Theme
Universities are known for their cutting-edge research. How can that ethos be harnessed to enhance their educational offer, pedagogical approaches, technological innovation and approach to academic life? Future Ready Higher Education invites researchers, practitioners, and professionals across the sector to explore visionary and imaginative futures for universities.
This conference seeks to explore the multiple imaginaries of higher education looking ahead: how universities might evolve, what values could and should guide any changes, and how those who work (and study?) within it can help to shape what the future looks like so that it benefits them. It will provide the opportunity to share insights on developing cultures of lifelong learning; embracing and critiquing the role of digital technologies in teaching and research (including AI); and different conceptions of innovation and entrepreneurship for staff and students. Questions arise around the opportunities for and the impact of mobility of staff and students, principles of sustainability, and the future knowledge, skills and attributes needed by and expected of students. Fascinating research opportunities emerge through making connections between data sources, harnessing and integrating generative AI productively and responsibly, developing partnerships across disciplines and introducing methodological innovation.
Through critical, creative, and research-informed dialogue, this conference aims to move beyond reaction to technological and political trends to authentic change, to a more proactive envisioning. What questions need to be asked now to enable students, researchers, teachers and universities to create a future higher education they want to inhabit and which benefits everyone? The conference calls on participants to share research, theory, and practice that sees higher education as an ongoing space of creativity, inclusion, and purpose. By reflecting on what it means to be “future-ready,” we seek to collectively shape what higher education can become.
The SRHE conference aims to advance the understanding of higher education, support and disseminate research and practice, and provide a platform for the perspectives and knowledge offered by systematic research and scholarship. With an international membership which spans a broad range of the humanities and social sciences, the SRHE community includes researchers, students, policymakers, educational developers, professional services staff, and others with an interest in higher education. The SRHE conference acts as a space for broad-ranging knowledge exchange, exploration of productive pathways for collaboration, and dissemination of ideas in a variety of formats, across a range of research domains. In line with this, conference submissions that do not directly address the conference theme are also eligible for inclusion, and will be considered in full by staff and reviewers.
Keynote and Plenary Speakers
Future-ready higher education:
some things we need to talk about
These days everyone seems to have something to say about the future of higher education – often simply as a cynical attempt to make money, justify unpopular reforms, or simply to denigrate the idea of universities altogether.
This conference offers the SRHE community the opportunity to seize back the idea of ‘the future’ and put it to more honest use – as a means of reimagining what we want universities to be, to talk about the values and virtues of higher education, and reflect on what roles we think higher education might play in a fast-changing world.
In this opening talk, Neil Selwyn introduces a number of starting points from which the rest of the conference can progress. These include embracing the unknowability of the future, why we need to think about futures (plural), and how anticipating (un)desirable futures is a great way (in John Urry’s words) to ‘disturb the present’ and start making changes in the here-and-now.
Regardless of your discipline and area of research interest, this talk aims to inspire you to start thinking about higher education futures along more expansive, forward-thinking and hopeful lines … the future starts here!
Biography
Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne – having previously worked in the Institute of Education, London and the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. He has spent the past 30 years researching the integration of digital technology into schools, universities and adult learning.
Neil is recognised as a leading international researcher in the area of digital education – with particular expertise in the ‘real-life’ constraints and problems faced when technology-based education is implemented. He is currently working on nationally-funded projects examining young people’s experiences of smartphone and social media bans, AI and the changing nature of teachers’ digital work, and digital reading in classrooms. Neil has carried out funded research on digital technology, society and education for national research agencies and funders in the UK, Australia, US, Sweden and Uruguay, alongside projects for the BBC, Gates Foundation, Microsoft Partners in Learning, Save The Children, National Assembly of Wales and UNESCO.
Neil is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and he also produces the ‘Education Technology Society‘ podcast.
Higher education utopia
This talk connects with the conference’s aim to explore visionary and imaginative futures for universities. Higher education futures are often presented as being determined for us by technological and other shifts that discursively construct themselves as primary, driving imperatives for change. In this context it is important that – as a global community of scholarship – we actively develop alternative ways of imagining, advocating for and building desirable futures based in the values, interests and core purposes of higher education itself.
In this keynote I will draw on research in the scholarship of utopia as one way of approaching this task. The talk will aim to provoke discussion among the SRHE community around how we might conceptualise our preferable futures, and what forms of research, advocacy and debate are needed to secure them.
