This paper mobilises the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and enjoyment to better understand how processes of education aimed at extending and defending democratic life might respond to and engage with populist politics. I approach this task by engaging with a particular vector of Mouffe and Laclau's political philosophy, moving from a critique…

This article argues that curriculum work can benefit from signifiers of Bildung to promote democracy in public education. The argument is built on the premise that cultural and intellectual traditions that value Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of better societies (Horlacher 2017). I start…

Institutional ethnography is often seen as a useful tool in the study of organizations and bureaucracy. However, many adaptations of the approach ignore the explicitly historical materialist project embodied in Smith's conceptualization of 'ontological shift' and her assertion that institutional ethnography is a 'reinterpretation' of Marx's…

This article examines the relation between education, voting and representation, and, in particular, the argument that more highly educated people should have more votes, as they should be better at judging important political decisions. In the past this issue attracted the attention of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Newman and Mill. In…

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a clarification of how 'education in a postliberal world' differs from the concept of 'postliberal education;' and second, to contribute to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism and liberal education in recent years. The paper is primarily conceptual and only secondarily…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24th February 2022, was met with widespread condemnation across Europe, with many universities and higher education-focussed national and regional organisations issuing their own public statements about the invasion and subsequent conflict and, in some cases, taking specific action in relation to one or both of…

Purpose: This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022. Design/methodology/approach: Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities,…

This article focuses on a method of moral self-cultivation advocated by the Chinese Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi: deep reading. To Zhu Xi, reading is not only an intellectual activity of learning knowledge, but also a spiritual exercise. Through meticulous, thorough, and unbiased reading, people can gradually cultivate their minds to have three virtues,…

Universities in many liberal democracies, such as the US, the UK, or Germany, grapple with a pivotal question: how much room should be given to controversial utterances? On the one side, there are those who advocate for limiting permissible speech on campus to create a safe environment for a diverse student body and counter the mainstreaming of…

Antifascists have developed action-oriented principles and practices for collective resistance to fascism. In this article, we discuss antifascism as "praxis," which is the nexus of theory and practice through collective reflection and action. Antifascist praxis can inform developmental science at individual and contextual levels of…

This article studies the history of playgrounds in Finland and focuses on the emergence and implementation of the objectives of the international playground movement in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it examines the relations between supervised playgrounds, women's emancipation, child welfare policies, and political discussion on…

This paper examines Jean Floud's assessment of the work of Karl Mannheim, against the background of the development of British sociology of education in the 1940s and 50s. She compared his approach with that of Durkheim, concluding that both adopted a focus on social statics rather than dynamics, this reflecting their conservative political…

The goal of this paper is to explore arguments about the moral (in)appropriateness of counter-contempt as a justified moral and pedagogical response to racist contempt. Drawing on debates for and against contempt in moral philosophy, the paper suggests a "contextual" approach to contempt that pays attention to both the specifics of the…

I here read the Iranian film "Hit the Road" through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. In doing so, I hope to illuminate the triadic link between cinema, philosophy and "paideia" (ethical-political education). To explore, I adopt a philosophical methodology with the double ambition to reveal the latent pedagogies…

The religiopolitical movement of White Christian nationalism has increasingly impacted policy and practice in public education in the United States. This theoretical paper examines how White Christian nationalist ideologies and rhetoric are influencing the discourse of schooling and education. We use Butler's (2016) definition of frames,…