Date: May 16, 2025
Time: 11:00–12:00 UTC
Format: Online Masterclass

The HDCA Education Thematic Group invites you to an online masterclass presented by Associate Professor Su-Ming Khoo.

The human development and capabilities perspective is an attractively liberal, pluralist, human-focused, conative and ‘friendly’ (Sen 1999) perspective on global development and change. This talk invites the HDCA community to take on the existential challenge posed by ‘polycrisis’ affecting the intrinsic and instrumental domain of education in complex, adversely transformative ways. ‘Polycrisis’ captures the idea of an overarching complex of problems, crises, antagonisms, and out-of-control processes on a planetary scale (Morin & Kern 1999, 74, Swilling 2013; 2019). Facets of the current global polycrisis include war, planetary ecological crises, financial crises leading to deeper financialization, persistent and widening economic and social inequalities and deprivation, datafication and the rise of artificial intelligence, and perhaps worst of all, the educational faces of genocide (Albanese 2024) resulting in ‘educide’ (Iriqat et al 2025) or ‘scholasticide’ (United Nations 2024). Education has been radically transformed, but not in a good way, through increased and normalized threats to students and staff, occupation and repurposing of schools and universities and deadly attacks, carried out with seeming impunity (GPCEA 2024).

The discussion invites human development and capabilities-oriented educationists to revitalize and integrate the dimensions of ‘humane-ness’, uncertainty and openness which are so central to HDCA (e.g. Walker and Unterhalter, 2018), with decolonial strategies for repair and critical and transformative education (Spivak 2004; Andreotti 2016; Khoo, 2025). An integrated approach strives to revitalize and define an educational paradigm oriented towards alternative humanistic ends, pluralism, reasoned democratic choice, open-ended capabilities expansion and redress of manifest injustice. The HDCA’s normative concerns with human well-being and flourishing, and its defence of individual as well as collective choices maintain open horizons for people’s cultural-historical creativity, reject and refuse reductively instrumental, dread-inducing education, and gesture towards a more open, pluralistic and more humane set of futures.

Structure:
The masterclass will last for one hour. Su-Ming Khoo will take the class for 35–40 minutes, followed by engagement through discussion and Q&A for 20–25 minutes.

The session will be recorded. If you prefer not to appear on the recording, we encourage you to keep your camera turned off during the event.

To receive the Zoom link, please email