Juan F. Carrillo, Dan Heiman, Noah De Lissovoy
Saili Kulkarni, Sunyoung Kim, Nicola Holdman
Critical Theories in Education
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?
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 1st, 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.
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
The Logic of Ed-Tech: Three Critical Directions
Michael Mindzak, Rahul Kumar
“Relationship-building” and the Normalization of Police in Schools: The Emergence of School Resource Officer Programs in Canada
Alexandre Da Costa
Student Rent-Strikes: Hope Through Unplanned Critical Pedagogy
Lucy Wenham, Helen Young
“All of this is whitewashed, all of this is colonized: ”Exploring Impacts of Indigenous Young Adult Literature on Teacher Candidates Perceptions of Indigenous Peoples
Joaquin Muñoz
Visible and Invisible Difference: Negotiating Citizenship, Affect, and Resistance
Kerenina K. Dansholm, Joshua K. Dickstein, Heidi D. Stokmo
Review: Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change
Hossein Davari
Critical Education is a peer-reviewed, diamond open-access, international and multidisciplinary journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES). Critical Education is indexed in Scopus, ERIC, EBSCO, DOAJ, ASCI, and a member of the Free Journal Network.
XII International Conference on Critical Education
Ankara University
July 3-6, 2024
REVITALIZING THE WORK OF CRITICAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL CRISIS: COMMUNITY, STRUGGLE AND RESISTANCE
Living in an age of economic, social, political, personal, and ecological crises, educators and school communities face serious physical and mental risks, tensions and other challenges. Under the effect of rising authoritarianism, conservatism, commodification, inequality, pseudoscience, fatalism, war, migration, unemployment, poverty, racism, misogyny, discrimination, displacement, abuse and xenophobia, educators and students feel more andmore insecure, hopeless, powerless, and become isolated from the community. There has been an increase in neoliberal, neo-conservative, andanti-democratic, authoritarian pressures on education, becoming the most significant and current obstacles to development, emancipation and humanization of both educators and students. Curricula have been structured to align with the requirements of the neoliberalism and neo-conservatism diverting from the liberating educational practices. While public education is diminished and discredited with lower funds, unscientific education, private schools are skyrocketing. The ideal of education for public good has been replaced by commodified education. Multiple intertwined crises require a response and community effort that interrupts paralysis, isolation. For these reasons, against all these attacks and the current of isolation, atomization, objectivation, and fragmentation, we would like to convene in the XII.International Conference on Critical Education in Ankara, Turkey, as the space of people where the powers and ideas can be developed, our solidarity and sense of community are refreshed, and we reconstruct new ways of resistance, struggle, and transformation.
We open this call for papers with some comments on our theme and purpose. We welcome all to join our conference which aims to advance and strengthen research, pedagogy, struggle, and critical community. Educators under the stress need this fellowship with new urgency. Critical educators are a foremost ally with democratic communities of struggle facing new attacks on the historic expansions of democracy and its promise. Fresh attempts to rebuild the discredited means of unjust exclusion now intensify at the head waters of the river of historic progress for the oppressed.
We welcome critical educators, progressive thinkers, and students to participate in the XII International Conference on Critical Education, fostering solidarity within community to seek new sources of inspiration, learning experiences, and tools of struggle, in order to build a democratic, scientific,libertarian, egalitarian, public, and secular education.
The International Conference on Critical Education, previously held in Athens (2011, 2012, 2017), Ankara ( 2013), Thessaloniki (2014, 2022), Wroclaw (2015), London (2016, 2018), Naples ( 2019), Valetta, Malta (2023) is a forum for scholars, educators and activists committed to social justice and social emancipation.
This conference, will be hosted by the Ankara University Institute of Educational Sciences with the help of the Faculty of Educational Sciences and its departments. The 12th ICCE will take place at the Cebeci Campus of the University of Ankara.
The Language of the conference will be English and Turkish.
Special Issue Call: Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education
Special Issue Editor:
Lana Parker
Associate Professor, Education University of Windsor, Canada Lana.parker@uwindsor.ca
The Status of Public Education: Documenting Neoliberal Capitalism’s Harms and Advocating for the Common Good
Overview and Aims:
“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Marx, 1859/1977)
Seen as a common or public good, public education offers the foundation for a more equal, just, and democratic society. As Biesta and Säfström (2023) suggest, “public education can be seen as the expression of the democratic values of liberty, equality, and solidarity. … [It has also] played a key role in promoting and sustaining these values” (Public education and the rise of neoliberalism section, emphasis in original). In this vein, a well-funded public school offers opportunities for community, fellowship, ethical relationality, and the development of critical, creative capacities (Parker, 2021, 2023a, 2023b). An economically healthy public system is marked, among other things, by: small class sizes; good teacher wages and the high levels of teacher training attendant to those wages; rich and diverse programming for all students; resources and infrastructure in good repair; and, most significantly, independence from market interests and from reliance on private sources of revenue.
