Keynotes I - IV

Keynote lecture I: 26.06.2025, 15:00, Interim-110

Krassimir Stojanov: Populism as Topic of a Critical Theory of Education

^{By ‘critical theory of education’, I understand the reconstruction of social pathologies in institutionalized education that contradict the very idea of education. I argue that one of the most important pathologies of that kind is what I call ‘educational populism’, that is, the ways, in which educational institutions directly and rather indirectly give rise to and support the development and the widespread of populist attitudes and ideologies. In the contemporary political theory seems to be a consensus that most distinguishes feature of populism is its anti-pluralism. The latter is closely connected to the antagonistic opposition between ‘the people’ and the ‘elite’, which the populists propagate. Within this opposition “the people” appears as a kind of organic unity, as a homogeneous entity with a collective will and consciousness. The construction of this unity proceed mainly through the cultivation of ressentiments. 
I claim that institutionalized educational practices such as selection and segregation based on the social and ethnic background of the students in homogeneous school tracks serve as origins of populist ressentiments.
Finally, I sketch out an alternative institutional model of anti-populist, democratic education which is very much inspired by Elisabeth Anderson’s concept of democratic equality in and through education.} 

Keynote lecture II: 27.06.2025, 9:15, Interim-109

Maeve Cooke: Ecologically Entangled Ethical Agency: Renewing Critical Theory, Reconfiguring Bildung

^{No matter where or how they live, humans today face ecological challenges of enormous magnitude. Environmental degradation through ruthless extraction of the planet’s resources by humans for human purposes, extended and intensified over the course of capitalist modernity, has brought humankind to a point where its very existence is at stake. The anthropogenic dimension of these ecological challenges is particularly troubling. I take the  view that contemporary critical social theories, including critical theories of education, must confront the challenges by looking outwards and towards the future. This calls for a critical philosophical perspective that is at once context-expanding, context-transcending and animated by utopian energies. In line with the idea of education as Bildung in a Hegelian sense, I propose a re-imagining and rearticulation of human freedom as the free development of ethical agency. I characterise this as ecologically entangled agency, oriented towards ‘the good’, in which self-determination is always also self-transformation. The free development of ethical agency requires attentiveness to the multiple, complex entanglements between human as well as other-than-human agencies, each with their own distinctive normativity, and calls for exploration of the ethical-existential significance of these entanglements in communicative engagement with other humans. In my paper, I show how a renewed, decentred and more open, Frankfurt School Critical Theory can contribute to reconfiguring Bildung in a way that takes account of ecologically entangled ethical agency.}

Keynote lecture III: 27.06.2025, 14:15, Interim-109

Douglas Yacek: One-Dimensional Education

^{In his classic study of American society and culture, One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse argued that consumer culture exerts an immense flattening effect on our collective and individual aspirations. In the consumerist world, the difference between true and false needs vanishes—we become convinced that ultimate fulfillment can be found in our next luxury purchase or mass-market commodity, and when it inevitably fails to deliver, we seek out another. While Marcuse, like other Frankfurt School theorists, ultimately places blame for our state of affairs on the so-called culture industry, I explore in this talk how our educational paradigm cultivates the very forms of thought and action that make the influence of the culture industry so successful. I argue that an ideology of equipage dominates our educational imagination, preventing us from conceiving and constructing educational experiences that challenge the status-quo and make personal transformation (Bildung) possible.} 

Keynote lecture IV: 28.06.2025, 9:15, Interim-109

Christopher Martin: Losing the War to Win the Peace? The Civil Educational Condition as an Emancipatory Interest

^{Contemporary liberal-democracy is steeped in the analysis, imagery and emotions of “division”. Political polarization, elites vs. populists, culture wars and separationist sentiments are pervasive themes in modern interpretations of liberal society and its future prospects. In the spirit of the conference theme, I apply social critical analysis in order to understand the underlying “struggles and wishes” behind these interpretations. I propose that we should understand division as a civic struggle over the norms of justice and legitimacy that best apply to civic institutions and associations. This struggle is the product of a deep crisis of epistemic authority i.e., of how to know who the trustworthy knowers are. Educational institutions, which rely on and reproduce norms of epistemic authority, are a key conflict zone. If this is right, then one task for critical theory is to facilitate free and equal citizen’s escape from the ‘prisoner’s epistemic dilemma’ that a deep crisis brings about (e.g., where the knower has an incentive to recover a feeling of epistemic certainty by rejecting truth-claims that contradict what that knower believes to be true). What might this theoretical work look like? In a prisoner’s dilemma, engaging in a struggle (e.g., ‘us vs. them’, ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’) is an ineffective strategy because a good outcome necessitates social cooperation. In our context, escaping the prisoner’s epistemic dilemma requires no less than a willingness on the part of each knower to “lose the war to win the peace.” I characterize “winning the peace” as akin to a Kantian civil condition and argue that citizens have an equal interest in establishing this educational condition. This, I conclude, is where a critical theory of education should focus its efforts.}