The School of Education is pleased to welcome another new colleague. Dr Karsten Kenklies joined the University recently and is a welcome addition to the School.  Read more about Karsten below:

I joined the School of Education in April from Jena University, Germany, where I was a Junior-Professor, holding the Chair for Comparative Education in the Institute for Bildung and Kultur. I worked for nearly thirteen years in Jena and (among other things) delivered History and Philosophy of Education undergraduate and postgraduate teaching there. Very much rooted in the tradition of a Hermeneutic Pedagogy, my research endeavours to unveil the systematic structures of theories and practices of education through their contextualisation (especially within the History of Ideas, Science, Philosophy and Art) and through diachronic (i.e. historical) and synchronic (i.e. intercultural) comparisons in a national and international (especially Japanese) perspective. Besides this – and linked to it by a methodological perspective framed by the notion of recognition – I am very much interested in developing a theory of Queer Education based upon modern theories of social philosophy and Queer Theory.

Based upon research I did supported by a research fellowship that took me to Japan for 6 months (preceded and followed by regular visits), I am currently working on a series of papers that analyse theories and practices of education in pre-modern Japan to connect those ideas to modern continental concepts of Bildung and Anglo-Saxon ideas of self-formation.