Dr Mario Novelli will be at the GEI as Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow from April to October 2024.

Mario Novelli has been working, in a variety of ways, on the relationship between education, conflict, war and peace for more than two decades. He is currently Professor in the Political Economy of Education at the Centre for International Education (CIE), School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex. He previously worked at the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bristol, working across the disciplines of Education, International development, Geography and Politics. He has also lived, worked and researched in a wide number of conflict affected countries, including Palestine, Colombia, Egypt, South Sudan, Turkey, Nepal, South Africa.

Drawing on the tools of critical political economy his work has focussed on the complexity of the relationship between education and conflict. He has written on issues of peacebuilding and education; peace education; the securitisation of education; education and the war on terror, education and countering extremism, political violence against teachers; the role of social movements and knowledge-making in conflict contexts, and has written a series of pieces that have promoted a critical approach to researching education and conflict. He led the development of the ‘4RS’ (Novelli et al 2017) approach to researching education in conflict affected contexts, which has become widely adopted in the field.

He currently co-leads a major Global Challenge Research Fund Network Plus project that is working with early career researchers in Africa and Central Asia to support the development of critical political economy approaches to researching education in contexts affected by conflict and crisis – the PEER network. He also led an ESRC funded four-country research project exploring the role of education and knowledge-making in social movements in conflict contexts. As a result, the book ‘Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-making in the Global South’, will be published by Pluto Press in January 2024.   

He is also Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal Globalisation, Societies & Education, Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellow, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (2021-2024) and an Associate Academic, at the UNESCO Centre, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He is also a member of the International Council of the ‘Universidad Intercultural de los Pueblos' a social movement university bringing together movements in the South West of Colombia. Further information on his work and publications can be found at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p196279-mario-novelli

GEORG ARNHOLD SENIOR FELLOWSHIP 2024

During the fellowship period he will carry out research and writing on ‘Education, War and Peace: The Geopolitics of Educational Assistance and Interventions in Conflict Contexts’. This project will provide a critical reflection on the relationship between education, conflict, war and peace and the global actors and practitioners that have devised strategies to engage and support education systems in conflict affected contexts. Drawing on more than two decades of engagement in both practice and research, this research of retrospective reflection explores a wide range of issues from refugee education, peacebuilding, de-radicalisation programmes, peace education, and global governance to tell the story of both the challenges and the promises of education’s complex relationship to war and peace and the role and practices of leading global agencies in these processes. It also tells the story of the way this field of practice and research is entangled in global geopolitics and imperial interventions, and how this has shaped its actions and undermined and limited its potential to support social transformation towards peace with social justice.