Viviane Fairbank

I am a philosopher and journalist currently based in the United Kingdom. My journalism and philosophy often overlap, and this website includes information about both.

Philosophy

I am a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Queen's College, Oxford. My work focuses on the objectivity of epistemic norms—norms of belief, justification, inference, and inquiry—and draws primarily from pragmatist and feminist philosophy. I am also interested in metaphysics, meta-ethics, and the philosophies of logic, language, science, and mathematics.

I received my PhD in 2026 from the St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy (SASP), in Scotland. My thesis was in the philosophy of logic, and my research was funded by a Widening Participation Scholarship from the University of St Andrews as well as a Jacobsen Studentship from the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

I am the editor of the Philosophy of the Formal Sciences section of the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy.

Journalism

With Allison Baker, I am co-founder and project lead of the Truth in Journalism Project, an initiative focused on the nature and methodology of fact-based journalism. We educate students and professionals in editorial fact-checking, and we encourage public discussion about the notions of accuracy and objectivity in journalism, especially when it comes to reporting on trauma, marginalized communities, identity, and lived experience. We are the co-authors of the Truth in Journalism Fact-Checking Guide, which articulates new guidelines for editorial fact-checking that are rigorous, inclusive, and informed by interdisciplinary expertise. For this work, we were awarded the 2021 Michener-L. Richard O'Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education.

Previously, I was an editor and head of research at The Walrus in Canada. I have written, edited, and fact-checked for The Walrus, the Globe & Mail, Harper's, NPR, the Literary Review of Canada, Reader's Digest, TVO, Toronto Life, BESIDE, the Review of Journalism, and Smithsonian—and I was nominated for Best New Writer at the 2017 National Magazine Awards. Currently, I'm interested in reading and writing about feminism, science, and justice.