Liz Jackson

Philosophy of education can be described as a field, a mode of enquiry, and as a tradition. While not all philosophers of education recognise or appreciate philosophy of education specifically as a tradition, it is indisputable that it is a particular culturally embedded social practice that is carried out and developed across generations. This essay considers how philosophers of education view tradition, in the field and in education. I examine educational philosophy scholarship in relation to tradition in four sections here that reveal a spectrum of approaches. These approaches are, basically, that (1) traditions and conceptualising traditions matter; (2) traditions in philosophy of education matter, rather than the conceptualising of tradition(s); (3) traditions and the nature of tradition are of little to no interest or peripheral to the field; and (4) traditions should be regarded with suspicion. Overall, apart from a few exceptional thinkers, most philosophers of education reference tradition(s) in a thin, superficial sense rather than in a more deeply reflective or substantive sense. I reflect on the value of this examination and the potential for further explorations of tradition in the field in the conclusion.

This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as reviewers, revealing their thoughts, arguments, understanding, and criticisms towards the creative economy status in East Asian countries (Japan and China mostly) higher education as reflected in the knowledge socialism narratives. Xiyuan as the lead author, co-editing with Woraport and Stefan, assigned each section to other authors and successfully devoted themself to organizing, proofreading, and revising the paper. Through a month of collective work, the final version of the paper elaborates on the contribution of East Asian creative universities and the economy as a whole to the knowledge socialism through co(labor)ation, with implications to the creative labors cultivation and shifted roles of students.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

Taking credit for digitalization and platformization, China has initiated its open science infrastructure implementation and made an effort to focus on open access (OA) journals and data sharing over the past two decades. With the continuous development need, issues and concerns have caught in attention, including data accessibility, research transparency, general population awareness and communication of science, public trust in science, and scientific research and innovation efficiency. This paper has unfolded the maze of open science stance in China and elaborated on its current economy, openness and freedom extents, and future innovation potential towards a global open science community, within depth and scope of both the Chinese and Western scholars’ interpretations.

The inspiration for this collective writing project began with a digital conference entitled ‘Knowledge Socialism, COVID-19 and the New Reality of Education’ held at Beijing Normal University. In this conference and through this article, multiple researchers spread across six continents have engaged in the collaborative task of outlining emerging innovations and alternative contingencies towards education, international collaboration, and digital reform in this time of global crisis. Trends associated with digital education, knowledge openness, peer production, and collective intelligence as articulated by Michael A. Peters’ conception of Knowledge Socialism are given careful analysis and exploration. Some of the members of this collective endeavor to identify problems, others, begin to draw boxes around potential solutions. Overall, this article engages with real world challenges and innovations that look beyond dominant neoliberal trends in the knowledge economy to build bridges toward novel possibilities in this era of rapid digital change.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal, this book brings together the work of over two-hundred international scholars, who seek to address the question, 'What happened to postmodernism in educational theory after its alleged demise?'. Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Scholars in various disciples have suggested that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism, and the fragmentary self has given way to something else --as yet undefined. The lifecycle of postmodernism started with Derrida's 1966 seminal paper 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'; its peak years were 1973-1989; followed by uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond. What happened after 2001? This collection provides responses by over 200 scholars to this question who also focus on what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

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.

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Post-truth contexts provide grounds for alt-right movements to capture and pervert notions of freedom of speech, making universities battlefields of politicised emotions and expressions. In societies facing these pressures around the world, academic freedom has never been challenged as much as it is today. As Peters and colleagues note, conceptualisations of ‘facts’ and ‘evidences’ are politically, socially, and epistemically reconstructed in post-truth contexts. At the same time, with intelligence commodified, reified or marginalised, freedom of speech and of mobility can entail fights for entitlements, or escapes from local responsibilities. The decline and corruptions of democratic free speech and academic freedom, or the absence of forces to defend them, are thus serious challenges. These challenges grow as the competition of ideas, sometimes under the rubric of academic freedom, often implies the power struggle and questioning of statuses in the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. Competition as a value invoked in some conceptualisations of freedom, becomes more important than human dignity, which was originally supposed to expand and strengthen under democratic conceptions of freedom in higher education. What had been happening to freedoms, of speech, teaching, and learning, across different subject positions and cultures of higher education, remains largely underexplored, as alt-right movements, neoliberalism and illiberalism, and post-truthism values and orientations expand.

Hong Kong, as a former colony of the United Kingdom, is characterised as a hybrid of East and West. Its colonial history is commonly seen as establishing many positive aspects of Hong Kong and shaping good qualities of its people, such as the value of rule of law, free speech, freedom of the press, and fluency in English. Yet the majority of people in both Hong Kong and China share Han Chinese ethnicity, which has been used by both the Chinese and Hong Kong governments to promote a blood-based idea of Chinese identity for decades. This paper explores “Chineseness", or Chinese identity, as promoted by the Hong Kong government. It first explores the concept of Chineseness, elaborating on a blood-based view that connects with ethnic-nationalism, in contrast with a pluralistic view of identity in the Hong Kong context. The paper then examines how Hong Kong government officials promote Chineseness through major outlets, on government websites and in speeches captured in media. As we show, the government tends to advocate a blood-based view of Chineseness akin to ethnic-nationalism. A more inclusive and pluralistic view which recognises the dynamic nature and multiple visions of Chinese identity better fits Hong Kong’s multicultural context.