Trevor Norris, Professor of Educational Studies in Brock’s Faculty of Education, was recently appointed Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious journal Philosophical Inquiry in Education (PIE) commencing on January 1, 2025 for a three-year term.
Norris brings extensive expertise to the international peer-reviewed journal, notably having served a six-year term as Editor-in-Chief for the Brock Education Journal where he won the first Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant for a Brock University journal.
PIE is associated with the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society and has been published for almost 40 years. The journal publishes three issues a year covering a range of topics and intellectual traditions promoting broad philosophical approaches to foundational educational questions.
Recent topics include empirical approaches to educational research, moral education, the role of well-being in education, published in both French and English. The journal also publishes in an Open Access format, meaning there are no fees incurred to authors, libraries or readers.
With research specialization in the philosophy of education and humanities-oriented research, Norris was also recently elected to serve as Director of The Posthumanism Research Institute (PRI) effective July 1, 2024.
As PRI Director, Norris oversees several academic activities and events throughout the year. Its membership is comprised of faculty and graduate students from across the University and associate members from external institutions.
A new initiative for 2024-25 includes a reading group entitled Marx in the Anthropocene.
“The reading group model is intended to drive discussion regarding current questions about the Anthropocene, especially how humans engage with and impact nature,” Norris said.
The reading group was capped at 20 participants with members spanning the academic field and beyond, including filmmakers, psychoanalysis’s, lawyers, and PhD students from around the globe.
Norris said while many research institutes around the world host traditional academic events like guest speakers, a reading group is an unusual pedagogical intervention that allows the group to slowly read a text over the course of a year.
“What is doubly unique about this reading group is that it will culminate in the arrival of the author, who is highly sought after and often declines speaking invitations but was attracted by the opportunity to engage directly with a group who have read his book closely,” he said.
Many of the PRI’s events can be viewed on the YouTube channel, and the PRI welcomes applications for affiliation and can be followed on Facebook for updates about upcoming events.
These academic initiatives employ many Brock University students, and helps situate the University as an important leader in academic research with real world impacts.
This book focuses on the traumatic experiences within and through music that individuals and collectives face, while considering ways in which they (re)engage with their traumas in educational settings. The chapters delve into the physical, psychological, philosophical, sociological, and political aspects, as they relate to the reciprocal influences of trauma on musical practices and education. Readers are immersed in topics related to societal violence, physical injuries, grief, separation, loss, death, and ways of working through these in educational and artistic situations. In the introductory chapter, the co-editors draw attention to theoretical matters related to trauma through narrative inquiry in music education. The first section of the book, Separation Revisited, brings together notions of separation, focusing on how loss is emotionally and physically manifested when death, grief, and bodily injury are experienced. In the second section, (Re)Engaging with Lost and Found, readers are encouraged to imagine new possibilities considering trauma and loss in educational and musical spaces. These pieces offer deliberate ruminations moving the discourse toward (re)engagement in and through music education and artistic contexts. The co-editors conclude the book by drawing attention to narrative inquiry’s double-edged nature in stories of trauma and how the retelling of lost and found narratives offers a way to imagine lives otherwise—lives not smothered by grief and horror—through the conceivable reliving of unfathomable stories of experience. This book emerges from the 7th International Conference on Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (NIME7), October 2020, co-hosted by Brock University, Faculty of Education and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music, Ontario, Canada.
