Tebeje Molla

• Deakin University

The right to education is universally recognized as a fundamental human right, safeguarded by numerous international declarations and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Viewing refugee education through the lens of human rights is rooted in the principle that everyone, regardless of citizenship status, should h...

Engaged scholarship plays a crucial role in shaping collective narratives and fostering inclusive societies. This article explores the concept of engaged scholarship, highlighting both its transformative potential and the discontents that accompany it. Informed by existing literature and personal reflections, the discussion is divided into three ke...

Although gaining ethical approval is a conventional and established requirement for academic scholarship, institutional approaches remain subject to sustained critique. While not questioning the legitimacy of institutional ethical procedures, the dominance of legal frameworks and a focus on entry to ‘the field’ is inflexible and irresponsive to eth...

Young people living on the fringes of society face heightened vulnerability and trauma that profoundly impact their ability to trust others. When trauma-impacted youth, such as those exposed to pervasive racism or with refugee backgrounds, have faced unfair treatment by authorities in the past, they often develop a deep distrust towards law enforce...

This chapter outlines the profound implications of Racial Othering on students with a refugee background, specifically centring on the experiences of African heritage youth. Drawing on the capability approach as an analytical framework, the chapter illustrates the pervasive nature of racial Othering by illuminating its role in propagating low teach...

This paper presents findings from a study investigating the engagement of migrant and refugee parents in supporting the distance education of their children amidst the Covid-19 lockdowns in Australia. While existing research has extensively addressed challenges within online education during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a dearth of research exam...

With the global increase in forcibly displaced populations, understanding and improving educational opportunities and outcomes for refugee youth is of paramount importance. This scoping review focuses on understanding the extent and nature of evidence related to school engagement among refugee parents and students. The review’s scope was limited to...

With the rise of excessive nationalism in traditionally liberal democratic societies, those identified as ethnoculturally ‘Other’ are often seen as threats to national values and security. Responding to racial Othering requires clarity about the problem and its structural roots. The first section of this paper defines racial Othering. The second se...

The past decade has seen increased attention paid to the ethical complexities of educational research undertaken in sensitive or ‘fragile’ settings, where trauma, marginalisation and socio‐political precarity are prevalent. Yet, despite increased awareness of micro‐ethical issues encountered in the field, there is limited research that engages with...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant educational disruption globally. When the pandemic forced schools to switch to emergency home-schooling, parental engagement in education became more critical. Some parents found home-schooling as an opportunity to form stronger relationships with their children. Others acquired an enhanced insight into thei...

Racialised and culturally distinct refugee groups increasingly face hostilities and negative representations in countries of resettlment. The experience of African refugee youth in Australia illustrates this general trend. This paper explores how racial Othering discourse seriously undermines the group’s wellbeing. The article concentrates in parti...

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the wor...

Crisis makes bold policy actions possible. In responding to socioeconomic and technological ruptures, policymakers create new imaginaries or revitalise existing ones. With the Australian Government’s Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) reform during the COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical case, this paper shows how crisis instrumentalism and policy imaginaries...

While the impacts of COVID-19 on higher education are still unfolding, it is clear that the disruption caused by the pandemic has provided a warrant to re-consider existing teaching and learning practices. We provide a reading on whether existing teaching and learning practices should be retained or whether new practices can and should emerge throu...

Este artigo reflete sobre o que significa fazer sociologia crítica das políticasna mudança de contextos teóricos, empíricos e metodológicos da educação. Concentramos nossas lentes analíticas em duas considerações principais.Em primeiro lugar, refletimos sobre a política da criticidade, examinando diferentes afirmações e debates sobre o que signific...

Since the mid-1980s, Australia has resettled thousands of African refugees. This paper focuses on the racialization of youth violence and the damage it sustains on refugee-background young Africans. The discussion proceeds in two interrelated stages. In the first stage, to understand the representation of African youth in the public sphere, the pap...

African refugee youth and young adults live at the intersections of many structural barriers, including xenophobia, racism, and misogyny. In this conceptual paper, we present considerations for education scholars who seek to conduct research with and about African refugee postsecondary students. We start with a discussion of the discourse of Otheri...

