technology advocates and technology sceptics on the use of e-learning in higher in Africa.

This paper explores the market-making devices behind Bridge International Academies: a for-profit education company aiming to school millions of nursery and primary aged-students living on less than $2 per day. A wide variety of devices are utilised by Bridge International Academies to construct mass markets for low-cost schooling, including GPS devices that map low-income communities, smartphones that automate administrative functions, and computer devices that perform the duties of a teacher. Moreover, this paper also outlines the network of investors supplying the company with the necessary capital to put market devices into practice and hence, build markets for low-cost schooling.

Calls continue for the decolonisation of higher education (HE). Based on internationalisation debates, a research team from Africa, Europe and Latin America reviewed published decolonisation voices. Using bibliometric analysis and a conceptual review of abstracts, the authors examined the drivers framing decolonisation in HE and identified the voices in those debates which involved the historically oppressed and those wishing to elicit change in these debates. The paper recognises the importance for decolonisation in education as the tensions explored by the authors often intersect through HE into other domains of the political, social, economic and culturally important areas for replication and change in society.

The study detailed in this paper examines the role of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) in the transnational policy-making landscape in relation to African fragile and conflict-affected states. Data collection was based on content analysis of a corpus of documents -- Education Sector Plans (ESPs)/Transitional Sector Plans -- examining to what extent the main categories identified in the literature concerning global education policy and international development, emerge from the documents. We conclude that certain terms and constructs that emerge from global education discourses recur frequently in the ESPs. The article argues that there is a depoliticisation strategy in the development of the ESPs, making it possible to identify a façade of precision, a façade of rationality and a façade of universality.

This paper engages in a series of critical self-reflections on the author's involvement in the spate of career guidance reviews that have taken place since the year 2000, and which were commissioned by such supra-national entities as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and various agencies and directorates of the European Commission. The author argues that this series of overlapping comparative studies--involving 55 countries in all--constitutes a powerful discursive field that has helped to frame career guidance in particular ways, and that it has led to opportunities for policy lending and policy borrowing on an unprecedented scale. The author examines the dynamics of such policy learning, identifying some of its potential motives as well as key mechanisms by which transfers take place through "push" and "pull" forces. He then goes on to raise a series of questions regarding the viability of deterritorialised policy exchange, noting that social practices such as career guidance are inscribed in a particular complex of values, meanings, and significations that are tightly coupled to the ecological climate in which they thrive. Drawing on his experience in the Middle East and North Africa, the author reflects on career guidance in Arab countries in order to illustrate the way transnational, globalised agendas are reconfigured and reinterpreted at the local level. The paper concludes by considering the ethical and epistemological responsibilities that need to be confronted by 'boundary persons' who mediate between the global and the local.

In both policy and research contexts, internationalisation in African higher education is welcomed for its potential to strengthen local capacity and cautioned against for its potential to extend long-standing asymmetries of power in international partnerships. This paper examines two sets of developments which seek to re-orient internationalisation to allow for greater local control, local focus and local benefit. The one relates to a more formalised policy, planning and research approach to internationalisation and the other pertains to an intra-regional form of internationalisation under the influence of the Bologna process. The paper explores prospects for internationalisation on the continent to yield more equal North-South partnerships and to support the revitalisation agenda and its development priorities in higher education. It suggests that continuing lack of local capacity, continuing structural inequalities in partnerships, and insufficient interrogation of dominant concepts and models of internationalisation may still pose problems in moving towards an alternative internationalisation politics in African higher education. (Contains 10 notes.)

This paper problematises globalisation and the democratisation of the research imagination, highlighting the potentials for harm and good. We do so, first, by exploring two philosophical/epistemological issues: the definition of "knowledge" and the role of "research" in knowledge creation. The paper then considers some of possible consequences of the democratisation of knowledge by examining the case of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and using it to test a heuristic device we have developed as a way of distinguishing between "really useful" and "potentially harmful" knowledges. (Contains 1 table.)

Some African leaders have made the argument that the promotion of an international human rights standard is a strategy that is used and abused by hypocritical Western governments to justify their intervention into the affairs of African countries. The tacit objective behind this articulation is the desire to avoid an external evaluation or monitoring of the internal affairs of their countries. The leaders who complain the most about the hidden agenda behind the advocacy and promotion of human rights standards in Africa do not necessarily adhere to these same standards. Such leaders seem to be proposing that the notion of human rights is alien to Africa. If such an assumption is admitted and accepted, then the logical conclusion is that there are no indigenous notions of human rights within the African continent. This paper will argue that there are rich traditions on the African continent founded on the notion of human dignity and "humanness". What is true is that the current international human rights standards, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were not developed through a global, broad-based consultation of the different values from around the world. Some analysts have defined the twenty-first century as the era of the "clash of civilisations". However, this can be offset by a "dialogue among civilisations", and there is an urgent need to articulate a supplementary universal declaration of human rights, duties and obligations based on values drawn from various cultures around the world.