Events

Roland Reichenbach has been a Professor of General Educational Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, since 2013. His research focus and main interests are concerned with pedagogical ethics, the philosophy of education, political education as well as processes of negotiation and agreement. He is the author of numerous books on educational topics and processes.

The school has important significance for democratic societies. It serves “democratic” education and training. Yet the school itself is neither polis nor embryonic society (“society in miniature”). A polis exists only among “free equals”, and society “at large” is in no way reflected in the school–or only within a very limited sense–in miniature.

Michael S. Merry is professor in the department of Child Development and Education at the University of Amsterdam. He also is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities and the Departments of both Geography and Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He received a broad education in the humanities in Chicago, Leuven and New York before earning his doctorate in philosophy and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been visiting fellow at several universities, including Bristol University, New York University and Brown University.

His presentation addresses the issue of 'controversy in the classroom.' As societies across Europe and the world appear to increasingly splinter along socioeconomic, ethnic and ideological lines; social media algorithms facilitate echo chambers that discourage listening to the other side; and political trust in state institutions everywhere is in freefall, educational philosophers, political scientists and policy-makers in many countries look to the school and insist on the urgency of discussing sensitive subject matter in the classroom. The speaker invites us to seriously consider that endeavor and asks, 'what could possibly go wrong?'

Julian Culp is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Program Coordinator for Philosophy, and Fellow of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris. Previously, he was a lecturer in philosophy and political theory at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, where he received his Habilitation and PhD in philosophy. Culp held postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Toronto and the Catholic University of Louvain, and he spent research stays at Duke and Princeton universities. Culp is the author of Global Justice and Development (Palgrave, 2014) and Democratic Education in a Globalized World (Routledge, 2019), as well as of numerous articles in journals such as Philosophy Compass, Theory and Research in Education, Third World Quarterly and Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education (CUP, 2023), the journal Analyse & Kritik – Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory (De Gruyter) and the book series Philosophy of Education – Debates and Constellations (Brill and Mentis).

During their academic career, many students experience a political coming of age which induces them to start or join activist groups concerned with various social, cultural, and political causes great and small. For some, this process begins in high school, where they are offered some sort of civic education and other classes that provide opportunities to explore their (political) interests. Yet, most pupils that end up as activists indicate that they found the formal programs too rigid and constraining rather than encouraging. This encouragement they found through other (informal) channels in and around their schools. Research by prof. dr. Tibbitts et al. explores these formal and informal channels through in-depth interviews with a group of 18–24-year-old (student) activists from the US to find out what factors in educational environments are encouraging or discouraging student activism. Since American culture has great influence on European culture (from music to politics), most recently expressed during the Black Lives Matter protests, these findings are as relevant to European teachers as to American ones.

 The second session of our seminar series Democratic innovations will discuss Arthur Gwagwa's paper "How is digital foreign interference undermining self-determination in Africa?" Arthur is a PhD candidate at UU's Ethics Institute.

Samuel is an assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. 

Tom situated his research findings within the wider framework of his research into the role of politicians in the link between political distrust and democratic reform. To this end, Tom will also referred to the results of a collaborative research project into parliamentary debates in four countries and drew upon his experiences in the Dutch state committee studying the Dutch parliamentary system.

Wim Blockmans is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Leiden University. In 2020 this prominent historian published Medezeggenschap. Politieke participatie in Europa vóór 1800, the product of a lifetime of reflection on issues of political participation. A thoroughly revised translation of this remarkable scholarly work was published by Routledge in 2023.

Hannah Werner is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics and Representation at the University of Zurich. She does research on democratic innovation, legitimacy and the consequences of climate change for democratic attitudes. In her research she combines perspectives from political psychology, democratic theory and environmental psychology and various methods, such as experiments, cross-national surveys and qualitative interviews. 

Her new research project focusses on how the climate crisis affects how citizens think about democracy and which role democratic innovation can play in sustaining both democracy and building broad support for climate action.