Education
Faulkner received her Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Louisiana Trobe University in 2006.
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Joanne Faulkner
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She is known for her research on Nietzsche"s thought and the ethics of innocence. Faulkner"s Dead Letters to Nietzsche, Or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (2010) was reviewed in Parrhesia where the reviewer, Matthew Sharpe, called the book "highly commended."
In her 2011 book, The Importance of Being Innocent, she discusses the concept of innocence in regards to children and feels that it "does not serve their interests well" because the idea of losing innocence is not a real problem. A review by Gender and Education called her book "a thought provoking and wide-ranging consideration of philosophical perspectives on contemporary assumptions about childhood" in the Westernised world, especially in Australia.
In The Importance of Being Innocent, Faulkner addresses why she feels that innocence is not a problem: it is because it"s a culturally constructed fiction that is used as a "commodity" and a concept that "holds children within constant victimhood." She has also written that attempts to keep children innocent "marginalises middle-class children by separating them from information, from adults other than parents and from a public life to which they might contribute," which she argues is wrong.
Faulkner has stated that her interest in exploring innocence came from "the expectations we put on them through being a parent," but that she also is interested in innocence as it applies to political thought and political justifications.
Views
Faulkner is the chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and the vice-president of UNSW Branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).
Membership
In NTEU, she has spoke out against current Australian politics, calling a 2014 budget on that has the "aim to "keep people in their place."" She is also a member of the project Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada.
