Associate Professor Tracy Bowell is based at Te Whare Wananga o Waikato – The University of Waikato – in Hamilton on the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Aotearoa has been Tracy’s adopted home for over 30 years. Before moving to Aotearoa, she studied Philosophy at the Universities of Sussex and Cambridge in the UK. She completed her PhD, on metaphysics and epistemology,  at the University of Auckland. Tracy’s principal research interests are in argumentation and critical thinking. Her publications include articles on virtue theories of argumentation, argumentation and social justice, argument and post-truth, protest as argument (forthcoming), and various aspects of critical thinking pedagogy. She is also co-author (with Robert Cowan and Gary Kemp, University of Glasgow) of Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide, the 6^th edition of which will be published during 2026. Tracy’s publications also include work in Philosophy of Education, Wittgenstein’s philosophy and feminist philosophy, as well as work on higher education pedagogies.  Tracy is the current CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

While visiting the Lab, Tracy is undertaking a project on Charity as principle and virtue in argumentation. The project examines whether charity is an argumentative virtue, and the extent to which it is related to enacting the principle of charity. It will also consider which other argumentative virtues come into play when the principle of charity is applied in argument interactions. Tracy can be contacted at taboo@waikato.ac.nz

José Alhambra is a postdoctoral research fellow at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He has developed his work in the field of argumentation theory and informal logic. His doctoral dissertation, “The Place of Analogy in Argumentation Theory”, examines the use of analogies for justificatory purposes and their role in argument evaluation. He is currently working on a research project on the debate between particularism and generalism in the theory of argument. In this context, generalism is the claim that the logical evaluation of arguments depends on a suitable supply of general rules that specify what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from what kinds of data, while particularism rejects this claim. The central points of contention concern the role of context in the evaluation of the reason posed by an argument and whether such evaluation can be conducted on a case-by-case basis. During his visit to the Critical Thinking and Civic Engagement Lab, José will further explore these issues, along with the ethical and social implications of both particularism and generalism.

Olena Yaskorska-Shah’s main interest falls into the investigation of persuasive communication and applying computational tools for the teaching and dissemination of logic and critical thinking skills. She has been working in different international and interdisciplinary research groups investigating argumentation in context, such as ARG-tech, University of Dundee, UK, IALS, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland and New Ethos, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. The current list of applications can be checked here: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-4669-9462 .

Currently she is working towards developing methods and epistemic tools for critical information processing, which would have applications in such domains as media literacy and epistemology, discourse studies, methodology of sciences, etc.

If you are interested in argumentation in discourse or visualization and computational tools in teaching and studying argumentation and critical thinking, please contact me: OYaskorska@gmail.com .

Anjali Bauri is pursuing a Master of Arts in philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She completed a Bachelor of Arts and Science in philosophy and psychology, with an honours in philosophy. Her research has been primarily focused on children, their vulnerability, and caregivers’ obligations towards children. Her work draws on several fields of study both within and on the boundaries of philosophy (applied ethics, biomedical ethics, social-political philosophy, childhood studies, feminist philosophy, argumentation, social justice, etc). While she is at the Lab, she is working on two papers: “Opposing Children: Adversarial Argumentation in Caregiver-Child Contexts” and “Ethics of Doubt and Skepticism in Adversarial and Cooperative Models of Argumentation. You can find out more about her here.  

If you want to talk about grad school or about children and how they argue, feel free to reach out at anjalie.828@gmail.com