CHEF has established links with ‘sister centres’ around the world.

The sister centres are:

• Critical Studies in Education, University og Auckland, New Zealand
• REDI, Department of Education, Deakin University, Australia
• Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Melbourne University, Australia
• Centre for Research Capability and Development, Coventry University, UK
• Graduate School of Education, Bristol University, UK
• Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), UCL and Oxford, UK
• Department of Education, and the Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, UK
• Hamburger Centre for University Teaching and Learning (HUL), Germany
• CIPES, University of Porto, Portugal
• Centre for Educational Policy Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Drexel University, USA
• C3 Research Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities, Staffordshire University, UK
• HERO (Higher Education as Research Object), Uppsala University, Sweden
• Varlam Cherkezishvili Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, East European University, Georgia
• Scholarly Communication Research Group (SCRG), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland

Advisory board

As part of its new institutional cycle as research centre (2022-2027), Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) is creating its Advisory Board (AB) to strengthen its organization with membership from CHEF’ international partner institutions, national partner institutions and networks, and local partners at Aarhus University. 

The role of an Advisory Board member will be to advise the Co-Directors (Sue Wright and Søren Bengtsen) and a small Steering Group on emerging themes on which to develop CHEF’s activities and opportunities for doing so in cooperation with other institutions and actors in the field of higher education in Denmark and internationally.

It is a great pleasure for us to present our newly constituted Advisory Board with members from Aarhus University, Denmark more widely, and internationally. We are very grateful and thankful to the AB members for accepting, and we look forward to the first AB meeting in March 2023

The following list of the CHEF AB is in alphabetical order.

Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Education, University College London, UK

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Dean & Pro-Director.  He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate (East European University) and an earned higher doctorate (University of London).  He was Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Institutional Research for his ‘outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice’ and is President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.  He has been a Visiting Professor in China, Australia and other countries, and been a special advisor to UNESCO and to the UK Parliamentary Committee on Education.  He has produced 35+ books (several having won prizes &/or translated into other languages), written hundreds of papers, given 150 keynote talks in over 40 countries, and been cited well over 25,000 times in the literature.

Jill Blackmore, Professor, Deakin University, Australia

Jill Blackmore AM Ph D is Alfred Deakin Professor in Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Vice-President of the Australian Association of University Professors.  She researches from a feminist perspective education policy and governance; international and intercultural education; leadership and organisational change; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; and teachers' and academics’ work, health and wellbeing. She is former Director of two  Deakin strategic research centres in education, Chair of Deakin Academic Board, and Australian Association of Research in Education President. She has worked in multiple consultancies with government, industry, NGOs and professional organisations such as International Education Association.  Recent projects are School autonomy reform; International students’ mobility, identity, belonging and connectedness, and Geopolitics of transnational student mobility. Her latest publication is Disrupting Leadership in the Entrepreneurial University: Disengagement and Diversity (2022, Bloomsbury).

Que Anh Dang, Assistant Professor, Coventry University, UK

Dr Que Anh Dang is an Assistant Professor and interdisciplinary researcher at the Institute of Global Education, Coventry University UK. She has been working in international higher education since 1996 at the British Council Vietnam and in the past 17 years at universities in Denmark, Germany and England in different capacities including management, teaching and research. 

She has published internationally about the concept of higher education regionalism, transnational education, globalisation and doctoral education, SDGs-related international research partnerships, normative power and knowledge diplomacy in Asia and Europe. Her academic work draws on her trans-disciplinary background combining educational sociology, international development and cultural political economy perspectives. 

She currently leads the international PEER project investigating Higher Education and Research Partnerships between the UK and 15 East Asian countries in the past decade. She is a member researcher in the CHEF’s project ‘European Universities -Critical Futures’.

Lise Degn, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark

Lise Degn is Associate Professor at the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. Her primary field of expertise is the governance and management of higher education institutions, focusing particularly on how managers at department level navigate shifting and conflicting demands and how this affects their leadership practice. Lise has also worked on related themes such as well as academic work and performance. In recent years, Lise has focused her attention on responsibility in research and is currently leading a large research project on research integrity, and how the translation of policies of research integrity is (or is not) shaping academic work.

Ivana Didak, Senior Policy Officer, The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities

Ivana Didak has been working as Senior Policy Officer in The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities since 2018. She coordinates The Guild’s working groups on Education Innovation, Erasmus+ programme, the European Universities initiative and participation of lower R&I performing countries in Framework Programmes. Previously, she worked in the Croatian Erasmus+ National Agency where she focused on International Credit Mobility. Ivana holds a Master’s degree in European Politics and Policies from KU Leuven and a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Zagreb.

Rachel Douglas-Jones, Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Rachel Douglas-Jones is Associate Professor of Anthropological Approaches to Data and Infrastrucutre at the IT University of Copenhagen, where she is Head of the Technologies in Practice research group and a member of the ETHOS Lab. Her research interests include the governance of science, research ethics and integrity. She is the co-editor of Hope and Insufficiency: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison (Berghan 2020), co-editor of the JRAI special issue Towards an Anthropology of Data (JRAI 2021) and co-editor of The Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (Palgrave 2022).

Berit Eika, Pro-Rector, Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark

Berit Eika became Prorector for Education at Aarhus University on 1 June 2014 and works with the University´s strategy and policies for education and chairs the committee of education. Before she was vice-dean at the Faculty of Health, a position held since 2011. As vice-dean, she developed medical teaching and education and established the AU Centre for Health Sciences Education.

She graduated as a medical doctor (MD) in 1986 and received her PhD degree in 1994 from Aarhus University. Her thesis examined the role of bladder diseases related to diabetes and was partly carried out during a research stay in 1991 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (US). Berit has two master’s degrees in health informatics (from the University of Aalborg) and in Health Professions Education (from the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands). In 2005 she became the first Danish medical professor of Health Education.

Andrew Gibson, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

I am Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Education, at Trinity College Dublin, where I am also co-director of the Cultures, Academic Values in Education (CAVE) research centre. I have worked in higher education policy research since 2012, and have consulted for the OECD on the HEInnovate series of reviews of the national higher education systems of Ireland, the Netherlands, and Austria. Prior to starting in Trinity, I worked in Aarhus University on the "Research for impact: Integrating research and societal impact in the humanities PhD" project led by P.I. Søren Bengtsen. My interests are broadly within the philosophy of higher education and higher education policy. My current research focuses on the ontology of policy, humanities research policy, and normative arguments about the humanities as a meta-disciplinary space.

Barbara Grant, Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Barbara Grant is Associate Professor in the School of Critical Studies in Education at Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland. She researches in the field of critical university studies, with a particular interest in doctoral education, including the supervision of graduate students, academic work and identities, and activism within the university. She has also written about research methodologies and academic writing. She is currently writing a book about women doctoral supervisors in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Davydd Greenwood, Emeritus Professor, Cornell University, US