Rowena Azada-Palacios

Joanna Bourke is a prize-winning social and cultural historian, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a public intellectual. Her books, which have been translated into multiple languages, have explored the history of gender, working-class culture, emotions, war, and the relationships between animals and humans. Her most recent books are Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence (Reaktion Books, 2022). The latter was written as part of her Wellcome Trust-funded project SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters), of which she is the Principal Investigator. Her book Five Evil Women will be published by Reaktion Books in January 2026. Philosopher of education Rowena Azada-Palacios spoke to Joanna Bourke about how historical approaches can help us understand and find solutions to present-day issues of sexual violence.

The concept of cosmopolitanism has been the subject of philosophical debate as to whether a commitment to it requires the shedding of particularist attachments (such as attachments to a national or group identity, or their accompanying convictions), or whether such particularist commitments might enhance a cosmopolitan orientation. This article brings these debates to bear on the internationalization of higher education, particularly in relation to the work of academics who implement universities’ internationalization strategies through teaching, and who aim to do so fairly and justly. Drawing on our individual reflections as well as shared conversations about our experiences, we propose that the philosophically informed concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can helpfully inform internationalization strategies.

This paper is a reflective response to Tena Thau’s suggestion – in her 2024 piece ‘Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda’ – that philosophy has little to teach about the war in Gaza (and, by extension, similar cases of widespread, horrific human suffering). I first reconstruct one of the arguments that Thau makes in her piece. I then show that her criticisms about philosophy are true for a particular way of doing philosophy, and I attempt to uncover the underlying philosophical anthropology that makes these moral philosophical approaches unsuitable for addressing grave human suffering. Finally, I propose that a critical phenomenological approach that examines widespread suffering through an anti-/post-/decolonial lens may be more suitable when teaching philosophically about human suffering.

This paper explores the meaning of ‘decolonization’ in relation to the school curriculum and the role of the philosopher of education in this task. Taking the Philippines as an example, this paper illustrates how coloniality has underpinned not only school curricula, but also entire systems of formal education in the post-colony. Following from this, it argues that decolonization in education must transcend the diversification of curricula and aim at a broader vision of justice. Drawing from the author’s own attempts to reimagine the teaching of national identity, the paper proposes that philosophers of education who wish to participate in the work of decoloniality view their contribution as the three-fold task of historical critique, conceptual retrieval, and creative reimagination.

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha's notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed.

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.

Hannah Arendt has been criticised for the sharp distinction she drew between the social and political realms, and her application of this distinction to schools. In this paper, I demonstrate that this distinction can be interpreted as a heuristic that Arendt developed to address a tension that she had encountered in her attempt to understand childhood. She understood schools to be spaces that could prepare children for citizenship. However, she also recognised that attempts to prepare children for citizenship threatened two characteristics of childhood: their vulnerability and their natality. Arendt's heuristic can be fruitful for addressing dilemmas in citizenship education in ethnoculturally plural contexts.