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Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Call for Papers: “Ethical and Epistemological Issues in the Teaching of Politics”

Justice Everywhere is pleased to share the following call for papers:


The Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) at UCL and the Teaching Political Theory Network (TPTN) at the University of York are co-organising a one-day workshop focussed on ethical and epistemological issues in the teaching of politics.

Time: Friday, 6 June 2025

Location: University College, London

The teaching of politics is taken to include the teaching of all relevant sub-disciplines (e.g., political science, international relations, political theory) as well as activities that inform and support it (e.g., related pastoral and administrative activities).

The aim of the workshop is to provide a platform for educators and researchers to critically explore contemporary philosophical issues, scholarly debates, and innovative pedagogical approaches related to the central theme.

We welcome presentations, case studies, papers, and panel proposals that might address, but are not restricted to, the ethical and/or epistemological dimensions of:

  • the teaching of argumentation in politics;
  • background methodological choices/assumptions;
  • neutrality of teacher viewpoint;
  • freedom of speech in the classroom;
  • teaching controversial/offensive/upsetting topics;
  • inclusive classroom practices;
  • decolonising/liberating the curriculum;
  • differential treatment of students;
  • modes of assessment;
  • reducing the emphasis on grades;
  • use of A.I.;
  • programme design;
  • co-designing teaching materials with students;
  • aiming to enhance student employability;
  • the teaching of interdisciplinary subjects.

Please send your expression of interest and a short abstract of no more than 100 words to polsci.cpp@ucl.ac.uk by the end of Wednesday 9th April 2025.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Democracy / General / Governance / Social justice

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‘Flooding the zone’ and the politics of attention

Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photography by Gage Skidmore.

This is a guest post by Zsolt Kapelner (University of Oslo).

‘Flooding the zone’ is a term often used to describe the strategy Trump and his team have followed in recent weeks. This strategy involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion. Many have criticized this strategy and, in my view, rightly so. But what precisely is wrong with it? In this short piece I want to argue that ‘flooding the zone’ is not simply one of the, perhaps dirtier, tricks in the toolbox of democratic competition; instead, it is an inherently antidemocratic strategy which deliberately aims at exploiting one of our crucial vulnerabilities as a democratic public, i.e., our limited attentional capacity.

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Migration / Punishment / Rights / Social justice

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Mass Deportation and Migrant Crime

A photograph of a Trump rally during the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign. Trump is visible in the front, and behind him are several rows of fans, some holding signs including "Latinos for Trump" and !Make America Great Again" signs.
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a “Make America Great Again” campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Arizona. (c) Gage Skidmore

This is a guest post by Mario J Cunningham M.

“Mass deportation now!” was the omnipresent motto of banners at the 2024 Trump rallies – replacing the “Build the wall!” of 2016. The re-election of Donald Trump, who openly ran on a mass deportation platform, represents a hard blow for all those concerned about migration justice. The hardening of anti-immigrant rhetoric is now understood as a mandate in the most prominent Western liberal democracy. How should we make sense of this? Paying attention to how this policy was marketed and the role “migrant crime” played in its success sheds light on an often-overlooked normative challenge migrant advocates need to come to terms with.

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General / Reflections on Ukraine / Social justice

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The Sword is Mightier than The Pen and Reflection on the Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy

A portrait photograph of Margaret Atwood wearing a colourful scarf against a dark background
Margaret Atwood. Credit: © Luis Mora

This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The interview has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original interview can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel under the heading: ‘What Good is Philosophy? – A Benefit Conference for Ukraine.’

Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere has published edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the past few weeks. We now reproduce Aaron’s interview with Margaret Atwood as a conclusion to the series.

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Academia / Democracy / Education / Pedagogy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Utopia, Dystopia, and Democracy: Teaching Philosophy in Wartime Ukraine

A photograph of a large multistorey building destroyed by shelling.
Karazin Business School, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland.

This is a guest post by Orysya Bila (Ukrainian Catholic University) and Joshua Duclos (St Paul’s School), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Why teach philosophy in wartime Ukraine? It’s a fair question. It’s a necessary question. Given the variety and gravity of Ukraine’s urgent needs, few will think to themselves: “But what about philosophy? Is Ukraine getting enough philosophy?” As two scholars committed to teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine – one American, one Ukrainian – we believe an explanation is in order. 

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Academia / International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

A photograph of a destroyed and rusted military vehicle on St. Michael's Square, Kyiv. Behind the dark vehicle, you can see a colourful church tower with a golden dome.
St. Michael’s Square, Kyiv, June 2022. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland

This is a guest post by Dr Nataliia Viatkina (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine/American University Kyiv), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled, “The Missing Conversation”, with the subtitle, “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, Professors Lorraine Daston and Peter Harrison. What is their conversation about?

