The petition presented to parliament last week calling for trans women to be excluded from women’s sport is simply the latest round in a difficult and volatile global debate. Organised by Save Women’s Sport Australasia, the petition challenges Sport New Zealand’s “draft guiding principles for the participation of transgender players in sport” for failing to consult widely enough. […] … learn more→

Skepticism has long reigned about Chinese universities and the publications of their researchers. But, over the past twenty years, the situation has changed dramatically. The Chinese state has invested in universities, reformed them to make them world leaders. What is the current state of affairs? Chinese universities are part of a system that may have been inspired by that of the […] … learn more→

In the 1980s, when the available means of communication were counted on the fingers of one hand, it was said that we should accept them as a parallel school. Today, with its digitization, we can say that the media is a new interface of the school. In the pandemic context, technologies stopped being discussed as a […] … learn more→

South Asia is crucial to the future of Australia. But Australia has just one (small) program focused on South Asian studies across its many universities. This has not always been the case. In the mid-1970s, 13 of Australia’s universities offered undergraduate subjects on South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the […] … learn more→

The South Australian government in recent months announced it was relaxing its catchment zone policy for secondary schools. This means families can apply for their year 6 or 7 child to attend any public high school in the state in 2022. The change is designed to enhance choice for families, who will no longer be stuck with […] … learn more→

Last year, one of the things I enjoyed most was co-presenting a session about ‘Negotiating professional and personal spaces online’ with new friend and colleague Erika Smith (Mont Royal, Canada). We talked about a lot of things around this topic (you can view our slides from the session), and ran out of time because there’s so much to say. […] … learn more→

Academic posters. They are a thing. You can find academic posters at a lot of conferences. Ah, conferences. Remember when we had face to face conferences? Oh, that seems like a long time ago now – but when we had them, academic posters were often displayed in a separate conference room. Separate poster sessions may […] … learn more→

The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task. But this is not all that universities can do or should do. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even easier to reduce teaching to knowledge […] … learn more→

Theology, law, medicine, mathematical and physical sciences, letters: in these five fields which structured the university at the beginning of the XIX E century, the degrees “conferred by the Faculties following examinations and public acts […] there will be three: the baccalaureate, the license and the doctorate ”, indicates the decree of March 17, 1808 signed by Napoleon. This […] … learn more→

The conversation around video games has been subtly shifting over recent years. Once almost universally slated as pointless at best, and at worst extremely harmful, video games have come in for what we now know to be unfair criticism. Politicians have used them as an excuse for their own failings over social issues such as […] … learn more→