This exploratory study proposes a “Textures of Exclusion” framework to challenge the Western-centric “glass ceiling” metaphor by examining how intersectional power dynamics materialise gendered inequality in Asian higher education. Drawing on 36 biographical narrative interviews with women academics in Japan (n = 15), China (n = 9), and Malaysia (n = 5), supplemented by a comparative cohort (n = 7), we employ reflexive thematic analysis to map embodied experiences onto a material typology of paper, bamboo, and concrete. The analysis foregrounds three material textures: the suffocating “air” of homosocial normativity (Paper ceiling, Japan); the predatory “elasticity” of neoliberal metrics (Bamboo ceiling, China); and institutionally hardened ethnic-political boundaries in parts of the Malaysian material (Concrete texture). A “Resilience Paradox” emerges, whereby extraordinary individual agency inadvertently subsidises institutional inertia by privatising structural burdens. Shifting from visual metaphors of transparency to haptic metaphors of texture, this article offers a de-Westernised diagnostic tool for feminist institutionalism. We demonstrate that genuine equity requires moving beyond empowerment rhetoric to dismantle the specific material architectures extracting women’s invisible labour. As an exploratory qualitative inquiry based on purposive sampling, this study does not claim statistical generalisability to the broader population of women academics in these regions; rather, it offers an analytically transferable framework whose explanatory potential should be tested across broader Asian contexts, larger samples, and among gender-diverse scholars in future research.
This study addresses the collaborative work of school leaders to develop a team to serve at a diverse Hong Kong secondary school. The study draws from culturally responsive leadership theory to understand how school leaders supported educators in a diverse student-serving institution while facing contextual challenges such as limited citywide training in diversity and teacher attrition, a high-stakes environment, and public stigmatization. The study was developed from a dataset from a greater in-depth case study. The findings shed light on collaborative strategies leaders developed to create a pipeline at their school to shape a teaching team that can support diverse students. At the same time, the findings present the greater mechanisms that complicate such work. The study has implications for how leaders can be supported through policy in postcolonial and high-stakes contexts where educators need competencies to support localized conditions for diversity. Theoretically, the implications highlight the relevance of learning from global perspectives and collaborative practices to deepen our understanding of culturally responsive leadership and similar equity approaches.
Critiques of educational technology that draw on platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism tend to presume that authority over knowledge lies in markets, professions, and institutions, which platforms must reach from outside. This article proposes the concept of sovereign platformization for a different configuration, in which state agencies gather the capacities to authorize, evaluate, and certify knowledge into platform infrastructure they build, procure, or regulate. Official recognition of learning then comes to depend on that infrastructure. The concept is limited to platforms whose outputs carry official standing. It treats the state as a set of heterogeneous agencies and local authorities whose systems converge with those of firms at the point of recognition. Recent developments in China, Japan, and South Korea illustrate how platforms approach the threshold of official recognition and, in South Korea, cross it and later fall below it. A reading of the Han Feizi situates this development within a longer shift from binding interpreters to the state toward substituting for them. Substitution gives platform outputs presumptive authority, so that teachers’ judgment enters as correction, exception, or appeal. The concept identifies what this arrangement puts at risk: a position from which teachers and learners can judge knowledge independently of the infrastructure that records it.
Contemporary society is marked by increasing fragmentation, ecological crisis, and the dominance of instrumental and consumer-oriented values, which have weakened meaningful relationships among human beings, nature, and the wider world. In response, holistic education has emerged as an important educational alternative that emphasizes interconnectedness, wholeness, and the harmonious development of human capacities. This study examines the philosophical meaning of holistic education through the perspectives of John Amos Comenius, John Dewey, and contemporary ecological sustainability. Comenius highlights spiritual wholeness and the unity of creation through pansophic education, while Dewey emphasizes growth through experience, inquiry, and democratic participation. Ecological sustainability extends holistic education by stressing interdependence, coexistence, and responsibility within human and ecological communities. Despite their differences, these perspectives share a commitment to relationality, integration, and the overcoming of fragmented understandings of human existence. The study argues that holistic education provides an integrative framework that connects spirituality and experience, self and community, humanity and nature, thereby offering meaningful guidance for contemporary educational theory and practice.
