Keynote Speakers

Dr. Fiona Blaikie is Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Brock University; former Director of the Joint PhD in Educational Studies Program, and former Chair of Graduate Studies and Research (at Lakehead University). She has won numerous awards, most recently the USSEA/InSEA International Ziegfeld Award. Fiona’s current scholarship in visual arts education focuses on new materialities, situated feminist ontologies, and posthumanism. Her edited collection, Visual and Cultural Identity Constructs of Global Youth and Young Adults was published (2021) by Routledge. Currently, Fiona is Co-Chair of the Arts Education Research Institute (AERI) and Associate Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University.

Private and public feelings, energy/ies and intensity/ies: Local-global a/symmetries of power in relation to pedagogy, the arts, and scholarship

We will examine intensity/ies and energy/ies expressed in public and private feelings and the ways in which they are shifting from grand narratives inherent in Global North modernist authorial power and meaning residing in the public works and ideas of scholars, captains of industry, society, politicians, and artists to reframing power in more distributed ways, shaped by porous socially, politically, and culturally situated conditions. We will turn to Global South studies and posthumanism, in which humans are non-exceptional. Taking up pedagogy, the arts, and scholarship, we will contemplate enduring and emerging a/symmetries and hegemonies, locally and globally. We will examine ways in which our own lives are circumscribed and situated in micro and macro ways, ontologically, in time, place, culture, class, race, sexuality, gender, and spirituality, as we move moment-to-moment through worlding constructs of who and how we are in relation to private and public feelings of potential and limitation, and our senses of agency, connection, and belonging, individually and collectively.

Dr. Ethan Trinh (pronouns: they/them/their) is a Vietnamese, queer, immigrant, researcher, and teacher educator. They currently serve as the Associate Director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, a Title VI National Resource Center, in partnership with The Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Trinh’s scholarship focuses on queer teacher’s emotions and well-being and explores how to embrace queerness as healing teaching and research practices. Dr. Trinh has published 5 edited books with Routledge, Brill & TESOL Press that highlight critical storytelling, doctoral students’ identities, emotional well-being, community, and queer allyship. They were the recipient of the 2022 Leadership Mentoring Program Award by the TESOL International Association and are the 2024-2025 Nominating Committee at TESOL International.

A Walking Meditation on the Soils of Quê Hương: An Autohistoria-teoria Lullaby of Embracing Inbetweenness

In this talk, I would like to invite the audience to take a walking meditation with me (Thich, 1999; Trinh, 2020) to explore how my identities are split in betweenness in the journey of returning (to) quê hương (Barad, 2007; Trinh, 2021). By using autohistoria-teoria, a personal essay that theories, as a methodology (Anzaldúa, 2015; Trinh, 2020, 2021, 2024), I stitch the series of personal and professional events that happened to me so that I can explore my intersectional identities of a Vietnamese, queer, immigrant, multilingual leader, teacher educator, and writer who lives in the in-between spacetime. In this talk, I weave theory into analysis, analysis into theory, put them into thinking, writing, walking with me. As quê hương is out of reach physically, each fragment of its culture such as smelling, tasting, seeing, touching, hearing, and feeling has created a safe space for me to refuge, resist, relearn, love, and embrace my in-between-ness. This talk is a critical, soulful, spiritual lullaby for me to lay down, come back, re-think with my inner child to pave a new path for future researchers who are walking in their self-exploration journey to find their own quê hương.

Dr. Vina Adriany is a Professor at the Department of Early Childhood Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia. She is currently a Director of Southeast Asian Minister of Education Organization, Centre for Early Childhood Care Education and Parenting (SEAMEO CECCEP). Her scholarship focuses on the issues of gender and social justice in early childhood education (ECE), the construction of children and childhood in marginal communities, and the impact of neoliberalism in ECE. Her research mainly adopts theories that include feminist poststructuralism and postcolonialism. She has published a number of peer-review articles on the issues. She is currently a co-editor at Pedagogy, Culture, and Society journal, Routledge. She is also an editorial board member in several journals such as Policy Futures in Education, SAGE; International Journal of Early Years Education, Routledge; Global Childhood Studies, SAGE; dan Children and Society, Willey. She was also visiting scholars at several universities that include, National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan; Sutan Qaboos University, Oman, Gothenburg University, Sweden; and Ankara University, Turkey.

