Professor Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela 

IAS Fellow at University College, October - December 2025

Contact Details

• Home Institution email: carolina.guzman.uta@gmail.com 
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela is Serra Hunter Fellow in the Faculty of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Tarapacá in Chile. Previously, she was a full professor of higher education at the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the Universidad de Tarapacá. She has a background in psychology (University of Valparaíso, Chile) and a PhD in education (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain). 

For more than fifteen years, Professor Guzmán-Valenzuela's research has focused on the evolving role of universities in the twenty-first century, with a particular emphasis on Latin America and Chile. Her work covers five main areas:

1. Global higher education, internationalisation and neo-liberalism,
2. the North-South divide in the production of knowledge
3. The public/private divide in the provision of higher education as a public good,
4. Epistemic (in)justice, social inequalities and stratification processes in tertiary education systems,
5. Theorisation of qualitative research, especially in the context of education and social sciences.

Professor Guzmán-Valenzuela's intellectual contributions are framed by an interdisciplinary approach that integrates sociology, education, political theory, geography, psychology and philosophy. She has developed a conceptual framework around the 'transformative university', a public institution engaged in social transformation. Her work also addresses collective agency, the public sphere and social justice, drawing on decolonial theories to critically examine knowledge production in higher education. She is currently leading a project focusing on the decolonisation of universities in Latin America. 

She has consistently secured competitive research funding totalling around £700,000 and has led numerous funded research projects over the past decade. Her research employs diverse methodologies with cross-national applicability.

Professor Guzmán-Valenzuela actively extends the reach of her scholarship by contributing to cutting-edge books and international journals. Since 2011, she has published more than 40 papers in leading journals, and she has contributed more than 10 chapters to books. Her most recent co-edited book is The Bloomsbury Handbook of Student Voice in Higher Education (2024).

Professor Guzmán-Valenzuela is a globally recognised scholar with academic networks in Europe, the UK, USA, South Africa and Latin America. She has presented over 30 papers at international conferences and frequently collaborates with colleagues from around the world.

She has also made significant contributions to high-impact research and public engagement. Her current involvement with the International Association of Universities (IAU) Expert Group on Open Science underlines her commitment to promoting open knowledge and advancing global education policy.

As an IAS Fellow, she will work with Professor Catherine Montgomery (Education) and Dr Craig Stewart (Computer Science) on a project exploring the knowledge and impact of doctoral research produced in UK universities. The project aims to reconceptualise doctoral research as a critical site for the creation of new knowledge and to explore its potential contribution to research capacity in academia and the wider scientific community. This work will involve organising interdisciplinary seminars and workshops, working with colleagues from different departments and schools to explore knowledge production and its global implications. She also plans to engage with non-academic communities to apply research to address local challenges. Through international research initiatives and partnerships, she aims to extend the reach of the project by working with Durham's global networks.

Events

TBC