Aireen Grace Andal

This article aims to put into dialogue Philosophy for Children (P4C) and education rights. Whereas rights have robust conceptualizations and have been the topic of many scholarly discussions, scholarship on P4C still has a lot to unpack for a more expansive understanding, especially when scaled up to the level of rights. This work asks whether or not the rhetoric of “rights” can be used to discuss if P4C has a rightful place to be a mandatory part of school curriculum. Thus the article explores how P4C is positioned between children education and rights discourses. The range of views on P4C is broad enough to prevent the concentration of discursive power in a single source or authority in terms of scale of discussion. P4C is therefore subject to both scrutiny and praise in the same way that other human rights ideologies have been. In conclusion, this work hopes to speak and contribute to the literature on P4C by problematizing children’s discursive positions as learners and citizens with rights.

This study examines playgrounds as lenses on urban transitions to explain the link between urban transformations and changes in the discourse of play and childhood. Specifically, it compares Soviet public playgrounds and post-Soviet privatized playscapes in the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, through primary observation and secondary data analysis. Using the framework of social reproduction developed by Cindy Katz and Saskia Sassen to explain how the local forces affect cities, my analysis shows that the shift in the discourse of play and childhood in the post-Soviet period is hinged on global influences combined with local transformations, from the abandonment of Soviet ideals of communal play spaces to the embracement of today’s consumerist play places. Whereas the old Soviet playgrounds have uncertain purposes, in contemporary Yekaterinburg private playgrounds offer a narrative of play in terms of leisure, love, and convenience for parents. Children turn into consumers of private play, leaving most of the Soviet playgrounds as idle spaces in the city. This article argues that Yekaterinburg’s shift toward participating in the globalized economy combined with its transition from the Soviet ideals maintains social relations and reproduces social inequalities in childhood, as this condition favors consumerist narratives of play. I conclude that the playgrounds in Yekaterinburg are bystanders of new global ecologies whereby social, political, and economic transformations become an impetus to reproduce new ways of seeing the social importance and meaning of play and playgrounds.

Commentary on DPJ Editorial by Robin Alexander (2019), Whose discourse? Dialogic Pedagogy for a post-truth world. This commentary adds emphasis on the importance of the four areas of dialogic pedagogy--language, voice, argument and truth-- that Alexander proposes to be invested in and prioritized more. It is argued that dialogic pedagogy will benefit from the development of the current approach to respond to the post-truth era, rather than from looking for new ways to do dialogue. Finally, it is suggested that practitioners of dialogic pedagogy take the post-truth era as a situation that fosters critical thinking and reevaluation of how dialogue is conducted.

This work aims to examine the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) in the context of President Duterte’s anti-drug campaign in the Philippines. This article focuses on how Duterte’s war on drugs can be dissonant with the purpose of juvenile justice standards. This work conducts an examination on the issue of age of criminal responsibility in the Philippines in a three-fold manner: (1) using Hanna Arednt’s theory to explain how violence is legitimised in the anti-drugs campaign then giving examples of how young people suffered from this; (2) analysing the legal standpoint towards young people under the war on drugs; and (3) using legal and psychological literature to argue that Duterte’s war on drugs can be dissonant with the purpose of juvenile justice standards. Young people are framed as instrumental to the drug crisis in the country instead of being victims of social ills, thereby justifying the strict measures on MACR to respond to the national drugs problem. Drawing on the principles on Juvenile Justice practices in different parts of the world, it also discusses that using the war on drugs as justification to lower MACR has underlying ethical normative and pragmatic issues which can pose threats to young people’s rights especially when lowering MACR is understood as a cursory response to drug crisis. Finally, this article seeks to encourage further discussions about the ways in which the norms and standards in setting age of criminal responsibility are to be interpreted in specific national contexts.

This work examines how transmen pregnancy is found within the discourse of moralizing and pathologizing reproductive health. Moralization criticizes the “artificial” character of transpregnancy, and pathologization sees transpregnancy as rather “abnormal”. This work analyses these discursive contentions with case of the increasing public visibility of pregnant transmen through selfies. A commonplace reading of these transpregnant selfies can be, on the one hand, extended forms of othering or, on the other hand, emancipation from moralization and pathologization. However, this work argues that the visual display of transpregnant bodies is neither a form of othering nor gaining recognition but rather a suspension to moralization and pathologization of trans-identities. Transmen pregnancy has the character of both disrupting the concept of pregnancy-as-usual and at the same time evokes a very familiar experience of human reproduction. This thus gives transpregnant selfies their liminal character of both abnormal and normal at the same time. Given that transpregnancy is still a new subject for philosophical inquiry, this work hopes to contribute to the literature by surfacing some of transpregnancy’s ethical dimensions when juxtaposed in the cyberspace.