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

The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) is pleased to announce our keynote addresses at the 2025 CIES annual conference, with the theme Envisioning Education in a Digital Society (March 22-26, 2025 in Chicago, IL) will be given by Prof. Payal Arora (Utrecht University) and Michael Trucano (Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Senior Advisor at the AI in Education Observatory, Vice Chair of Digital Promise and Co-Chair of the Global Reference Group on Technology in Education at the Global Partnership for Education, on sabbatical leave from the World Bank).

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. 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.

Michael Trucano is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Senior Advisor at the AI in Education Observatory, Vice Chair of Digital Promise and Co-Chair of the Global Reference Group on Technology in Education at the Global Partnership for Education, on sabbatical leave from the World Bank. His work explores issues related to effective and ethical uses of new technologies in education. Current areas of inquiry include generative artificial intelligence in education, and, more broadly, emerging edtech policies, initiatives, and institutions after the pandemic.

Trucano joined Brookings after a distinguished 26-year career at the World Bank, where he provided policy advice, research, and technical assistance to governments integrating new technologies into their education systems. He has been involved in large-scale educational technology initiatives in over 70 countries, including China, India, South Korea, Uruguay, the United States, and many countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. He most recently served as the World Bank’s global lead for technology and innovation in education for eight years and co-founded its edtech team, which supported remote learning programs during COVID-19 school closures. He co-authored the World Bank’s edtech strategy, Imagining Human Connections, led research under SABER-ICT, edited a working paper series, and co-authored a book on Getting Textbooks to Every Child in Sub-Saharan Africa. Trucano is known for his expertise in developing national edtech policies and building related government agencies, as well as his work on standards for globally comparable data, technology use to support teaching, evaluating the impact of technology in education, educational publishing, digital learning resources, edtech startups, and digital safety, privacy, and ethics. He also helped found initiatives like the EdTech Hub and the mEducation Alliance and serves on the board of Digital Promise.

A frequent public speaker and interview subject, Trucano is quoted in publications such as The Economist, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and The Verge. He was the principal voice behind the World Bank’s influential EduTech blog, authoring over 200 articles on global trends in technology use in education, including Worst practice in ICT use in education. He regularly moderates conferences and industry events, such as the annual global symposium on ICT and education in Seoul, which he helped establish in 2007, and the Education World Forum. Trucano is also known for organizing efforts to share lessons from “failed” projects to increase the likelihood of future success.

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.