Andrée-Anne Cormier

Andrée-Anne Cormier is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Montreal and was a Visiting Fellow during 2013-2014 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She is interested in understanding what liberal-democratic justice requires in specific non-ideal educational contexts and what duties of justice liberal states have towards children/future citizens. More specifically, her dissertation explores the conditions under which it is morally acceptable for the state, and for civil servants, to exercise power over children’s education. Her goal is to develop a liberal-democratic account of ‘educational legitimacy’, which aims to specify (1) how authority over educational matters should be divided between parents and the state; and (2) under what conditions policy-makers’ and practitioners’ decisions in the domain of education can count as reasonable, i.e. legitimate although not necessarily ‘perfectly’ just.