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In the last decade, doctoral education has undergone a sea change with several global trends increasingly apparent. Drivers of change include massification and professionalization of doctoral education and the introduction of quality assurance systems. The impact of these drivers, and the forms that they take, however, are dependent on doctoral education within a given national context. This paper is frontline in that it contributes to the literature on doctoral education by examining the ways in which these global trends and drivers are being taken up in policies and practices by various countries. We do so by comparing recent changes in each of the following countries: Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and the USA. Each country case is based on national education policies, policy reports on doctoral education (e.g., OECD and EU policy texts), and related materials. We use the same global drivers to examine educational policies of each country. However, depending each national context, these drivers are framed in considerably different ways. This raises questions about (1) their comparability at a global level and (2) the universality of the PhD. Also we find that this global-local nexus reveals unresolved tensions within the national doctoral educational frameworks.

This article examines the Jordanian lower-primary national curriculum and its propensity for student-centred teaching and learning. It draws upon Basil Bernstein's sociological theory of pedagogic codes to analyse the curriculum model and the advocated pedagogical approach within official curriculum documents, textbooks and teacher guides. Although the research conducted confirms the aspirations of the national curriculum for the adoption of student-centred pedagogies, analysis of the selected texts reveals mixed messages where in some areas the curriculum exemplifies an integrated code and in others a collection code. The messages about classroom framing are also found to be contradictory. The paper argues that if Jordan is to fulfil its stated aspirations to embrace more progressive pedagogies, a full review of the curriculum is needed to ensure its classification and framing cohere better with a student-centred approach.

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore women's engagement with leadership in HE in South Asia. A potent affective economy was discovered. Leadership was associated with affects such as competitiveness, aggression, impropriety, stress and anxiety, in ways that were intensified by highly patriarchal and corporatised HE cultures. Indeed, its difficulties and toxicities meant that leadership was rejected or resisted as an object of desire by many women. We illuminate how different forms of competition contribute to the affective economy of HE leadership. The research also raises wider questions about the possibilities of disrupting dominant neoliberal constructions of HE if those who question such values are excluded (or self-exclude) from leadership positions.

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities.

This article aims to deconstruct the underpinning tenets of the term "newer researcher into higher education." In recognition of the ambiguities of the term, we begin by questioning the nature of the field(s) of research into higher education (HE). Secondly, we critique the policy discourses associated with the term "newer researcher." Then, with a view to illustrating the over-linear assumptions of such discourses, the article articulates the biographies of practising researchers in this field through narrative reconstructions of the five authors' own routes as researchers into HE, openly acknowledging their temporalities and serendipitous conditionalities. Finally, we consider the nature of a career in the context of the professionalisation of routes into HE research. Our concluding remarks return us to the question of the status of HE research and to suggestions of positive ways to embrace the dilemmas we face.

This paper reports on empirical research on youth as active citizens in Senegal with specific reference to their education and their sexual and reproductive health rights. In a context of postcoloniality which claims to have privileged secular, republican understandings of the constitution, the authors seek to illuminate how youth activists sustain patriarchal, metropolitan views of citizenship and reinforce ethnic and locational (urban/rural) hierarchies. Their analysis is based on a case study of active youth citizenship, as reflected in youth engagement in the recent presidential elections in Senegal. This included involvement in youth protests against pre-election constitutional abuse and in a project monitoring the subsequent elections using digital technologies. The authors compare how youth activists enacted different notions of citizenship, in some instances involving a vigorous defence of Senegal's democratic constitution, while in others dismissing this as being irrelevant to youth concerns. Here the authors make an analytic distinction between youth engagement in "politics," seen as the public sphere of constitutional democracy, and the "political," which they relate to the inherently conflictual and agonistic processes through which (youth) identities are policed, in ways which may legitimate or marginalise. Despite the frequent construction of youth as being agents of change, this analysis shows how potentially productive and open spaces for active citizenship were drawn towards conformity and the reproduction of existing hegemonies, in particular through patriarchal gender relations and sexual norms within which female youth remained particularly vulnerable.

This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as 'active citizens' and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods, we draw on post-structural theory to analyse the discourses youth deployed to talk about sex and their sexualities. Rather than a source of pleasure, youth's talk of sex and sexuality was dominated by discourses of morality and medicine, in ways that sustained a heteronormative gender regime permeated by entrenched hegemonic masculinities. We conclude that rather than the fertile possibilities identified in our opening review, the SRH lens re-inscribed a negative framing of sexuality which was compounded by both family and religious norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]