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Hany Zayed

Dr. Zayed is a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Having recently completed his doctoral studies, his dissertation titled "The 'Digital Transformation' of Egyptian Secondary Education: From Technological Reason to Technological Realism" offers a critical sociology of education and technology. It moves away from idealized visions and utopian promises of positive technological transformations, examining instead the empirical realities, unintended consequences, and politics of techno-educational reforms within their political-economic and socio-historical contexts.

Drawing on fifteen months of digital ethnographic fieldwork, including field interviews, event observations, content analysis, and digital social research, his work reveals how digital technologies facilitate the platformization of education. This process integrates transnational private actors into public education, dissipates the pedagogical functions of schools, pushes for an individualized form of learning, and generates copious amounts of data that are utilized in state dataveillance and surveillance capitalism.

Dr. Zayed has a growing track record of scholarly publications and international conferences. His works include "The Political Economy of Revolution: Karl Polanyi in Tahrir Square" in the Journal of Theory, Culture and Society, and "Researching Digital Sociality: Using WhatsApp to Study Educational Change" in the Journal of Digital Social Research.

During his time at the Center for Global Studies, Dr. Zayed will be working on research and publications on digital education with faculty mentors. He will also provide guest lectures and research presentations.

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Melissa Whatley

Dr. Melissa Whatley is assistant professor of international and global education at SIT Graduate Institute. Her research applies quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to improve our understanding of policies and practices that impact access and equity in U.S. international education, particularly in the community college context.

Dr. Whatley will be observing the International Studies Research Lab as part of her broader research into and collaboration with community college international educators. 

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Yasuyo Inoue

Yasuyo Inoue is a professor of library science at Dokkyo University, Saitama, Japan.  Her current research focuses on how the relationship between the US (especially American Library Association) and Japan impacted the education and training of librarians in post-war Japan, especially the professionalization of children’s and Young Adult librarians.  There were several well-known donation programs during the period of occupation, such as the CARE project, the Silver-Bell children’s library (which later became the Hiroshima prefecture library), and children’s services at the American Library (CIE library), but the process of education and training of library staff to become professional children’s librarians has been little studied. One example is Keio Library School, which hosted ALA professionals to teach children’s services and YA services for several years. Carnegie foundation sent a list of children’s books as a model collection attached to this teaching program, but no content of the list is known. As a CGS/UIUC visiting scholar, Prof. Inoue will be conducting research at the ALA archive at UIUC, the Carnegie foundation archive at NYC, and the National Archive at Maryland.