Karen Lo Eugene Chuang Professorship in Diversity and Equity

Educated at the University of Cambridge and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Professor Liz Jackson worked in educational development in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates before joining the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2012. From 2020-2023, she worked at the Education University of Hong Kong, where she was Head of the Department of International Education. She returned to HKU in 2023.

Professor Jackson is a leading figure in philosophy and global studies of education. She has published 20 books and 200 journal articles and book chapters. Her scholarship has examined religion, culture, race, ethnicity, social class, and gender in societies including Hong Kong and Mainland China, the United States, Bangladesh, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Chile, and Tanzania. She has delivered over 50 invited international lectures and been a visiting professor at several prestigious universities around the world.

Professor Jackson has received over 15 awards for her research. Her single-authored books have been particularly commended. Muslims and Islam in US Education: Reconsidering Multiculturalism (2014) won the HKU Research Output Prize and the Inaugural Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Book Award. Beyond Virtue: The Politics of Educating Emotions (2020) earned the American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award and the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Her other authored books include Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education (2019), Educational Assessment in Tanzania: A Sociocultural Perspective (2020), Contesting Education and Identity in Hong Kong (2021), Corporal Punishment in Preschool and at Home in Tanzania: A Child Rights Challenge (2022), Can the Church Be Decolonized? Holy Cross Education in Bangladesh (2024), and Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice (2024). She has also edited or co-edited several books focused on diversity and equity issues.

Since 2021, Professor Jackson has been on the list of the World’s Top 2% Most Cited Scientists (Stanford University/Elsevier). She has been the Principal Investigator for three General Research Fund (GRF) grants and one Early Career Scheme (ECS) grant which have examined how schools in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China educate students to appreciate local and global diversity.

Professor Jackson was the first woman Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre, the youngest scholar and the first scholar not based in Australia or New Zealand to be elected President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, and the first woman Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Currently, she is President of the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong, Chair for the Special Interest Group on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism of the American Educational Research Association, and a Member of the Ethics and Religious Studies Subject Panel of the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. She has also served in various leadership roles in the Faculty of Education and across the University.