We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Sonia Livingstone and Prof. Payal Arora will be our Keynote Speakers for the 2025 CIES Conference

The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) is pleased to announce that Prof. Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and Prof. Payal Arora, Utrecht University, will be holding the keynote addresses at the 2025 CIES annual conference, with the theme Envisioning Education in a Digital Society, held on 22-26 March 2025 in Chicago, IL.

Sonia’s research centers on many of the challenges youth and children experience as they grow up in a digital age. Topics such as children’s privacy and protection, youth mental health vulnerabilities, commercially exploitative business models, the EdTech takeover of education, parental ‘controls’ in the family, screen time, and the potential for digital play are foundational in Sonia’s work. The underlying inspiration for her scholarship is drawn from her long-standing interest in the mediation of everyday life; and listening to the voices of audiences as agents, citizens and the public and especially to children and young people. For Sonia, this provides a rich source of critical insights for engaging with stakeholders and promoting a rights-focused impact. As Sonia’s work highlights children’s rights in the digital world must not only be protected, but recognized and supported. To meet these challenges, we need a truly global process of dialogue and deliberation that must include the voices and experiences of children.

As a digital anthropologist, Payal is concerned with how diverse people make use of and meaning with digital tools. Her work focuses more specifically on the digital economies of the Global South. Payal’s research centers on exploring who and how technology is used in the Global South, underlining the fact that “the ‘next big trend’ in digital won’t emerge from a Western market.” Her research sheds light on several existing barriers, including overcoming mindsets, organizational cultures, and funding politics. She makes the case that these “next billion users” are at the forefront of digital creation and innovation, pointing to the need to respect and support all people as we jointly forge ahead to carve novel and resilient digital design approaches in these precarious times. In her research, she shows how much we can learn from ‘thick data’, especially given the limited and misleading understandings of digital cultures outside the West.

Prof. Sonia Livingstone DPhil (Oxon), OBE, FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how changing conditions of mediation reshape everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 21 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (OUP 2020) and Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six (Bloomsbury, 2024). Since founding the EC-funded 33 country “EU Kids Online” research network, and Global Kids Online (with UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti), she has advised the Child-friendly Governance Project, Child Helpline International, Council of Europe, European Commission, European Digital Media Observatory, European Parliament, International Telecommunications Union, OECD, Ofcom, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, UK government and UNICEF. She has served as President of the International Communication Association, chaired LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission and is currently leading the Digital Futures for Children centre at LSE with the 5Rights Foundation. See www.sonialivingstone.net

Prof. Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of two initiatives – Inclusive AI Lab, for debiasing tech and FemLab, a feminist futures of work approach. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South to help shape inclusive AI enabled designs and policies. Payal is the author of 100+ journal articles and award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. Forbes named her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ She has been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award for her work on Diversifying AI. Her new book with MIT Press “From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” has been longlisted for the 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards. 200+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Financial Times, Fast Company, Wired, BBC, The Economist, and Tech Crunch. She has consulted for the public and the private sector including UNHCR, Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, Google, and GE and sits on several boards including for UN EGOV, and LIRNE-Asia. She has given 350+ keynotes and invited talks in 85 countries for events such as ACM Facct, Copenhagen Tech Festival, re:publica, COP26, World Economic Forum, Swedish Internet Foundation, alongside figures like Jimmy Wales and Steve Wozniak, and TEDx talks on the future of the internet and innovation. She is a Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow alumnus and is Indian, American, and Irish and calls Amsterdam her home.

Prof. Susan L. Robertson is a political sociologist of education whose academic career spans universities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Susan completed two undergraduate degrees in Perth, Western Australia, one at Curtin University in Applied Science, where she graduated with distinction, and the other at the University of Western Australia, where she graduated with honors. Susan went on to do her PhD in Policy/Sociology at the University of Calgary, Canada (1990).

Until recently, she was Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK, and held the Chair in Sociology. Prior to this she was Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK and Director of the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies. Susan is currently a Bye-Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Aarhus University, an Adjunct Professor at OISE, University of Toronto, and holds a fractional appointment as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK.

She is the author/co-editor of 13 books, including Public Private Partnerships in Education (2012) and well over 100 refereed papers in international journals and book chapters. CIES conference goers might be interested in some of her recently published papers, that include Provincialising the OECD, (2021)  Guardians of the Future (2022),  and Promises, Promises: IO and Promissory Legitimacy (2023) She has also delivered keynotes all over the world, including leading international conferences such as WCCES, ECER, HERDSA and NARST. Her long-standing areas of research interest include theorizing the state and education, global and regional dynamics, multi-scalar governance, teachers’ labor, and social justice.  Much of this work has emerged out of substantial research funding from the European Commission, the UK’s ESRC, and New Zealand’s Marsden Award.  With her colleague Roger Dale, she was the founder of the now Q1 journal Globalisation, Societies, and Education, which she continues to co-edit.