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In this article, I (a) register ambiguities of the ‘global’ and of ‘vision’ to indicate the complex relationship of global citizenship education (GCE) with the contemporary world. After setting this stage for GCE, I (b) argue that the current reduction of GCE normativity to social justice may ultimately work at cross-purposes with its vision of enlarged visibility of injustices around the globe. The hegemony of the social perspective on justice limits the visual horizon of the curious eye/I. Because uncomfortable questions are central to vision as dream and sight I introduce to GCE the theme of a politicized curiosity about various faces of (in)justice. I (c) conclude that, against the single-focused, social-justice perspective, GCE requires a more stereoscopic vision that better illuminates the many faces of justice in their synergies and tensions.

This book argues for a restored normativity of education through a powerful notion of justice. Today, the foundational issue of justice seems to have lost its power as a qualifier for ethical-political education since the current educational-philosophical discourse tends to narrow down, singularize, and limit the spaces of justice in, for, and through education. Opposing this tendency, the chapters included here move beyond conventional paradigms while exploring the relationship between education and justice in the world of today. The book has three parts. The chapters in the first part explore the ontological and socio-political grounds underlying our notions of the relation between education and justice. The next part contextualizes this exploration through tangible examples. Next, the third part offers a self-reflective meta-critique by exploring how we, as philosophers of education, suffer from onto-epistemic blindness and perform symbolic violence, as we tend to promote and uphold conventional or standardized visions and missions. In short, this collection of essays offers a new eye on the link between education and justice and enriches the discourse through its multi-perspectival and more sensitive exploration of justice in, for, and through education today

Many utopian visions operate by scapegoating an Otherness. They blame an ‘enemy’ for an unbearable, dystopian current reality, holding the ‘enemy’ responsible for it or for obstructing the passage to a desired, new reality. Then they exclude (or even promise the elimination of) this ‘enemy’. Despite the renewed interest in utopias, such utopian frames remain theoretically neglected or, worse, they are considered typical of the logical structure of utopianism. This paper aims to show that this issue merits a different political-philosophical attention. We begin with operations of utopian predicates in the relevant scholarship and distinguish them from the operations of the term ‘incriminatory’ that we are introducing. We term incriminatory the kind of utopian frame whose future-oriented, idealized and desired image is constructed in and through an incriminated ‘Other’. We indicate the re-conceptualizing merits of this new term and then we discuss the affirmative utopianism that does not incriminate a specific Other. Our main argument, which we deploy contra Yannis Stavrakakis’s position, is that utopias are not unavoidably or inherently incriminatory.

The politics of lifelong learning and learnification have triggered educational philosophy’s justified indignation and blanket critiques of learning. The market logic of learning has, meanwhile, se...

The present article extracts the normative and the crypto-normative from the polemical contexts in which they have been deployed as charges to study them in their more affirmative dimensions. Polem...

The concept of learning has obtained great popularity in many fields. In common cause with neo-liberal ideology, learning has led to a learnification process that turns social pathologies into individual deficits. Various ways out of this situation have been sought; chief among them is the recruitment of unlearning as a promising negation of learning and of its politics. Educational-philosophical, sociological, decolonial, as well as organizational and policy discourses valorize unlearning for different and often opposing reasons. However, as this article shows, unlearning has already been co-opted and utilized by learning discourses to advance the neo-liberal conception of learning. A further reaction to this usurpation of unlearning has been a tendency to premodify unlearning as ‘critical’ or ‘deep’. The present article critiques these conceptualizations and operationalizations of unlearning and argues for a more complex outlook on learning and unlearning than that which is currently predominant.

Discussions of loyalty typically focus on its alleged tendency to encourage pernicious attachments to collectivities. The present article intervenes in these discussions by asking how considerations of loyalty in limit-situations (Karl Jaspers) might illuminate neglected ethico-political intricacies. Rather than suggesting that loyalty, independently of circumstances, is always a virtue or a vice this article explores how loyalty’s complex synergies in limit-situations sometimes advance rather than oppose cosmopolitan justice. This perspective, I claim, helps us see that, instead of always making us partial, as many contemporary discourses on loyalty assume, loyalty sometimes makes us partisan in an ethico-politically enabling sense.

