Rama AlshoufaniPhD student

About me

My professional background is in humanitarian aid and education. I worked as an education consultant with UNESCO HQ in Paris, and as a field case worker with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in Damascus and as an interpreter at the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) in Istanbul. I came to Sweden in 2015 to study a Master’s programme in International and Comparative Education at Stockholm University, where I wrote my master thesis about self-worth and refugee education. This diverse background accumulated to lead me towards my current research interest.  

 I currently work in the area of Philosophy of Education. My PhD thesis discusses education’s relationship with the philosophical concept of the other. I became interested in this concept because I found it to evoke fundamental questions about Western philosophy and education. The other is an idea that is entangled with notions of meaning and subjectivity; and possesses a tremendous historical and political dimension. Therefore, based on the work by Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Standish and Sharon Todd, my research discusses how the concept of the other poses challenges to universalized notions of what education is and what it is for. The study pays special attention to the instrumentalization of education in addition to issues of ethics and morality.