AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Conference Opening & Welcome

Prize Announcements for Annette Baier Prize, Innovation in Inclusive Curriculum Prize & Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist.

Take ‘individualism’ to combine an internalist locating of remembering, thinking, and feeling in the brain with a normative vision of agency as self-sufficiency. Constitutive dependence on resources beyond the skull and skin then appears as deficit: it’s fine to be in causal connection with other people, places, or artifacts, but the mature agent exhibits a form of autonomy that is independent rather than relational. This talk identifies neurocentrism and Eurocentrism as parallel expressions of a shared individualist picture which has had significant costs. Displacement, dispossession, and certain forms of cultural assimilation are forms of cognitive and epistemic violence precisely because bodies, lands, and shared practices are not external or dispensable to minds — they are partly constitutive of remembering, feeling, and knowing.
A distributed approach to mind makes these costs visible. Our reliance on the distinctive resources of dynamic cognitive ecologies brings risk and vulnerability. Scaffolding (from historical cognitive tools through to GPS and AI) is not optional, but it can be differentially distributed, manipulated, or dismantled.
Memory is the key site of contestation. We need to bear witness to real past injustices while acknowledging that remembering is constructive and selective, and that traces of past events are often fragmentary, ambiguous, or destroyed. Some see constructive processes and causal connections with the past as competing commitments. I argue in contrast that construction is the means by which we make epistemic and affective contact with past events, not an obstacle to that access.
Better engagements with difficult past events do not seek a single canonical version. They flaunt their constructedness, embrace ongoing transformation, and enact maintenance responsibly, in archival and heritage practice as in individual and collective remembering. Constructing the past faithfully enough and sustaining the cognitive ecological conditions to support responsible future-oriented action are closely intertwined projects. Similar principles apply across distinctive domains. Cognitive and affective life is already scaffolded, interdependent, and thus vulnerable, in ways that individualism both distorts and undermines. A distributed approach helps to integrate cognitive and political projects, to identify damage done by neurocentrism and Eurocentrism alike, and to support the slow, shared work of forging viable alternatives.

“I say that between colonialism and civilisation there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.”
Aimé Césaire, 1955, Discourse on Colonialism
This paper interrogates the possibility that today, in this moment marked by genocide, violence, and the collapse of international law, by imperialist expansion and the return to colonial subjugation, humanity must be found elsewhere and elsewhen. Through examining the absent humanity inherent in any project born of colonial violence and imperialist expansion this paper turns to Oceanian futurisms and liberation movements as the prospective horizons for resurgent Indigenous humanisms. As such, reading Césaire’s diagnosis of colonialism alongside the liberatory theory of Oceanian freedom fighters, this paper concludes with a reflection on the prospect of humanity lying in rebellion against the order which has birthed and sustains these moments of genocidal and imperial violence.

As authoritarians intuitively grasp, if you control what people know about the past, you better control the future. George Orwell once raised an even more radical claim: that if you control the present, you control the past itself. This talk examines this claim by sketching an account of historical truth that partially validates Orwell’s thought—and also helps us understand why the truth about history is so vital to a democratic way of life. 

This talk will give an overview of a book I’m writing, which is called The Systemic Stance: Culpability and Obligation Under Structural Injustice. The book starts from the fact that injustices resulting from social systems are difficult to pin on anyone. Given this, who has responsibility for these injustices? The book’s two-part answer comes from a perspective I call ‘the systemic stance.’ This is a stance agents can (and, I suggest, should) take when confronted with unjust systems that are made of agents but are not themselves agents.
When we adopt the systemic stance, we target our indignation, resentment, anger, and rage at the system itself. This is the first part of my two-part answer: negative reactive attitudes concerning systemic injustice fittingly target the social system taken as a whole. This conclusion contradicts a tidal wave of work in moral psychology and moral philosophy from the last sixty years, building on P.F. Strawson. I’ll give some arguments for this conclusion.
The second part of my two-part answer concerns moral obligations. Although social systems can be targets of reactive attitudes (or so I claim), they cannot make decisions, so they are not fitting bearers of moral obligations. So, the second part of my two-part answer can be summarised: moral obligations concerning systemic injustice are held by agents, starting from where those agents are in the system. These obligations call upon their bearers to pull the levers the system makes available to them, doing something I call ‘contextual care.’ I’ll explain what I mean by this.

This analysis identifies the designation "Agentic AI" as a syntactic architecture of institutional immunity. We treat the term not as an ontological classification, but as a governing picture that restructures the landscape of corporate accountability. The institution deploys the grammar of "Agency" to construct a "New Cartesian Theatre"—a space where the statistical model occupies the seat of the subject while the human decision-makers vanish into the background. This performance functions as a "Colonial God Trick," presenting the algorithm as an autonomous, neutral knower to secure total exemption from contestation. I dismantle this bewitchment by restoring the human practitioner to the centre of the epistemic act. I defend that responsibility adheres strictly to the embodied, situated actors who design, prompt, and deploy these systems. Authority remains with the human and institutional subjects who hold the power to act, correct, and justify. This inquiry locates the site of agency in the institutional incentives and human choices that the "Agentic AI" label serves to obscure. I replace the metaphysical debate about machine intelligence with a practice-centred reconstruction of accountability, centring the norms of reason-giving, oversight, and relational redress.