Karen Evans
Karen Evans has contributed to adult and continuing education as an adult educator, author, researcher, and academic leader over the course of five decades. Now emeritus professor of education at University College London (UCL), she has throughout her career brought fresh approaches and understanding to the relationships between human agency and adult learning, to work with youth, to lifelong education and international development, and to workplace and professional learning.
Evans joined the UCL Institute of Education in 2001 and served as head of the School of Lifelong Education and International Development from 2001 to 2005. Among many responsibilities and achievements at UCL over the following fifteen years, she directed inter-disciplinary research programs in the Centre for Learning and Life Chances (LLAKES), demonstrating how lifelong learning can reshape lives. She also established innovative work-learn-educate initiatives for post-qualification professional learning.
Evans’s most notable recent contribution to the field of adult education is building research partnerships that rethink the scope and mission of lifelong learning across Asia-Europe. Under her leadership as coordinator of the Asia-Europe Education and Research Hub for Lifelong Learning (ASEM-LLL), a network of cooperating Asian and European universities, active membership of the core research network on workplace learning expanded to ten Asia-Pacific and eleven European countries. Her efforts have influenced research and policy agendas throughout the region, from at Singapore’s Institute for Adult Learning to Latvia University’s Doctoral School initiative on Human Capacity and Learning in Life and Work.
As UCL emerita since 2016, Evans has continued to play leading roles in LLAKES and ASEM-LLL, publishing extensively and mentoring others in support of vigorous futures for international lifelong learning. Her recent publications include the Third International Handbook of Lifelong Learning (2023), for which she served as editor in chief. The landmark volume gives new impetus to lifelong learning to develop beyond discourses that previously framed its development.
Evans is also coeditor of the Sage Handbook of Learning and Work (2022), coauthor of How Non-Permanent Workers Learn and Develop (2019), and coeditor of Youth and Work Transitions in Changing Social Landscapes (2013), among many other publications. She serves as joint editor of the Springer Book Series on Lifelong Learning.
Evans’s PhD, completed at the University of Surrey while she served as an adult education tutor-organizer, explores why young industrial workers were demonstrably underserved by adult education. After earning her doctorate, she developed comparative perspectives on learning in life and work transitions. Her landmark comparative study on agency in young adult transitions produced internationally renowned work on bounded agency in the interplay of life, work, and adult learning in changing social landscapes.
Over the course of her career, Evans has held influential fellowships and visiting professorships, from a Commonwealth of Learning fellowship in Vancouver in the 1990s to visiting scholar and advisory roles in the Asia-Pacific region. Her dedication to deepening the connectivity of adult education and lifelong learning was recognized with the European Commission’s outstanding researcher award in 2017.