Michael A Peters
Biographic Data
| ID | 134522 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael A Peters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael A |
| FAMILY NAME | Peters |
| SIGNATURE | PETERS M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Beijing Normal University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1482-2975 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 388 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 375 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 13 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
China’s 2025 White Paper on Smart Education
This paper examines China’s 2025 White Paper on Smart Education as a governance-oriented policy framework for integrating artificial intelligence into the national education system. Rather than treating the document as a technological blueprint, the study analyzes its underlying governance logic, focusing on the role of the state, educational equity, and public digital infrastructure. Through policy analysis and selective institutional examples, …
Artificial intelligence, the Global South, and knowledge socialism
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the global knowledge economy, creating unprecedented opportunities for innovation while simultaneously reproducing structural inequalities between the Global North and South. AI development is deeply intertwined with historical patterns of resource extraction, epistemic domination, and technological dependency, which perpetuate economic and cognitive asymmetries. This article examines how AI reinforces…
Educational posthumanism at the limits of modern humanism
This collective essay, contributed to a special issue on East Asian engagements with philosophy of education, situates educational posthumanism where modern humanism meets its limits. Modern educational and social institutions have been constructed on logos—reason, technical rationality, predictability, calculability, and controllability—to secure safe and stable human lives. Through shared norms, rational procedures, and standardized judgment, t…
Preconfiguring Postdigital Futures
Algorithmic Capitalism in the Epoch of Digital Reason
Silicon Empires
Handbook of Ecological Civilization
The Dikw Model in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
AI, Pedagogy, and the Conditions of Knowledge
Speculative Practicescapes of Learning Design and Dreaming
This article addresses a serious issue that besets learning design: its over-reliance on frameworks that promise particular outcomes for individual learners that accord with pre-defined metrics. This is partly a function of the nature of learning design and development itself which is commonly seen as outcome-oriented activity that should benefit individual learners in specific ways. An alternative approach is adopted here which calls attention t…
Refuge and resilience
This text presents a comprehensive overview of the author’s experiences and contributions to PESA, as well as the themes and concerns that have shaped their academic work. The lecture series, named in the author’s honour, aims to foster new thinking among emerging scholars. The author’s intellectual journey has been deeply influenced by the contemporary apocalyptic zeitgeist, which they frame as a series of local and global crises that underpin t…
Postdigital Educational Geopolitics
Wisdom in the Age of AI Education
The Geopolitics of Postdigital Educational Development
Voting with their feet
Expanding networks of government primary health centers (PHCs) to bring health services closer to communities is a longstanding policy objective in LMICs. In pluralistic health systems, where public and private providers compete for patients, PHCs are often not the preferred source for care. This study analyzes the market for primary care services in the Indian state of Bihar to understand how choice of primary care provider is influenced by dist…
Collective Writing
This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 presents the workflow of the article’s development. Appendix 2 lists approximately 100 collectively wri…
What made primary health care resilient against Covid-19? A mixed-methods positive deviance study in Nigeria
INTRODUCTION: The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic overwhelmed some primary health care (PHC) systems, while others adapted and recovered. In Nigeria, large, within-state variations existed in the ability to maintain PHC service volumes. Identifying characteristics of high-performing local government areas (LGAs) can improve understanding of subnational health systems resilience. METHODS: Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, we …
Resilience of front-line facilities during Covid-19
Responsive primary health-care facilities are the foundation of resilient health systems, yet little is known about facility-level processes that contribute to the continuity of essential services during a crisis. This paper describes the aspects of primary health-care facility resilience to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in eight countries. Rapid-cycle phone surveys were conducted with health facility managers in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, C…
Introduction for the special issue on Contemporary Chinese Marxist social outlook and philosophy of education
We would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt thanks to all the colleagues and friends who have provided various support and guidance for the completion of this special issue. We would like to thank the EPAT as an excellent academic platform for designating the topic, and the managing editor Andrew Madjar for his extremely insightful guidance; his patience, responsibility, and professionalism have impressed the authors deeply. A…
Russia-China/China-Russia
Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research
Why Foucault? provides an analysis of new directions in educational research, focusing on the utilization, application, and development of Michel Foucault's work by drawing on the contributions of leading international scholars in the field. The essays in this collection go beyond the introductory and expository to explore new themes and applications to educational theory, policy, practice, and politics. This book provides truly international cov…
Educational research
