Category Archives: Documentation

Video and Discussion Paper: Global Knowledge Disparities – The North-South Divide

Barbara Ischinger (OECD), Hebe Vessuri (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and Andreas Eckert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Forum Transregionale Studien) discussing about “Global Knowledge Disparities – The North-South Divide”.

Video: Humboldt-Ferngespräch: Global Knowledge Disparities – The North-South Divide on Vimeo.

Text: You can find the discussion paper of the Humboldt-Ferngespräch here (pdf). The text and video are based on the “Humboldt Ferngespräche” discussion held at the Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin on November 20, 2014  within the framework of the international Winter Academy “Education, Inequality and Social Power. Transregional Perspectives” organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung –
Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland.

“We need education to decrease inequality” – Interview with Jutta Allmendinger

Allmendinger ProfilJutta Allmendinger is President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of Educational Sociology and Labor Market Research at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She recently published a discussion paper on „Social Inequalities in Europe: Facing the challenge“. In her interview with Gesche Schifferdecker she speaks about how we could overcome educational poverty, what our futural challenges are and why it is so difficult to discuss about education and inequality in a transregional context.

“A collapse of formal schooling in Egypt”: Interview with Hania Sobhy

Hania Sobhy Photo: Max Weber Stiftung under CC BY 4.0

Hania Sobhy
Photo: Max Weber Stiftung
under CC BY 4.0

Hania Sobhy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut where she is writing up her research on Pro-Revolution Mobilization in Egyptian Elections 2012-2014. In 2012-2013, she was a postdoctoral Fellow with the EUME program of the Forum Transregionale Studien

During the conference “Inequality and Education”  she presented a paper about Educational Privatization and the Collapse of State Institutions under Mubarak”. She published recently an article about “Mafish Ta’lim: Why Egypt Ranked Last on Education” on the Mish ma32ool Blog.

What was surprising to you when you were a child? What is it that you always wanted to know about the world?

I think that from a young age I wanted to know why things that seemed so wrong, unjust or counterproductive happened and continued to exist. At the age of 17 I wrote a letter to a famous newspaper columnist with a lengthy critique of what I understood as the policies, conflicts of interest and corruption that created the poor and increasingly marketized condition of education I was experiencing. He actually published portions of my letter over three days in his column. In a sense, I was interested in the incentives and power relations that sustained the status quo. I was also starting to wonder about what it is that creates a will to resist. I wanted to understand why most people took little action to contest these corrupt practices. Is it ‘cultural’ as some might argue? Is it a kind of ‘learned helplessness’ based on repeated experiences of the futility – and often emotional and physical violence – that are associated with such acts of contestation?

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