Dr Ren-Hao Xu is a Lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. He is a policy sociologist with research interests in education policy, higher education, comparative and international education, and governance.

His recent research has followed two interconnected trajectories. The first investigates the changing governance of Australian higher education. Working with Professor Andrew Norton, Ren-Hao has examined how Commonwealth-supported places are allocated and enacted within universities, tracing the evolution of policy from the Demand-Driven System and the Job-ready Graduates reforms to the emerging stewardship model led by the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Through this work, he explores how funding policies are translated into institutional decision-making and how new forms of governance reshape relationships between the state and universities.

Running alongside this is a broader theoretical interest in policy mobilities and assemblage theory thinking. Rather than treating education policy as something confined within national borders, Ren-Hao examines how policies, ideas, and governing rationalities travel, become reassembled, and acquire new meanings in different political and institutional contexts. This perspective has informed his research on issues ranging from the influence of AUKUS on Australian higher education, to the global circulation of New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL), and the emergence of new transnational higher education spaces.

These research trajectories have led him towards the geopolitics of higher education. His current work explores how geopolitical imaginaries and processes of political spatialisation shape and reshape "international" higher education. His recent projects investigate topics including the changing geographies of international student (im)mobilities in Australia and beyond, and the strategic movement of university students between Germany and Taiwan as part of Europe's broader pursuit of digital sovereignty.

He welcomes supervision inquiries from potential students who share his research interests, including but not limited to:

• Higher education
• Global education policies
• Comparative and international education
• Sociology of education

Editor of Critical Studies in Education, 2026 -

Editorial Review Board of International Journal of Educational Management, 2026 -

• Co-Investigator: Research Grant Scheme 'The Evolutionary Pathways of Digital Transformation in High School under Double Bind: A Comparative Study of Policy Discourses and Practices in Taiwan, Estonia, and Singapore [NSTC 115-2410-H-003-042-MY3], National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan, $186,345 AUD, 2026-2029
• Co-Investigator: Research small grant for publication, National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan, $6,500 AUD, 2025.
• Chief-Investigator: Early Career Researcher Grant, National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan, $29,000 AUD, 2024.
• UWA Graduate School of Education Early Career Research Award, $2,500 AUD, 2024.

EDUC5616 International and Comparative Education

EDUC5658 Globalising Education Policy

EDUC5659 Higher Education: Past, Present, and Future

EDUC5519 Contemporary Issues and Reforms in Education

EDUC5111 Theory and Practice in Tertiary Teaching