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Sangeeta Kamat, international education professor and program coordinator in the College of Education, was recently elected vice president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), a scholarly organization that studies educational issues, trends and policies through comparative, intercultural and international perspectives.

The society, founded in 1956 in the U.S., comprises more than 4,000 individual members – researchers, analysts, practitioners and students – and represents over 1,000 universities, research institutes, government departments, non-governmental organizations and multilateral agencies worldwide. CIES members examine the world’s educational issues, trends and policies, with a goal of promoting teaching, research and publication of comparative and international education.

Kamat also serves as Grace Lee Boggs Faculty Fellow at the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research in the College of Education. A scholar of globalization and education reform, critical theory, gender analysis and educational discourse, she earned her doctorate in social and comparative analysis of education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998.

Her research has been featured in several books, including “Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India,” which she wrote, and “Education and Development in a Global Era: Strategies for ‘Successful Globalisation,’” which she co-authored.

As inspiration, she cites “the extraordinary work” of numerous community-based organizations in India and other developing nations, saying, “Their tireless efforts to articulate an alternative discourse of development have informed my research questions and methods.”

More information about the CEIS can be found at http://www.cies.us/.