Maia Chankseliani

I am honoured to stand as a candidate for the position of Board Member-at-Large of the Comparative and International Education Society. CIES has been central to my intellectual formation and professional life since I joined the Society as a New Scholar in 2011. The support, collegiality, and intellectual openness I encountered during that formative period shaped my early scholarship and established a lasting commitment to service, mentorship, and inclusive scholarly community.

My academic work focuses on international student mobility, higher education policy, and the contribution of education to social and political development. Through collaborative research across diverse contexts, I have come to value comparative and international education as a field that is at its strongest when it combines empirical rigour, attentiveness to meaning and context, and relevance to policy, practice, and institutional decision-making across diverse settings.

Service to the field has been a sustained priority in my career. Within and beyond CIES, I have taken on roles that involve collective governance, editorial responsibility, and academic leadership. These experiences have given me a practical understanding of how professional societies function, how committees sustain scholarly life, and how inclusive leadership can strengthen both participation and the field’s intellectual energy.

If elected to the Board, I would bring three core commitments. First, to strengthen inclusion across CIES by supporting participation from scholars and practitioners based in under-represented regions and institutions. Second, to support the committees and structures that sustain the Society’s scholarly life, ensuring they are effective, transparent, and well supported. Third, I would work to support students and early career researchers, who will shape the future of our field and the Society itself, and for whom CIES can serve as a formative intellectual and professional home. Across these commitments, I see Board service as an opportunity to help CIES remain intellectually open, methodologically plural, and attentive to the conditions that allow diverse forms of scholarship and practice to flourish.