Stockholm university

Lia BahiziPhD student

About me

My research project delves into normative ethics within the field of Philosophy of Education. I explore different philosophical perspectives on Human Dignity, such as for example those of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Martha Nussbaum, and discuss their potential relevance for education. I focus particularly on the relevance Human Dignity can have on learning relationships between children and adults in compulsory educational settings, using both fictional and non-fictional narratives (film, literature, poetry and secondary empirical material) as access points into philosophical reflection and argument. The thesis offers a critique of educational practices that are overly focused on attributed values, such as for instance employability, offering dignity as a regulative ideal to counter-balance such tendencies and as a way to imagine other meanings for education.

Before joining Stockholm University and the Department of Education, I earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Human Rights at Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm and Uppsala University respectively. During my studies, I focused on children’s right to culture and to education. I conducted field-studies and did internships at organizations in Rwanda and Uganda that work with complementing the formal education system for children and youth through for example vocational training and the Arts.

Apart from my studies in Human Rights, I have also studied Opera. I love singing, dancing, acting and meditating.

Supervisors: Niclas Rönnström, Rebecca Adami, Ruhi Tyson.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Philosophy of education in a new key

    2020. Klas Roth (et al.). Educational Philosophy and Theory

    Article

    Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key (see Peters et al., 2020) from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price.

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