In this article, Cris Mayo examines the relationship among anti-LGBTQ policies, gay marriage, and sexuality education. Her concern is that because gay marriage is insufficiently different from heterosexual marriage, adding it as an issue to curriculum or broader culture debate elides rather than addresses sexual difference. In other words, marriage may be an assimilative aspiration that closes down discussions of what sexuality is and can mean, that sidesteps other related social issues such as health care for all, and (...) that reinforces sexuality and gender identity as privatized, not political, concerns. Mayo examines different strands of LGBTQ history that complicate the meanings of sexuality and that critique a variety of antigay or heterosexist policies for their exclusions. She concludes by suggesting that the possibilities of sexuality are not served by advocacy for one gay relationship formation and calling for a sexuality education that is instead directed at sexual diversity. (shrink)

Troubled times in education means that philosophers of education, who seem to never stop making defenses of our field, have to do so with more flexibility and a greater understanding of how peripheral we may have become. The only thing worse than a defensive philosopher is a confident and certain philosopher, so it may be that our very marginality will give us renewed energies for problematizing education. Occupying our marginal position carefully and in concert with other marginal inquiries, I think, (...) will do our field good. Because of its attention to what it takes to be willing to learn and to approach theoretical and real world obstacles with open if cautious interest, philosophy of education is about holding concepts and movements in tension, bending the implications of commonplace, commonsensical ideas about education, and carefully examining the all of these maneuvers for the exclusions they wittingly and unwittingly produce. Problematizing the certainties derived from majoritarian positions, be it whiteness, Westernness, or any other dominant perspective, can provide us with a diversity of claims to scrutinize and epistemological positions to be wary of. (shrink)

This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex possibilities for (...) meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The aim of this paper is to reconceive safety as a form of relation embedded in particular ways of speaking, listening and thinking. Moving away from safety as a relation that is achieved once and for all and afterwards remains safe avoids some of the disappointments of discourses of safety that seem to promise once a risk is taken or a gap is bridged that thereafter relations among people will be easier and calmer. This bumpier version of safety suggests that (...) humor creates the kind of instabilities in discourse that act, perhaps ironically, as an invitation to enjoy the difficulties of communicating complex and challenging ideas. Humor, then, creates a kind of safe space, not devoid of dramatic shifts or emotional response, but organized around those shifts as experiences that are moments apart from conflict. I explore the use of humor as a form of serious play in social justice classrooms, examining the strategies of indirect teaching, contradictory lessons, and jolting pleasure that more traditional pedagogical approaches are less able to create. I see in humor a complex form of address and interaction that plays on the multiple possibilities within an utterance or concept and by reminding classroom communities of those possibilities. Humor can erupt from shared moments and disjunctive understandings and can as easily be mobilized by teachers as by students. By reopening the possibilities of concepts and relations, humor shatters simplistic readings by literally playing out what might be said and what could be tried but often manages to combine a sense of safety via shared laughter with its disruptions. (shrink)

I will argue in what follows, following the insights of James Marshall on busno‐cratic power, that resistance to this new power is already well underway, and that this resistance is potentially problematic and potentially transgressive 1 . The self is not only a chooser in busno‐cratic land, it is also re‐commodifying itself and in so doing, beginning to struggle at the limits of its commodified situation. I will argue that commodified selves, as much as they are constrained, are also potent (...) sites for resistance. Part of that resistance is being waged in the terrain of the high stakes test, where the self that could ‘choose’ runs headlong into a product that definitively limits its range of choice. In order to engage critically with this resistance, I examine the cracks in the monolithic power of testing, cracks that point to the uncertainty of numbers and the ambivalent anxieties of test takers. (shrink)

I will argue in what follows, following the insights of James Marshall on busno‐cratic power, that resistance to this new power is already well underway, and that this resistance is potentially problematic and potentially transgressive (in Marshall's words ‘a reflective reconstitution’). The self is not only a chooser in busno‐cratic land, it is also re‐commodifying itself and in so doing, beginning to struggle at the limits of its commodified situation. I will argue that commodified selves, as much as they are (...) constrained, are also potent sites for resistance. Part of that resistance is being waged in the terrain of the high stakes test, where the self that could ‘choose’ runs headlong into a product that definitively limits its range of choice. In order to engage critically with this resistance, I examine the cracks in the monolithic power of testing, cracks that point to the uncertainty of numbers and the ambivalent anxieties of test takers. (shrink)

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

The authors review Judith Suissa's provocative book, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective, a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory educational change. The authors suggest, however, that an enhanced conversation among critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy and anarchist thinking on education can help to show both the continued relevance of radical and creative thinking, and that (...) anarchist thought has been part of the development of oppositional, critical, collaborative, teaching and learning projects. (shrink)

The authors review Judith Suissa’s provocative book, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective, a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory educational change. The authors suggest, however, that an enhanced conversation among critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy and anarchist thinking on education can help to show both the continued relevance of radical and creative thinking, and that (...) anarchist thought has been part of the development of oppositional, critical, collaborative, teaching and learning projects. (shrink)

Liz JacksonEducation University of Hong KongNel Noddings is known around the world for her contributions to philosophy and philosophy of education. Her work on caring and relational ethics broke ne...

In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.

Paulo Freire : the educator, his oeuvre, and changing contexts -- Holistic interpretations of Freire's work : a critical review -- Critical literacy, praxis, and emancipatory politics -- "Remaining on the same side of the river" : neo-liberalism, party movements, and the struggle for greater coherence -- Reinventing Freire in a Southern context : the Mediterranean -- Engaging with practice : a Freirean reflection on different pedagogical sites.

Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including 'profit with purpose' businesses such as co-operatives, this short guide reveals how to make a success of values. By unpacking what we mean by values and ethics, and setting out a series of practical approaches, Ed Mayo presents how values can become a natural part of commercial life. This book identifies both the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organization, from a bank that responds (...) to an ethical crisis to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality. The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down, or that you would expect. There is no right or wrong set of values, but there is power and potential in making the most of the values that are right for the business you are in. By reading Values: How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be." -- Back cover. (shrink)

: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that HIV testing be routinely offered to certain patients in hospitals with a high prevalence of HIV infection and on all pregnant women. The CDC does not, however, offer implementation level guidelines for obtaining informed consent. We provide a moral justification for requiring informed consent for HIV testing and propose guidelines for securing such consent. In particular we argue that genuine informed consent can be secured without elaborate counseling, such (...) as that currently used at Counseling and Testing Sites, provided that sufficient written notice is given to the patients before testing and that they are specifically asked for permission. (shrink)

In this article, the authors highlight connections between research on Two Spirit Native Americans and standard social studies curriculum. Two Spirit is a Pan-Indian term describing Native Americans who believe they embody both masculine and feminine characteristics/traits in one physical body. Findingsfrom this research expand the field's conception of multiple perspectives and diversity, while creating opportunities for nuanced understandings of genderexpression and gender that go beyond the male/female dichotomy currently accepted as the norm. The authors utilize historical research and a (...) semi-structured,in-depth interview with a current Ojibwe leader to better understand and theorize Native Americans' acceptance of diverse ways of being. The authors conclude that modern-day social studies teachers and students have much to learn from this traditional Native worldview. Specifically, the authors believe that encouraging students to adopt more inclusive perspectives on gender expression and to recognize the plausibility of multiple genders may lead to more advanced, social learning. Combined with reinforcement from responsible adults at school, this recognition would lessen a variety of present-day social ills, including the incidence of teen suicide caused by homophobia. (shrink)

I begin with some elementary observations about assertion. In spite of recent criticisms of philosophers who have been too ready to take the subject-predicate indicative sentence as the standard form of assertion, there is no doubt that this form of sentence does represent something very fundamental about assertion. To put the matter in a rough-and-ready way: if we are to assert anything at all, it seems obvious that we must first draw our listener's attention to something that we propose to (...) talk about, and then, when we have secured his attention, go on to say something about that to which we have drawn attention. (shrink)

James Joyce was educated almost exclusively by the Jesuits; this education and these priests make their appearance across Joyce's oeuvre. This dynamic has never been properly explicated or rigorously explored. Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, this book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce's fiction. It takes readers through some of the canon's most well-read texts and produces bold, fresh new readings. By placing these readings in light of Jesuit religious practice - in particular, (...) the Spiritual Exercises all Jesuit priests and many students undergo - the book shows how Joyce's deepest concerns about truth, literature, and love were shaped by these religious practices and texts. Joyce worked out his answers to these questions in his own texts, largely by forcing his readers to encounter, and perhaps answer, those questions themselves. Reading Joyce is a challenge not only in terms of interpretation but of experience - the confusion, boredom, and even paranoia readers feel when making their way through these texts. (shrink)

On the fundamental of Hindu philosophy with commentary in verse form.

Of the many possible, and no doubt actual, forms of incoherence covered by my title, I shall be concerned with only one, and must begin by dismissing the others. The incoherence I shall speak of is not any alleged inconsistency between deterministic and indeterministic physical theories , such as between classical particle mechanics and quantum theory. It is an inconsistency internal to determinism. Not, that is, internal to any deterministic theory ; but to the general claims put forward by determinists—whether (...) scientists, philosophers, or laymen. Still another qualification—it is ‘hard’ determinism I shall be concerned with—‘hard’ in the sense in which William James distinguished between hard and soft determinism. Soft determinism James himself ridiculed as glaringly incoherent, and in any case I shall not be specially concerned with determinism as regards human conduct—with the problem of free will and responsibility. (shrink)

There is among many moral philosophers today a renewed emphasis on the connection between reason and morality, and an attempt to exhibit moral behaviour as characteristically rational. What is original in Mr. Kneale's extremely interesting paper is the following-up of a suggestion that certain words like “right,” “wrong,” “ought,” are used in the same way both by lawyers and by moralists; this leads to a logical rehabilitation of the somewhat unpopular concept of the moral law, which in turn argues objectivity (...) and rationality in morals, and makes it possible “to distinguish between good and bad moralists in much the same way as we can distinguish between good and bad lawyers.” The legal pattern is essentially the same as the moral pattern. (shrink)

In order for online communities to assemble and grow, some basic infrastructure is necessary that makes possible the aggregation of the collective action. There is a very intimate and complex relationship between the technological infrastructure and the social character of the community which uses it. Today, most infrastructure is provided by corporations and the contrast between community and corporate dynamics is becoming increasingly pronounced. But rather than address the issues, the corporations are actively obfuscating it. Wikiwashing refers to a strategy (...) of corporate infrastructure providers where practices associated to their role of profit seeking corporations that would be seen as unethical by the communities they enable are concealed by promoting a misleading image of themselves associated with the general values of wikis and Wikipedia . The empirical analysis is based on case studies and triangulation of several methods. (shrink)