Although global higher education partnerships can promote greater intercultural understanding, establish unique environments for student and faculty development, and generate opportunities for innovative and entrepreneurial ventures, they can be beset with problems that negate their potential effectiveness. This paper proposes that open systems…

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science…

The STEM crisis discourse enacts a crisis sensitivity that governs the way of thinking and feeling about change in relation to techno-science. This article examines how this crisis sensitivity is historically co-constituted with systems analysis to configure the global, the future, and the accountable subjects as the objects of techno-scientific…

Niklas Luhmann's late concept of inclusion/exclusion in world society compensates for the lack of a systems theory of social differentiation, but ultimately remains incomplete. Moreover, it is remarkable that Luhmann apparently never linked the inclusion/exclusion concept to his late theory of the education system. The following considerations…

In an effort to address the relationship between globalisation, education and Niklas Luhmann's branch of systems theory, we present his essay, published here for the first time in English translation, 'Education: Forming the life course', next to the nine contributions that compose this special issue and build on this and his other writings to…

The article argues for intersectionality as analytical concept for transnational education policy analyses of teachers' work. We first lay out the conceptual and methodological groundwork, and then revisit two case studies of teachers' work to deepen understanding of the conceptual framework for intersectional transnational education policy…

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in…

The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, publishing, and cross-border papers, is expanding rapidly and spreading to a growing number of countries. Strong national science systems have emerged outside Euro-America. Yet the multipolarization of economic capacity and scientific output plays out within a…

Global policy makers increasingly adopt subjective wellbeing as a framework within which to measure and address human development challenges, including policies to mitigate consequential societal problems. In this review, we take a systems-level perspective to assemble evidence from studies of wellbeing, of collective intelligence, and of…

The current literature of school education, transnationalisation and migration explores actors, structures and social mechanisms, however, tends to focus on these analytical levels separately. This article advocates a more explicit analysis of the interconnections of structures, actors and mechanisms within and across schools and wider national…

Stocks and flows (SF) are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO[subscript 2] with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure,…

The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called "domains," and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this…

Liberal education as a form of higher education is increasing globally even as it struggles for support and legitimacy in the USA. Its emergence and spread are only partially attributable to the growth in the tertiary sector worldwide: although the sharpest spike has been in Asia, new programs have opened in Western Europe, Russia and the Middle…

Since the 1960s, comparative education in the United States, Canada, and Europe has shown considerable growth and vitality, in terms of membership in professional organizations, participation in international conferences, research, and publications. Epistemologically and methodologically, new modernist and postmodernist paradigms have been…

Interest in inclusive education in the global south has grown significantly since the adoption of the Salamanca Statement in 1994. Increasingly, those who fund and provide education want to be seen taking action on inclusion generally and disability inclusion specifically. However, the much-welcomed enthusiasm to respond to global commitments is…