Liz Jackson

Sinophobia has become normalised and increasingly acceptable in Hong Kong in recent decades. Such Sinophobia intersects with aims of protecting what is local in the society, as seen in Hong Kong news media. This paper first explores the concept of Sinophobia. It then provides a background on Sinophobia in Hong Kong, explaining the tensions between the identities of Hong Kong/hongkongers and Mainland China/mainland Chinese. After elaborating on the role of media and the nature of local media in Hong Kong, this paper examines Sinophobic, stereotypical and quasi-racist discourse in three major Hong Kong news sources. While respecting Hong Kong heritage is a valuable goal, the Sinophobia accompanying some such aims can be seen to fuel hatred among people. In this context, encouraging a more inclusive and reflective discourse is warranted to work against the pitfalls of Sinophobia as a particular form of xenophobia in Hong Kong.

ABSTRACT Gratitude has recently received increasing scholarly attention as a moral value and virtue important for individual and social functioning and therefore worth cultivating in schools. However, previous research has often been based on experiences in western societies, while moral values and moral cultivation are understood in different ways across cultural contexts. This exploratory qualitative study examines teachers’ conceptions of gratitude and their experiences of cultivating gratitude in schools in mainland China. Based on semi-structured interviews, the findings highlight Chinese teachers’ culturally distinctive conceptions of gratitude and its cultivation, namely its role in developing relationships and maintaining social harmony, and the importance of acts of reciprocity. This empirical study develops a more substantive cross-cultural understanding of the nature of gratitude and practices of moral cultivation in schools.

Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neo-liberal globalization. According to such views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own. When applied to the contemporary issue of alleviating child poverty, it seems such emotions are both appropriate and easily developed through education. However, emotional appeals increasing a sense of urgency regarding such a dire issue should not necessarily be prioritized in the face of competing possibilities. Emotions can be difficult to develop, regulate, and sustain. Their appropriate expression and application in global contexts can be problematic, as people’s valuation and understanding of feelings varies across societies. Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and compassion and rational duty to social justice. This article examines competing views on education for understanding and responding to child poverty, and defends post-humanitarian imaginaries and the possibility of non-relational care ethics. Care, compassion, empathy, and emotion may be involved in learning about child poverty, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in such grave matters of social injustice.

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education researc...

Immanuel Kant is often viewed by educational theorists as an individualist, who put education on “an individual track,” paving the way for political liberal conceptions of education such as that of John Rawls. One can easily find evidence for such a view, in “Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” as well as in his more metaphysical, moral inquiries. However, the place of reason in Kant’s philosophy––what I call the “autonomy of reason”––spells out a negative rather than positive conception of freedom, from which stems a less individualistic or political liberal education than many presume. I cite both well known and lesser known works in the essay to demonstrate that Kant defended universal freedom only as a means towards developing the “autonomy of reason”, and I consider comparatively the education it entails with that spelled out by Rawls, despite the common conflation of the two.

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education research as well as anecdotal evidence, relating these experiences to the theories. It thus aims to tie together theoretical insights, higher education scholarship, and ordinary real-life experiences of gendered social relations in conference activities.

In this paper, I continue a conversation initiated by Barbara Applebaum on how to manage irreconcilable difference, harmful language or ‘words that wound’ and various implications of power in the classroom. Referencing emerging works on the nature of speech and silence, classroom power and queer identity, I pose three questions to Applebaum in order to continue thinking through the timely situations with which she grapples. What is the nature of reasonableness is the classroom setting? Must speech reflect power; and silence, oppression? In what ways does the nature of sexual identification further complicate Applebaum's scenario and similar situations many of us face in teaching about diversity in public settings? In exploring these questions, I hope to add to the conversations on speech and power in the classroom as framed by Applebaum, Megan Boler and John Petrovic, among others.

It is not unusual to hear philosophers of education today describe the field as global. But in what sense is philosophy of education global? In this article, I analyze how and to what extent philosophy of education can be understood as a global field. The article argues that how we conceptualize philosophy of education as a global field (or not) makes a difference for how we conduct and evaluate scholarship, engage and collaborate with others, and consider the strengths and possibilities of the field, as well as its challenges. Overall, I justify a critically reflective approach to thinking about philosophy of education as a global field. I identify opportunities to strengthen global engagement, awareness, and diversity in relation to scholarly norms and values, while also examining pitfalls, obstacles, and risks, and some strategies for tackling challenges faced. I contend here that there are many senses in which philosophy of education is (or can be) global. But not all of these senses are entirely positive. And, in some instances, the globalization of philosophy of education requires scrutiny rather than celebration.

Some may say the rise of parochial, sectarian populism has indicated a failure of civic education. On the other hand, it might be said to demonstrate the increasing power of some alternative forms of education. This paper hopes to shed light on how ordinary people learn in ways and through means that are at odds with the experiences of scholars and elites. To do so it explores the intersections of education, technology, and social mobility, to highlight how people learn social class, and learn in classed ways outside schools. In contrast to the dream of information liberty, this article considers how online media is marked by private control of information, often retracing and broadening gaps between social classes. The article provides a theoretical understanding of the relationship between technology and education and the linkages of class and media consumption. It then integrates these topics by exploring how online learning through segmented social media operates to reproduce class and facilitate and mobilize sectarianism. This paper concludes with a recommendation for more focus on the study of class by philosophers interested in education for democracy and social justice.

This special issue includes a series of interviews with the past women presidents of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), including Felicity Haynes, Nesta Devine, Tina Besley, and Liz Jackson. This article sets the stage for reading the interviews, though an extended dialogue between the two authors of this project. In what follows, the authors reflect on insights gleaned from the interviews, and the past and future of women leadership in philosophy of education. Using a dialogical format, it highlights different experiences and similar challenges across generations, questions what has changed versus what has stayed the same over decades, and elaborates on the value of the interviews for readers coming from different academic generations and subject positions. It reflects on the state of the field and its future directions from the perspectives of two women philosophers working and thinking across generations.

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose (and do not categorise under forced headings) diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience.

Experience and subjectivity influence how texts are read, with reading involving “filling in the blanks”. This impacts the usefulness of intercoder reliability exercises in collaborative textbook analysis. Specifically, scholars’ individual backgrounds limit possibilities for substantive and meaningful intercoder reliability, particularly in international, cross-cultural, and multicultural settings. In this case, reliability is a problematic goal in textbook content analysis, possibly precluding substantive recognition of reader subjectivity—of researchers as well as students and teachers. In contrast, we argue that collaboration in textbook research can reveal the multifaceted nature of texts and generate multi-perspectival interpretations which are more meaningful in diverse contexts.