Selfhood and Appearing: The Intertwining represents a most robust and breathtaking re-theorization of themes central to the philosophy of consciousness and relationality. Ranging from re-formulatio...

Marianna Papastephanou University of Cyprus Since Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (rea...

In antiquity Diogenes was asked to identify himself as a citizen. He retorted by affirming that he was a “citizen of the world” and thus implicitly rejecting local citizenship. Ever since, his political identification has become a reference point in most literature on cosmopolitanism. After a brief discussion of the predicate “citizen of the world,” this article turns to Hannah Arendt’s attribution of it to Karl Jaspers. It explores how Arendt’s related work helps us recast issues of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, get a more accurate picture of her complex view on locality and universality, and introduce new sensibilities into political philosophical engagement with claims of world citizenship. Themes of limits, solitude, and darkness emerge as possible points of interest of a philosophy that acknowledges the centrality of politics in the life of the person whose right to world citizenship is tested by subjective and collective answerability to cosmos.

Many educational philosophers have criticized the shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning. Gert Biesta, in particular, claims that learning individualistically promotes ‘learnification’, that is, a pernicious politics at the expense of relational educational experiences. While I endorse many of his critical points, I have argued that his theorization of learning overlooks conceptual nuance and semantic tensions. Ingerid Straume has also illustrated some such tensions by referring to Cornelius Castoriadis’ notion of politics. But, in this article, I wish to develop this critical discussion by examining Castoriadis’ conception of learning alongside Biesta’s. Pointing out ambiguities of learning, I conclude with a conception of learning as diversified and inclusive of anamorphic (transformative) possibilities throughout a person’s life, in tensed company with others and in a complex engagement with the cultural and socio-political milieu.

Gert Biesta astutely criticizes thepolitics of learning through which learning has been popularized and exalted. He offers a valuable critical diagnostics of this politics, but, I argue, his conc...

Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, he wrote: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong”. Examining Foucault’s (so unlikely) valorisation of certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach Foucault’s Iranian writings as aberration against this tendency, I read them as an effect of Foucault’s specific epistemic and utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of Foucault’s comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault’s interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream appraisals of Foucault’s political philosophy. 20 1 1 19

Locating political education in a global time of pathos and apathy, this article explores some complexities that derive from various notions of human distance and affect potentialities of democracy as a way of life. It begins with a diagnosis of current, global realities and discusses the philosophical act of diagnosis as such. The operations of (a)pathetics thus singled out are then critically connected to Friedrich Nietzsche's 'pathos of distance', Michel Foucault's visit to Japan and William James' essay on 'what makes life significant' in which he critiques an accomplished 'democratic' utopia of his times. The conclusion indicates how the registered complexities present political education with further challenges of (non)translatability. 13 1 81 95

In its most popular sense, cosmopolitanism is taken to be a way of life and a kind of selfhood. The cosmopolitan self learns from other cultures, embraces diversity, and considers her selfhood or lifestyle defined more by routes than by roots. Thus understood cosmopolitanism becomes a descriptive concept, that is, it says something about how the person lives and acts and about what the person is like. When this cosmopolitan existence is elevated to a political ideal or virtue, it strikes a normative note. For example, to say that a society or an individual is cosmopolitan is to attribute something good to such a society or individual, that is, to see in them a commendable feature or to summon them to acquire it. Philosophy has, from antiquity to the present, formulated, debated, contested, revisited, and negotiated the descriptive and normative aspects of cosmopolitan existence and citizenship. It has thus provided rich and diverse descriptions and prescriptions of cosmopolitanism. Political philosophy, in particular, investigates the relationship of cosmopolitanism with kindred or alternative descriptions and prescriptions of how we exist or should exist in the world. In line with philosophy, the philosophy of education also considers what counts as cosmopolitan. Often transferring philosophical insights directly to educational frameworks, educational philosophy discusses whether cosmopolitanism (and which version of it) may be a desirable pedagogical aim. Questions such as “who embodies the cosmopolitan,” “what matters as cosmopolitan practice,” or “how to cultivate the cosmopolitan subject and the corresponding citizenship” are indicative of educational-philosophical concerns. At a deeper level, educational philosophy addresses challenges to identity, contestations of Western values, and contemporary, global changes that affect educational appreciations of cosmopolitanism. And it examines how critical approaches to cosmopolitanism and to related notions may shed new light on educational cosmopolitan sensibilities and reveal ambiguities in cosmopolitan political and pedagogical operations.

