QeRN Weekly — week 2026-W24
A quiet but telling week. No new contributor essays landed, so this edition leans on the curation desk — and the reading converged on one thread: institutions across the Global South shifting from consuming knowledge infrastructure to building it. In higher education, in AI policy, in capital markets, the pattern is the same: less commentary, more plumbing.
This week
AI for Skills Development in Higher Education (2025–2026)
UNESCO's programme with Saint Joseph University of Beirut takes the unglamorous route to AI in universities: governance frameworks, staff capacity, and human-centred integration rather than tool-of-the-month adoption. It matters because institutional absorption — not access — is where most education technology efforts fail, and this is a working template for doing it deliberately.
How the Global South is reimagining the future of AI
A survey of AI initiatives across the Global South that have moved from consumer posture to builder posture — local models, local data governance, local talent pipelines. This is the Knowledge That Benefits thesis observed in the wild: the question is no longer whether these societies will use AI, but whether they will own any of it.
Islamic finance 2.0: tokenisation and the evolution of sukuk markets in the GCC
Foreign-currency sukuk issuance has passed $100bn and tokenisation is moving from pilot to practice. What was a novelty instrument in 2005 is now institutional plumbing — and the interesting questions have shifted from permissibility to market structure, settlement, and who writes the standards.
From the archive, reframed
Feminism is the Feeling of Being Safe — Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
From 2012: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's Oscar, read at the time as a case study in what a society gains when it owns the means of telling its own stories. Fourteen years on, swap 'film' for 'AI models' and the argument is this week's WEF feature almost verbatim. Owning the means of representation was the rehearsal; owning the means of computation is the performance.
That's the week. If you want the full curation list — including what didn't make the cut and why it's still worth your time — the Insider edition carries it every week. Subscribe at qern.org.