Despite this underlying potential, however, any defense of education as a public good must resist nostalgia, ahistoricism, or conservativism. That is, though public education holds promise, it has also often been rooted in material, cultural, and ideological conditions of exclusion (Nelson et al., 2022). As such, public education as a common good, and the related argument against privatization, must include two parallel, though not mutually exclusive, understandings: First, that the legacy of public education in many countries has often been unjust in its implementation. Second, that although as a system it has been imperfect in its practice of equality and justice, it still represents the most powerful foundation from which to seek and improve these aims.
Decades of neoliberal capitalism have had a corrosive effect on public education systems around the world. Peters (2021) notes that one of the guiding objectives of neoliberalism is to displace the idea of public goods with the notion of public choice. This permits the entry of market ideals, profit motives, and choice through every facet of educational systems and policies. For example,
the neoliberal belief that public education funding is inefficient permits systematic and prolonged underfunding and diversions of tax-payer dollars to private schools. Neoliberal perceptions of choice and the focus on the individual versus the collective serve to similarly undermine arguments for public education for all. Further, the very premise of education — the answer to the fundamental question of what is education for? — has been reshaped by neoliberal values of economic competition and unmitigated capitalist growth. In all, scholars have documented that neoliberalism in education influences all education policy, curriculum, and pedagogy, as well as refashions the underlying economic fiscal supports that uphold the public system.
What is sometimes obscured, and perhaps increasingly so as neoliberalism enjoins neoconservative ideologies, is that the underlying mechanism of neoliberal capitalism is economic. Its project has been about converting previously public goods into terrain for marketization and competition, with an emphasis on generating profits that are concentrated into the hands of a few. As such, this special issue will focus on revealing neoliberal capitalist policies and critiquing the material conditions of inequality, impoverishment, and austerity that these shifts have produced; it is also aimed at advocacy for well-funded public education as a common good worth protecting.
Description of Invited Articles:
For this issue, I invite analysis that foregrounds a critique of the contemporary expression of neoliberal capitalism. I seek submissions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., from within education, but also from public policy studies, progressive economics, sociology, philosophy, and more) to substantively engage with the material and philosophical challenges wrought by a neoliberal, capitalist totality, as it operates on education. A prevailing theme will be how this totality has produced harms for public education as a public good. Papers can be philosophical, theoretical, or conceptual; they can also be empirical, with methodologies such as Critical Policy Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and the like. Some of the questions that you may wish to engage include:
Timeline:
Manuscripts due to Editor: January 31, 2024 Manuscripts under review: February 1 – March 15, 2024
Manuscripts returned to authors for revision: March 31, 2024 Final Manuscripts due to Co-editors: April 30, 2024 Publication of Special Issue: May 31, 2024
About the Editor:
The special issue editor, Lana Parker, is an Associate Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor, Canada. She has expertise employing philosophical methods and critical discourse tools to analyze neoliberal trends in education. Her work interrogates these trends in contrast with the possibilities of ethical, responsible, and responsive pedagogy. She served as the Editor for the Journal of Teaching and Learning for three years. Her nationally funded research includes a phenomenological analysis of how capitalism and social media shape how youth engage with information, including mis- and disinformation, which is reflected in her recently published edited collection, Education in the Age of Misinformation: Philosophical and Pedagogical Explorations. In addition, Lana is a co-investigator on the Public Exchange Project, which exposes neoliberal trends of privatization in the Canadian context.
About Critical Education:
Critical Education is an international, refereed, open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES). Contributions critically examine contemporary education contexts, practices, and theories. Critical Education publishes theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, higher education, and informal education. ICES, Critical Education, and its companion publication Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, defend the freedom, without restriction or censorship, to disseminate and publish reports of research, teaching, and service, and to express critical opinions about institutions or systems and their management. Co-Directors of ICES, co-Hosts of ICES and Workplace blogs, and co-Editors of these journals resist all efforts to limit the exercise of academic freedom and intellectual freedom, recognizing the right of criticism by authors or contributors.
Author Guidelines: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about/submissions
References
Biesta, G., & Säfström, C. A. (2023). Introduction: The publicness of education. In G. Biesta &
C. A. Säfström (Eds.), The new publicness of education (pp. 1-7). Routledge. Marx, K. (1977). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1859)
Nelson, C., Broom, S., Sisaket, L., & Orphan, C. (2022). Imagining decolonial desires of the public good. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 35(5), 456–477.
Parker, L. (2021). Literacy in the post-truth era: The significance of affect and the ethical encounter. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(6), 613-623.
