54th PESA Conference 2026

University of Melbourne, 6-10 December 2026

Ethical thought-work and parrhesia in educational ideologies

 

 

The 54th Annual PESA conference invites scholarship that engages with the ideological dimensions of education: the “commonsense” assumptions that quietly shape aims, pedagogies, policies and everyday practice, and the ethical and political consequences that follow. We foreground parrhesia – courageous truth-telling that risks the self in reception – and ask what becomes possible when philosophy of education refuses easy satisfactions, like the outsourcing of thought, the comforts of institutional neutrality, and the instrumental capture of “critical thinking” as a technique.

 

Where are the possibilities for courage now? What is at stake? And what kinds of speech and silence does education produce, reward, and or foreclose?  How are boundaries drawn between mutual understanding and neutralised contestation? Could it be that ‘commonsense’ worldviews may not be clearly articulated in the minds of educators and educational policy makers, but nevertheless have ethical and political implications?