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Director, Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics, Rhodes University

Pedro Tabensky was born in Santiago, Chile, to refugee parents. His mother is a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary two weeks before the final stage of the final solution. His father, of Polish Jewish ancestry, is a refugee of the Chinese revolution. He has lived a peripatetic life since the age of three, ending up in South Africa in 2001 and meeting his wife, with whom he has two children. Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics (AGLE), Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University (South Africa). He is the author of Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose and of several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is also the editor of and contributor to Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation; The Positive Function of Evil; and, coedited with Sally Matthews (his wife), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. He has a book, published in 2023 by Routledge, titled Fanon and Camus on the Algerian Question: An Ethics of Rebellion. He is commencing work on another book provisionally titled Ethics and Education as Practices of Freedom, coming out with Lexington, probably in 2026.

Experience

  • 2006–2023
    Professor, Rhodes University