For forcibly displaced people, high educational attainment is economically and socially empowering. Using experiences of African refugee youth in Australia as an empirical case and drawing on the capability approach to social justice, this paper aims to assess the substantiveness of education opportunities of refugees. Qualitative data were generat...

This article re ects on what doing critical policy sociology means in shifting theoretical, empirical and methodological contexts of education. We focus our analytical lens on two primary considerations. First, we re ect on the politics of criticality, examining di ering claims and debates about what it means to do critical research and be a critic...

This paper presents an overview of critical policy scholarship (CPS) in education. Historically, policy research has been dominated by what is commonly referred to as the policy science tradition, which is positivist in its philosophical stance and instrumentalist in its purpose—it focuses on producing knowledge relevant for policy decisions. Howev...

This chapter sheds light on the cultural citizenship of refugee-background Black Africans in Australia. Specifically, it elaborates on cultural citizenship as an analytical framework, outlines recent multicultural policy provisions in Australia, and highlights how conservative politicians and media personalities racialize youth violence and stigmat...

Promoting teacher professionalisation has become a key policy agenda in Australia and internationally. Professional learning is often invoked as a means to achieve this goal. In this paper, drawing on findings of a series of studies we conducted on the topic in the Early Childhood Education and Care sector, and guided by a range of theoretical tool...

Measured in per capita terms, Australia has one of the most generous refugee resettlement programs in the world. This paper investigates the extent to which refugee status is recognized as a category of disadvantage in Australian higher education. Drawing on a scalar view of policy work and Fraser’s notion of misframing, the paper assesses the poli...

Drawing on the capability approach to human development and Bourdieuan reflexive sociology, this paper explores the interplay of teacher agency and professional practice. The paper names five facets of teacher agency. It shows that teachers with a strong sense of agency actively seek learning opportunities—inquisitive agency; think effortfully abou...

The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a critical realist approach can add to our understanding of professional recognition of educators in a pre-school setting. Recognition is a function of personal achievement and social arrangement, and is understood through examining those subjective conditions and objective structures as observ...

A policy problem is a discursive construction, and the way in which the problem is framed determines both the nature of the policy responses and the possibility of resolving it. In this paper, drawing on critical frame analysis, we examined three major equity policies in the Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. In mapping ou...

The issue of continuing professional learning for educators in the early childhood education and care sector is in the spotlight in Australia due to the government's reform agenda, which seeks to professionalize the workforce. In an effort to ensure quality programmes are on offer for all children, educators are expected to upskill. The assumption...

In this special issue, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capital and Amartya Sen’s capability approach to social justice and human development to understand the factors constructing educational disadvantage, and the implications for policy development to improve opportunities and processes of education for those that encounter educational dis...

The demands of Industry 4.0 (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) for a future-ready skilled workforce have placed significant political pressure on PhD programs to deliver different sorts of graduates. The paper documents the prevalent ‘skills gap’ narrative of global policy actors and, and using a multi-scalar policy lens, examines global and nation...

Access to educational opportunities is instrumental for social integration of refugee youth. This paper reports on a qualitative case study of educational aspirations and experiences of refugee-background African youth (RAY) in Melbourne, Australia. Guided by a capability approach to social justice, in-depth interviews were conducted with two group...

This paper claims a central role for school leaders (principals or head-teachers) in the enactment of social justice policy in schools, who act as key agents or ‘gate keepers’ for what counts as social justice in their contexts of practice. Social justice means different things in different contexts depending on where leaders – who use policy as an...

The established link between quality early childhood programs and positive child trajectories has led to the professionalization of the early childhood workforce in Australia. Attention has concentrated on the upgrading of qualifications and opportunities for professional learning. This paper focuses on exploring teacher professional learning, posi...

Guided by a freedom-based assessment of human development, this paper questions the compatibility of knowledge economy optimism and the authoritarian political order that prevailed in Ethiopia since the mid-2000s. It shows how the knowledge economy discourse has played a positive role in widening access to higher education; briefly summarizes assum...

What does being a professional early childhood educator entail? This paper aims to address this question. Starting from the early 2000s, there has been increased attention to workforce professionalization in the early childhood education and care sector across OECD nations. Against the backdrop of recent early childhood workforce professionalizatio...

