Conference Agenda

This paper explores contemporary far-right imaginaries (specifically the so-called “Great Replacement”) as educational phenomena rather than simply as political ideologies or epistemic errors. The guiding claim I try to make is that such narratives function as pedagogical projects: they teach people how to see, how to judge, and how to experience time under conditions often described as post-truth. Their effectiveness lies less in the persuasiveness of their arguments than in their capacity to form habits of perception, credibility, and temporal orientation. In recent years, educational responses to the far right have largely taken the form of antifascist education, focusing on exposure, debunking, and moral denunciation. While ethically necessary, these responses appear educationally insufficient (and are kind of failing if we consider the widespread success of proto-fascist ideas). Belief in “replacement” narratives persists even when factual claims are challenged, and empirical research suggests that such beliefs often operate as coherent interpretive frameworks rather than as isolated false propositions. This persistence raises a distinctly pedagogical question: what is being learned, and how, when these narratives become compelling? I approach this question int his paper from a philosophy of education perspective, arguing that far-right discourses should be understood as competing educational projects, that is, projects that organize experience, not merely opinion. Drawing on pragmatist and post-critical traditions, I argue that ideas cannot be assessed only by their truth or falsity in advance of their circulation; they must also be examined in terms of what they do pedagogically: how they orient attention, distribute credibility, and render certain experiences intelligible while foreclosing others. My analysis focuses on two widely circulated texts by the French writer and activist Renaud Camus, The Great Replacement and You Will Not Replace Us! Rather than treating these texts as objects to be unmasked or debunked, I depart from adopting an immanent reading, tracing how they educate perception and temporality from within. This approach does not suspend ethical or political judgment; rather, it pays careful attention as a condition for educational critique. The question is not whether these ideas are objectionable (they are), but trying to understand how they become formatively effective and where are their flaws from the inside. A key concern of the paper is to clarify why conventional educational responses so often fail. Replacement narratives do not simply deny facts; they reconfigure what counts as evidence, how mediation is interpreted, and when deliberation is considered legitimate. They frequently transform the present from a space of inquiry into a space of urgency, where learning appears as weakness and hesitation as complicity. In this sense, the problem is not only epistemic but temporal: these discourses teach people how to feel time. The paper also clarifies the distinctive responsibility of education in relation to other public arenas. Political and journalistic responses are oriented toward decision, exposure, and urgency; education, by contrast, is responsible for cultivating the conditions of judgment, attentiveness, and shared criteria. From this standpoint, immanent (post-critcal) reading is not an indulgence but an educational necessity. If education is to respond meaningfully to contemporary fascist imaginaries, it must intervene at the level where these imaginaries work: the formation of habits, orientations, and temporal experience.

Contemporary educational policy and practice are increasingly characterised by the proliferation of “buzzwords” that purport to signal innovation, reform, and responsiveness to social change. Terms such as active citizenship, gamification, digitalisation, AI, 21st century skills, sustainable education, safe spaces, critical thinking, and well-being, have become ubiquitous across policy documents, research agendas, and professional discourse (Stenersen & Prøitz 2022). Such terms are also widely discussed within the philosophy of education, often from a critical standpoint and typically as individual cases (e.g., Biesta 2010). Rather than offering another review of existing critiques, this paper seeks to move beyond case-by-case analysis in order to interrogate the phenomenon of educational buzzwords at a more general level. It asks what is at stake in the contemporary circulation of buzzwords in education and how this phenomenon might be understood and addressed. To this end, the paper approaches buzzword discourse from three perspectives: conceptual, normative, and critical and post-critical (Hodgson et al. 2017).
Conceptually, the paper examines how buzzwords operate through semantic looseness rather than precision. Their apparent inclusivity allows them to accommodate competing interpretations while avoiding explicit normative commitments. This elasticity enables ideas with long and contested philosophical histories – such as autonomy, Bildung, or care - to be reintroduced under new labels, detached from their original ethical and theoretical frameworks. As a result, educational concepts are flattened into managerial or instrumental terms that prioritise measurability, adaptability, and policy alignment over educational meaning.
From a normative perspective, the paper argues that the repeated renaming of educational ideas raises significant ethical concerns. When familiar practices are rebranded rather than critically re-examined, opportunities for substantive normative debate about the purposes of education are foreclosed. Buzzwords tend to present themselves as self-evidently desirable, thereby limiting space for dissent and obscuring value-laden assumptions about learners, teachers, and society. In this way, buzzword discourse contributes to the depoliticisation of education, displacing questions of justice, authority, and responsibility with technical, motivational, or managerial language.
Finally, the paper situates educational buzzwords within broader traditions of critique concerning instrumental reason and the trivialization of educational thought. It argues that the rapid turnover of terminology produces an illusion of progress while reinforcing continuity in underlying power relations. The emphasis on constant conceptual renewal privileges adaptability and responsiveness over historical understanding and critical judgment, fostering a culture in which educators are expected to adopt new vocabularies rather than interrogate their implications. At the same time, the paper moves beyond a purely critical impulse that treats buzzwords solely as instruments of linguistic governance. It also approaches them as forms of cliché that, nevertheless, carry significant meaning. As Hannah Arendt (1994, 311) reminds us, we must “become very humble … and listen closely to popular language”, persistently returning to reality in an effort to understand what is truly happening.