In an interview a year before his death, Foucault confessed that his real quarry was not an investigation of power but rather the history of the ways in which human beings are constituted as subjects; a process that involved power relations as an integral aspect of the production of discourses involving truths. His work dealt with three modes of objectification in our culture that transform human beings into subjects: modes of inquiry which try t…
Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self
The notion of ‘enterprise culture’ emerged in the United Kingdom as a central motif in political thought under Margaret Thatcher's administration. The notion represented a profound shift away from the Keynesian welfare state to a deliberate attempt at cultural restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the entrepreneurial self - a shift characterised as a moving from a ‘culture of dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance’. In e…
Subjectivity and Truth
This book focuses on Foucault's later work and his (re)turn to 'the hermeneutics of the subject', exploring the implications of his thinking for education, pedagogy, and related disciplines. What and who is the subject of education and what are the forms of self-constitution? Chapters investigate Foucault's notion of 'the culture of self' in relation to questions concerning truth (parrhesia or free speech) and subjectivity, especially with refere…
Futures of Critical Theory
Chapter 1 Introduction: Futures of Critical Theory: Dreams of Difference Chapter 2 1. Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Critique of Modernity Chapter 3 2. A Critical Theory of the Self: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault Chapter 4 3. From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg Chapter 5 4. Foucault and Critique: Kant, Humanism and the Human Sciences Chapter 6 5. Levinas's Ethico-Politica…
Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy
The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institutions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with a institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of …
Governmentality Studies in Education
Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality originated in a lecture series in the late 1970s at the Collège de France and soon became the basis for a range of historical and contemporary studies across the social sciences and humanities. The concept in part rests on a simple but powerful idea that links government to the freedom of the subject in a novel understanding of liberal politics. It also provides an analytics of power based on the exami…
Truth-telling as an Educational Practice of the Self
This paper is devoted to an examination of Foucault's changing notion of truth in relation to the changing practice of education. In the first section I examine briefly the notion of truth as Foucault uses it to investigate the socio-political sphere. The remainder of the essay is given over to Foucault's six lectures entitled 'Discourse and Truth: the problematisation of Parrhesia', given at Berkeley during the months of October-November in 1983…
Education in a post-truth world
This short chapter provides an account of “post-truth” by reference to the Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year” for 2016 and a description of politics in our time. It notes the close affiliation with the concept “Alt-right”, a synonym for the emergence of the Far-Right in American and European politics. The chapter focuses on Donald Trump, and the “big lies” he told as one of his main media techniques in his campaign to become the US President.…
Why is My Curriculum White
You have to be careful, very careful, introducing the truth to the Black man who has never previously heard the truth about himself, his own kind, and the white man ... The Black brother is so brainw
Performance and accountability in 'post-industrial society ̊s
In the first section the paper records some of the important changes that have been forced on British universities. These changes are referred to under the signs of 'performance ̊s and 'accountability ̊s. An attempt is made to analyse these signs as they figure in current policy discourse. The next section proposes an analysis of post-industrialism, which is both more cautious than the technocratic celebrants and more pessimistic. This analysis f…
China’s double first-class university strategy
In 2015, the Central Party Committee and the State Council in China announced plans for the coordination and promotion of world-class universities and first-class subject building (Guo Fa, 2015, No
Postdigital Dialogue
Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of neoliberalism
In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the Collège de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault's great insights in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the sel…
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
Bite force and occlusal stress production in hominin evolution
Maximum bite force affects craniofacial morphology and an organism's ability to break down foods with different material properties. Humans are generally believed to produce low bite forces and spend less time chewing compared with other apes because advances in mechanical and thermal food processing techniques alter food material properties in such a way as to reduce overall masticatory effort. However, when hominins began regularly consuming me…
Education and the Postmodern Condition
Postmodern Education and the Politics of Backlash by Henry A. Giroux, Series Editor's Introduction Foreword by Jean-Francois Lyotard Introduction: Lyotard, Education, and the Postmodern Condition by Michael Peters The Loss of Innocence: Lyotard, Foucault, and the Challenge of Postmodern Education by William Bain Legitimation Problems: Knowledge and Education in the Postmodern Condition by Michael Peters Lyotard and Rorty on the Role of the Profes…
AI and the future of humanity
Notes15 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2022.208555416 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-chatbots-naive-idiots-no-sense-of-irony-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-0317 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Writing the Self
In this paper I investigate 'the confessional' as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of 'writing the self', tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life-for him philosophy is a way of life -and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of …
China’s belt and road initiative
China’s Belt and Road Initiative that refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, is a new development model and modernization strategy launched by the Chinese govern
