In Conversation with Kadir Beycioğlu: Engaging Critically with his Scholarship on Social Justice

This paper pays homage to the late Kadir Beycioğlu's contributions to social justice and gender in education. In his later work, Beycioğlu crafted a reflexive narrative that employed philosophical methodologies to explore the concept of social justice within educational settings. Although not a predominant theme, some of his writings touched upon the institutionalisation of gender inequalities and explored how such disparities are deliberately perpetuated to uphold the status quo and sustain hegemonic power structures. In this brief article, we aim to engage in a dialectical and theoretical discourse with Beycioğlu's scholarship on social justice and gender. We intend to expand upon his arguments, critically assess some aspects of his work, and provide responses to several of his assertions. In doing so, we adopt the approach of conversationalism (Chimakonam, 2017), creating an intellectual space for critical, reflective, and productive dialogues among ourselves and in relation to Beycioğlu's later work. We hope to enrich the ongoing discourse on social justice and gender by honoring the lasting contributions of Kadir Beycioğlu to social justice and delineating his work into three distinct theoretical strands and engaging critically with his scholarship.