As highlighted in the previous chapter, the problem of inequality in Ethiopian higher education (HE) is superficially represented as a lack of access and the policy response is associated with building human capital of the nation. Notwithstanding equity policy instruments put in place by the Government, inequality in Ethiopian HE has persisted in a...

The post-2000 international development discourse has been dominated by what can be characterized as knowledge economy optimism (as echoed in the World Bank’s statement in the opening quote above). The new enthusiasm about economic value of knowledge was linked with national poverty reduction efforts.

Notwithstanding extensive expansion of the system and the array of equity policy instruments put in place in response to unequal access and participation, the problem of inequality in Ethiopian higher education (HE) has persisted in the form of the underrepresentation of women, high attrition rates and low graduation rates among females and ethnic...

This chapter focuses on one of the key structural inequalities in Ethiopian higher education (HE), namely gender culture. The chapter aims at explicating how the gender culture in Ethiopia perpetuates subordination and disadvantage of women in the nation’s HE institutions. In a social environment, relating oneself to others is done in line with nor...

In Ethiopia, Western-style modern higher education (HE) has a history of less than eight decades. In this relatively short period, the system has passed through a series of changes. Following a passing account of Ethiopia’s religion-based traditional education system, the chapter presents a brief historical account of the development of modern HE i...

This chapter focuses on how peripherality (both in terms of political participation and geographical location) has historically affected access to and success in education in general and in higher education (HE) in particular, in Ethiopia. In any policy, power relations between social groups define the centre–periphery demarcation. Communities are...

In Ethiopia today, democracy is a distant mirage. The ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), has assumed nearly total control of the social, economic, and political spheres of society. Guided by its ‘developmental state’ model, the ruling party prioritizes economic prosperity over political freedom—in its view,...

As is outlined in the forgoing chapters, the Ethiopian higher education (HE) system has passed through a series of reforms and expansion, with widening access and improving relevance as key goals. However, notwithstanding the policy efforts underway in the last two decades, the problem of inequality persists. This book has presented evidence on (a)...

When it comes to basic life and health conditions, inequalities in a society fall under material and symbolic resources such as recognition and respect (Baker, Lynch, Cantillon, & Walsh, 2009; Therborn, 2006). Education is a symbolic resource associated with material returns. Lack of access to education directly relates to what Goran Therborn calls...

Africa is being re-imagined as a knowledge economy, and higher education (HE) systems have been propelled into the centre of national economic plans and strategies. This paper provides an analysis of four recent major initiatives directed to the revitalisation of HE in sub-Saharan Africa: the Pan African University (2010), the Africa Higher Educati...

In this chapter, we reflect on current debates on the employability of doctoral graduates and related concerns about PhD graduates’ work skills (or their lack) using recent Australia policy debates and developments (2008–2014) as a case study. The chapter proceeds in three sections. We begin with a global overview of the political attention being d...

The prevalent knowledge economy discourse has direct implications for higher education policies and practices. It is expected that the higher education sector supports national economic competitiveness mainly through promoting scientific research, supporting technological transfer and innovation, and producing ‘knowledge workers’ such as higher deg...

This article examines the lived experiences of women in Ethiopian higher education (HE) as a counterpoint to understandings of gender equity informed only by data on admission, progression and completions rates. Drawing on a critical qualitative inquiry approach, we analyse and interpret data drawn from focus group discussions with female students...

A feature of HE reform discourse is the tendency to construct the rationale for reform in terms of averting calamity and risk. We refer to this risk talk as ‘crisis discourse’. This study examines the formulation of PhD crisis discourse internationally and in Australia. We find that a key feature of PhD crisis discourse is that universities are pro...

In the context of low-income countries, the role of donors in public policymaking is of great importance. Donors use a combination of lending and non-lending instruments as pathways of influence to shape policy directions in aid-recipient countries. This paper reports some findings from a doctoral study on the role of the World Bank in the recent h...

Increasingly national policy processes are intersected with and affected by global policy actors and ideas. In aid-recipient countries such as Ethiopia, donors use financial and non-financial means to influence national policy decisions and directions. This paper is about the non-financial influence of the World Bank (WB) in the Ethiopian higher ed...