Dr. Amelia Hadfield was also extremely busy over the break, here are her reports from her activities.

Paris Diderot (31st March) : Development Policy and the Commonwealth

This conference examined the role, nature and efficacy of the Commonwealth, from a variety of inter-disciplinary perspectives. Entitled ‘A Commonwealth Approach to Development? Theory, Networks and Outcomes’ this one-day conference was organized and led by Dr Melanie Torrent (Paris Diderot) in Diderot’s new campus on 31st March 2014. Drawing academics from across Europe and Britain, with the support of LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones), SAGE (Sociétés Acteurs Gouvernement en Europe), and publishers Taylor & Francis, the conference examined a variety of political, economic and cultural ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ that have helped to render the Commonwealth as a multifaceted development actor. Dr Amelia Hadfield (Canterbury Christ Church University) presented a paper entitled ‘Re-assessing British influence: development practices in the Commonwealth and the EU’, which provided a comparative look at the expansion of development policy undertaken by the Commonwealth, the degree of ‘soft power’ intrinsic in this approach, the various leading roles played by Britain in supporting the Commonwealth’s overly-discreet quest to become a normative power, and the surprising series of missed opportunities between the Commonwealth and the EU in constructing efficacious development policy.

With the support of The Round Table journal (http://www.moot.org.uk/index.asp), Dr Hadfield will continue to examine the role, relevance and results emerging from the Commonwealth when she travels to Canada at the end of May as a keynote speaker at the Royal Commonwealth Society’s AGM.

Robinson College, Cambridge (10-11 April): The Governance of the Europe of Knowledge

The emergence of the ‘Europe of Knowledge’ has wrought significant changes and challenges for educators and policy-makers alike. This intense two-day workshop brought together a wide range of scholars from across the European Union to examine a variety of pressing issues in these and other areas of European education. Operating as a UACES Collaborative Research Network (CRN) with the support of Robinson College, and organised by Drs Julie Smith and Meng-Hsuan Chou, the participants used five separate sessions to look at various facets of European education, including topics on excellence, mobility, national systems, networking and funding. Along with her co-author Professor Robert Summerby-Murray, of Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University, Halifax Nova Scotia (http://www.dal.ca/), Dr Amelia Hadfield (CCCU) presented the first of two papers entitled ‘Mobility Programmes: Educational Geography, Vocational Demography, or European Demagogy?’ A follow-up to the research presented here at CCCU in November 2013, the paper took a deeper look at the increasing disconnect between pedagogy and post-Eurozone commercial exigencies, and will consider these issues in-depth once again at the UACES Annual Conference in Cork this coming September. With co-author Dr Mary Murphy (University College Cork) Amelia’s second paper examined ‘The Impact of Re-nationalisation of EU Education Policy on the Europe of Knowledge’, focusing upon the increasing differences found across German, Irish and British education sectors.