Dr. Antonia Darder is an internationally recognized Freirean scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership. She has held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; the University of Victoria, University of Newcastle, and Queensland University, Australia; and the University of Lincoln in the UK. She is an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow, the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, and an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books in the field, including Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Freire and Education, The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism, Decolonizing Interpretive Research: A Subaltern Methodology for Social Change, and On Class, Race, and School Reform: Contested Perspectives.

For more than 50 years, Dr. Darder has worked tirelessly to counter social and material inequalities in schools and society. Her activism, teaching, and critical scholarship over the last four decades has consistently focused on culture, language, racism, political economy, and questions of liberation. She has extended Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of love and contributed to furthering our understanding of inequalities in schools and society. Through her decolonizing scholarship on the body, ethics, racism, curriculum, methodology, and the arts, she has contributed to rethinking questions of pedagogy and social justice from a worldview that centers the voices of oppressed populations.

Beyond academia, she is a poet and visual artist. As a distinguished professor of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois, she wrote and produced a student-community collaborative award-winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression, which explored the persistence of inequities within higher education. Her lived experience growing up as a Puerto Rican child in the barrio, her struggles as a single mother, her battles within the academy, and her love of life are essential to her commitment to working for a more just and loving world.

Jones Irwin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Education at IOE. From 2015–2019, he served as Project Officer at the National Curriculum and Assessment Council (NCCA) in Ireland, working on the development of the first values/multifaith-based state curriculum for primary schools in Ireland (currently there are 30 Community National Schools).

His current research areas are existentialist and postmodern philosophy and their relationship to education. His previous books have focused on Paulo Freire (monograph titled Paulo Freire's Philosophy of Education: Origins, Developments, Impacts and Legacies [2012, Bloomsbury, London]), and he has also worked on Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek.

His most recent book is Paulo Freire's Philosophy of Education in Contemporary Context: From Italy to the World (Peter Lang, 2022), which he co-edited with Professor Letterio Todaro of the University of Catania. He is currently working on a new co-edited book with Slovak philosopher Barbora Badurova, Ethical Education Across European Systems: Concepts, Practices, Dilemmas (Peter Lang, Berlin/Geneva), and is completing his long-awaited monograph, Religion After the Death of God (Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group).

Peter Lang, along with Dr. Stephen Cowden, co-edits the publisher's New Disciplinary Perspectives on Education book series. The series is currently in its tenth volume, and one of the major projects planned for 2025/26 is the publication of a Critical Education Reader as part of this series.

Another important area of research is poetics and literature, and their relationship to philosophy. As the resident Poetry Critic for Red Ogre Review, he writes critical articles on experimental poetry and metafiction. He has also recently published his first comprehensive book of prose and poetry, Deep Image (Tofu Ink Press, San Francisco, 2025).