Dr Will Brehm

Position

Associate Professor - Education

Contact details

E: Will.Brehm@canberra.edu.au
T: +61 2 62015699
L: Building 6 Room D08

Click to view Dr Will Brehm's Research profile

Biography

Dr. Will Brehm is an Associate Professor in Comparative and International Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan) and an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia). He supports various international organizations, such as the World Bank and UNESCO, on education-related projects and research.

Will holds a Ph.D. in comparative and international education from the University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining the University of Canberra, he worked at the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and the University College London.

Will’s research interrogates the intersection of comparative and international education with international relations and the political economy of development, focused primarily on the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia. A focus on history generally and the methodology of historical materialism specifically are the threads that tie together the different areas of his research. His research career began with a focus on the history of the field of comparative and international education, detailing the ways in which specific individuals and institutions were influenced by US geopolitics during the Cold War.

In Southeast Asia, Will's research first focused on Cambodia where he explored, both before and during his doctoral studies, various issues of social injustice and education inequality resulting from the system of shadow education, also known as private supplementary tutoring. His interests in Cambodia focused primarily on the ways in which cultural norms dovetailed with development efforts in the 1990s to produce the conditions under which private tutoring became necessary and acceptable, despite the inequality that it produced. This research is pulled together in his award-winning book entitled Cambodia for Sale (2021, Routledge), which was called a 'pathbreaking inquiry.'

The next stage of Will's research career focused on the inverse of his previous interests in Cambodia while also looking comparatively across countries: instead of exploring how history determined the present, Will shifted to the way in which the present interprets history. This research strand focused on the development of a regional identity through education systems across five countries in the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia. It explored the struggles between regional and national identities by looking at the process of history curriculum design at the regional level inside UNESCO Bangkok and at the national level inside five ministries of education. This work was pulled together in a co-edited collection published by Teachers College Press entitled Memory in the Mekong (2022). He continued this thread of work by co-editing the book Education and Power in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023).

Will is also known for the podcast he created and hosts called FreshEd. The podcast focuses on new educational research and is a valuable teaching resource used in over 100 universities, reaching an audience in over 180 countries. Episodes have been downloaded almost 1 million times.