Education and its contagion often get in each other’s way. Education, whatever the intentions of educators, often suffers from its contagious character, that is, from the fact that its often praiseworthy aspirations to transmission and dissemination turn education into a toxic social institution. Hence, education always requires care, critique and collective responsibility, especially in times that pass for asymptomatic, that is, when life seems normal and uneventful. Education should be pandemic, that is, universal, but non-toxically so.

Old and new complicities of collective political attachment in violence give patriotism a bad name. Simplistic positions often view collective attachment as either entirely bad or as sanitizable me...

This chapter argues that hegemonic conceptions of cosmopolitanism fail to theorize a complex cosmopolitan normativity. Within such hegemonies, cosmopolitan education for global citizenship constructs future citizens as culturally mixed-up selves mobile across borders and merely respectful to, and tolerant of, the diversity that they encounter. The reader of the chapter will be presented with arguments about why this is politically too inadequate to cover the normative significance of cosmopolitanism and too uninspiring as regards citizenship education. Cosmopolitanism needs a rethinking that makes higher ethico-political demands on the global self and world for the cultivation of critical-educational ecological and relational sensibilities.

This concluding chapter (coda) begins with a brief account of the geometrical metaphor of concentric circles, its employment in cosmopolitan literature and its relevance to selfhood. Then, polycentric challenges to this model such as Homi Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism and W. E. Connolly’s rhizomatic cosmopolitanism are discussed. Against the concentric metaphor and its polycentric challenges, a third option is explored: the metaphor of eccentric circles. Since eccentric circles are not drawn around the same centre, some new possibilities emerge for illustrating the relation of cosmopolitanism with multiple allegiances. As figures of such allegiances, eccentric circles can also disrupt the harmonious and proportionate geometrical order of concentricity and thus better accommodate the more dissonant, unruly, and fluctuating character of real human entanglement. Ultimately, the ‘ec’ of the eccentric goes beyond the ‘poly’-centric because it denotes a departure from a centre rather than a mere enrichment that may not disrupt the centrality of the ego enough.

The philosophical idea of the death of God (God understood in pre-modern terms as living presence) has had various semantic operations within dominant (post)modern positions on human empowerment. Beginning with the significance of this, the article aims to discuss the half-life of a God who has become a metaphor. In other words, it explores the reverberation of God and God's death in secularized philosophy as well as the consequences of this for ethics and the conception of the Good. Then, the article illustrates the complex connection of this aim with the Occidental delimitation of human potentialities through gleanings from Murdoch, Arendt and Badiou´s ideas about the constellation ‘worldlessness, rupture, human frailty and everydayness’. It shows that such delimitation, operative in theories that share most of the assumptions surrounding the above constellation, re-sacralizes the justification of ethics as (in)humanist programme. Finally, it indicates how this particular delimitation of human potentialities can be revisited through the revival of the dead metaphor of the angelic and the kind of ethics it can animate.

Cosmopolitan concern for the whole world is often treated as oppositional to particular collectivities, to corresponding sensibilities and to the obligations that follow from them. Tensions revolve around demands made upon the self (depending on the emphasis on the local or the global) and infuse educational discourse accordingly. Culturalism approaches the self as a culturally or multiculturally shaped identity, monopolises the terrain of cosmopolitan debate and narrows the scope of cosmopolitan education only to encouraging hybridity of selfhood and to cultivating respect and tolerance of global diversity. In this article, I discuss Jeremy Waldron's conception of cosmopolitan selfhood by drawing on the exemplary status attributed to specific manifestations of hybrid identity. What will gradually emerge from my discussion is, hopefully, a broadening of cosmopolitan demands upon the self and an emphasis on the transforming and reforming rather than the forming or informing significance of cosmopolitan education. This trans/re-forming significance is attached to a critical positioning of the subject regarding the ethico-political responsibilities of one's home (-land, culture, commitments) that often go unnoticed. Doing one's homework is shown to be a precondition for a cosmopolitanism understood within the order of treatment of, rather than agreement with, the Other.