Who gets to name the pain? Misrecognition, misrepresentation and the self: going beyond epistemological domination in educational spaces

In How to Do Things with Words, John Langshaw Austin (1962) observed that ‘for too long it was assumed by philosophers that the business of a “statement” can only be to “describe” some state of affairs, or to “state some fact”, which it must do either truly or falsely’ (p. 1). Yet to write or utter a statement is not merely to describe something; it is to perform an action, and many ‘statements’, he argued, have a performative force.

In many teacher-training programmes, such statements are drawn from sociological, psychological, and psychiatric research and are used to name children’s struggles: either through the language of inequality, which describes them as underachieving, or through the language of pathology, which frames them in terms of symptoms and conditions. Whilst these statements are important in enabling trainee teachers to recognise and support children identified as underachieving or diagnosed with developmental conditions, and in providing a shared professional language, Agnes will argue-drawing on Austin’s and Iris Murdoch’s philosophy-that statistical and diagnostic statements in teacher education can lead to significant misrecognition of students when taken too rigidly by teachers. In such cases, they risk shaping how children are seen and responded to in educational spaces, encouraging teachers to engage in acts of ‘naming’, affecting students’ sense of self and distorting the lived particularity of the child before the educator.

Agnes Kosek is Academic Employability Lead, Lecturer, and Module Leader on the Mental Health programme at the University of Central Lancashire, London. She is also a seminar leader at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) on the BA Education, Society and Culture programme, where she teaches Philosophical Reflections on Education with Film. She has previously taught Educational Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Psychopathology at the University of Greenwich, and contributed to the Primary Education and Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) Initial Teacher Training programme, where she mentored early years practitioners in line with Ofsted and professional teaching standards.

Agnes has taught across both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and brings over ten years of experience as a teacher in primary schools and early years settings. She holds an MA in Philosophy of Education from UCL and is currently undertaking a PhD at the UCL Institute of Education.

Her scholarly interests centre on pedagogy and philosophical psychopathology, with a particular focus on the misrecognition and historical misrepresentation of ethnic minorities and neurodiverse children in political discourse. She examines how such processes shape children’s self-development and influence both psychological practice and pedagogical decision-making in educational settings.

Agnes is an Affiliate Member of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy at IOE, UCL, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). She serves as Editor of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) Newsletter and is a member of the Society’s Communications Committee. Her research foregrounds moral development, with a particular emphasis on the importance of just and ethical encounters between students and educators.