Understanding Academic Culture in Uzbekistan

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Full title: "Understanding Academic Culture in Uzbekistan: Possible Cognitive Challenges Towards the Internationalization of the Country's Higher Education"
UA CMES Fall 2021 Colloquium Series
Filmed by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies on December 8th, 2021
www.cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium
Ulugbek Azizov, Rector, Uzbekistan State University of World Languages
Recently, Uzbekistan’s higher education sector has been criticized for its failure in moving towards Western education models for the last 27 years. The Uzbekistani government is now pursuing the policy of improving the country’s presence in various world university rankings by 2030. Based on this policy, Uzbekistani university teachers are now required to increase their publications in international peer-reviewed journals. The present talk critically analyzes possible cognitive challenges towards the policy of internationalization of Uzbekistan’s higher education. In so doing, it assumes and empirically demonstrates that requiring from Uzbekistani university teachers to start publishing in international peer-reviewed journals is not just a political/administrative problem, but a cultural one. To verify this assumption, the talk employs a cognitive metaphor analysis to interpret how the “ustoz” and “shogird” metaphors govern Uzbekistani university teachers’ thoughts and actions, and while doing so, demonstrates how these metaphors hinder the process of internationalization of Uzbekistan’s higher education.