Webinar – Basil Farraj – Carceral Violence & Resistance: From Palestine to Global Sites of Confinement

Please join UBC Middle East Studies (MES) for ” & Resistance: From Palestine to Global Sites of Confinement,” a Zoom webinar with Dr. Basil Farraj (Birzeit University). Please feel free to circulate the event poster widely.
Dr. Farraj is the Director of the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Institute of International Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. His research addresses the intersections of memory, resistance, and art by prisoners and others at the receiving end of carceral violence.
Date: Tuesday, November 17
Time: 12:30-2pm (PCT – Vancouver Time)
Location: Zoom Webinar

This event is co-sponsored by UBC Anthropology, Asian Studies, Geography, GRSJ, Human Rights Collective, Law and Society, and the Public Humanities Hub

Faculty for Palestine Canada Condemns Israeli Military Attacks on the Islamic University of Gaza and the Continuing Scholasticide Across Palestine

The Islamic University of Gaza was bombed again on Oct 25, and several staff members were killed, and several students were injured. Israeli bombardment had already destroyed much of IUG’s campus, but teaching had continued amid the ruins.

Faculty for Palestine Canada Condemns Israeli Military Attacks on the Islamic University of Gaza and the Continuing Scholasticide Across Palestine

28 October 2026

Faculty for Palestine Canada condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli military strikes on the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) on Sunday, October 25, 2026. The university reported that its campus and the surrounding area were struck twice that day, while students were attending classes. Three members of the university’s administrative staff were killed, and seven students were injured, some critically.

We mourn our colleagues. We extend our deepest condolences to their families and to the entire IUG community, wish the injured students a full recovery, and extend our solidarity to the academic community across Palestine.

In a recent statement on the IUG assault, the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, representing Gaza’s non-profit higher education sector, declared that “an attack on one of our universities is an attack on all of us.” The committee calls on universities and scholarly associations worldwide to condemn these attacks, demand their immediate end, pursue accountability under international law, support the ISNAD scholarship program, and build sustained collaborations with Gaza’s universities. 

We therefore urge faculty associations, senates and unions, scholarly associations, academic institutions and student unions across Canada to condemn scholasticide in Palestine, mobilize material and institutional solidarity, including support for the ISNAD program, the scholarship initiative established by Gaza’s universities to sustain students, faculty, and the operation of their institutions.

We call on Canadian universities and colleges to publicly condemn scholasticide in Palestine, and commit financial support and engage in collaborations with Gaza’s existing universities.

We call on the Government of Canada to condemn these Israeli ongoing attacks in Palestine and take concrete measures to end Canadian complicity in violations of international law in occupied Palestine, and support accountability for the destruction of the Palestinian education sector.

Faculty for Palestine Canada expresses its unequivocal solidarity with universities in Palestine, and fully supports the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza’s urgent call for international academic solidarity and accountability.These air strikes did not happen in isolation. Israeli bombardment destroyed much of IUG’s campus, along with every other university in Gaza, in the earliest months of the genocide that began in October 2023. Since then, Gaza’s faculty, staff, and students have rebuilt teaching and learning amid the ruins, in damaged buildings and online, refusing to let Palestinian higher education be erased. That a university was once again bombed with classes in session demonstrates that the assault on education in Gaza continues.

This is part of a much longer history of scholasticide: the systematic destruction of Palestinian education, knowledge production, intellectual and cultural life, a key feature of the ongoing Gaza Genocide. Since October 2023, this longstanding assault intensified catastrophically, destroying universities, libraries, archives, bookshops, cultural heritage, and the educational infrastructure essential to Palestinian collective life. The scholasticide in Gaza has already killed over 242 academics and more than 1,300 university students since October 2023, and has injured and forcibly displaced thousands of faculty, staff, and students.

