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Facilitated and chaired by: Dr Cora Lingling Xu who is the co-convenor of the International Research and Researchers Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here.

Overview

This online SRHE International Research and Researchers Network event explores how the concept of time inheritance can inform research, policy and practice in international higher education. Developed in Cora Lingling Xu’s recent book The Time Inheritors (SUNY Press, 2025), the framework draws attention to how unequal access to time-related resources shapes educational trajectories, opportunities and outcomes across diverse social contexts.

The workshop brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors, including academics, practitioners and current university students, to examine how time inheritance can be applied to their own fields of work and experience. Presentations will address questions of inequality in political economy, algorithmic temporality and educational leadership, Deaf education and accessibility, adolescent lifestyles and long-term outcomes, and student perspectives on mindsets and orientations within university settings. Together, these contributions will show how time inheritance offers a productive lens for understanding both structural inequality and everyday educational practice.

A distinctive feature of the event is its dialogue across research and practice. Alongside scholarly contributions from speakers based in the UK, India, China and the United States, practitioners and students will reflect on how the framework speaks to their professional practice, lived experience and institutional contexts. The workshop will conclude with insights from discussant Julie Rattray, followed by audience discussion, offering participants an opportunity to consider the wider implications of time inheritance for international higher education research, pedagogy and policy.

schedule

Speaker bios

Cora Lingling Xu is Associate Professor at Durham University, UK. She is a sociologist interested in education mobilities and social inequalities. She is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Cora’s research on Chinese international students and Gaokao has been featured in BBC Radio 4's documentary 'Chinese on Campus', on BBC News and in South China Morning Post. Her book 'The Time Inheritors' (SUNY Press, 2025) explores the role of time in shaping Chinese higher students' trajectories as they navigate rural-to-urban, cross-border and transnational education. This book is winner of the 2026 Best Book Award presented by the Comparative and International Education Society’s Higher Education SIG.

Leya Mathew is an Associate Professor in the Social Sciences division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the socio-cultural transitions that have accompanied economic liberalization in India with a special focus on gender, education, work, and migration. 

Yiru Chen is an educator, filmmaker, and accessibility advocate working at the intersection of Deaf education and inclusive media arts. She currently serves as a Teacher of the Deaf at St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn, New York, where her practice integrates creative storytelling, emerging technologies, and culturally responsive pedagogy to support BIPOC Deaf, DeafBlind, and Deafdisabled learners. A Teachers College, Columbia University alumna, Yiru has presented at universities including NYU on accessibility as a creative methodology and structural imperative. Her research and practice span sign language pedagogy, accessible arts education, and AI-driven tools for equity in disability communities. She collaborates on international partnerships exploring how language and cultural inheritance shape the ways educational knowledge and experience move across Deaf/Disability communities and institutional contexts globally.

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Human Futures at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research examines educational leadership, artificial intelligence, and the ethical and temporal conditions shaping education systems and human development. He is the author of Sustainable Educational Leadership and the Climate Crisis (Routledge) and the forthcoming Cambridge University Press monograph Fire in the Nursery: Educational Leadership at the End of the Human. His work appears in journals including Comparative Education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, and Educational Management Administration & Leadership.

Siyi Liu is currently a PhD Candidate in Digital Geography at University College London. Her research focuses on smart city-regionalism and digital governance, as well as migration and housing. She will join the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate, focusing on AI policy research. She has presented her work at major international conferences, including the RGS Digital Geographies Symposium, the AAG Annual Meeting, and the Regional Studies Association Conference. Her research has been published in Asian Geographer and Population, Space and Place. She holds a BA in Geography with Social Data Science from UCL and has worked as a consultant at the World Resources Institute. She has also been a visiting scholar at Seoul National University and a visiting student at the City University of Hong Kong.

Yin Chun is an undergraduate engineering student from Imperial College London.

Julie Rattray is Head of the School of Education at Durham University, having taken up the role in August 2024, and Professor in Higher Education. Her scholarship has made a substantial contribution to higher education research, particularly in relation to threshold concepts, liminality, the affective dimensions of learning, and the ways conceptions of teaching and learning shape policy, pedagogy, and practice. Her work has been influential in advancing understanding of student learning, transformation, and participation in higher education. For this SRHE International Research and Researchers Network workshop, Professor Rattray brings both senior academic leadership and deep expertise in higher education as a field of research and practice. As discussant for “Time Inheritance in international higher education research and practice,” she is ideally placed to respond to the workshop’s range of international, interdisciplinary, and practice-based presentations, and to draw out their wider implications for research, policy, and pedagogy in international higher education.