Thinking about Higher Education with Hannah Arendt

9 February 2021

Hannah Arendt refused to be pigeon-holed within any particular disciplinary frame and insisted that she was first and foremost a thinker: a public educator whose task it was to engage with what she saw as the major events of her time. Her work is hugely varied and spans many fields and subjects, but she was constantly working and reworking a number of inter-related concepts – among them thinking, judgement and action, which together constitute a process of deliberation or phronesis. In this webinar we shall consider each of these concepts, the relation between them, and their possible application to higher education policy and practice in the 21^st Century.

Professor Jon Nixon led this exploration of the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s thinking to higher education today. Jon Nixon is Honorary Professor in the Center for Lifelong Learning Research and Development at The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, UK. Jon is the author of the recent Hannah Arendt: The Promise of Education. (Key Thinkers in Education Series) Cham, Switzerland: Springer 2020, as well as Hannah Arendt (1906-1975): Embodying a promise in the university, in R. Barnett and A. Fulford (eds.) Philosophers on the University: Reconsidering Higher Education. New York: Springer pp. 83-94, 2020. Jon has written extensively on higher education and the philosophy of education.

This webinar was hosted by the Centre for Research on Problem-oriented Project Learning at Roskilde University.

Relevant publications:

Jon Nixon (2015) Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. London and New York: Bloomsbury

Jon Nixon (2018) Universities as civic spaces: in the footsteps of Arendt and Jaspers, in R. Barnett and M. Peters (eds) The Idea of the University, Volume 2: Contemporary Perspectives, New York: Peter Lang pp.447-460