{"title":"Twisted at the Root: Capitalist Alienation, its Re-Inscription, and Implications for Education","authors":"Lana Parker","doi":"10.1111/edth.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Capitalism inheres alienation as a fundament of modern life, twisting the root of being such that a sense of pervasive estrangement becomes the condition undergirding much of our phenomenal existence. Alienation, I argue, formed in the cleavage of capital mediation, leaves us reinscribing its tenor across multiple spheres, as we are compelled to not only maximize capitalist growth, but also maintain the fullness of capitalism beyond the economic realm. To locate this argument, I begin with a brief description of Marx's analysis of capital as an alienating force. In the second section of the article, I employ Heidegger's existential analytic to argue that capitalist alienation is a perversion that shifts and informs how we exist, as we are called not only to accumulate but also to justify capitalism as a reifying force. I approach the analysis by looking at three phenomena: first, the issue of transcendental debt; second, the emergence of neoliberal idle talk as a supplement to capitalism; third, the oppression of the built environment, as capitalist efficiencies are prioritized in a globalizing world. Given the robustness of phenomenal encounters with capitalism, it is increasingly difficult to argue that education might offer solutions for issues of alienation. Nonetheless, this very prevalence is what makes the stakes of some kind of educational response clear. As such, I conclude the article with an exploration of what might be done to disrupt capitalist tendencies through a pedagogy of respite.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"75 6","pages":"1002-1022"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pronouns, Dignity, and Academic Freedom: How Inclusive Classrooms Advance the University's Epistemic Mission","authors":"M. Afton Greco","doi":"10.1111/edth.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>On the standard picture, membership in the set of utterances “academic speech” is both necessary and sufficient for an utterance to enjoy the protections of academic freedom. In this article, I challenge the sufficiency claim by showing that there are significant epistemic and pedagogical benefits to be had by delineating a class of utterances that qualify as academic speech but that are not entitled to academic freedom protections. To this end, I adopt Eamonn Callan's (2016) distinction between “intellectual safety” and “dignity safety” and argue that there are some utterances that contribute to intellectually productive learning environments but also undermine the dignity of some members of the classroom. While such utterances count as academic speech (or so I argue), they should not enjoy academic freedom protections because this would be detrimental not only to the instructional and social aims of the university, but also (and perhaps surprisingly) to the knowledge aim. While my account of the relationship between academic speech and academic freedom is not as simple as the standard account, it can bypass two serious objections that the standard account must contend with—namely, that it relies on either a conception of academic speech that is <i>underinclusive</i>, or a conception of academic freedom that is <i>overinclusive</i>. I use these objections to highlight the importance of independence between our theoretical conceptions of academic speech and academic freedom.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"75 6","pages":"985-1001"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Educative as Violence: Anti-Educational Impossibilities/Possibilities","authors":"Brad Bierdz","doi":"10.1111/edth.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70050","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article critiques the inherent violence within conventional education systems, examining their determinative and coercive constructions as forms onto-epistemic violence. While marginalized groups experience intensified forms of this violence, all students are subjected to educational normativity that disciplines, regulates, and constrains learning through compulsory structures. Drawing on poststructural theorists such as Henry Giroux, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the article explores how curricula, disciplinary practices, and performativity perpetuate explicit and implicit violence. Butler's symbolic violence elucidates how schools structure intelligibility, determining whose knowledge and being are legitimized. Similarly, Foucault's analysis of disciplinary mechanisms reveals how schools function as instruments of social control, limiting onto-epistemic possibilities. Positioning crip theory as the primary framework, with decolonial and posthumanist perspectives as complementary, this article examines how cripped subjectivities are both sites of systemic violation and forces of disruption that unsettle educational normativity. The article argues for aleatory and non-determinative educational formations that refuse stable architectures, advocating for crip (non)pedagogies, mutual aid-based learning, and nomadic subjectivities that challenge the fixity of knowledge and being. This deimagining demands the fundamental undoing of normative educational reproductions of cognition and being, allowing for more fluid, interdependent, and generative onto-epistemic formations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"75 6","pages":"1083-1106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maristela do Nascimento Rocha, Cristiane Maria Cornelia Gottschalk
{"title":"Intergenerational Formative Epistemic Injustice: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Dominant World-Pictures","authors":"Maristela do Nascimento Rocha, Cristiane Maria Cornelia Gottschalk","doi":"10.1111/edth.70052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article critically examines dominant formulations of epistemic injustice, focusing on Miranda Fricker's tradition and its broader influence. We argue that much of the literature on epistemic injustice is formulated within a specific Western world-picture, and we discuss its implications. A significant source of this confinement is the view of <i>language</i> as merely a tool for communication. Drawing on Wittgenstein, we argue that this way of conceiving language ignores its deeper connections to our <i>forms of life</i> and that the generalization of epistemic injustice definitions, intended to be universally applicable, perpetuates <i>intergenerational formative epistemic injustice</i>, which has persisted since colonial <i>times.</i> This, in turn, limits epistemic capacity formation and the theory's applicability in different contexts, such that claims of including marginalized ways of knowing may, in fact, facilitate their co-optation and assimilation within a Western framework. Given the global diversity of epistemic harm and its intergenerational character, this article argues that the disaggregation of the scholarship and the recognition of diverse world-pictures as constitutive of its conceptual formation are essential to disrupting epistemic injustice.