Imagining “Bandung” child*

Bandung is a capital city of West Java, Indonesia. It is a city where I was born, raised and live. It is also a city where the first high level Asia Africa conference that aimed to challenge colonization and Western domination was held. However, since the conference was organized by adults, in this context the countries’ leaders, focusing on mainly economics and politics, the discussion on children was absent in that conference. The absence of children’s focus in the conference makes any attempt to decolonize children and childhood studies in Indonesia disconnected from the conference. While in fact, the construction of children and childhood in Indonesia is always a juxtaposition between global and local values. As a postcolonial country, the roles of international donor organizations in shaping the value of children is highly pervasive. From the World Bank’s involvement in developing early childhood education sectors to the ratification of the United Nation Conventions of Children Right, the Western production of knowledge is visible in the life of young children in Indonesia. In this presentation, I would attempt to explore a possibility to expand the meaning of Bandung conference by arguing the need to put children at the centre, beyond the language neoliberal and neo colonial.

*The title of this presentation was inspired by a queer project entitled “imagining queer Bandung” that was held from June to August 2021 in Berlin.

Dr. Marleny Bonnycastle is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on the impacts of social justice, oppression, immigrants and refugees, and community development. She is especially drawn to homelessness and housing, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, women and feminism, stigma and dignity, and community-based participatory research. At the University of Manitoba, she teaches anti-oppressive social work practice, qualitative research, systematic inquiry, and human behavior. She supervises students at the master’s and doctoral levels at the Faculty of Social Work, Faculty of Health, Natural Resources Institute, and master’s in Human Rights. Her projects have been funded by multiple research bodies, such as SSHRC Partnership Grant, SSHRC Insight Grant, and National Housing Strategy-CMHC.

Women’s Transformations In Colombia’s Armed Conflict And Peacebuilding Context

In 2016 Colombia adopted the Final Peace Agreement between the government and the armed group FARC to end the world’s longest civil war. Although there is an emerging consensus that women have played different roles in the armed conflict, peace agreement, reparation, and reconciliation as victims and actors/agents, this has not been systematically explored. This paper uses Feminist Popular Education (FPE) principles and approaches to examine this proposition. It explores how women NGOs, movements and advocacy groups have used FPE to engage women in critical reflection of their memories, roles, resistance, and activism to challenge masculinities and transform gender inequalities around armed conflict, peace, and transitional justice. An environmental scan of tertiary data of seven women’s organizations during the last 30 years was used to analyze gender inequality and women’s transformation. The paper analysis women as subjects of peace and not only victims including gender educational inequalities and women’s involvement in peace at critical times of the armed conflict. FPE became an educational political tool to create a space and a mechanism to articulate women’s concerns and demands to grow into active agents and get their transformation. The paper ends with a critical elaboration of women’s empowerment at different states of the armed conflict and how FPE could promote women’s agency to mitigate the political, social, and historical context of gender inequality.

Dr. Edward R. Howe is a Professor in the School of Education at Thompson Rivers University. Dr. Howe’s main research interests are teacher education and comparative and international education. His research blends narrative inquiry and reflexive ethnography through comparative ethnographic narrative as a means to better understand teacher acculturation and internationalization of higher education (Howe et al., 2023). Recent publications include Teacher Acculturation: Stories of pathways to teaching and Finding Our Way Through a Pandemic: Teaching in Alternate Modes of Delivery. His work has appeared in Frontiers in Education, Journal of Education for Teaching: International Pedagogy and Practice, Teaching and Teacher Education, and others. Dr. Howe’s teaching focuses on global citizenship education, transcultural teacher education, self-study, and narrative pedagogies. He has more than 30 years of K-12 and university teaching experience in Canada and Japan.

Internationalization of Canadian Higher Education: Reality or Rhetoric?

