The Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) warmly welcomes you to the website for the 44th Annual Conference of the society.
The conference will take place at the Conference Centre, Kingsgate Hotel, Te Rapa, Hamilton, New Zealand from Saturday November 22 - Tuesday November 25 2014.
The conference theme is:
Education as Philosophies of Engagement
Ko te kōrero
To highlight the conference theme, this simple phrase is chosen to evoke the well-known Maori proverb, "Ko te kai a te rangatira, he kōrero" meaning literally "Talk is the food of chiefs" and metaphorically, "Discourse nourishes the essence of our humanity."
The term ‘engagement’ suggests many aspects crucial not only to education, but to living in our contemporary globalised world. Engagement invokes thoughts about the relational, the personal; to cultures, religions; physical, emotional, psychological and virtual spaces; contesting political, economic and social critique and encompassing notions of civic engagement and activism; of engaging the stranger and the foreigner, the self, the ‘thou’ and ‘other’. Engagement signals the importance of traversing philosophical possibilities and negotiating ways to deal with contrasting or conflicting views - with anger, with violence and war. How can we/ought we engage with each other and with world issues such as inequalities, child poverty, female education, genocide, democracy and so on based on these provocations? We elaborate on this further in the Call for Papers.
Left: Student Protests London 2010. Source: wikimedia. Right: Demonstrators in Bayda. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
The NZ paua shell or abalone provides us with a visual metaphor to highlight this year’s conference theme: ‘education as philosophy of engagement’. It highlights the expansive possibilities that exist to philosophise, theorise and conceptualise ‘engagement’ from diverse local, indigenous and global standpoints. As such the theme of engagement offers scope for generating new and exciting colours, compositions, interanimations and hues in 21st century education.
Please check the links on the right hand side of this page in order to learn more about the conference.
Conference organisers:
Tina Besley, Jayne White & Michael Peters (University of Waikato).
Conference Committee:
Sonja Arndt, Richard Heraud, Carl Mika, Chandra Poudyal, Georgina Stewart, Margaret Stuart, Meripa Toso, Lynley Tulloch
Conference administrator:
Maggie Lyall
To contact us, email us at
Left: 2009 Landsgemeinde Glarus, Switzerland. Source: Wikipedia. Right: Voting in Pakistan Elections 2013. Source: Wikimedia.