Invited Speakers
Dave Hill
Dave Hill – Marxist political, trade union and education activist in the UK and also in Greece. He is Emeritus Professor at Anglia Ruskin University, UK; Visiting Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and Research Fellow in Wuhan University, Hubei, China.
From a poor manual working class family background he has been politically active since teenage years. He is Founder/ Managing Director of the free online academic journal, the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) (www.jceps.com) (two million free downloads since he founded it in 2003), and, together with Kostas Skordoulis, is co-founder/ and international co-organiser of the annual ICCE (International Conference on Critical Education).
He is Editor of the Routledge Studies in Education, Neoliberalism and Marxism, currently with a list of 33 books. He has written/ co-written/ edited/ co-edited 25 books and a couple of hundred book chapters and articles.
As a political activist, he has fought thirteen municipal, parliamentary and European-elections for The Labour Party and 2009 – 2023 for the (Marxist) Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) and he was an elected regional trade union chair.
Constantine-(Kostas) Skordoulis
Constantine-(Kostas) Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics at the Department of Pedagogy and Primary Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches Environmental Ethics, Didactics of Science and Theory of Scientific Knowledge.
He is currently the Head of the Department, Deputy Dean of the School of Education and Academic Director of three Postgraduate Programs focusing on Science Teachers Education.
He has studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury and has worked as a Visiting Researcher at the Universities of Oxford and Groningen.
He is a Member of the International Academy of History of Science, co-Editor of “Almagest: International Journal for the History of Scientific Ideas” and Member of the Editorial Boards of the journals: “Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies”, “International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences”, “Advances in Historical Studies” and “Green Theory and Praxis”.
His latest book is: “Critical Environmental Education: Current and Future Perspectives” (Springer, 2020).
Kostas has published extensively on Socio-Scientific Issues. A substantial component of his research is focuses on Marxism and Science highlighting the ontological objectivity of science in conjunction with the social character of scientific practice.
Kostas is involved in organizing the International Conferences on Critical Education with Dave Hill.
Kathleen Lynch
Prof. Kathleen Lynch is a sociologist and Professor of Equality Studies (Emerita) at University College Dublin (UCD) where she has also held a Senior Lectureship in Education. She served as a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) from 2020-2025. She was elected to serve as an Executive Member of the Global Forum for Rehumanizing Education in 2025.
Kathleen has devoted her life to advancing equality and social justice through research, education and activism. Her teaching and research are guided by the belief that the purpose of scholarship and research is not just to understand the world but to change it for the good of all humanity. To that end, she played a leading role in establishing the UCD Equality Studies Centre (1990) and the UCD School of Social Justice (2004/5). Her work involved developing and teaching graduate, undergraduate and Outreach programmes in Equality Studies and Social Justice over a 30-year-period.
She has authored many academic articles, and a number of books on all types of equality and social justice issues, especially on education: The Hidden Curriculum, 1989; Schools and Society in Ireland (with S. Drudy) 1993; Equality and Education, 1999: Equality and Power in Schools (with Anne Lodge) 2002; Equality: From Theory to Action 2004 (with J. Baker, S. Cantillon and J. Walsh), and New Managerialism in Education: Commercialisation, Carelessness and Gender (with B. Grummell and D. Devine) (2012, 2015).
She has also published extensively on the relationship between care, equality and social justice: Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (2009 lead author); and Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice, (Polity Press, Cambridge 2022).
Her forthcoming book focuses on the relationship between education, care, and social and ecological justice: Beyond Human Capitalist Education: From Capitalocentrism to Carecentrism. (Summer 2026) London: Routledge. Her academic work has been translated into a number of different languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Korean.
She was awarded the University College Dublin (UCD) Medal for Pioneering Change, in 2018, and the Irish Research Council, President of Ireland Prize for her Research Promoting Equality and Social Justice, in 2019.
Panayota Gounari
Panayota Gounari is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston (USA) and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece). Her research, anchored in Critical Applied Linguistics, weaves together Critical Discourse Studies, critical language policy, and critical pedagogy to explore how discourse sustains, legitimizes, and contests power hierarchies and social asymmetries across educational and sociopolitical spheres, while remaining attentive to emancipatory and liberatory possibilities.
She is the author of over 80 publications, including books, peer-reviewed journal articles, and chapters in edited volumes published in five languages. Her scholarship spans the politics of language and multilingual education, the discursive workings of neoliberalism, far-right populism, and authoritarianism, as well as questions of collective memory and historical revisionism.
Her most recent book, From Twitter to Capitol Hill: Far-right Authoritarian Populist Discourses, Social Media, and Critical Pedagogy (Brill, 2022), offers a critical examination of the discursive construction of authoritarianism during Trump’s presidency and its ramifications for pedagogy.
Gianna Katsiampoura
Associate Professor of History of Science and Critical Education
Dr. Gianna Katsiampoura is an Assοciate Professor of History of Science and Critical Education at the Department of Primary Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She holds a BA in Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Psychology from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the National Technical University of Athens, a PhD from Department of Sociology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, and a postgraduate degree in Adult and Distance Education from the Hellenic Open University.
