Riyad A Shahjahan
Background
I am an Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, and a Master's degree in Adult Education, Community Development and Counseling Psychology, from the University of Toronto. I received my Ph.D. at the OISE/University of Toronto in Higher Education.
Research
My primary areas of interest are the topics of equity and knowledge production in higher education and beyond. I am particularly interested in understanding how some ways of being/knowing are valued over others and what are the social-cultural-political-historical processes that impact these knowledge validation and dissemination processes. The following question drives my scholarship, “What constitutes valid ways of being and knowing in higher education?” This question has led me to recently focus on analyzing higher education issues such as temporality, embodiment, scholarly impact, policy, curriculum, teaching and learning, and equity and diversity in comparative educational contexts. To this end, I have published over thirty refereed articles in venues, which include Educational Researcher, Journal of Education Policy, Comparative Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Higher Education and Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research.
My current research examines globalization of higher education policy, temporality and embodiment in higher education, cultural studies, and de/anti/postcolonial theory. I have been conducting both empirical and theoretical work, focusing on a) the role of transnational actors/processes (international organizations, global rankings, media) in globalizing higher education policy; and b) rethinking the traditional objects of study/practice in higher education (e.g. temporality, pedagogy, scholarly impact, and/or globalization) from global and non- western critical perspectives.
Phone: 517-355-4539
Address: 428 Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1034
I am an Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, and a Master's degree in Adult Education, Community Development and Counseling Psychology, from the University of Toronto. I received my Ph.D. at the OISE/University of Toronto in Higher Education.
Research
My primary areas of interest are the topics of equity and knowledge production in higher education and beyond. I am particularly interested in understanding how some ways of being/knowing are valued over others and what are the social-cultural-political-historical processes that impact these knowledge validation and dissemination processes. The following question drives my scholarship, “What constitutes valid ways of being and knowing in higher education?” This question has led me to recently focus on analyzing higher education issues such as temporality, embodiment, scholarly impact, policy, curriculum, teaching and learning, and equity and diversity in comparative educational contexts. To this end, I have published over thirty refereed articles in venues, which include Educational Researcher, Journal of Education Policy, Comparative Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Higher Education and Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research.
My current research examines globalization of higher education policy, temporality and embodiment in higher education, cultural studies, and de/anti/postcolonial theory. I have been conducting both empirical and theoretical work, focusing on a) the role of transnational actors/processes (international organizations, global rankings, media) in globalizing higher education policy; and b) rethinking the traditional objects of study/practice in higher education (e.g. temporality, pedagogy, scholarly impact, and/or globalization) from global and non- western critical perspectives.
Phone: 517-355-4539
Address: 428 Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1034
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Books by Riyad A Shahjahan
Together, George J. Sefa Dei, Alireza Asgharzadeh, Sharon Eblaghie Bahador, and Riyad Ahmed Shahjahan promote 'educational inclusion' in the context of African schooling. The aspects of diversity explored in this study include: minority / majority relations, race, ethnicity, gender, language, class, religion, and physical (dis)ability. The authors build their analyses of these issues around a series of interviews, which project a perspective that policy makers and administrators rarely seek out. By studying the challenges of inclusive education in Ghana and, further, by making comparisons with the Canadian context, this volume seeks to shed light on the ongoing struggle for an empowering school system in Africa and elsewhere.
Papers by Riyad A Shahjahan
have closely examined how GURs’ media outlets construct meanings
of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We
critically examine 135 publicly available visual media (photographs)
in the Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds
(QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend
our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian universities
within global discourse. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s ‘imaginary,’
Stuart Hall’s heuristics of representation, and attending to
photographic techniques, we posit that THE and QS GUR imagery
constructs a ‘social imaginary’ of Asian HE simultaneously as a: 1)
technological frontier, 2) site of educational prestige, and 3) environmental and cultural paradise. We argue that these constructed
visual imaginaries of Asian HE serve as sites for social consumption,
reproduce particular imagined communities and imagined selves,
and serve as scripts for action, in an era of platform capitalism.
of temporality’s effects on the university from local, national and global perspectives. I then review Berg and Seeber’s (2016) The Slow Professor, which draws inspiration from the slow movement to explore how faculty can mediate and resist academia’s culture of speed. The review essay thus moves from an examination of the role and function of temporality in universities in general terms to the more specific discussion of the recent impact of time on academic work. I explore and provide critiques of the four books before, in the concluding section, providing a framework for understanding the ontological and epistemological implications of time in higher education that are currently missing in the literature.
higher education policy may contribute to neo-colonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform
the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artefacts and tools such as policy reports, performance indicators, and technical assistance, of the OECD and World Bank, suggests that standardized IO policy processes and practices reproduce global inequities. In
collusion with other policy actors, these IOs constitute and perpetuate coloniality in global higher education, through enacting a god-eye point of view, colonialdifference, and the geopolitics of knowledge. This article proposes a set of questions that may open the possibility of ‘delinking’ from modern/colonial world systems and pushes us to decolonize our imaginaries of the landscape of global HE.
Together, George J. Sefa Dei, Alireza Asgharzadeh, Sharon Eblaghie Bahador, and Riyad Ahmed Shahjahan promote 'educational inclusion' in the context of African schooling. The aspects of diversity explored in this study include: minority / majority relations, race, ethnicity, gender, language, class, religion, and physical (dis)ability. The authors build their analyses of these issues around a series of interviews, which project a perspective that policy makers and administrators rarely seek out. By studying the challenges of inclusive education in Ghana and, further, by making comparisons with the Canadian context, this volume seeks to shed light on the ongoing struggle for an empowering school system in Africa and elsewhere.
have closely examined how GURs’ media outlets construct meanings
of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We
critically examine 135 publicly available visual media (photographs)
in the Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds
(QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend
our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian universities
within global discourse. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s ‘imaginary,’
Stuart Hall’s heuristics of representation, and attending to
photographic techniques, we posit that THE and QS GUR imagery
constructs a ‘social imaginary’ of Asian HE simultaneously as a: 1)
technological frontier, 2) site of educational prestige, and 3) environmental and cultural paradise. We argue that these constructed
visual imaginaries of Asian HE serve as sites for social consumption,
reproduce particular imagined communities and imagined selves,
and serve as scripts for action, in an era of platform capitalism.
of temporality’s effects on the university from local, national and global perspectives. I then review Berg and Seeber’s (2016) The Slow Professor, which draws inspiration from the slow movement to explore how faculty can mediate and resist academia’s culture of speed. The review essay thus moves from an examination of the role and function of temporality in universities in general terms to the more specific discussion of the recent impact of time on academic work. I explore and provide critiques of the four books before, in the concluding section, providing a framework for understanding the ontological and epistemological implications of time in higher education that are currently missing in the literature.
higher education policy may contribute to neo-colonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform
the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artefacts and tools such as policy reports, performance indicators, and technical assistance, of the OECD and World Bank, suggests that standardized IO policy processes and practices reproduce global inequities. In
collusion with other policy actors, these IOs constitute and perpetuate coloniality in global higher education, through enacting a god-eye point of view, colonialdifference, and the geopolitics of knowledge. This article proposes a set of questions that may open the possibility of ‘delinking’ from modern/colonial world systems and pushes us to decolonize our imaginaries of the landscape of global HE.