I am a Professor of the Sociology of Education working in the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. My interests are in critical approaches to development policy and practice with respect to global inequalities. I focus on educational and social differences largely (though not exclusively) through micro-level studies of the intersecting and overlapping social relations of gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, religion, nation and age (youth) with implications for livelihoods, equality and social development locally and globally. I have lived and worked in several countries in the Global South and North which has highlighted for me the sustained work of education in the (re-)production and valorisation of particular colonial 'Western' knowledges that need to be addressed urgently in efforts towards greater global equity. This has significant implications for approaches to development in the explicitly or implicitly interconnected fields of theory, policy and practice as they are imagined by and impact differently on people in different local spaces.