This renewed assault comes alongside Israel’s ongoing military siege of Hebron in the illegally occupied West Bank, where sweeping closures and severe restrictions on movement are further disrupting higher education, preventing students and faculty from accessing their universities, which have now suspended in-person classes. Increased Israeli military raids have also taken place at Birzeit University in the past several years. These attacks across occupied Palestine form part of a broader assault on Palestinian knowledge production, cultural continuity, and the right to education.

As faculty and academic workers across Canada, we firmly reject scholasticide across Palestine; the normalization of these Israeli military attacks; and the silence of Canadian academic institutions, associations, and unions that profess commitments to academic freedom and human rights. We insist that defending Palestinian higher education is a collective academic responsibility.

Faculty for Palestine Canada stands with our Palestinian colleagues and their students in their struggle to defend their universities, their right to education, and their right to determine their future on their occupied lands. 

 

 

 

 

 

Alternate Routes: CFP CONFERENCE/SPECIAL ISSUE: Cost-of-Living Crisis (Barcelona, June 2027)

Via Carlo Fanelli:

Dear colleagues,
On behalf of Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, I am delighted to invite submissions for our upcoming conference and special issue examining the contemporary cost-of-living crisis and its broader social, economic and political dimensions.
The conference will be held June 8-10, 2027, at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and selected contributions will be considered for publication in a special issue of Alternate Routes.
This event is especially significant as it coincides with the 50th anniversary of Alternate Routes. Since its founding in 1977, the journal has provided a critical forum for scholarship examining inequality, power, social justice, labour, political economy and social change. As we mark five decades of publishing critical social research, we look forward to bringing together scholars, students, activists and community researchers to reflect on contemporary challenges and possibilities for transformation.
We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. We are particularly interested in work that explores how the cost-of-living crisis intersects with housing, labour markets, social reproduction, welfare states, financialization, migration, inequality, climate change and political mobilization. We also encourage submissions that examine collective responses, alternatives and struggles for social and economic justice.
The full Call for Papers, including submission guidelines and key dates, is available here:
We would greatly appreciate it if you could circulate this call through your departments, research networks, graduate student lists and professional associations.
We look forward to receiving your submissions and to celebrating 50 years of Alternate Routes with colleagues from around the world.
Sincerely,
Carlo
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Social Science
Editor, Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research
York University

Critical Education v17 n3 (August 2026)

Critical Education
Volume 17, Number 3
2026

This issue of Critical Education includes the second instalment of our Special Section on Palestinian Liberation in Education, which focuses on solidarities and activism for a free Palestine.

The general Articles section includes studies of stupidity as a pedagogical commitment; how the debate on smartphones in schools hides deeper social issues; the ways in which doctoral students experience and navigate power within supervisory relationships; the effects of and resistance to policies promoting privatization of education; academic capitalism and accreditation in higher education; the lived experiences of racialized educators; and trauma-informed relational pedagogy.

The Book and Media Reviews section examines two books published earlier this year: Beyond Bad Apples: Teacher Education for Police-Free Schools and AI Schools and the New Child Labor.

Articles

Palestinian Liberation in Education: Solidarities and Activism for a Free Palestine

Book & Media Reviews

Solidarity Call from the Private Sector Teachers’ Union (Türkiye)

Support Resisting Teacher in Tükiye!

“Under the leadership of the Private Sector Teachers’ Union, teachers working in private educational institutions and our teachers who have been victims of the interview system have been resisting in Ankara since June 14 to secure the restoration of their revoked rights, to defend their professional dignity, and to attain a humane life.

Our teachers, whose appointment rights—hard-won through great effort—have been usurped by the interview system, preventing them from practicing their profession; who have been condemned to work for minimum wage in private educational institutions; whose labor has been devalued; and who have been pushed into precarity through fixed-term contracts—are now being subjected to assault, dragged on the ground, and taken into custody with reverse handcuffs when they try to voice their demands in front of the Ministry of National Education and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in order to break free from this spiral of exploitation.

We reject the violence and oppression inflicted upon education workers who seek to raise their voices by exercising their democratic rights in the face of the deep precarity and rights violations they are subjected to!

