Philosophy of Education: The Promise of Education and Grief

Dear Colleagues,

For decades, the promise of education has been seen as critical to knowledge creation, democracy, justice, human welfare, and economic and social change. However, our education systems are produced within and simultaneously constrained by powerful political discourses. New Public Management approaches to running public service organizations and, lately, brahmanization (Piketty, 2019) of left-wing parties and policies are examples of this preventing—through polarization and liberal–illiberal bifurcation—substantial and conflictual but productive transformation. Further, and for better or worse, we live in a time in which knowledge production no longer exclusively belongs to academic and formal scientific and educational institutions, ultimately challenging opinions isolating learning as something primarily academic and linguistic. It leaves the educational field in stasis as a condition of educational grief, grief as a consequence of love.

Given this, we need to think and work with education in general and philosophy of education specifically in a scientifically profound new ways. Not as a civilization critic of, let us say, Western philosophies and policies as such, but as a break with views of education and sciences as purely goal-oriented, causal, and teleological, views of knowledge as representational, and corresponding ways of telling stories of science and research as constant improvements, constantly higher levels of rationality.

This Special Issue on Philosophy of Education is aimed at academics who are critiquing the discursive production of policies. Creating openings toward expanded meaning fields making it possible for us to talk about, e.g., preliminary and approximate causality, as well as about situated causality. Raising the level of data literacy amongst learners and institutions nourishing a valuable diversity of onto-epistemic cultures, embracing class, ethnicity, gender, and generation conflicts, and empowering learners to raise critical questions. The goal is to shape society to collaboratively embrace the strife and conflict that these processes require.

The key areas of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to: New Enlightenment; posthuman and/or new material knowledge; relational ontology and ontology of movement and subjectivation; practical philosophy and affective pedagagogies; eternal consciousness; education and health; affective computing and digitalization; deep learning and critique; environmental and social sustainability; foresight in educational sciences; habits and change; and affective languaging.

References: 

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinosa: Practical Philosophy. (R. Hurley, Trans.) San Fransisco: City Lights Books 

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchill, Trans.). London: Verso. 

Dewey, J. (1957). Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press. 

Dewey​, J. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology​. New York: Modern Library. 

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm: Indiana University Press. 

Guattari, F. (2014). The Three Ecologies (I. P. a. P. Sutton, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. 

Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H. & Anne Bruch (2020). Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology, Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), pp. 76-89, doi:10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235 

Peirce​, C.S. (1998). The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 

Piketty, T. (2019) Capital et Idéologie. Paris: Seuil. 

Ravaisson​, F. ([1838] 2008). ​Of Habit.​ Translated from the French by C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair. New York and London: Continuum. 

Stenger, I. (2018). Another Science is possible. A manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Stengers, I. (2008). Experimenting with refrains: Subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism. Subjectivity, 22(1), 38-59. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.6 

Prof. Dr. Anne Beate Reinertsen
Guest Editor

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• Philosophy of Education
• Practical Philosophy
• Inquiry as Signature Pedagogics
• Inclusion and Justice
• Democracy
• Environmental and Social Sustainability
• Education and Health
• Education as Change
• Slow Scholarships
• Affective pedagogies
• Eternal consciousness
• Languaging
• Concilience and transversality
• Deep Learning
• The Digital Society