Critical Education: Announcements

Call for Submissions: Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship

Critical Education — 2024-10-28

Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship

Guest Editor
Abraham P. DeLeon
University of Texas at San Antonio

What happens when critical scholarship takes seriously, the potentials imbued within a collective social imagination? What occurs when radical ways of knowing and doing activate the imagination that points to a different kind of past, present, and future? These kinds of questions are what I hope will inspire the papers I am seeking for this special issue in Critical Education. The empiricism that dominates much of academic scholarship, especially within the social sciences and education in particular, casts aside the transformative potentials of the imagination. Concerned too much with measurement, validity, replicability, and fundable projects that reify a particular kind of reality, mainstream scholarship does not engage with an imaginary that animates humanity’s potentials that is radical, creative, imaginative, and weird. The imagination runs through our social body like connective tissue, capillaries of radical potentiality. Our history is imbued with the imaginary, crossing not only fictional works that appear in film or literature for just two examples, but also that have animated a utopian impulse of a radical kind of difference: a different future, a different world, a different way of being with each other.

The imagination cannot be reduced to simply cognition or a neuro-functionality that activates a purely Western, scientific understanding. A radical social imagination can begin from a place of nowhere (Ricoeur, 2024), a non-space that allows a new kind of freedom of form to materialize that exists beyond scientific discourses that try to ensure its capture. Like Sartre’s (1948) work that the imagination has the potentials for negation, freedom, and engagement with nowhere, this special issue wants to explore the limits and potentials for the imagination for a radical and different kind of social imaginary. This space of nowhere becomes a productive frontier for larger questions about the future, the potentials for social action, and the possibilities for new epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical encounters. This special issue is a call for us to begin a new kind of radical project that attempts to break free from the current shackles of this intellectual culture, what Foucault (1998) might have called “inventing a new body”, one that is “volatile” and “diffused” (p. 226-227). We heed the call of the dreamers and allow the imagination to burst furth in new scholarly directions.

Here are some possible provocations to guide a submission, but are just meant to act as creative sparks.

I welcome any submission with a creative and imaginative vision for the past, present, and future.

What have been past historical examples by a variety of political, creative, or other affinity groups animated by the imagination?

What would it mean to embody a rhetoric of the future?
How can the avant-garde animate scholarship in new imaginative directions?
Do historical or cultural myths possess a generative moment that can inform social theory in fundamentally new ways?
What happens when social theory engages with the imagination? What kind of transformations are possible?
How can the imagination inform political organizing in fundamentally new ways?
What happens with social theory when it embodies the fictional worlds of a social imagination?
What become the limits of inquiry when the imagination is activated?
What would it mean to decolonize the future? How do indigenous ways of knowing inform our futures?
What kind of alternative futures emerge when we utilize an imaginative lens?
What are some examples of indigenous or non-Western forms of imagination that are instructive or visionary?
What do specific genres of fiction (horror, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, romance) offer the critical scholarly project?
How can fiction and creative writing inform social and critical theories?

The editor is available for any inquiries or questions on ideas about potential manuscripts and encourages conversations around potential ideas. Please email him at abraham.deleon@utsa.edu.

Manuscripts will be due on May 1^st, 2025. Please see the guidelines for submissions at Critical Education: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

References

Foucault, M. (1998). Aesthetics, method, and epistemology: Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2. (R. Hurley and Others, ). The New Press.

Ricœur, P., Taylor, G. H., Sweeney, R. D., Amalric, J.-L., & Crosby, P. F. (2024). Lectures on imagination. The University of Chicago Press.

Sartre, J.-P. (1948). The psychology of imagination. (B. Frechtman, Trans.). Philosophical Library.

Call for manuscript reviewers

Critical Education — 2024-09-11

Critical Education is a looking to expand its pool of manuscript reviewers.

If you are interested in contributing to the broad, multi-disciplinary field of critical education by participating in the peer review process, we encourage you to register with Critical Education as a reviewer.

We define critical education broadly as a field or approach that works theoretically and practically toward social change and addresses social injustices that result from various forms of oppression in globalized capitalist societies and under neoliberal governance.

We are looking for reviewers with expertise from across the broad range of education scholarship including but not limited to various: forms of research (e.g., empirical, theoretical, philosophical), contexts (e.g., early childhood, primary and secondary education, higher education, informal and popular education), conceptual orientations (e.g., critical pedagogy, anarchism, Marxism, critical postmodernism) and subfields (e.g., anti-racism, alternative education, critical and media literacy, disability studies, gender and sexuality, de/colonial and Indigenous education, leadership and policy studies, climate, outdoor, and place-based education, teacher education, solidarity and social movements, disciplinary subjects, etc.).

Critical Education uses a double-blind review process and follows the guidelines and practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

How do I sign up as a reviewer for Critical Education?

If you are already a registered user of the journal, sign in and from the drop-down menu below your username (top-right corner) choose View Profile > Role > check Reviewer box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Before closing the profile window be sure to click the Save button on the bottom left of the page.

If you are not yet registered with Critical Education, use the Register link at the top of the journal home page and create an account. When creating your profile be sure to check the Reviewer role box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Don’t forget to click the Save button.

