Working Title: Community Engaged Praxis in Peace, Social Justice, and Human Rights Education: Partnering for Transformative Change
Editors: Sandra Sirota, Maria Hantzopoulos, Amy Argenal (equal co-editors)
CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTER ABSTRACTS [500 words]
Due November 1, 2023
Submit abstracts here.Over the past several decades, the fields of peace and human rights education have moved out of the margins and emerged distinctly as recognized global fields of scholarship and practice. Promoted through multiple efforts, including through the United Nations (UN), civil society, grassroots educators and collectives, in preschool to grade 12 (p–12) educational settings, and in the academe, peace and human rights education initiatives seek to consider content, processes, and structures that aim to dismantle various forms of violence, as well as move toward broader cultures of peace, justice, and human rights. These fields have moved alongside the proliferation of social justice education, particularly in the United States, which is similarly concerned with developing critical analytical tools to catalyze social change. Examples of this are the recent integration of Ethnic Studies curriculum and culturally sustaining approaches in K-12 schooling. Given their ongoing shared commitments to concepts like individual and collective transformation, anti-racism, abolition, decolonization, and the dismantling of identity-based discrimination, these fields connect to the broader goals of liberatory education. They embody pedagogical processes and approaches such as dialogue, praxis, critical consciousness, and collaboration as key tenets.
Despite their proliferation and intentions, these fields of liberatory education are often implemented in a top-down prescriptive fashion, imposing norms from the dominant culture (ie. Global North, West) on communities or youth, rather than centering local knowledges in the acts of transformation and liberation. As peace, social justice, and human rights education become more widely accepted and mainstreamed fields, it is increasingly critical for scholars and practitioners to interrogate how localized experiences and praxis both shape and challenge some of the normative and universalizing assumptions, discourses, and practices that frame the origins of the fields. By examining the ways in which formal, non-formal, and informal educational spaces are reimagining education through community-engaged partnerships and initiatives scholars and practitioners gain deeper insight into restructuring and improving education for a more equitable and socially just world.
We invite practitioners, scholars, artists, and community-based organizations, who are involved in community-engaged peace, social justice, and/or human rights education (broadly defined) partnerships for transformation and social change to submit abstracts for this proposed edited volume. We understand community-engaged in this context to involve members of a community in partnerships – with each other and/or an outside individual or group of researchers, practitioners, artists etc. – that demonstrate characteristics such as mutual feelings of trust, shared power and decision-making, a reciprocal relationship of learning and teaching, and an open exchange of ideas. e conceptualize community-engaged partnerships in many ways, including but not limited to collaborative participation in social movements, school programs, community-based organizations, extracurricular clubs, research projects, arts initiatives, theoretical contributions, professional development opportunities, educational initiatives, and civic actions.
We seek to highlight research, projects, and theoretical contributions which center community-engaged praxis working toward equity and justice in both community and formal education settings. We are interested in partnerships that emphasize and center youth and community participation, transformative agency, and empowerment as means to not only improve educational outcomes within their respective cultural and political contexts, but also ones that work towards building cultures of peace, human rights, and social justice writ large. We are open to many types of submissions – empirical case studies and research projects, artistic and experiential reflections and essays, theoretical treatises on the field and its relationship to community-engaged praxis – and more.
Some of the questions, among others, that we are interested in are:
- How does community-engaged praxis in liberatory education disrupt and challenge dominant hierarchical structures of teaching and learning, research, activism etc.?
- How does community-engaged praxis strengthen research and/or practice in liberatory education?
- How can community-engaged praxis benefit local communities? How in turn can this shape global priorities?
- What are the challenges of community-engaged praxis in liberatory education for researchers/practitioners/community members?
- What are new theories or models of community-engaged praxis in liberatory education?
The deadline to submit abstracts is November 1, 2023. The abstract word limit is 500 words. Please fill out this form to submit your abstract and related information.
We will notify authors of selected abstracts via email by December 15, 2023.
Full book chapter submissions (8000 words max, using APA guidelines) are due by July 1, 2024.
We are in discussions with two presses, and aim to submit the book proposal by January 2024.
Please note that publication is not guaranteed until full chapter submissions undergo rigorous peer review.
