The book provides authoritative accounts of educational research in nine different European regions and highlights substantial national differences in levels of research activity throughout Europe. The book also outlines current research priorities and consider the potential benefits of greater European collaboration in research.

Georg Wiessala offers a critique of the ways in which intellectual and academic exchanges inform and shape external interactions with countries, institutions and non-state actors across the Asia-Pacific. Wiessala analyses ideologies, mechanisms and policies through which matters of exchange and inter-cultural dialogue have come to bear on the EU-Asia dialogue.

Building Higher Education Cooperation with the EU: Challenges and Opportunities from Four Continents offers a detailed study of higher education cooperation between the EU and four continents with an examination of the challenges and opportunities. These findings have enabled the development of a new understanding of the internationalisation of higher education.

This book examines what challenges and opportunities globalisation is bringing to higher education, and as a consequence, how education might look in the future.

This book conceptualizes the EU’s ambition at exercising a “joined up approach” (i.e. the mobilization of EU sectoral policies to realize EU foreign policy goals towards a third country). The framework is applied to three case studies: Switzerland and the Institutional Framework Agreement, Morocco and the Western Sahara issue, and Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the help of these, the author argues that the EU is more likely to follow foreign policy objectives by leveraging on sectoral cooperation ties when the foreign policy objective concerns the conditions of participation in the single market (Switzerland). He also shows that a lack of member states’ coherence concerning the compatibility of the foreign policy objective with overarching economic (Israel) or regional/geopolitical (Israel and Morocco) interests counteracts the exercise of a joined-up approach.

This volume of the International Perspectives on Education and Society series investigates the challenges and prospects for higher education in Africa, especially issues of development, expansion, internationalization, equity, and divergence.

This book provides authentic accounts of the effects of the revolutionary political reform experienced in the past half century on education in Europe’s considerable rural hinterland. These reforms include the liberation of the Baltic and Eastern European states from Soviet communist domination, the ‘eurozone’ economic crises, and the current and future migration of people fleeing war and poverty from the Middle East and Africa. Overshadowing these events are so-called global forces which champion economies of scale and pressurize academic performance as keys to economic success. Trapped in this distal whirlwind of change are 1000s of small and/or rural elementary schools and the life chances of more 1000s of young children. The research presented here unveils the unseen and under-reported consequences of top-down, urban-oriented educational policies on children’s and communities’ experience of place and space. Exposure of these conditions in rural Europe is long overdue, but obscured for decades by political extremes of left and right. Yet, the lived reality of peremptory and swathing school closure programmes, and poverty inflicted on rural populations in parts of Eastern Europe is relatively unreported in the western educational literature – a situation exacerbated by the virtual invisibility of rural educational research generally. The chapters in this book reveal the insights of social science scholars from 11 European countries including those from low GDP, formerly soviet bloc countries, recently enabled to present their research at western European conferences such as the European Educational Research Association. Their research will inform and alert education academics, researchers and professionals to these rural European educational contexts. The research methodologies reported are diverse and innovative. The national context chapters are complemented by overview chapters which survey and synthesise (i) definitions and conceptualisations of rural, (ii) pan-European appraisal of educational, structural and geospatial statistics on small and rural schools, and (iii) identify key messages for better understanding of the rural situation in European research, policy and practice. Crucially, despite the gloom, the authors report positive strategies for rural school survival at governmental and/or school and community levels, that include community involvement, rural educational tourism, and deliberative inter-community school network planning.