This research critically investigates internationalization of higher education (IHE) bridging theory and practice. Internationalization is “the international process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions and delivery of post-secondary education, in order to enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff, and to make a meaningful contribution to society” (de Wit et al., 2015, p. 29). IHE is often measured by student mobility and statistics, but how do universities, communities, and nations become truly internationalized through the mere presence of international students? While international student numbers offer an element of internationalization, student mobility alone is an insufficient measure of internationalization. The notion that internationalization produces internationally knowledgeable global citizens is largely rhetoric rather than reality (Garson, 2016). IHE is largely driven by neoliberal globalism, with most international students from Asia studying at Western universities, creating hegemony of knowledge and uniformity of educational provision. Critical scholarship has identified unintended consequences of IHE including commercialization and diploma mills. Criticisms are mounting of rapidly expanding programs, specifically aimed at attracting foreign tuitions. However, there is a paucity of research devoted to IHE giving voices to international students; ironically, the ones universities increasingly depend upon. This study helps de-center this meta-narrative.

With respect to the foregoing, the research questions framing this study are:

What are the experiences of international students at small-to-mid-sized Canadian universities within smaller communities?
How do international students experience internationalization?
How are universities and communities internationalized through the presence of international students?

Thus, this research promises to make the following significant contributions to IHE:

Provide a platform and voice to international students in critical IHE studies;
Identify and analyze the common experiences of international students, which will contribute to innovative and student centric approaches to IHE at Canadian universities;
Disseminate research findings to IHE organizations and students to help improve university programs and policies for students across Canada; and
Contribute theory to critically analyze the phenomenon of IHE in Canada.

This mixed methods research uses survey and interview data from international students at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in the interior of British Columbia (BC). Canada welcomes many immigrants from East Asia — in particular China and India, the two nations where most international students hail from. Canada is increasingly one of the top destinations for international students. BC universities, in smaller communities are a popular choice, as they offer smaller class sizes, personalized instruction, and programs that welcome international students. Thus, TRU has experienced significant growth over the past two decades.

Howe’s (2022) Comparative Ethnographic Narrative represents an original approach as international students collect, analyze, and report interpretive data from peers to better understand IHE, from an insider’s perspective. Despite the fact IHE has received much attention, there are few studies giving voices to international graduate students in Canada. This transcultural research offers a refreshing counter-narrative to the western hegemony of knowledge.

Howe, E. R. (2022). Teacher Acculturation: Stories of pathways to teaching. Leiden: Brill. https://brill.com/view/title/61351?rskey=02H0u5&result=2

Dr. Ly Tran is a Professor in the School of Education and Research for Educational Impact (REDI) centre, Deakin University, Australia. She was a lecturer at Hue University, Vietnam prior to coming to Australia. Her research focuses on international education, student mobilities, graduate employability, and the education-migration nexus. Her latest books include East and Southeast perspectives on the internationalisation of higher education (Routledge) with Tracy Zou and Hiroshi Ota and Internationalisation of the Curriculum: A Comparative Perspective across Australian and Vietnamese Universities (Routledge) with Huong Phan and Jill Blackmore. Ly is the Founder of Australia-Vietnam International Education Centre. She was named as one of Australia and ASEAN ‘Top 50’ voices on international education 2023. She won the Inaugural Melbourne Asia Game Changer Award from Asia Society Australia, and the Inaugural Shining Star Achievement in Research Award in the Noam Chomsky Global Connections Awards.

Disrupting the Global-North-centric discourse in international education through reverse student mobility and decolonisation of the curriculum

International education trends and practices are predominantly Global-North-centric. This centricity is shown through the dominant South-North student mobility, teaching and learning practices, transnational research activities and transnational education programs. International education activities may consciously or unconsciously perpetuate ‘Western’ ways of constructing knowledges, ‘Western’ ways of doing things and ‘Western’ ways of being. In particular, ‘Western’ supremacy and dominant knowledges and practices are often privileged in the teaching and learning of international students and how this cohort is treated. However, international education has the potential to disrupt the Global-North-centric practices and ‘Western’ universalism.