From State responsibility for education and welfare to self-responsibilisation in the market
The papers in this collection, each in their own way, express a concern for analysing and charting the effects of the process called ‘responsibilisation’ in the realm of education which, as the nam
Technological unemployment
For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own acc
Philosophy of education in a new key
Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co
Philosophy of Education in a New Key
Ruyu HungNational Chiayi University, TaiwanThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, orchestrating the Philosophy of Education in a New Key regarding East Asia. In 2016 the pioneerin
Philosophy of Educational Research
(2002). Philosophy of Educational Research. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 357-360
Geophilosophy, Education and the Pedagogy of the Concept
(2004). Geophilosophy, Education and the Pedagogy of the Concept. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 217-226
Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject
(1993). Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject: Liberalism, Education and the Critique of Individualism. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 19-39
Weinstein, sexual predation, and ‘Rape Culture’
The New York Times (11 December 2017) indicates that following Harvey Weinstein’s dismissal for sexual misconduct some 42 other men have been similarly accused on sexual assault and forced to resig
Towards a philosophy of academic publishing
This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of edit…
Philosophy of education in a new key
This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps
Extended Reviews
Brent's Transcendental Arguments for the Forms of Knowledge
Self Refutation Arguments Against Young's Epistemology
Evaluation and education
Administrative Discretionary Justice
Footedness
Te reo o te tai Tokerau
The national examination of Maori language in New Zealand’ has not, to date, reflected the strong oral tradition of Maori culture. For over a decade oral Maori had been a minor component (15%) of a national examination which had emphasised the skills of literacy. Te Reo O Te Tai Tokerau Project, as part of the State Department's developmental work in Maori, was designed to investigate the feasibility and reliability of teacher‐based assessment of…
The insertion of ‘New Right’ thinking into education
This paper locates and discusses the recent New Right reforms in New Zealand education within the context of the crisis of the welfare state. It examines and critiques such reforms under the theme of the individual versus the community, reviewing both new policies and the relevant literature which has emerged over the last few years. Finally, drawing on the scholarship of various neo‐marxist writers it addresses the issue of alternatives to the b…
Education, the New Right and the Crisis of the Welfare State in New Zealand
(1990). EDUCATION, THE NEW RIGHT AND THE CRISIS OF THE WELFARE STATE IN NEW ZEALAND. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 11, Fazal Rizvi, Deakin University, pp. 77-90
Educational “Reforms” and New Right Thinking
(1991). Educational “Reforms” and New Right Thinking: An Example from New Zealand. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 46-57
Performance indicators in New Zealand higher education
This paper examines and critiques the development of a set of performance indicators in New Zealand higher education introduced as a result of recent reforms. The first section outlines the policy context for their introduction in terms of a set of core public sector reforms more generally, and reforms carried out with regard to education and higher education in particular. The second section reviews and discusses the national set of performance …
Performance and accountability in 'post-industrial society ̊s
In the first section the paper records some of the important changes that have been forced on British universities. These changes are referred to under the signs of 'performance ̊s and 'accountability ̊s. An attempt is made to analyse these signs as they figure in current policy discourse. The next section proposes an analysis of post-industrialism, which is both more cautious than the technocratic celebrants and more pessimistic. This analysis f…
Against Finkielkraut's La Défaite de la pensés culture, post-modernism and education
Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject
(1993). Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject: Liberalism, Education and the Critique of Individualism. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 19-39
Human capital theory and the industry training strategy in New Zealand
This paper begins with the assertion that the regime of ‘perpetual training” (Deleuze 1992) will become the new regime and system which now motivates and integrates education and industry in the western world. This notion is located in the national industry training strategy for New Zealand. The first section serves to provide the policy context, focusing on public sector restructuring and the significance of the Employment Contracts Act (1991). …
Performance’, The Future of the University and ‘Post‐industrial’ Society
Individualism and Community
Race differences in brain size
Education and the Postmodern Condition
After the subject
Philosophy and education
"After" Auschwitz
1This paper is part of a larger research project concerning the emblematic status of the phrase and metaphor “After Auschwitz” as it has been used by Theodor Adorno and Jean‐Francois Lyotard to stand for the “end” of modernity, or at least, the radical questioning of the “project of modernity” (Habermas). My paper “'After Auschwitz’: Adorno, Lyotard and Modernity” was presented as part of the Postgraduate Seminar Programme (Policy Studies Group, …
Positioning Theory
Wittgenstein and post‐analytic philosophy of education
I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy...’ Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger's later works, the penetration of Anglo-American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times: narratives of progress, of socialism, of abundance, o…
Education and the philosophy of the subject (or constitution of self)
Sociology (311 works) · Political science (266 works) · Law (232 works) · Philosophy (229 works) · Law (192 works) · Philosophy (192 works) · Epistemology (190 works) · Higher education (128 works) · Philosophy of education (109 works) · Politics (101 works)