Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies
School of Social Sciences
ZHCES Seminar Series
Comparative and International Education in an Age of Intelligent Machines: The Last Ten Years
Speaker:
Dr. Bjorn H. Nordtveit
University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Abstract: What does it take for a field to rethink itself? Drawing on nearly seventy years of the Comparative Education Review, this talk first traces the field’s turn from “best practice” orthodoxy toward a more critical, inclusive, and self-questioning discipline. Over the last decade the field has been reshaped by Generative Artificial Intelligence, pandemic-era virtual teaching and learning, increasing online scholarship, and a reckoning with its own biases – all amid political and social forces that are remaking how knowledge is produced. Then the talk gets practical: What happens when manuscripts arrive partly written by AI? How does double-blind peer review work, and what makes a submission competitive? A former editor demystifies publishing for students and early-career researchers and argues that human judgment, transparency, and decolonial, anti-racist commitments remain the anchor of credible scholarship.
About the Speaker: Bjorn H. Nordtveit is Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Chair of the Department of Educational Policy, Research & Administration, and Interim Director of the Center for International Education. He edited the Comparative Education Review from 2013 to 2023 and previously spent twelve years with UNESCO and the World Bank working on education in Asia and West Africa. His books include Schools as Protection? Reinventing Education in Contexts of Adversity (Springer 2016); a new Springer book on multimedia in research is under contract.
DATE: 5th August, 2026 (Wednesday)
TIME: 03.00pm
Venue: #207, SSS-II
(All are Welcome)