She is a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of History of Science and Vice President of the Greek National Committee of the Division of History of Science and Technology/ International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology . From 2017 to 2024, she served as Secretary/Treasurer of the Inter-Divisional Teaching Commission (DHST/IUHPS). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, Critical Education, and was Assistant Editor of Almagest – Journal for the History of Scientific Ideas (2010–2025).
Her research interests include critical and cultural studies of science and education, with emphasis on gender. She has published over 120 papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, authored the monograph Science and Political Commitment: Twentieth Century Histories (Propobos, 2021), and edited several collective volumes.
Shirley R Steinberg
Shirley R Steinberg is an innovative social justice educator and theorist, committed to critical pedagogy, diversity, inclusion, equity, accommodation, and transformative curriculum. She created The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy at McGill University, Canada. She then became the Werklund Research Chair of Leadership at the University of Calgary, and directed The Werklund Centre for Youth Leadership for several years.
Her film, Elders’ Room, received 17 Film Festival awards, engaging the Blackfoot People (Niitsitapi) of Southern Alberta. Her work has been disseminated internationally for the past two and a half decades. She has facilitated the publication of over 750 books and is the founding editor of four academic journals. She can be reached at msgramsci@gmail.com
Professional affiliation (university/institution) University of Calgary.
Nazlı Somel
Nazlı Somel is a scholar in the sociology of education and a faculty member in the Department of Educational Sciences at Boğaziçi University. She received her PhD from Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, where she developed a relational approach to educational inequality, combining theoretical insight with ethnographic research in a primary school in Istanbul.
Her research focuses on curriculum reform, education policy, and school organizational dynamics, examining how global and national policies are enacted in everyday educational practices. She has published in leading journals such as Comparative Education and the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and has co-authored books on curriculum change and education policy.
Her recent work explores the neo-conservative transformation of education in Türkiye in relation to global political and educational trends, particularly as reflected in transnational organizations’ 21st-century education frameworks. Somel also writes accessible pieces on education policy for Eleştirel Dersler Dergisi and serves on the Scientific Board of the teachers’ union Eğitim-İş.
Nejla Doğan
Dr. Nejla Doğan received her bachelor’s degree from the Department of History at Anadolu University and her master’s degree from the Department of Public Administration at the Institute of Public Administration for Türkiye and the Middle East. She completed her PhD in the field of Philosophical, Social, and Historical Foundations of Education at the Institute of Educational Sciences, Ankara University.
Her main academic interests include education and cultural policies of the Second Constitutional and early Republican periods, modernist educational thought and practices, postmodernism, neoliberalism and education, critical education, feminism and education, secular education, and educational inequalities. Doğan has published book chapters, articles, and newspaper essays on these topics as well as on contemporary educational issues.
Her book titled Nation-Building, Modernization and Education in the Thought of Ziya Gökalp was published by İmge Kitabevi in 2024. Between 2017 and 2021, she served on the editorial board of Eleştirel Pedagoji Dergisi (Journal of Critical Pedagogy).
Nuray Türkmen
I work in the Department of Adult Education at Ankara University. Beyond formal school and classroom settings, my relationship with education first took shape through collective educational initiatives carried out in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Later, through my experiences as a teacher and an academic, I had the opportunity to think more deeply about education and learning. I strive to develop my academic work in connection with neighborhood- and city-based practices and my political engagements.
While working in the Department of Adult Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, Ankara University, I was dismissed in 2017 for being a Peace Academic. Seven years later, I was reinstated, and since 2024 I have continued my work in the same department.
My research interests include learning within social movements and collective action, radical education, education in political parties and local governments, workplace learning, and anti-colonial education.
Erdal Küçüker
He was born in Ankara in 1970. He completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at Ankara University. Between 1993 and 2008, he worked as a primary school teacher and education specialist at the Ministry of National Education. Since 2008, he has been working as a faculty member in the Department of Educational Administration at Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa University. In 2013, he spent seven months as a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Education at Monash University.
His research has focused on understanding the problems of education in Turkey and developing policy recommendations. He continues to work in the fields of educational planning, economics of education, and educational law. More recently, he has been exploring the changes in workers’ emotions, thoughts, and behaviors during labor resistance movements. He is particularly interested in the impact of resistance on workers’ development of a class-based perspective on social issues—in other words, the “pedagogy of resistance.”
Paulo Vittoria
Paolo Vittoria is Professor of social education at Federico II University of Naples. He taught for a long time at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Co-Director of Educazione Aperta. Rivista di Pedagogia Critica. Columnist of Il Manifesto newspaper. Among last books Critical Education in international perspective – co-authored with Peter Mayo for Bloomsbury.
Spyros Themelis
Spyros Themelis is an Associate Professor in Education at the University of East Anglia, working at the intersection of sociology of education and critical pedagogy. He leads ROMLIT an innovative research project examining the early years literacies of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) children in the UK. This work advances a relational and structurally informed understanding of literacy, challenging deficit models and foregrounding the interplay between policy, institutions, pedagogy, families and communities.
Alongside ROMLIT, his research explores social movements in education and their role in renewing higher education and democratic life, with a strong focus on the Global South.
Spyros has published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals, with his work translated into several languages. His books include Social Change and Education (Palgrave, 2013) and Critical Reflections on the Language of Neoliberalism in Education (Routledge, 2021) and The Pedagogy of Radical Change (2025).