Biography
Sian Bayne is Professor of Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, where she is Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education and leads on Education Futures in her role as University Assistant Principal. Her research is critical and interdisciplinary, currently focused on higher education futures, utopia and the impacts of artificial intelligence on education. She gives regular keynotes on the future of digital and higher education and publishes widely. She is affiliated with the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Moray House School of Education and Sport. More information about her work is available on her web site.
Dr Jenna Mittelmeier
The impossibility of ‘global’ universities in a bordered world
Higher education increasingly positions itself as a site of global knowledge production, yet international student and staff participation is inherently shaped by unequal bordering practices. Exclusionary structures such as visa regimes mean that international educational mobilities are not equitable opportunities afforded to all. Rather, participation is conditioned by hostile migration structures, passport privilege, and the greater likelihood of visa refusals for applicants from some countries. This positions visa regimes as epistemic conditions for accessing higher education: politicized structures layered through intersecting geopolitics and colonial histories whose consequences are unequal inclusion and epistemic gatekeeping. While digital technologies, such as international distance education, are frequently touted as mechanisms to overcome these structural inequalities and enable participation without crossing borders, they are themselves shaped by gendered, classed, and racialized inequalities which perpetuate existing power imbalances. This contribution argues that higher education can never truly be globally open while it remains embedded within a bordered world.
Professor Maia Chankseliani
International Student Mobility: Borders and Possibilities
Governments open and close borders to students according to which mobility they deem desirable. In the year to June 2026, the UK granted 41% fewer sponsored study visas than at the June 2023 peak, the US recorded a 17% fall in new international enrolment in autumn 2025, while the UK will rejoin Erasmus+ for one year. Policy counts visas and enrolments but knows little about what follows. Drawing on my new book, Seeing Otherwise, this talk follows returnees home. International study is formation through comparison: encountering different institutions, norms and ways of living can change how the familiar is seen. Its consequences are conditional. Formation expands possibilities; their direction emerges through the conjunction of agency with structural and cultural conditions. I introduce ‘presence’ to understand how people remain oriented towards others and institutions under resistance, and ask what virtual mobility and AI do to the experience of encountering another world.
Biography
Maia Chankseliani is Professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Her research explores what difference higher education makes in the world, and for whom. She is particularly interested in how education shapes people, how institutions change, and why ideas that work in one context are sometimes reshaped or resisted in another. Her work has taken her across higher education systems in different parts of the world, combining research with engagement in international education policy. A central strand of her research examines what happens when people study abroad and return home, and how their experiences shape the societies to which they return. Her books include What Happened to the Soviet University? (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Seeing Otherwise: International Higher Education and the Possibility of Change (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
Professor Rajani Naidoo
Universities in the Age of AI: Reclaiming Humanity and Redefining Human–AI Boundaries
As artificial intelligence reshapes social, economic, and epistemic landscapes, humanity faces a defining challenge: how can we protect the foundations of the good in humanity while enhancing our capacity to harness AI? Universities have a distinctive role in this task, and not simply as institutions that adapt to technological transformation, but rather as places where democratic values, knowledge, critical judgment, and the public interest can be actively defended and renewed. I consider four interconnected challenges. First, how is technological power becoming concentrated, and what does this concentration mean for democraty? Second, as AI systems increasingly mediate research and education how can we preserve intellectual autonomy ?Third, how are digital platforms shaping attention, identity, public discourse, and political participation—and what would it mean to design digital environments that enhance rather than undermine democratic engagement? Finally, as machines increasingly simulate cognition and creativity, what distinctive human capacities, relationships, and forms of collective reasoning must democracy protect and cultivate?
Biography
Rajani Naidoo is Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor in Higher Education and Social Change and Executive Director of the Exeter Centre for Leadership at the University of Exeter. She held a UNESCO Chair in Higher Education Management, and is Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University (South Africa) and the University of Bath. Rajani has been Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management and of the Doctoral Programme in Higher Education at the University of Bath, where she was also Vice-President (Community and Inclusion). She featured in the top 2 % in the Stanford/Elsevier global citations ranking in her field. Her interdisciplinary research examines how global, national, and organisational forces shape universities, focusing on the impact of hyper-competition and collaboration and the pursuit of social justice. She is a Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education and chairs the British Council Education advisory group. She is currently researching freedom of speech and campus relations; and the responsibilities of universities in the era of artificial intelligence.
Find out more about this year’s Sponsors and Exhibitors and how to connect with them during the conference:
For enquiries about conference exhibition, sponsorship or other forms of engagement, please get in touch with Mariam Ismail, SRHE Engagement and Development Manager: mariam.ismail@srhe.ac.uk.