Vlademire Kevin D. Bumatay

I am a PhD student in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at King’s College, University of Cambridge. My PhD research is funded through a Cambridge International Scholarship and an Open-Oxford-Cambridge Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and is conducted under the CDA project ‘Philosophy of Evaluation: Uncovering the Hidden Knowledge of Practitioners’. I am jointly supervised by Dr. Anna Alexandrova, Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Dr. Andi Fugard, a Senior Director in the Evaluation Practice at Verian Group.

My research deals broadly with the philosophy of social policy and programme evaluation. That is, understanding the kind of epistemic practice that evaluation is—its logic, epistemology, methodology, and ethics—as it is carried out in real world policy contexts. To this end, I will be working with evaluators at Verian, who conduct evaluations across a range of policy areas such as housing and homelessness, education, and children’s social care, among others.

Prior to starting my doctoral studies at Cambridge, I taught Philosophy for a decade at the University of the Philippines, where I completed my BA (History and Philosophy) and MA (Philosophy) degrees. I was awarded the 2021 Claro R. Ceniza Logic Prize by the Philosophical Association of the Philippines and have published my research in Synthese.