This presentation has two foci. First it focuses on how reverse student mobility can be a powerful mechanism to decolonise international education. It draws on a longitudinal research project on the New Colombo Plan that explores to what extent formerly colonised Global South countries in the Indo-Pacific region, such as Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, Fiji and Papua New Guinea can represent a geographical, social, cultural and educational space to transform Australian students. It provides evidence about the impacts of North-South mobility on students’ academic, intercultural, professional and personal development, on institutional relationships, and on the home and host communities. The stories these students and related stakeholders shared disrupt common assumptions and the students’ own existing neo-colonial attitudes that Global South locations are backward or poorer places with fewer resources, compared to Global North destinations, so they are not worthy study destinations. In particular, the research shows how these students develop ethnorelative perspectives, comparative curriculum-specific knowledge, empathy, intercultural competence and professional capabilities. These findings challenge traditional thinking about student mobility, which is dominated by South-North trends, and in which ‘Western’ knowledge is often regarded as superior and universal and ‘Western’ experiences are seen as elite and a marker of distinction. The research evidence shows that Noth-South mobility students should be recognised as a powerful force as partners in curriculum making through their internationalised experiences and Indo-Pacific knowledges to enrich the learning community, including for those who do not have a chance to engage in learning abroad. They should be empowered to play a transformative role not only as agents in humanising public diplomacy, enriching human-to-human connections, institution-to-institution connections and home-to-host connections, but also as actors in decolonising international education.

The second part of this presentation focuses on the process of curriculum colonisation, recolonisation and decolonisation, using Vietnam as a case study. It explores how colonisation of the curriculum is perpetuated through passive policy borrowing, seeing ‘Western’ ways as the compass and copying what’s called ‘best practice’ in the West or how the West is done while bypassing local values and practices. The case study puts forward practical recommendations about how to draw on Vietnam’s legacy of fighting for independence and sovereignty as a tool to mediate curriculum appropriation and de-colonise international education.

Dr. Deevia Bhana is the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair in Gender and Childhood Sexuality and a Professor at the School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research focuses on how gender and sexuality come to matter in the young life course, particularly examining how these dynamics shape the lives of children and young people in educational contexts. Some of her recent works include Girls and the Negotiation of Porn in South Africa: Power Play and Sexuality (2023); Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Health in Southern Africa, co-edited with Mary Crewe and Peter Aggleton (2023); Gendered and Sexual Norms in Global South Early Childhood Education: Understanding Normative Discourses in Post-Colonial Contexts, co-edited with Yuwei Xu and Vina Adriany (2024); and Gender and Young People’s Digital Sexual Cultures (2025). Deevia Bhana serves as the Co-Chair of RINGS (International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies), a global association consisting of 75 research institutions dedicated to gender and feminist research. She holds several editorial leadership roles and is one of the Chief Editors of the journal Children and Society, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, and is an Associate Editor of Health Education Journal.

Troubling the Silence of Sexuality in the Global South Childhood Studies

In this address I trouble the continued silencing of sexuality in researching children and childhood in the Global South challenging the dominant narratives that render children’s sexualities invisible under the guise of sexual innocence and heteronormativity. Drawing inspiration from research conducted on childhood sexualities in South Africa and the recently published volume Gendered and Sexual Norms in Global South Early Childhood Education: Understanding Normative Discourses in Post-Colonial Contexts, the discussion interrogates the entangled legacies of colonialism that continue to shape normative understandings of sexuality across diverse contexts such as Brazil, China, Pakistan, South Africa, and Vietnam.

I ask: why is there a lack of attention to issues around children and young people’s sexuality and what can we do about this ongoing silence? To answer these questions, I foreground how historically ingrained gender and sexual norms, rooted in colonial discourses, persist in contemporary Global South settings, perpetuating binary understandings of gender and reinforcing heterosexual imperatives. By exploring the complex intersections of gender, race, class, culture, religion, and political censorship, the silencing of childhood sexuality is intensified whilst what is unknown and unpredictable remains unrecognised. Next, I focus on how gender and sexuality come to matter in children and young people’s lives addressing the complexity of pleasure, desire and danger contrasting these narratives against the adult empire of knowledge supporting childhood sexual innocence and childhood protection. Finally, I advocate for the destabilisation of the entrenched silences, emphasising the urgent need for research that reimagines childhood sexualities in the Global South. To do this requires a revolution of thought, thinking and theory so that childhood sexualities can be recognized, valued and supported towards a future where all children can thrive. Through this, I argue for the decolonisation of childhood sexualities highlighting the critical role of Global South perspectives in reshaping our understanding of childhood, gender and sexuality.