Founded in 2010, Critical Education is an international, diamond open-access (no fees to read or publish), peer-reviewed journal, which publishes articles that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies and hosted by The University of British Columbia Library. Critical Education is indexed in a number of scholarly databases including Scopus, EBSCO, DOAJ, and ERIC and is a member of the Free Journal Network. For more about Critical Education see: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about

Critical Education and Problems of Change — Special issue call for manuscripts (updated & deadline extension)

Critical Education — 2024-03-02

CRITICAL EDUCATION AND PROBLEMS OF CHANGE

Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2024

Submission Types: Empirical and theoretical papers; interviews; practitioner field reports, experiential descriptions, or teaching examples

Review Process: All submissions of scholarly articles will be peer-reviewed. Interviews and field reports will be reviewed “in-house.”

Guest Editors: Kevin R. Magill (Kevin_Magill@Baylor.edu) and Arturo Rodriguez

Philosophical Overview/Perspective: Institutions once designed to ensure democratic participation by limiting governing power are instead used to manipulate the commons while attacking group solidarity, marginalizing the most vulnerable in societies. Capitalist austerity measures and identity politics built into bad-faith legislation ensure antagonisms distract from democratic educational possibility (Ross & Vinson, 2013; Sondel, 2015). The results are populations divided, which secures worker subservience to existing structures of power or domination. Resultant social tensions keep society distracted, precluding democratizing agency. Schooling and schooling experiences reflect the acceptance of cultural narratives where societies live out the dominant status quo and a vertically aligned social hierarchy (Rodriguez, 2008). The miseducation of students becomes a means to, at best, maintain a hierarchy, but more insidiously, becomes an ideological lever for actively legitimizing dehumanization. However, critical educators fight against these alienating conditions as students and teachers direct knowledge, exchanges, and personal agency toward more democratic civic participation to secure human freedom and dignity (Freire, 2018; hooks, 2014; West, 2004).

In this special issue, we seek empirical and theoretical papers, interviews (with organic intellectuals, activist students or teachers, education workers committed to their community, and community members striving for more equitable schools and societies), practitioner field reports, and book reviews that take a critical approach to education and the social world. By critical, we are referring to ideas, research, and approaches that can help students and educators take pragmatic approaches toward promoting human liberation from conditions that enslave individuals and ensure the conditions for democracy. This may mean demonstrating more complex connections between the classroom and society or ways critical educators create the conditions for a more just world. We are interested in scholarship that describes teacher and student agency within the current political climate and perspectives that counter vertical social hierarchies. Examples may include, but are not limited to social, historical, and political analyses; class relations in society, conflict resolution, dismantling censorship mechanisms that regulate human possibility and experience; teacher work within and as part of their communities; student, teacher, and community solidarity responding to oppressive conditions and/or legislation; analysis of artifacts, discourse, and culture; or research on, transformational civic practices or engagement; applications of critical or cultural frameworks to educational phenomena; anti-fascist, decolonial, and anti-oppressive approaches; innovations that help facilitate opportunities for emancipatory social transformation through critical education and praxis. Contributions related to activist communities transforming ideology, social conditions, and teaching conditions among LGBTQ+, Indigenous, feminist, racialized, and other minorized groups are encouraged.

Submission may also relate to the different aspects of schooling as a historical activity system or the greater educational ecology, which might include reimagining classroom mediation, use of disciplinary tools, equitable divisions of classroom labor, and/or classroom labor directed toward social transformation (Engeström, 2015; Sanino et. al, 2009). We want to illuminate how teachers, students, and educational and other community stakeholders work in solidarity to transform the oppressive social conditions that situate education and society (Magill & Rodriguez, 2021).

Manuscripts due: June 1, 2024

For details on manuscript submission, see: Critical Education Information for Authors.

When submitting your manuscript, please choose the journal section “Critical Analysis and the Problems of Change” from the drop-down menu.

Additional questions can be directed to: Kevin R. Magill (Kevin_Magill@Baylor.edu)

References

Engeström, Y. (2015). Learning by expanding. Cambridge University Press.

Evans, M. (2009). Citizenship education, pedagogy, and school contexts. Education for citizenship and democracy, 519-532.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury USA.

hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.

Magill & Rodriguez. (Forthcoming) Structures of American Education. Roman & Littlefield.

Magill, K. R. & Rodriguez, A. (2021). Teaching as intellectual solidarity. Critical Education, 12(1), 1-21. http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/article/view/186451

Ross, E. W. (2015). Teaching for change: Social education and critical knowledge of everyday life. The importance of teaching social issues: Our pedagogical creeds, 141-147.

Ross, E. W., & Vinson, K. D. (2013). Resisting neoliberal education reform: Insurrectionist pedagogies and the pursuit of dangerous citizenship. Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice, 20, 17-45.

Sannino, A. E., Daniels, H. E., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2009). Learning and expanding with activity theory. Cambridge University Press.

Sondel, B. (2015). Raising citizens or raising test scores? Teach for America, “no excuses” charters, and the development of the neoliberal citizen. Theory & Research in Social Education, 43(3), 289-313.

West, C. (2004). Democracy matters, winning the fight against imperialism. New York: Penguin.