NAAPE 2025 Keynote Speaker Profiles
Catherine Z. Elgin, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, USA
Catherine Z. Elgin is professor of the philosophy of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is an epistemologist who focuses on the nature and scope of understanding. She argues that understanding is holistic – that is, understanding is in the first instance a grasp of interconnected networks of epistemic commitments, rather than a grasp of individual propositions. Rather than being or aspiring to be a mirror of nature, understanding is a matter of providing resources for epistemic agents to foster their cognitive objectives. Understanding then is agential. Models, idealizations and fictions are among the resources agents deploy. Such devices are felicitous falsehoods. Although strictly false, they are felicitous in that they embody and advance understanding of the subject matters they bear on. Thus according to her epistemology then the arts as well as the sciences are vehicles of understanding. Elgin is the author of Epistemic Ecology (2025), True Enough (2017), Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (1997), Considered Judgment (1996), With Reference to Reference (1983), and co-author with Nelson Goodman of Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (1988).
C. Thi Nguyen, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, USA
I’m C. Thi Nguyen. I used to be a food writer, now I’m a philosophy professor at University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. My first book is Games: Agency as Art. It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 Book Prize. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. And games turn out to be our way of writing down and communicating modes of agency; by playing them, we can try out different forms of agency. Here’s a summary of the book. There have also been some symposia discussing the book. I was named to Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50 – their list of “thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the world a better place.”
Kathryn Joyce, Ph.D.
Center for Ethics and Human Values, Ohio State University, USA
Kathryn Joyce is the director of the Civil Discourse for Citizenship Program at the Ohio State University's Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV). In that capacity, she leads workshops on navigating disagreements, facilitates dialogues on difficult topics, and organizes various co-curricular programs for undergraduates. She also teaches a course called “Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society.” Joyce specializes in social and political philosophy, philosophy of education, and ethics. Her research primarily concerns the character of relationships among equals and philosophical dimensions of education policy and practice. In particular, Joyce offers epistemic and normative critiques of the standard approach to evidence-based decision-making in education. She argues for a context-centered approach that incorporates evidence from a wide-range of sources including professional judgment and knowledge of local norms and values. Before arriving at Ohio State, Joyce was a postdoctoral research associate in values and public policy at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 2020.
Emily Robertson, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita, Syracuse University, USA
Emily Robertson is professor emerita from Syracuse University, where she was a member of the Cultural Foundations of Education Department, School of Education, and the Philosophy Department, College of Arts and Sciences. She is a philosopher of education whose work focuses on epistemology and education, the development of rationality as an educational ideal, and democratic education. Robertson was interim dean and associate dean of the School of Education at Syracuse. She is a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society. In 2017 she published (with Jon Zimmerman) The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues In American Schools (Chicago). Recent articles include “Free Speech and Challenges to Open-Mindedness in Higher Education,” in Open-Mindedness and Perspective, ed. Wayne Riggs, Oxford (2025) and. “Epistemic Aims of Education: Epistemic Autonomy or Epistemic Responsibility,” forthcoming in Aims, Responsibilities, and the Future of Education, eds. Jonathan Beale and Christina Easton, Oxford (2025).
