Special Issue Call for Papers: Engaging ECE in times of chaos and authoritarianism

2024-02-02

Special Issue Call for Papers: Engaging ECE in times of chaos and authoritarianism

Guest Editors: Daniel J. Castner, Indiana University-Bloomington & Sara Michael Luna, University of Central Florida

            Early childhood educators work within increasingly precarious conditions. For decades programs have been feeling the effects of neoliberal ideologies, the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM), and narrowly conceived interpretations of quality. Looming environmental catastrophe, growing economic disparities, and political polarization characterize a chaotic context for the education and care of young children. Meanwhile, authoritarian shifts in local and national policy along with uprisings of authoritarian regimes around the globe pose existential threats to the future of open societies. These perilous conditions are the unfortunate and unavoidable backdrop for early childhood research, policy, and practice. The way forward for more sustainable, equitable, peaceful, and liberating early childhood research, advocacy, and pedagogy is far from obvious. Nonetheless, amid the chaos of dire historical conditions and overt expressions of authoritarian force, the education and care of young children must proceed undeterred by and in resistance to an uncertain and seemingly bleak future.

For this special issue of GER we are seeking conceptual and empirical articles that interrogate the contemporary conditions of early childhood education and illustrate generative approaches to early childhood research, policy, and practice. Topics might include but are not limited to:

  • Critical and/or genealogical analysis of the early childhood policy, pedagogical or philosophical shift from neoliberalism bounded by democratic governance to authoritarianism.
  • Critical appraisals of undemocratic trends in educational reform policies, highlighting how these policies influence ECE practice.
  • Innovative approaches to research, advocacy, and pedagogy that contest authoritarian socio-political trends in ECE.
  • International comparisons of policy and practice.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words using 12-point font to djcastne@iu.edu or sara.michaelluna@ucf.edu by March 15, 2024. Attach your abstract as a Word document (please do not send PDFs) and write Global Education Review in the subject line of your email. Abstracts will be reviewed for fit and you will be informed by April 1 if the article is invited for review. Full manuscripts will be due by October  31, 2024. The issue will be published in June 2025.

Authors of articles invited for review are required to participate in a blind review of up to two articles submitted for publication in the same issue.