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"75 6","pages":"1060-1082"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethics, AI, and Irresistible Temptations","authors":"Kathy Hytten","doi":"10.1111/edth.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this essay, I explore the ethical complexities of using generative AI in academic writing. Drawing on personal experience, I reflect on the shifting terrain of scholarly labor, authorship, originality, and transparency in a moment when AI can produce fluent—and even eloquent—academic prose. Rather than offering prescriptions, or strategies to resolve the ethical tensions, I reflect on the moral ambiguity of AI-assisted scholarship, the inadequacy of current disclosure norms, and the temptation to remain silent in the face of evolving ethical expectations. I argue for ongoing reflection while navigating this new intellectual landscape and exploring the elusive possibility of meaningful policies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"76 1","pages":"140-147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146057916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AI and the Future of (Philosophy of) Education","authors":"Lauren Bialystok","doi":"10.1111/edth.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I forcefully argue that generative AI presents an unprecedented and existential threat to the project of education. Reflecting on how we have historically understood the work of philosophers of education, I argue that our work going forward will be to defend the importance of requiring everyone to cultivate their minds when it is possible for them to outsource most tasks to a machine.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"76 1","pages":"133-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146057915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflecting on Democratic Citizenship Education: Compassionate and Imaginative Action, Educational Encounters, and Civic Reconciliation","authors":"Yusef Waghid","doi":"10.1111/edth.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reflects on and extends my earlier arguments on democratic citizenship education by foregrounding three interrelated themes: compassionate and imaginative action, educational encounters, and civic reconciliation. I argue that education must move beyond a narrow reliance on deliberative reasoning by cultivating engagement that is also emotive and aspirational. Compassion and imagination, alongside reason, cultivate more inclusive and humane pedagogical practices. Democratic education is further conceptualized as an encounter rather than the pursuit of consensus, allowing dissensus to shape enhanced and more authentic engagements. Finally, I propose that civic reconciliation requires addressing historical injustices and embracing the African ethic of <i>ubuntu</i>, which emphasizes communal relationships, mutual respect, and continuous renewal. Reconceptualized in this way, democratic citizenship education becomes an ethical and relational endeavor that not only informs but also heals, inspires, and sustains democratic life in diverse and unequal societies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"76 1","pages":"25-31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146096393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Philosophy of Education as a Global Field","authors":"Liz Jackson","doi":"10.1111/edth.70056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70056","url":null,"abstract":"<p>It is not unusual to hear philosophers of education today describe the field as <i>global</i>. But in what sense is philosophy of education global? In this article, I analyze how and to what extent philosophy of education can be understood as a global field. The article argues that how we conceptualize philosophy of education as a global field (or not) makes a difference for how we conduct and evaluate scholarship, engage and collaborate with others, and consider the strengths and possibilities of the field, as well as its challenges. Overall, I justify a critically reflective approach to thinking about philosophy of education as a global field. I identify opportunities to strengthen global engagement, awareness, and diversity in relation to scholarly norms and values, while also examining pitfalls, obstacles, and risks, and some strategies for tackling challenges faced. I contend here that there are many senses in which philosophy of education is (or can be) global. But not all of these senses are entirely positive. And, in some instances, the globalization of philosophy of education requires scrutiny rather than celebration.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"76 1","pages":"148-156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146057710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Philosophy of Education is Basic to Philosophy","authors":"Nicholas C. Burbules","doi":"10.1111/edth.70055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70055","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article argues that the traditional view of philosophy of education as a derivative branch of philosophy has it backwards: that for many canonical philosophers, reflections on education were basic to their philosophy. More than this, attention to the educational dimensions of philosophical claims generally makes them better grounded and more viable. Philosophy of education is, in this sense, basic to philosophy.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"76 1","pages":"157-163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.70055","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146057711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distribution Double Bind: On the Ethical Implications of “How”†","authors":"Megan L. Bogia","doi":"10.1111/edth.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When weighing how much aid we should give, policymakers also wonder: how should the state distribute that aid? Issues of implementation and feasibility are, after all, an essential component of policy decision-making and effectiveness. Yet, when philosophers of education consider the ethical trade-offs between these postsecondary policies, few have incorporated these considerations into their accounts. In this article, I seek to advance the larger project that questions of implementation and feasibility pose discrete problems of justice that are therefore worth considering when philosophers weigh the trade-offs between pursuing different postsecondary options. I do this through introducing one such problem within this much wider anticipated genre: the problem of what I call “the distribution double bind” when pursuing means-tested financial aid in the United States. I argue that the distribution double bind arises when the available options to distribute a given benefit — in this case, financial aid via the FAFSA — are either meaningfully coarse or meaningfully fine. I contend this new dilemma generates distinct ethical concerns that are relevant to our philosophical considerations of how the state should fund higher education.</p>","PeriodicalId":47134,"journal":{"name":"EDUCATIONAL THEORY","volume":"75 5","pages":"781-801"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145013194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}