As it turns out, one reason for their discussion is the question: Would a boycott of Russian scientists be an effective protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? This is not the only question—there are several others, and all of them lead to the article’s main topic: scientists and historians have stopped communicating with each other. Both Professors believe that now is the time to resume the dialogue. 

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General / International / Moral values / Reflections on Ukraine

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To Cancel or Not to Cancel? – Questioning the Russian Idea

A photograph of St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv at night time.
St. Sophia’s Catherdral, Kyiv, November 2023. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor George Pattison (University of Glasgow), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Nine months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he argued that although Western leaders always claim to be the champions of freedom, Western liberalism was now engaged in the complete suppression of anything that contradicted its view of what was socially and culturally desirable. As he told his audience, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky prophetically foretold all this back in the 19th century”. Specifically, Putin cites Shigalev, one of the nihilistic conspirators in The Possessed (or Demons). Shigalev is a gloomy theorist who realizes that his plans for unlimited freedom will result in unlimited despotism. “This,” says Putin, “is what our Western opponents have come to”. Specifically, he applies Shigalev’s remark to the so-called “cancel culture” of the West, comparing it to Nazi book-burning and contrasting it with the fact that, even during the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders maintained a respect for each other’s cultural achievements (indeed, I remember posters outside one of our local venues advertising the Red Army choir and dancers). Probably referring to the cancellation of a course on Dostoevsky at Milan-Bicocca University days after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin told his listeners that even Dostoevsky is now cancelled in the West—ignoring the fact that the course was swiftly reinstated following a public outcry.

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International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Putin’s Use and Abuse of History as a Political Weapon

The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga. Painting by the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a guest post by Professor Cynthia R Nielsen (University of Dallas), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

To draw upon different strands of history for the purpose of creating, strengthening, or re-imagining a national narrative is not in itself problematic and, in fact, is common to most, if not all, states. Yet when one’s historically informed (or de-formed) narrative is transformed into a History that cannot be contested or challenged and is used to colonize, exploit, and justify waging aggressive and unjust wars on other sovereign states—or as Vladimir Putin did with Chechnya, autonomous territories within one’s own borders—one’s Historical narrative becomes a propagandistic weapon.

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Duties / International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Against the Odds: Defending Defensive Wars

A photograph of an apartment building damaged by bomb impacts. In the foreground, a child's climbing frame is visible.
Saltivka, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor Gerald Lang (University of Leeds), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Peace is better than war. It takes two to fight. These are truisms: they’re true, but so obvious that they’re not usually worth stating. But they swiftly generate conundrums in the ethics of war in general, and the Ukraine conflict in particular. We can learn something, in my view, from thinking about these conundrums. But we may need to tackle the understandable concern that it’s unhelpfulto explore them at a time when energy and attention levels are flagging in the international community, even though Ukraine remains under attack from Russia and arguably requires all the support, moral and otherwise, that it can get. In some circumstances, indulging in more theoretical speculations—the kind of speculative and hypothetical thinking that forms the daily diet of philosophers of war—may come across as being objectionably detached, or perhaps as just another way of being a useful idiot. These worries deserve careful consideration, not hasty dismissal. If there’s to be a place for serious philosophizing about war, it needs to be reconciled with the more engaged concerns of those who care deeply about the Ukraine war but lack specifically philosophical concerns about it.

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International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War

A photograph of male and female Ukrainian soldiers standing in a line.
Ceremony on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Photo: President of Ukraine, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain

This is a guest post by Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford University), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

There are three wars currently in progress in Ukraine: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainian war against Russia. It is necessary for the purpose of evaluation to make these distinctions, for the first of these wars is, like the Second World War (understood as a war between allied and axis powers), neither just nor unjust. Only a war fought by one or more belligerents against an opponent can be just or unjust. Many or most of what we refer to as wars consist of a just war on one side and an unjust war on the other – or, to be more precise, a war with predominantly just aims on one side and a war with predominantly unjust aims on the other.

There is no credible understanding of a just war according to which the Russian war against Ukraine is a just war. It is a wholly unprovoked war of aggression intended by those who initiated it – primarily Putin – to conquer Ukraine, annex its territory, and assimilate its population. The motives of the war’s planners are doubtless many and various but some stand out as obvious and dominant. One is to expand the Russian empire until it is at least coextensive with its earlier boundaries under the tsars and the post-revolutionary Soviet dictators. Another motivation echoes the American concern about “falling dominoes” as a reason for invading Vietnam. Many of the states that were ruled by Soviet puppet regimes during the Cold War have, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, been adopting more and more elements of Western culture, in particular liberalism and democracy. Ukraine was a falling domino that threatened to become a fully independent, economically flourishing democracy in a large border territory that Russia had repeatedly ravaged in the past – a state that would be an example, highly visible to Russians, of an appealing alternative to Putin’s tyrannical kleptocracy.

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