The working conditions imposed on teachers are a direct consequence of the rapid marketization of all levels of education—including universities—in Türkiye, whereby education has been stripped of its status as a public right and transformed into a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. In 2002, there were 1,887 private schools across Türkiye; by 2026, this number has reached 14,700, while the share of private schools within the total number of schools has risen from 4% to 20%. While the owners of private educational institutions have grown wealthy through VAT exemptions, customs duty exemptions, land allocation, tax reductions, employer insurance premium supports, and interest or profit-share subsidies, education workers have been condemned to unemployment, precarity, poverty, and a futureless existence.

The problems faced by teachers in private educational institutions are not limited to wages alone. Education workers are employed for ten months of the year through fixed-term contracts, spending the remaining two months without pay or insurance, while being deprived of severance pay rights and living under the constant threat of dismissal year after year. Their trade union rights are effectively obstructed by the ‘umbrella’ structure of Collective Agreement Branch No. 10, which encompasses disparate and unrelated fields of work under ‘Trade, Office, Education and Fine Arts.’

Today, the teachers in Ankara—who have resorted to hunger strike as a last resort to make their voices heard—are striving to keep the teaching profession alive, to remind society of what belongs to the public, and to make possible an equal and free education and science. For this reason, this resistance must be not only the resistance of interview-victim teachers and private-sector teachers, but of all of us. As the academics and researchers whose signatures appear below, we adopt our teachers’ demands as our own and address the government:

  • The ‘Base Salary’ law, repealed in 2014, must be re-enacted!
  • The interview system in appointments must be abolished, and the 1,611 teachers who have been victims of the interview system must be appointed!
  • The employment of teachers in private educational institutions on fixed-term contracts must be ended!
  • Collective Agreement Branch No. 10 must be reorganized according to professions, and the structural barriers to trade union rights must be removed!

We salute our comrades in struggle who are now on the seventh day of their hunger strike in Ankara, and we call upon all academics and independent researchers to expand solidarity.

 

Long live the united struggle of education and science workers!

New issue of Critical Education includes translation of Paulo Freire lecture from 1967


This new issue of Critical Education (Vol. 17 No. 2) includes translation of a lecture given by Paulo Freire at a 1967 conference held in Santiago under the sponsorship of the Organization of American States, the government of Chile, and the University of Chile. Scholars from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, and The Netherlands contribute articles on education of justice-involved youth; pedagogies of resistance; Gen-AI solutionism; white privilege in teacher hiring policies; how the rise of anti-wokeness upholds and nourishes systemic oppression; and former students’ experiences in Sudbury model schools, which emphasize student autonomy, egalitarian relationships, and minimal hierarchy. In addition, there are reviews of books by Henry A. Giroux (Revised edition of Teachers as Intellectuals) and Marc Spooner and James McNinch (Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v17i2 
Published: 2026-05-17

Articles

Book & Media Reviews

Workplace 37 (2026) – Teachers’ Work in Contentious Political Times (Part 2)

 

 

Workplace #37 includes the second installment of a series on Teachers’ Work in Contentious Political Times edited by Dana Morrison (West Chester University), Brianne Kramer (Southern Utah University), Lauren Ware Stark (Université de Sherbrooke), Erin Dyke (Oklahoma State University), and Denisha Jones (Defending the Early Years).

 

Published: 2026-04-13

 

Call for Submissions: Teaching for EcoJustice in an Era of Polycrisis

Teaching for EcoJustice in an Era of Polycrisis

A Special Issue for Critical Education

Co-Editors:
Brandon Edwards-Schuth, Augusta University
Maria Helena Saari, University of Oulu

We invite submissions for a special issue devoted to the theme of “Teaching for Multispecies Justice in an Era of Polycrisis.” This special issue seeks scholarship that critically examines the role of education in addressing the interrelated systemic injustices and logics of harm directed toward both human and more-than-human lives. As we face an intensifying polycrisis—characterized by the entanglement of climate catastrophe, capitalism, mass extinction, social inequities, and ongoing legacies of colonialism (Homer-Dixon, & Rockström, 2022; Homer-Dixon et al., 2022)—questions of justice, pedagogy, and educational transformation become urgent imperatives. We welcome contributions that explore how educators, teacher-educators, and scholars are reimagining educational practice to resist dominant cultural assumptions undergirding the polycrisis and to center multispecies flourishing.

