This seminar is part of the Education, Purpose and Human Flourishing in Uncertain Times research programme.

Theme 3: History and Politics

This series explores how we might better understand the ‘idea’ or indeed the ideal of flourishing, and the importance of education as a pathway to it. Previously, we first examined a variety of important concepts concerning personhood and society as it relates to flourishing, such as character and virtue, and asked whether flourishing lies in the development of these. In the second seminar series, we turned our attention to other notions interdependently related to flourishing, specifically the notions of culture and context. We asked whether and how the development of mind and socio-emotional qualities such as character, virtue, open-mindedness, resilience, and actualisation are differently, but no less meaningfully, shaped by history and culture across world contexts. In this third series, we are turning to the impact of history and politics on pathways and understandings of human flourishing. We ask to what extent we should consider enabling and disabling historical factors in national and international contexts, and point towards examples of collective endeavour and struggle in response to adversity.

These seminars are open to the public and can be joined in person, or virtually on the following MS Teams link: Click here to join the meeting.

Recordings of past seminars can be found at this link.

David Johnson is Reader in Comparative and International Education. He convenes the Centre for Comparative and International Education. He is the Programme Research Lead for the Templeton World Charity Foundation Education project on Education, Purpose and Human Flourishing in Uncertain Times. He is a Chartered Educational Psychologist who studies learning and cognition and is particularly interested in tracking learning progression in national systems of education over time. Recent work includes time series studies of learning in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Sudan.

For full seminar details and recordings of past seminars, please click on this link: Education and Human Flourishing: History and Politics 

To be added to the mailing list, please email: prl@education.ox.ac.uk or contact Dr Fiona Gatty at fiona.gatty@education.ox.ac.uk.