GCES Symposium 2016

Suaad Alshebou

Suaad Alshebou is an Associate Professor in the department of Educational Foundations and Administration at the College of Basic Education in Kuwait. She holds a Ph.D. in adult comparative education from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Dr. Alshebou has extensive experience in higher education systems. She worked at Kuwait University from 1993-2003 and also worked as a visiting professor at the Center for International Education at George Mason University in the United States during the 2012 academic year. At a national level, Dr. Alshebou worked as a consultant in a number of national educational projects managed by the Ministry of Education from 2010-2014. She also participated in five projects initiated by the educational committee based at the Amiri Diwan from 2009-2012. Her research interests include comparative and international education, adult and continuing education, life-long learning, professional development, and family learning. In 2014, Dr. Alshebou was awarded the State Prize of Education for her research on family learning in the state of Kuwait. She has also participated in both national and international conferences and published papers.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Columbia University in New York. Iranian by birth, Swiss by upbringing, and U.S. citizen by naturalization, she has widely published about globalization (policy borrowing and lending), comparative policy studies, and educational reform in different countries. She has published eight books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. The most recent book is entitled The Global Education Industry (co-edited with Antoni Verger and Christopher Lubienski) and is published by Routledge as the 2016 volume of the World Yearbook of Education. She was President of the (U.S.) Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in 2009 and is currently an Advisory Member of the Board of the Gulf Comparative Education Society (GCES).

Elizabeth Buckner

Elizabeth Buckner is an Assistant Visiting Professor of International Comparative Education and Middle East Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. In this role, she focuses on the education issues of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa region. She has conducted research on a broad range of educational issues, including the privatization of higher education, mobile technology, educational inequality and the risk of conflict, and is currently engaged in new projects on teacher professionalism and urban refugee education.

Her research has been published widely, including in Comparative Education Review, Comparative Education, International Studies Quarterly, and the British Journal of Middle East Studies. She has received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies (AIMS), and the NSEP Boren.

Previously, she was a Senior Research Associate at FHI 360 in Washington D.C. Dr. Buckner completed a Ph.D. in International and Comparative Education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and also holds an M.A. in sociology from Stanford, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. She speaks French and Arabic, and has lived in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Syria, and Oman

Calvert Jones

Calvert W. Jones is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Government & Politics, having previously served as an Assistant Professor at the City College of New York (CUNY). She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2013, focusing on comparative politics, the Middle East, and mixed methods. Her current research examines new approaches to citizen-building in the Middle East, with an emphasis on goals, mechanisms, and outcomes in state-led social engineering efforts.