Drawing from the fields of EcoJustice Education (Lupinacci et al., 2018; Martusewicz et al., 2021), Multispecies Justice-oriented education (Rautio et al., 2021; Tammi et al., 2023; Saari, 2025), critical ecopedagogies (Edwards-Schuth & Lupinacci, 2021; Lupinacci et al., 2023), Indigenous land based decolonizing pedagogies (Basso, 1996; Tuck et al., 2014), Critical Animal Studies (Corman & Vandrovcová, 2014; Nocella II et al., 2014; Pedersen, 2025), Earth Democracy (Shiva, 2015) and prefigurative politics (Raekstad & Gradin, 2020), and related frameworks, this special issue asks:

  • How has education become a transformative practice that challenges anthropocentrism, human supremacy, and hierarchical ways of being?
  • What pedagogical approaches enable learners to recognize, resist, and reconstitute relationships with the more-than-human world in ways that support social and environmental justice?
  • What can we learn with/from the more-than-human and land to (re)imagine ways of being in the here and now, and who/what counts as teachers/educators?
  • What kinds of learning and praxis occurs beyond formal classrooms that are essential to doing

Social and Environmental Justice?

We are particularly interested in work emerging from educational contexts—including but not limited to teacher education, K-12 classrooms, higher education, and community-based learning—that demonstrates how critical, creative, and arts-based pedagogies can foster multispecies consciousness and scholar-activist engagement with the polycrisis. We seek interdisciplinary contributions from environmental education, educational philosophy, curriculum studies, cultural studies of education, geography, anthropology, Indigenous studies, science and technology studies, and related fields. We especially welcome submissions from diverse contexts and bioregions, activists, and LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC perspectives.

Topics could include:

  • Ecocritical projects in teacher education
  • Teacher learning and professional development around EcoJustice, Ecopedagogy, humane education, and Critical Animal Studies
  • Multispecies Justice-oriented education in formal/non-traditional educational settings
  • Arts-based research around more-than-human relations
  • Indigenous and Decolonizing perspectives in education
  • Community Activism, Prefigurative Politics, and Earth Democracy in practice
  • Short Film and/or book reviews of 800-1200 words (please contact the editors with your ideas and/or for a list of suggested texts)

Abstract Requirements

  • Include author information, title and an abstract of 250 words max
  • Include 3-5 keywords
  • Email ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS to: bedwardsschuth@augusta.edu by August 15th, 2026

Manuscript Submission Requirements (after abstract acceptance)

  • Manuscripts should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words (including references), APA 7th
  • Include an abstract of 250 words max
  • Include 3-5 keywords
  • All submissions will undergo blind peer-review
  • Submissions due November 15, 2026 (via Critical Education submission portal)

Timeline

  • August 15, 2026 – Abstract proposals due (250 words maximum)
  • September 15, 2026 – Authors will be notified of abstract acceptance by
  • November 15, 2026 – Full manuscript submissions due
  • December 15, 2026 – First round of peer review feedback to authors
  • January 31, 2026 – Revised manuscripts due
  • 2027 – Publication of special issue

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Brandon Edwards-Schuth
Assistant Professor of Educational Research
Augusta University
Email: bedwardsschuth@augusta.edu

Dr. Maria Helena Saari
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Oulu
Finland
Email: maria.saari@oulu.fi

For inquiries about the special issue, please contact: bedwardsschuth@augusta.edu

 

References

Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press.

Corman, L., & Vandrovcová, T. (2014). Radical humility: Toward a more holistic critical animal studies pedagogy. Counterpoints, 448, 135–157.

