The 17th Asian Conference on Education (ACE2025)
November 23-28, 2025 | Toshi Center Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, and Online
Welcome to The 17th Asian Conference on Education (ACE2025), held in partnership with the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, Japan.
ACE2025 encourages academics and scholars to meet and exchange ideas and views in an international forum stimulating respectful dialogue. This event will afford an exceptional opportunity for renewing old acquaintances, making new contacts, networking, and facilitating partnerships across national and disciplinary borders.
Since its founding in 2009, IAFOR has brought people and ideas together in a variety of events and platforms to promote and celebrate interdisciplinary study, and underline its importance. IAFOR continues to engage in many cross-sectoral projects across the world, including those engaging leading universities (Virginia Tech, UCL, Singapore Management University, University of Belgrade, Lingnan University, Barcelona University, University of Hawai’i, Moscow State University), think tanks, research organisations and agencies (the East-West Center, The Center for Higher Education Research, The World Intellectual Property Organization), as well as collaborative projects with governments and international governmental organisations (Government of Japan through the Prime Minister’s office, the United Nations in New York) and media agencies (The Wall Street Journal, JWT, HarperCollins).
With the IAFOR Research Centre at Osaka University, we have engaged in a number of interdisciplinary initiatives we believe will have an important impact on domestic and international public policy conversations and outcomes.
IAFOR's unique global platform facilitates discussion around specific subject areas, with the goal of generating new knowledge and understanding, forging and expanding new international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research networks and partnerships. We have no doubt that ACE2025 will offer a remarkable opportunity for the sharing of research and best practice and for the meeting of people and ideas.
We look forward to seeing you in Tokyo and online!
– The ACE2025 Programme Committee
- Venue & Location: Toshi Center Hotel, Tokyo, Japan
- Dates: Sunday, November 23, 2025 to Friday, November 28, 2025
- Early Bird Abstract Submission Deadline: June 20, 2025*
- Final Abstract Submission Deadline: August 22, 2025
- Registration Deadline for Presenters: October 03, 2025
*Submit early to take advantage of the discounted registration rates. Learn more about our registration options.
IAFOR's Conference Themes for 2025-2029
Our four themes can be seen as standalone themes, but they are also very much in conversation with each other. Themes may be seen as corollaries, complementary, or in opposition/juxtaposition with each other. The themes can be considered as widely as possible and are designed, in keeping with our mission, to encourage ideas across the disciplines.
About ACE
Over the years, the Asian Conference on Education (ACE) has brought together thousands of passionate scholars and educators from around the globe to discuss ideas critical to the development of education in Asia and beyond, making it one of the most respected, and longest running annual conferences focused on all levels of education in Asia.
ACE was the first conference organised by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) in Osaka in 2009, when the organisation was founded. To date, some 40,000 academics have attended an IAFOR conference, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Europe or North America.
Founded in Japan at a time when academic conferences held in English did not exist (outside those organised by professional associations dedicated to English language teaching), IAFOR quickly found support for these among a growing number of scholars in Japan, Asia, and beyond. Participants came together to make friends, network, and, at a time of rapid globalisation and technological advances, explore the latest ideas. The conferences also encouraged the search for research synergies in the pursuit of addressing and finding solutions to many of the myriad and complex challenges presented by the modern world.
IAFOR now has university partners across the globe, counts some of the world’s foremost intellectuals as advisers, and boasts an interdisciplinary research centre in Osaka University’s School of International Public Policy. The organisation also has a conference program that spans three continents, and in a divided world, IAFOR’s founding principles of nurturing ideas, individuals and research projects across barriers of nation, culture, and discipline are more timely than ever.
About IAFOR’s Education Conferences
IAFOR promotes and facilitates new multifaceted approaches to one of the core issues of our time, namely globalisation and its many forms of growth and expansion. Awareness of how it cuts across the world of education, and its subsequent impact on societies, institutions and individuals, is a driving force in educational policies and practices across the globe. IAFOR’s conferences on education have these issues at their core. The conferences present those taking part with three unique dimensions of experience, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion, facilitating heightened intercultural awareness and promoting international exchange. In short, IAFOR’s conferences on education are about change, transformation and social justice. As IAFOR’s previous conferences on education have shown, education has the power to transform and change whilst it is also continuously transformed and changed.
Globalised education systems are becoming increasingly socially, ethnically and culturally diverse. However, education is often defined through discourses embedded in Western paradigms as globalised education systems become increasingly determined by dominant knowledge economies. Policies, practices and ideologies of education help define and determine ways in which social justice is perceived and acted out. What counts as "education" and as "knowledge" can appear uncontestable but is in fact both contestable and partial. Discourses of learning and teaching regulate and normalise gendered and classed, racialised and ethnicised understandings of what learning is and who counts as a learner.
In many educational settings and contexts throughout the world, there remains an assumption that teachers are the possessors of knowledge which is to be imparted to students, and that this happens in neutral, impartial and objective ways. However, learning is about making meaning, and learners can experience the same teaching in very different ways. Students (as well as teachers) are part of complex social, cultural, political, ideological and personal circumstances, and current experiences of learning will depend in part on previous ones, as well as on age, gender, social class, culture, ethnicity, varying abilities and more.
IAFOR has several annual conferences on education across the world, exploring common themes in different ways to develop a shared research agenda which develops interdisciplinary discussion, heightens intercultural awareness and promotes international exchange.
About IAFOR
"Inspiring Global Collaborations"
Founded in 2009, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) is a mission-driven politically independent non-partisan and non-profit organisation dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary discussion, facilitating intercultural awareness and promoting international exchange, principally through educational interaction and academic research. Based in Japan, its main administrative office is in Nagoya, and its research centre is in the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), a graduate school of Osaka University. IAFOR runs research programs and events in partnership with universities, think tanks, and other associations. Through its international, intercultural and interdisciplinary conferences, research, and publications, IAFOR is a network hub for interdisciplinary discussion across Asia and beyond.
Read more about IAFOR.