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About Me

In high school, students are all asked to choose the career paths that they’ll embark on for the rest of their lives. Do they want to be a doctor? Or a mechanic? Own a business? Maybe perform?

 I wanted to argue.

 I wanted to spend my time getting into debates with people and the problem with that is it wasn’t really an available option to study or learn. I considered law but I found the whole process was more interested in winning than truth. So I studied journalism and philosophy - two fields where truth was something to be discovered, rather than won.

 In my doctoral thesis, I wrote about a non-electoral democratic theory called demarchy. This type of democracy held that all citizens could be decision-makers directly; they could be called to serve as representatives in the same way that citizens could be selected randomly to work on criminal juries.

 There is an X factor in this type of hypothetical government though - every citizen would need to be willing to hear multiple perspectives on an issue, rationally deliberating, and dealing with ambiguity. Seemed to be a tall order when our politics are polarised to the point of being anti-democratic. We as a people are often more interested in winning than we are in making the best decisions for everyone.

 

It wasn’t enough for me to be a journalist telling people the truth, or a philosopher finding the truth. People have to learn to discover the truth for themselves, to be able to discuss their beliefs and ideas with others, and to be willing to be wrong. They needed to learn how to think more effectively, and for that, I also studied to become a teacher. 

I’ve been a teacher in Australian senior schools since 2014 before going on to work as an online specialist in critical thinking and media literacy for Education Queensland’s IMPACT Centre in 2018. I teach students what it means to be rational, going from abstract principles of reasoning to applied problem solving examining political debate.

 You can also find me at the University of Queensland, where I lecture in philosophy and research media literacy and citizenship education for the Critical Thinking Project. You can find my research publications on this page.

 I also experiment in YouTube content creation. I’ve been an avid gamer since I was a child and I examine philosophical content through the lens of video games. Philosophy is often dense and inaccessible, and so I look at a game and how it explores a concept such as epistemology or feminism.