Higher Education in the Arab Region (HEWG)

Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

Inequality of Opportunity in Access to Higher Education in Egypt and Jordan: Exploring the Role of Socioeconomic Status Over Time

Ragui Assaad is the Freeman Chair in International Economic Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He is a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum and a member of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. Assaad’s research focuses on labor markets and human development in the Arab World, with a focus on youth and gender issues as they relate to education, transition from school-to-work, labor force participation, job creation, poverty, informality, migration, and family formation. Over the past 27 years, he has led the design and implementation of the Economic Research Forum’s Labor Market Panel Surveys, a series of nationally-representative longitudinal surveys of labor market conditions in Arab countries, all of which are currently available as public use microsamples from the ERF data portal.

American University in Cairo

Project 1: Addressing AI in Education Critically for the Arab Region and for Arabs in the diaspora

Project 2: Promoting a Culturally Relevant Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in the MENA Region & Arabs in the Diaspora

Maha Bali, professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK, an MEd in eLearning from the University of Sheffield, and a BSc in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. She writes and speaks frequently on social justice and care in education, open and digital education, and critical AI literacies. She blogs at http://blog.mahabali.me

University of Bern

Entrepreneurship and the University

I am a social anthropologist who currently works as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. I received my PhD in anthropology from Boston University in 2021 and my MA from the American University in Cairo in 2010. My doctoral research examined the production of class and national identities in and around private international schools in Egypt. My book, based on this work, is forthcoming with State University of New York Press in 2026 as part of the Series Education in Global Perspective. More broadly, my research and publication focus on issues of cultural politics, identity and belonging, class and inequality in Egypt.

Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Higher Education in the Midst of Violence: Protracted Refugeehood and Precarious Futures

Mai Abu Moghli is an Assistant Professor at the Human Rights Program of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Her main fields of specialization include critical human rights and critical development studies, comparative and international education and education in emergencies and refugee studies with a focus on the Arabic-speaking countries. Her current research focuses on academic freedoms in higher education institutions, decolonizing higher education, and critical research ethics.  Dr. Abu Moghli has published numerous academic articles as well as op-eds in policy journals, media outlets, and academic blogs targeting a broader audience, including in the Nation, NORRAG and INEE, MERIP , Al Shabaka, and the New Arab . She is featured in a number of podcasts: FreshEd, Taqarob  and Al Sharq.