Fazal Rizvi
Fazal Rizvi has been a Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois since 2001, having previously held academic and administrative appointments at a number of universities in Australia, including as Pro Vice Chancellor (International) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and as the founding Director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education. He currently holds two adjunct positions in Australia, at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University, and has been a visiting scholar at a number of universities around the world.
Fazal's background is in Philosophy, but much of his research has addressed issues in education policy. Over the past two decades, he has focused on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts; the global mobility of students; and theories of globalization and the internationalization of higher education. His current project includes an examination of the ways in which Indian universities are negotiating pressures of globalization and the knowledge economy, as well as a more theoretical exploration of the cosmopolitan possibilities of education.
In 1996, he was the President of the Australian Association for Research in Education, while in recent years, Fazal has presented a number of major addresses including the Lecture at the British Educational Research Association in September 2007. He has also served on a number of government bodies, including the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australia Foundation for Culture and the Humanities, and as an international panel member on the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008). At Illinois, he directs an online Masters program in Global Studies in Education. The highly innovative program is designed to establish a transnational dialogue among educators from around the world about ways they might ‘internationalize’ their curriculum.
From 1993 to 2000, Fazal edited Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and serves on editorial boards of a number of journals. He has written, or contributed, to the following titles by Routledge:
See previously featured authors
Globalizing Education Policy
Rizvi and Lingard's account of the global politics of education is thoughtful, complex and compelling. It is the first really comprehensive discussion and analysis of…
read moreAugust 2009 | Paperback: 978-0-415-41627-6 (Routledge)
World Yearbook of Education 2008
Geographies of Knowledge, Geometries of Power: Framing the Future of Higher Education
This volume examines higher education in globalized conditions through a focus on the spatial, historic and economic relations of power in which it is embedded.…
read more2007 | Hardback: 978-0-415-96378-7 (Routledge)
Youth Moves
Identities and Education in Global Perspective
This fascinating collection of original essays seeks to address the possibilities and dangers of young people's transnational, commodified identities; how society and educational institutions might…
read more2007 | Paperback: 978-0-415-95563-8 (Routledge)
Educational Policy and the Politics of Change
Governments around the world are trying to come to terms with new technologies, new social movements and a changing global economy. As a result, educational… read more1997 | Paperback: 978-0-415-11871-2 (Routledge)
more information about Educational Policy and the Politics of Change
Fazal Rizvi was a global academic long before the term began to be widely used to describe scholars who do not only work across a number of different countries but also regard Trans nationality as an analytic optic through which to understand issues of education policy and practice. Most of his research and publications are grounded as much in his transnational biography as it is in his scholarly discipline. Throughout his career he has tried to understand issues of global mobility not only of people but also of educational ideas and ideologies. He has examined the various ways in which the mobility of people reconstitutes communities, making them culturally diverse and hybrid; and how, through policies such as multiculturalism, the state seeks to define and manage the dynamics of intercultural relations. His work on educational policies has sought to find out how these are developed, allocated and implemented by national governments within the broader context of global institutions and networks.
His new book, Globalizing Education Policy (2010), co-authored with Bob Lingard, released published, examines how educational systems throughout the world are undergoing significant changes within an ever-changing economic, social and political context, driven mostly by what governments perceive to be the imperatives of globalization. The book, written largely as a textbook for graduate students, describes some of the key global drivers of policy change in education, exploring how modern communication systems, as well as intergovernmental organizations and transnational corporations, steer national policy priorities. It suggests that, the discursive terrain within which educational policies are now developed and enacted is increasingly informed by a range of neo-liberal precepts, which have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about educational purposes and governance. Yet Fazal and Bob also insist that the global drivers of policy change do not operate in the same way in all nation-states, and that the globally networked architecture of policy processes still allows local concerns to be accommodated. In the conclusion to the book, they ask how the destructive effects of globalization might be resisted; and how communities might imagine alternatives to the dominant globalization narrative.
Fazal Rizvi was born in India, and, as a teenager, was taken to Australia by his father, a noted historian of Islam in South Asia, whose book The Wonder That Was India: Volume 2 is still widely read both in India and elsewhere. As an undergraduate student in Australia, Fazal read this book around the same time he encountered Edward Said's Orientalism. His engagement with the widely conflicting methodological approaches to history in these two books had a major impact on Fazal's development as a scholar of post coloniality and education. In his own work, he largely rejected his father's narrative view of history, and sided more with Said's contention that history was always written politically, and that policy and politics, in turn, needed to be understood historically. In his own writings Fazal has therefore stressed the importance of theorizing globalization in terms that are historical and political, as well as relational and critical. He has elaborated some of these theoretical reflections in an interview recently published in collection of interviews, Globalizing the Research Imagination (Routledge 2008), edited by Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey.
In his PhD thesis he criticized the deeply historical and apolitical nature of the analytical tradition, using, perhaps paradoxically, the philosophical resources from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This rejection of analytical philosophy increasingly led him to educational policy studies, and to the study of power in both its discursive and material forms. Yet the analytical skills he learnt as a student of philosophy remain crucial to the ways in which he addresses issues of the cultural politics of education. He regards education as a site where cultural production takes place in ways that are historically constituted and politically inflected. He views education policy as a normative articulation of values, allocated authoritatively to both steer practice and develop particular kind of subjects.
In 1997, Fazal moved back to Victoria, initially as the founding Director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education, and later as the Pro Vice Chancellor (International) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. These two positions enabled him to become familiar with policy challenges faced by various educational systems in Asia (and elsewhere) and as result, deeply interested in issues of global mobility of students and the internationalization of higher education. He has since published widely on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, the global politics of student mobility; and the internationalization of curriculum and pedagogy.
Fazal has been a visiting scholar at a number of universities, including the University of Warwick and Institute of Education, London in the UK, Jawaharlal University in India, University of Pretoria in South Africa, University of British Columbia in Canada, Hong Kong Institute of Education and the University of Wisconsin Madison in the United States. In recent years, he has presented a number of major addresses including lectures at the British Educational Research Association, a keynote address at the Alliance of International Educators annual meeting in Shanghai, the Radford Address at the Australian Association for Research in Education, and a keynote at the Commonwealth Ministers of Education conference in Cape Town. He continues to travel widely, confirming his self-ascribed description as a global academic.