Edwards-Schuth, B. & Lupinacci, J. (2021) Pedagogies of Diverse Bioregions: An Ecotistical Move from Ego to Eco. Europe Now, 45. https://www.europenowjournal.org/issue-45-november-2021/

Homer-Dixon, T., Renn, O., Rockström, J., Donges, J., & Janzwood, S. (2022). A call for an international research program on the risk of a global polycrisis (Version 2.0). Cascade Institute. https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/a-call-for-an-international-research-program-on-the-risk-of-a-global-polycrisi

Homer-Dixon, T., & Rockström, J. (2022, November 13). What happens when a cascade of crises occur? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/opinion/coronavirus-ukraine-climate-inflation.html

Lupinacci, J., Edwards-Schuth, B., Happel-Parkins, A., & Turner, R. (2023) Ecocritical pedagogies and curriculum. In P. Davies, E. Clinton, and G. Carolyn (Eds.) International encyclopedia of education, 4th edition, Volume 2 (pp. 202-209). Elsevier. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630- 5.08045-3. ISBN: 9780128186305

Lupinacci, J., Happel-Parkins, A., & Turner, R. (2018). Ecocritical scholarship toward social justice and sustainability in teacher education. Issues in Teacher Education, 27(2), 3-16.

Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2021). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Nocella II, A. J., Sorenson, J., Socha, K., & Matsuoka, A. (2014). Defining critical animal studies: An intersectional social justice approach for liberation. Peter Lang Verlag. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1230-0

Pedersen, H. (2025). Post-anthropocentric pedagogies: purposes, practices, and insights for higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 30(2), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2023.2222087

Raekstad, P., & Gradin, S. (2020). Prefigurative politics: Building tomorrow today. Polity Press.

Rautio, P., Tammi, T., & Hohti, R. (2021). Children after the animal turn. In N. J. Yelland, L. Peters, & N. Fairchild (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of global childhoods (pp. 341–352). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529757194

Saari, M.H. (2025) A Multispecies Justice Approach to Climate Change Education. in L. Griffin, L. Ropartz, S. Bannister & A. Merrick (Eds.) Climate Change Education Research Collection. International Baccalaureate Organization. Commissioned Report.

Shiva, Vandana. (2015). Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability, and peace. North Atlantic Books.

Tammi, T., Hohti, R., Rautio, P. (2023). From child–animal relations to multispecies assemblages and other-than-human childhoods. Barn, 41(2–3), 140–156. https://doi.org/10.23865/barn.v41.5475

Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.877708

webinar series on the privatization of public education in Canada

From The Public Education Exchange:

As part of the Public Education Exchange’s ongoing webinar series on the privatization of public education, we invite you to attend two webinars featuring papers from the special issue of Our Schools/Our Selves, Wrong, Again? The Political Evolution of “Parental Rights”, The webinars spotlight research examining how the language of “parental rights” is increasingly mobilized to challenge public education, democratic governance, and inclusive curricula. Each session will feature a short presentation by authors from the special issue followed by facilitated discussion.
Join one or both! And please share this invitation (posters below) with your networks!
Registration link:
Please register by April 5, 2026.
https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/QMOxjFg-Rdq2g0U1UgbA2A

Public Talk: An Empire of Unnatural Extinction – Prof. Sadiah Qureshi, Visiting Scholar, UBC

We’re so used to thinking of extinction as a biological process, that we can easily forget to think about it an idea with a far more complex history and politics. This seminar will explore the origins of the modern notion of extinction as species loss and consider how this is relevant for conservation in the present. In particular, we will explore what it means to discuss extinction as a political choice with significance for all life on earth.

Biography:

Prof. Sadiah Qureshi holds a Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Her latest book Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2025) explores the entangled histories of extinction, empire, and genocide in the making of the modern world. She cannot bear the thought of living in a world without birdsong, trees, or tigers.

RSVP: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6nSdNIjp2wnfJsy