Parker, L. (2023a). Education in the age of misinformation: An afterword. In L. Parker (Ed.), Education in the age of misinformation: Philosophical and pedagogical explorations (pp. 251-256). Palgrave Macmillan.
Parker, L. (2023b). Making the most of it: Thinking about educational time with Hägglund and Levinas. Journal of Philosophy of Education. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad067
Peters, M. A. (2021). Neoliberalism as political discourse: The political arithmetic of homo oeconomicus. In M. Sardoč (Ed.), The impacts of neoliberal discourse and language in education (pp. 69-85). Routledge.
I’m pleased to provide a sneak peak of a new book coming out from Routledge later in 2022.
Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South will be the first entry in a new Routledge books series titled Social Studies and Citizenship Education in the Global South. The book and book series are edited by Sebastián Plá (Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico) and me.
This book offers a path forward, for the growing collaboration in social studies education between Global North and South educators, practitioners, and researchers. In this volume, leading critical social studies education researchers from Latin America explore the constant presence of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and state violence. Chapter contributors represent a large part of the continent, and offer perspectives on a wide range of topics, including; recent history and memory, cultural dimensions of social studies education, and comparative studies among Latin American countries.
By bringing together this critical work in one volume, the book fosters conversation across geographic regions to transcend the national contexts for which these analyses are generally produced. This collection provides insights into issues of curriculum, teaching, teacher education and research in the region and will be of interest to readers both familiar with and new to research on social studies, history, citizenship, and geography education in Latin America.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. The New Social Studies Research in Latin America: An Introduction
Sebastián Plá & E. Wayne Ross
2. Educational Trajectories in an Adverse Political Context: The Social Sciences and History in the Colombian School
Sandra Patricia Rodríguez Ávila
3. Education, History, and Memory in the Chilean School: A Perspective on Chile’s Recent History from the Narratives of High School Students
Fabián González Calderón & Graciela Rubio Soto
4. Interculturalism in the Training of History Teachers: Persistence of the Disciplinary Code
Omar Turra Díaz & Juan Salcedo-Parada
5. Decolonial Pedagogy: Intersections and Resistances of Memory and History, in Mapuche Communities of Southern Chile
Carolina Huenchullán Arrué
6. Afrodescendant in Latin America and Social Studies: A Perspective from Mexico
Gabriela Iturralde Nieto
7. When Gender and Sexuality Intersect with History Teaching: Brazil is Burning
Fernando Seffner
8. Crossroads of History Teaching and Learning and Political Science in Latin America: TheResidenteProject
Luis Fernando Cerri
9. Disciplinary Codex in History Education
María Paula González
10. On the History We Teach Every Day: Historics, Historiography and Philosophy of History
Ana Zavala
11. The Critical Reading of the Southern Geographical Reality: The Challenge of School Geography
José Armando Santiago Rivera
12. The Panorama of Social Studies in Latin America Curricula
Sebastián Plá
Advance Endorsements
“The New Social Studies Research in Latin America is an achievement and an opportunity to facilitate a better exchange of ideas and more equal academic discussion. Written by leading researchers in Latin America and edited by key authorities in the field, it opens access to Latin American social studies research in their own words. The book is an essential read for social studies academics and practitioners who are open to being challenged and engaging in more ethical constructions of knowledge.” – Dr. Edda Sant, Reader in Education, Manchester Metropolitan University (UK)
“There is an essential uniqueness to The New Social Studies Research in Latin America that could truly benefit social studies education in North America. We are in urgent need of a global lens and vital dialogue that examines the political, economic, and social histories inherent to Central and South America. Like none before, this book will bring to our classrooms perspectives on power and a wonderful opportunity to shift our practices.” – Dr. Cinthia Salinas, Ruben E. Hinojosa Regents Professor in Education, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
“The collection of critical research on social studies in Latin America, in dialogue with global issues, makes The New Social Studies Research in Latin America an indispensable contribution to the renewal of critical social studies education.” – Dr. Antoni Santisteban Fernández, Professor & Director of the Department of Didactics of Language and Literature, and Social Sciences, Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain)
“The New Social Studies Research in Latin America offers readers vital insights into critical teaching and learning. The chapters call upon educators to account for the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of systems born in Empire and inequality and for the capacities of communities to learn themselves into a more just co-existence.” – Dr. Kent den Heyer, Professor, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta (Canada)
“Language has become a barrier to knowledge and exchange between research carried out in countries whose language is of Latin origin, in our case Spanish and Portuguese. It is important to promote and discuss the knowledge created in Latin America, which makes The New Social Studies Research in Latin America relevant.” – Dr. Ángel Díaz-Barriga, Institute for Research on the University and Education, National Autonomous University of Mexico (Mexico)
Brill has just published the Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education, edited by Alpesh Maisuria, who is a professor in Education Policy in Critical Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
“This encyclopaedia showcases the explanatory power of Marxist educational theory and practice. The entries have been written by 51 leading authors from across the globe. The 39 entries cover an impressive range of contemporary issues and historical problematics. The editor has designed the book to appeal to readers within the Marxism and education intellectual tradition, and also those who are curious newcomers, as well as critics of Marxism.
The Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education is the first of its kind. It is a landmark text with relevance for years to come for the productive dialogue between Marxism and education for transformational thinking and practice.”
I co-authored, with Sandra Mathison, a chapter titled “Critical Education” for EME. In this chapter we define critical education broadly as a field or approach that works theoretically and practically toward social change that anticipates a post-capitalist world. We explore multiple foundational sources for critical education including Marxism and critical theory, but also democracy and anarchism. And finally, we provide an overview of several manifestations of critical education. While many conflate critical pedagogy with critical education, we contend critical education has a broader reach.
Please contact me if you would like a copy of our chapter on critical education, as I have a limited number of offprints I can share.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
Alpesh Maisuria
2 The 4th Industrial Revolution, Post-Capitalism, Waged Labour and Vocational Education
James Avis
3 Alienation and Education
Richard Hall
4 Alternatives to Capitalism
Peter Hudis
5 Capital Accumulation and Education
John Fraser Rice
6 Colonialisms and Class
Spyros Themelis
7 Communism: The Party – Pedagogy and Revolution from Marx to China
Collin L. Chambers and Derek R. Ford
8 Corporate State: “Downhill All the Way” – Education in England from Welfare to Corporate State
Patrick Ainley
9 Critical Education
Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross
10 Critical Realism
Grant Banfield
11 Cuban-Marxist Education
Rosi Smith, Leticia de las Mercedes García Rosabal and Maikel J. Ortiz Bosch
12 Dialectical Materialism (Materialist Dialectics)
Constantine (Kostas) Skordoulis
13 Disaster Education
John Preston
14 Early Childhood, Feminism, and Marx
Rachel Rosen and Jan Newberry
15 Employment: Education without Jobs – Young People, Qualifications, and Employment in 21st Century Britain
Martin Allen
16 Ethnography of Education and Marxism: Education Research for Social Transformation
Dennis Beach
17 Freire, Paulo (1921–1997) as a Marxist Revolutionary for Education
Juha Suoranta
18 Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937): Culture and Education
Peter Mayo
19 Green Marxism
Simon Boxley
20 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” (1928–1967)
Peter McLaren and Lilia D. Monzó
21 Intersectionality: Scaling Intersectional Praxes
Gregory Martin and Benjamin “Benji” Chang
22 Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924) and Education
Juha Suoranta and Robert FitzSimmons
23 Liberation Theology
Peter McLaren
24 Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919) and Education
Julia Damphouse and Sebastian Engelmann
25 Managerialism and Higher Education
Goran Puaca
26 Marxism and Education: [Closed] and … Open …
Glenn Rikowski
27 Marxism and Human Rights against Capitalism
Daniel Hedlund and Magnus Nilsson
28 Marxist Feminism and Education: Gender, Race, and Class
Sara Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab
29 Middle Classes of the World
Göran Therborn
30 Neo-Liberalism and Revolution: Marxism for Emerging Critical Educators
Alpesh Maisuria
31 New Left, Anarchism and Education
Nick Stevenson
32 Palestine: Education in Mandate Palestine
Bernard Regan
33 Plebs League: Towards a Modern Plebs League
Colin Waugh
34 Postdigital Marxism
Petar Jandrić
35 Poverty: Class, Poverty and Neo-Liberalism
Terry Wrigley
36 Public Pedagogy
Mike Cole
37 Public University: The Political Economy of the Public University
David Harvie, Mariya Ivancheva and Robert Ovetz
38 Social Class: Education, Social Class and Marxist Theory
Dave Hill and Alpesh Maisuria
39 State and Private Capital: Education, State and Capital
Ravi Kumar and Rama Paul
40 World-Systems Critical Education
Tom G. Griffiths
Index
Was honoured to participate in @GlobalThursdayTalks this past week. Thank you Fatma Mizikaci and Eda Ata from University of Ankara for organizing these events and the invitation to participate. Also thanks to everyone who attended the live event. Here’s the video of the interview.
University of British Columbia, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
Seminar Series 2020-2021
“Neoliberalism, Critical Education, and Social Justice: A focus on the Current Moment in History”
Dr Alpesh Maisuria
University of the West of England
September 15, 2020 12:30-2:00pm Pacific [Zoom link tba]