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 (LSE). She has published 21 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her recent book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross).

Sonia chaired LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission, and has served as an Expert Advisor to the Council of Europe, Special Advisor to the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Communications, President of the International Communication Association, and Executive Board member of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. She has received six honorary doctorates and several international prizes.

Since founding the EC-funded 33 country “EU Kids Online” research network, she has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF and others on children’s internet safety and rights in the digital environment. Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures for Children centre (joint with LSE and 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online” project (with UNICEF). Other recent projects include the UKRI-funded “Nurture Network” and two European H2020 projects: “ySKILLS” (Youth Skills) and “CO:RE” (Children Online: Research and Evidence.

Prof. Payal Arora PhD. (Columbia Univ. NYC), is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University and co-founder of FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative. She comes with two decades of ethnographic research with marginalized communities in India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Namibia on how young users learn to make sense of digital media in their everyday lives and how these user-experiences shape global designs and policies.

Payal is the author of 100+ journal articles and award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” (by Harvard Press). Her new book with MIT Press “From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” comes out on September 3, 2024. Forbes called her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ About 150 international media outlets have covered her work, including The BBC, Financial Times, 99% Invisible, Tech Crunch, Invisible Machines, CBC, The Boston Globe, and The Economist.

Payal has consulted for organizations, including UNHCR, Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, and GE. She sits on several boards, including the World Women Global Council in New York and the UNESCO-UNICEF Gateways to Public Digital Learning initiative. She has given more than 350 keynotes and invited talks in 67 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 currently directs the AI ethics section for the EU H2020 project FINDR – Fairness and Intersectional Non-Discrimination in Human Recommendation and is a Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow Alumnus.

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.