Conference Program

This paper examines transnational education as a micro-space of democracy within contexts of political transition, uncertainty and systemic educational reform. Drawing on a reflexive, practice-based case study of a UK-Uzbekistan university partnership, it explores how democratic participation and agency are materially produced through curriculum co-design, inclusive pedagogy, and the everyday organisation of access, support, academic freedom and safe spaces within a multilingual, multicultural, non-western institutional context (Council of Europe, 2025; QAA, 2023; Collins, 2019). Rather than treating democracy as an assumed outcome of access, the paper conceptualises micro-democracy as a routine intentional alignment with democratic values, enacted across the full student and institutional lifecycle (Vazquez Garcia et al., 2025; Demirbolat, n.d.).

Uzbekistan’s 2030 reform agenda has strategically positioned widening participation as a central element of social cohesion and democratic renewal (Presidential Decree No. UP-158, 2023; Government of Uzbekistan, 2022). This followed decades of highly uneven access to higher education shaped by geographical, geopolitical, socioeconomic, and gender-based inequalities. These structural inequalities had historically constrained the capacity of higher education to foster participation, social mobility, and democratic engagement, particularly for students from rural regions and underprivileged backgrounds and for women in particular. In simple terms, education was not functioning as an enabler for social mobility but rather as an elite opportunity.

Against this backdrop, a partnership between a UK and an Uzbek university was established through the co-design of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes via a hands-on collaborative and participatory work that deliberately avoided “best practices” or a “pre-defined equilibrium”. The degree of unpredictability with regards to the outcome was embraced by all actors while the anchor was common: the creation of non-western, globally relevant decolonial curricula. The initiative was informed by the UK University’s purpose of creating a better society through education, underpinned by social justice, while supporting each individual and encouraging collective engagement. It was also closely aligned with the local context and national reform priorities, while remaining carefully contextualised to the contemporary Uzbek environment. Democratic participation, in this case, was materially produced through partnership and pedagogical intentionality of programme design, operating as a form of resistance to historically exclusionary higher education structures

This paper illustrates the ways in which transnational education can function as a democratic micro-space, a vehicle for social justice and transformative learning, through a holistic approach to inclusivity and democratic engagement for students and local academics (QAA, 2023; Council of Europe, 2025). It presents a context-sensitive anti-linear approach to transnational higher education practice showcasing resistance to past territorial inequality in access to higher education which was structurally aligned with a de facto stratification within nominally egalitarian systems. The paper contributes to debates on democracy and education, by theorising micro-democracy as relational practice produced through partnership, under conditions of change and constraint, rather than as an assumed outcome of access alone.