The academic discussion concerning justice in education tends to center around questions of equal educational opportunity and the (re-)distribution of educational resources. This paper responds to a special issue which collects different approaches to educational justice that move beyond the boundaries setby traditional, hegemonic perspectives in the field. I point to some important strands in which the different papers converge and outline how they attempt to produce a shift in the understanding of educational justice; how they bring into view and touch upon ways of thinking through educational justice which have previously not received attention or been obscured by more conventional paradigms. Different papers do this in different ways, but there is a joint effort to self-critically turn philosophy onto itself as well as a common tendency towards what could be called a shift beyond discourse towards more worldly, materialistic, bodily and embodied notions of justice and injustice.

This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people worldwide are watching films and series via their smartphones or personal computers, we here explore the educative aspects of this popular activity. Does this wide-ranging habit mis-educate the next generation? Or does cinema carry a potential for ethical-political education, parallel to the ancient Greek tragedies and the modernist Bildungsroman? The authors of this special issue deliberate this question by exploring the intersection between cinema and philosophy and the potential powers of cinematic education.

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.

What if education were not about becoming something, making something of yourself, becoming some thing? What if we were to consider education as becoming-world? These questions are posed against the background of the current populist nationalist backlash against the consequences of globalization, along with growing anti-intellectualism and anti-democratic sentiment. How can education contribute locally and globally to fostering and safeguarding the very possibility of democratic practices against the neoliberal consecration of reified social relations? Becoming Things, Becoming-world contributes to contemporary discussions in philosophy of education by developing a vision of a critical educational cosmopolitanism founded upon a renewed critique of reification.

While cosmopolitan education has often been articulated in terms of an ethical and political response to globalization, this thesis proposes a different outlook. I argue that the idea of cosmopolitan education predates the onset of what we now term globalization, and that it provides a meaningful conception of education beyond the present socio-political condition. Moreover, I propose to rethink cosmopolitan education as a critique of reification, i.e. a critique of social relations taking on the character of mere things. The critique of reification helps to foreground aspects that have previously been neglected and marginalized in educational cosmopolitanism, such as its economic-material dimensions. At the same time, a critical cosmopolitan perspective is needed for a timely de-centering of critical social theory.

Re-assessing the Cynic tradition and drawing on critical theorists such as Gerard Delanty and Axel Honneth as well as on New Wittgensteinian philosophers as Alice Crary, I advance a post-universalist understanding of cosmopolitanism. This is based on dynamic social relations and a broad understanding of rationality which includes imaginary aspects as well as the education of our sensitivities. Cosmopolitanism is understood as a lived practice which critically challenges reified social and cultural relations, including the strictures of particular socio-economic structures. The notion of reification is distinguished from other forms of alienation, objectification and instrumentalization and is deployed to characterize lasting distortions of our relations to each other, to the world and to ourselves. Against any idealizing take on communicative practice, I show that language, knowledge, and education do not necessarily counter-act reifying tendencies. Indeed, they themselves can become sources for enhancing processes of reification.

A fresh look at the critique of reification allows us adequately to describe and understand the interrelation between contemporary capitalism, the forms of subjectivity it produces and the possibilities of democratic education and education towards democracy. Such an understanding is needed in face of the apparent impossibility of imagining a society, and envisioning an education, beyond the conditions formulated by contemporary neoliberal policies. Education as becoming-world maintains a hopeful outlook on the possibilities of our globalizing and pluralizing social reality as well as a keen focus on the tensions and challenges that this poses for contemporary educational endeavors on individual as well as structural levels.

The paper discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought in relation to the German Bildung tradition. For many, Bildung still signifies a valuable achievement of modern educational thought as well as a critical, emancipatory ideal which, frequently in a rather nostalgic manner, is appealed to in order to delineate problematic tendencies of current educational trends. Others, in an at times rather cynical manner, claim that Bildung through its successful institutionalization has shaped vital features of our present educational system and has thus served its time and lost its critical potential. When thinking through Emerson's variations on Bildung I argue against the nostalgic appeals to Bildung that the criticism against it has to be taken seriously. Against the cynical assessment of Bildung having run its course, I will hold that with Emerson we can develop the idea of an 'aversive education' as a call for Bildung to be turned upon itself, allowing to revive it as a conceptual tool for transformation, drawing particular attention to its political dimension.

One of the most pervasive educational debates in recent decades, from mainstream media to educational policy, research, and philosophy, has been shaped by a concern with an apparently radical shift in the conception of public education from a primarily national to a global outlook. What authors mean by the ‘globalizing world’ to which contemporary educational institutions are supposed to adjust ranges from the emergence of new powerful supranational actors on the educational scene to globalizing economic structures, neoliberal policies, global cultural changes, to more flexible, mobile, and diverse populations as well as to the increase of worldwide communication due to the fast spreading of new media and technologies. The revival of the old ideal of the cosmopolitan can in this context be understood as an attempt to articulate an adequate response to the (perceived) demands that these new developments make on future citizens, and hence educational institutions, actors, and practices. We will address the distinction between classic cosmopolitanism and the so-called new cosmopolitanisms and the specific hopes and dangers which different philosophers of education have associated with the respective ideals of the future world citizens. Instead of naively falling into the trap of conceiving of globalization and cosmopolitanism as mere positive potential or negative threat for education, the chapter will emphasize the multiple critical approaches and the points of departure for resistance and transformation which have been articulated from ethical, social, cultural, and political cosmopolitan frameworks against the recently prevailing unilateral economic interpretations of current educational challenges.